Goodspeed wrote:None of this is accurate except the map spawns, which is often solved by using good custom maps. Anyway I don't think this falls into the category of a flawed engine, rather poor Random Map Scripting. Very similar situation in AoE3, actually.
Empires Apart is being built so that the resource placement of both players in a 1v1 will be "mirrored". If you have a bad map your opponent will have a bad map too, so these sorts of unbalances should at least be more consistent when deciding the outcome of a game. I'm not sure if it is possible to have these in AoE2 or AoE3 as well but as far as i know there isn't such a map script.
I have never seen my units not attack for a minute.
It was an hyperbole, if you patrol your units into an enemy army there is a big chance that your units will just keep walking forward instead of attacking, which can obviously lose close fights.
Boar only de-aggroes when its path is (temporarily) blocked or if you hit it only once with the vill you sent to get it.
Oddly enough, sometimes boar just deaggro for no apparent reason, even if you shoot them twice and there is nothing in their path. I don't know why this happens.
Pushing the deer with your scout is an acquired skill which I suppose you haven't quite mastered yet. I have never heard of this issue, either.
I meant that the deer behaviour is not very consistent, sometimes (rarely) they just decide that they want to go back almost instantly after they just ran and you can do nothing about it.
Vills never go idle for no reason. They only go idle if the path to their destination is blocked.
I had a game yesterday where i ordered my vills to wall one gap and after i came back they were standing idle after having built ony 1 wall segment. It might have been a mistake on my part but that almost cost me the game.
I don't think I've ever seen a pro game decided by units not attacking, deer acting strangely, boars de-aggroing or vills going idle for no reason. I've seen them decided by poor map spawns but again, I don't think this quite counts as an engine issue. The same is true for AoE3, at any rate.
Pro games are not decided by these but sometimes flaws add up and can be pretty annoying, and these should not happen when there are money prize pools imo.
I don't know where you are getting your data from, but it's not the current version of AoE2.
I admit i exaggerated a bit but i am not pulling these out of nowhere. You can go check forums or reddit/r/aoe2 and you will see how many people are pissed off by bad attack move/patrol/pathfinding/vills stopping when aggroing boars and some other issues.
That or micro. Or use patrol.
Patrol has the same exact problem, to a lesser extent.
I have 1000+ hours on AoE2 HD, i have experienced these flaws for a long time, and while i think the game is very enjoyable, i'd be really happy if those flaws weren't there.