How many military production buildings are you putting up? In AOM/AOK, I used to have several rax on one hotkey, several stables on another, etc. Since AOE3 lets you pump out units so much quicker (and supplements the standard production buildings with the native outposts, forts and galleons) I usually have only two barracks, one stable and one foundry by the end of Fortress. I only build another stable/foundry if I’m swimming in resources. Why waste resources to build another foundry when I can just stack up five cannons at a time?
Anybody see it differently? Is there any good reason to have more than the bare minimum of buildings? I can see the benefit of putting another rax near a forward TC to help protect a key chokepoint/resource area; but does anybody ever build more production buildings because they just can’t get enough units out of 2 rax’s, 1 stable and 1 foundry?
By the way, I thought that dealing with the micromanagement of building control groups in AOK/AOM was annoying. Kudos to the AOE3 designers for getting rid of the need for masses of production buildings. Same comment re: resource gather points and one-villager farms. I haven’t seen too many comments on those three changes, but I think they’ve eliminated a lot of annoying busywork and made it much easier to focus on what really counts: strategic economic decisions and military tactics rather than finicky busywork.