Multitasking and Attention

[Scroogie]

I would like to know what goes through a pro players mind while playing, e.g. how is he prioritizing tasks and deciding what to do next (i mean the very hotkeys and mouse movements that happen next), because i struggle with this quite a bit.

Would be thankful for any insights!

[harcha]

[deleted_user]

If you have to consciously think and like set time aside to analyze what hotkeys to press, that's not how top players play. It's second nature and split second decisions born of practice. Automatic.

Because the game is built about timings executing a tight macro build is crucial. This means sending a card the moment it's ready, optimizing herding and VS to eliminate idle time to age 2, doing the same thing to age 3 - consider one example the Chinese naked FF. Herding and VS optimization can be the game winning factor in placing the wonder before 5 cav arrive and idle you endlessly. Stuff like that. Not overgathering resources early to execute your build.

Always keeping an eye on unit queues to queue another vill or compete a military batch. Always keep an eye on the minimap.

A lot of stuff that goes through a top player's mind (this I know by way of discussion not experience) is intangible - like army movements and positioning, scouting, having a game plan and adapting it based off of the accreted information gathered thus far.

Prioritizing: this changes as the game progresses. Micromanaging 5 villagers to gain 5% efficiency is less important than being active on the map and pressuring resources, or having other general awareness to preserve villagers and army. Or often case, this is often the case, micromanaging a game deciding fight above all else, and finishing that fight by needed to manually micro cav to snare the retreating army and constantly bringing your infantry behind to DPS.

Idk how else to answer a really vague question. Watch streams, be a sponge, and then play a lot to actually improve. You have to play a lot.

[Aizamk]

to me the more important thing is playing in a way that requires your opponent to multitask more than they're used to. you can play sloppy as long as the way you play sloppy makes your opponent play even sloppier. the level of misinformation you feed should also take into account your opponent's preferred game styles, what they think they know about you, how attentive they usually are etc. - if they're usually quite attentive I might decide to pretend to go for a raid when in reality I'm just shift clicking towards them and away. sepoy/ashi multi-raid practitioners don't necessary have high multitasking skills- most of the time it's just rallying units to a place where there's a lot of villagers. but it takes a lot more apm to effectively shut it down if you're not a waller.

[harcha]

There are some simple things to make sure that your build stays on track like having your deck picked before the first shipment arrives, shift clicking units where such automation is possible (can be applied to villagers, but also to scouts)... sometimes I will send 2 villagers towards my TC before crates (shipment or ageup) arrive so that these resources are immediately gathered (idle vils gather crates automatically) and meanwhile I can also queue the shipment after ageup ASAP.

[deleted_user0]

aiz is right. it requires 2 click sending 2 hus to opponent dead animals but shit tons of clicks to deal with it.

[RefluxSemantic]

It's not that Aiz's advice is untrue, but I think it is a bit too technical (oh and aiz has little reason to worry about this stuff, he has insane apm).

I personally think the best thing to get better at multitasking is to automize things as much as possible. I always do things the same way, put things in the same control groups and I try to use the same patterns in my gameplay. It's just an easier way to automize things and to then build on that. To make an analogy, when you take a typing course they teach you to use one particular finger for a letter. Before trying to get fast at typing, you just practise a lot of that and try to make that an automatism. Then from there on out, by simply doing it a lot, you'll get faster and faster. I think the same things apply to aoe3. Figure out how you want to handle things mechanically, and then you'll continually improve.

For example, I always use the same control groups. Barracks, Stable, TC, art foundry all go into the same groups every time. I always put my ranged infantry on control group 1, I always put my hussars on group 3, I always put pikes on group 4. I never deviate from this and this has resulted to me not ever having to think about this little actions. Then when your small actions are essentially automized, you're mentally capable of focussing on the bigger picture. I think it's then good to focus on having little macro patterns, cycles of where you put your attention. For example you might go from check resources -> check production -> check minimap in that order and just try to make that a pattern that you do. I haven't been able to automize this, but I think it'd be really helpful to do. The more you can do things without needing to pay attention, the more attention you will have available and the better you'll get at multitasking.

