Remember how Age of Empires made your life easier... without asking? Here's some of the sneaking little techs & systems that did that.

1) We added the Spies research in Imperial because we hated the "hide my villager in the corner so I don't lose" just as much as anyone. The seed of the Spies came from me, but it was in a designer meeting so everyone in that meeting deserves equal credit. Another designer figured out how to make it cost way too much to research unless only a few enemy units were left. Yet another added the "doesn't work in Deathmatch".

2) In The Conquerors I added the Greatest Feature of All Time, which is of course farm queues - you can just assign extra farms to an existing one and they're replanted automatically. Ever since creating farm queues I've longed and pined to be known for creating another feature as good but I don't think it's possible.

3) a lot of people clamored for an idle villager button so we could find the slackers, and the programmers put it in for Age 2. I can't take credit for this one, but obviously I agitated for it too. The image below is a guy doing a cosplay of an Age villager. Not idle though.

4) Taunts - yes we had these in original Age of Empires in 1997 because they're GREAT. But we only had 25. Age 2 had 42. They are obviously a quality-of-life thing. Yes other games had it. But that doesn't mean they weren't great. Also number 11, the "Herb laugh" is indeed our artist Herb Ellwood, whose handle was "Hellwood" in the game. He worked on every Age of Empires game and was there before me. He had an awesome distinctive laugh.

What are your favorite "make my life better" game features?