I personally think taking out drop-off points is a horrible option. ES doesn't want fastest clicking to win, but how long does it take to make a resorce center? 2 seconds?
The biggest problem I have with it is that there will be no strategy in expansion whatsoever. Instead of making a new base, if this is implemented how it sounds you will just walk some villagers over and get them working. Very, VERY poor economic model right there. If in real life they wanted to get gold back in the day they didn't just walk to the mines and start teleporting resources.
Here's the key in the economic part of dropoff points:
Investment.
There will no longer be any investment. The choice in AoC was "should I risk going over there and building up a base to farm and getting the resources at the risk of losing it?" It required thought. You're putting an investment in a location, just like expansion in real life. Without dropoff points, it is 100% gone. The risk vs reward scale is tipped. There is no risk now, only reward.
One of the most serious drawbacks with this is that expansion realism and fun is destroyed. There is no erason to expand anymore. Expanding used to be something you do to improve your economy, but now all you need to do is send troops and villagers? Stupid, horrible idea. I can see this being starcraft one main base style now. What's the motivation to expand now? You certainly won't get more resorces building more around the map.
Another drawback is that it eliminates structure in cities. There's something alluring about you building into your environment, structuring your city around the resources that are availible to you. Like that? It's gone now.
I hope ES seriously reconsiders the dropoff points. It is the only serious concept that's a problem to me. I can not grasp why they chose to sacrifice all the great strategical things dropoff points do for saving an insignificant amount of micro time, since you only have to make one per spot.
Bottom line: Taking away 15 seconds a game of micromanagement isn't worth sacrificing economic strategy, realism, and structure.
Here's how I can see the future Age of Empires III online being with this system:
-People only have one cluster of the buildings they use and don't expand because there is no reason to, since the entire reason for expanding was to improve your economy.
-Raiding people's resources will consist of killing their troops surrounding their miners and then killing the miners instead of raiding a resource base.
-If you raid someone's base and destroy all their buildings they will gather at the same rate since they can send their villagers somewhere else and teleport resources to the invisible stockpile.
-There will be no point in taking over someone's area since they can relocate in less than 1 minute because they don't need to rebuild dropoffs.
-There's no longer a feeling of "home", nothing to fight for, because villagers can gather at the same rate in the time it takes them to walk to it.
Worth the very little time saved in micro?
[This message has been edited by CaptainPoncho (edited 04-19-2005 @ 06:58 PM).]