From there on, it's probably all about prioritizing. Idle TC time, completing batches of units, fixing idle villagers are things I consider very important. At the start of a fight micro is crucial, but at the end you can move back some more attention to macro. That's usually how I roll.

[Hazza54321]

@The_Lastsamurai

[Hazza54321]

Honestly the biggest deal would be keeping an eye on the minimap, that really helps with reaction time. Playing team games also helps, i find it much harder to raid people like erik and prince compared to kaiser mitoe turk for example, raphael is an exception.

[Challenger_Marco]

raphael an exception? explain more please !

[fishboyy]

I think Hazza means Raphael is hard to raid despite being a 1x1 player

[deleted_user]

Raphael and I could've cleaned house in the 2v2 tournament.

[Riotcoke]

Ktraln top 10 2v2 player

[_H2O]

One random thing you can do is to map your idle vil key to space bar and train your macro cycle to randomly hit it at times.

[harcha]

don't use idle vil key, use all idle vils key. it doesn't actually select all vils over the map, just the small groups of vils when for example a hunt or a mine runs out

[Challenger_Marco]

does shift+idle vill hotkey is effective than use all idle vills key? i dont use hotkey for idle vill i just click on the top left banner with shift and selects group of idle vills seems more comfortable either way i guess there isnt much diff pressing hotkey and re macroing and clicking idle vills both case you move your mouse over screen to make your vills to work ,maybe a minute sec diff or max 1 sec diff will that effect game?

[harcha]

yeah it's the same effect. except if you use the hotkey, you don't have to move your mouse to the corner of the screen i.e. ẖ̴̢̨̛̦̩̬̎̔̈̒̄ȏ̷̧̲̹͉̦̜̮̩̖̔̄̓̽̉̇̚͝͝ͅt̴̜̟̻̹̙͈̞̣͇̺̮͙̑̀͛͛̃͑̐̎̌̀͘k̴͙̳̞̯̯̜͇̜̤̔̆͛͊͐͛͋́̋̊̿ę̵̮̖̤͓͈̭̓̎̋̽̔̏͐̂̈y̶̡͔͒̏̾̀͑͊̇̅̍s̶̢̬̗̱̜̘͆̍̔́̈́̎̌̕̚͘

[_H2O]

don't use idle vil key, use all idle vils key. it doesn't actually select all vils over the map, just the small groups of vils when for example a hunt or a mine runs out

I just want to go to one. I would never move all my idles at once.

I hit space it takes me to an idle which like has others around it. I fix those then hit space again.

[dicktator_]

don't use idle vil key, use all idle vils key. it doesn't actually select all vils over the map, just the small groups of vils when for example a hunt or a mine runs out

I was able to get the same effect setting my normal idle vill key to shift space. Similarly you can set the idle military key to shift + a letter and it selects a whole group of idle military but not all idle military on the map.

don't use idle vil key, use all idle vils key. it doesn't actually select all vils over the map, just the small groups of vils when for example a hunt or a mine runs out

I just want to go to one. I would never move all my idles at once.

I hit space it takes me to an idle which like has others around it. I fix those then hit space again.

I hit shift space which takes me to a group of idles, task those to a resource then break some off if I don't want to send all to the same resource.

[[Armag] diarouga]

Overall I agree with Callen. It takes practice and at one point you don't think about it anymore and you execute the right commands. My advice would be to do the same BO again and again against a computer until you can execute it perfectly, then spam this BO in QS and eventually (after like 100 games), your APM will improve and you will have more "free time" to defend raids, be active on the map etc.

[The_Lastsamurai]

@Hazza54321 hahahah

[harcha]

don't use idle vil key, use all idle vils key. it doesn't actually select all vils over the map, just the small groups of vils when for example a hunt or a mine runs out

I just want to go to one. I would never move all my idles at once.

I hit space it takes me to an idle which like has others around it. I fix those then hit space again.

usually i will have idles when hunt or mine runs out. at that point it would be appropriate to select all of those hunters/gatherers and move them somewhere else. you will not be selecting idles all over the map dw