Sam Ham makes a good post, but I think Nirwanda and Dap misinterpreted some of my points.
Can you juggle? Can you clap your hands? Can you juggle and clap your hands between tossing? Takes no skill, because a monkey can clap his hands.
It's not the clapping that is difficult - it's how it effects the rest of the juggling. Same goes for queueing vills and soldiers, re-adjusting ox carts and storehouses, finding idle vills, keeping scout roaming, while still juggling.
All it does is interrupt you with simple tasks, but in Vanilla there are more of them, requiring quick response and multi-tasking.
That is what I was trying to say in response to your head-smashing line of discussion, Nirwanda.
Yes, it is a different skillset, not necessarily a better one. If you're not clapping, you can probably add another ball, egg or machete to the mix.
Back to my point about atty:
I was pointing out the similarity removing the bottom layer of task management between vanilla and tits, and atty removing the bottom layer of villager management between atty and the other gods.
The result is the same:
AoT players spend less time mashing buttons and smashing head and queuing units, so they can spend more time on meaningful tasks than vanilla players.
Atty players spend less time moving ox carts rebuilding storehouses, re-tasking idles, re-balancing economy, so they can spend more time dealing with meaningful tasks than other players.
Does atty take the same skill to play as norse, greek, or eggy?
As for Dap's individual caravan/fishing ship slippery slope, if you add so much clapping and snapping and jiving between juggles that you lose sight of the ball, then you are correct that it becomes absurd, but I don't think manualqueuing goes over the limit yet.
In fact, you can double your trade income by microing every individual caravan but there is no way in hell it is worth it. Instead, you either double your caravan count, or work harder to make your gold go further (for example lose fewer units), or some combination of the two, and come out miles ahead.
[This message has been edited by HailToTheOboe (edited 04-07-2010 @ 10:59 AM).]