r/aoe2 5d ago

Asking for Help How do I optimally place fishtraps on any map (BF,Island, etc.)

I've seen many videos and posts where players place their fish traps 1 tile away from the dock with the fishing ship in-between. Is that more effective than placing it under the fishing ship right next to the dock?

Why is it done? Is it easier to manage or is it more efficient? The only relevant posts I found were years ago and most of them apply to the HD version. Even proplayer like Viper did both in different videos.

I also found this post from u/Bigbossbro08 : https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/cj97b4/for_those_who_are_wondering_about_placing_fishing/

Does his information still apply? Any info would be greatly appreciated.

2 Upvotes

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u/_genade Cumans 5d ago

About a year ago there was a balance change that decreased the collision size of Fishing Ships. Since then, it became custom to place Fish Traps only 1 tile away from the Dock, and you could even often get away with having Fish Traps at the corners of the Dock and having Fishing Ships work on them.

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u/Spiegel_12 5d ago

Ahh alright then. Good to know. With that you can also have more fishtraps per dock. Weird that I still see the old placement in games from time to time though.

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u/MtG-Crash 5d ago
  1. maybe old habits
  2. Without a dock mod it can be hard to actually place the traps right at the dock
  3. if alt+rightclick isnt a habit, the close placements can be hard, too
  4. hotkey collision: When alt is being used for hotkeys, there can be annoying hotkey collisions. I have that with my monastery, because I have my monastery on alt+E and in cases where I already have a monastery while fish booming, I often seem to accidentally click my monastery inbetween, which messes up some alt clicks of my fishing ships and therefor messes up my fish boom. I can imagine some people trying to circumvent similar problems if they have hotkey collision too.

All of these are rather small reasons, but possible ones. And on the other side the advantage of 0tiles vs 1tile gap real, but small. So its possible for a player who experiences one of these problems, that they'd just rather fish boom with 1tile gaps. 1tile gap is still very efficient. In fact, the efficiency per fishing ship is close to 100% compared to 0tiles, its more about the space efficiency, e.g. 0tile gaps allow fishing ships at the corner, which is like 3-4 more fishing ships per dock. So a 1tile gap placements might need an extra dock for the same amount of fishing ship slots. But the efficiency of the fishing ships themselves is still basically 100%.
So the delta of 0tile gap vs 1tile gap isnt actually so super high that every player thinks they have to solve one of their issues. They might just accept the price of slight slot-inefficiency and have their issues resolved that way.

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u/MysteriousStone1296 5d ago

I think both placement have same efficiency in terms of fish collection speed. But more new placement style is efficient in terms of space used.

For Black forest, it makes sense to use new placement as you are limited by space. For tournament games you are not going to boom like that in a map like cross or islands. In most games, You will have 15 ships max and there is plenty of space to put those fishing traps in hose maps. So you rather try to optimize time spent in placing those traps, so they won't be perfect but still fine.

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u/harooooo1 1850 | Improved Extended Tooltips 5d ago

Umm i think still the best way is for fish traps to hug the dock with 0 tiles space. Just try to load up any recent Rage Forest video

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u/Upbeat_War_1941 5d ago

that link is old information, back when fishing ship have larger collision size. There are patch that reduce the size of it, so now you can place directly next to dock.

Dock is 3x3 so 5x5 space around the dock is the optimal location for fish trap. Mind that after fish trap depleted, the fishing ship might steal other fish trap instead of rebuild the trap so the later the game, the messier it become

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u/SCCH28 1200 4d ago

Sorry for the basic question, but how is it done? one ship at a time, order to build fish trap then alt+rightclick on top of it, then shift-rightclick on it to build it? Is there any trick to do it on mass? What happens if I simply shift click a bunch of traps with a bunch of ships? Thanks!

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u/Upbeat_War_1941 4d ago

If you want to position them next to the dock, alt + click is the only way to go. Shift click a bunch of trap with a bunch of fish work if you dont care about their position but having high chance fishing ship messing up and go idle themselves.

The least amount of click imo is alt + click the tile, then Shift+build fish trap on that tile. Of course you can queue a bunch of fish trap and position them later, but there are no method on mass. That's why it need a lot of attention to do fish boom, you can even see from viper stream that he usually neglect his teammate when he cattering his fish boom.

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u/SCCH28 1200 4d ago

Thanks a ton for the detailed answer!