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I don't think that's ever been the mentality of the devs. I don't necessarily see this as a problem, but more of a strength and weakness diversification between civs. When theres a wall it generally means there is a wall gate too. But you should still be able to brute force your way through walls with rams, just less efficient. Elephants are also still a thing, but imo they could use a rework aswell (much less siege dmg, more unit dmg, add splash dmg, trample etc).  I personally wouldn't simulate this ingame. Balance is also important in single player btw and a perfect balance doesn't exist, you can only come close(r) to it. But if it would be a close call to enriching gameplay vs balance, i would vote enriching gameplay for sure.

Speaking of unique tecs: the kush Powerful Priesthood actually weakens their own heroes? (I never messed around with that.)    It's nice that the classical Athenian rhetors are acknowledged. How about a decay tec: own buildings harder to convert, enemy buildings easier; don't know if the Athenians need that, but maybe another culturally strong civ.   I was thinking if we could pick up that diadochi thing; dunno, maybe transfer up to 10 units/min to an ally? (If pop allows it?)

Sure, but "realistic expectations" doesn't mean "it's great so far, so let's rest on our laurels now" either, does it... In other words, I'm expecting nothing, I'm just suggesting which parts IMHO need work. (Yes, yes, development is in the doldrums, I know. But I'm assuming development will eventually resume).   I know, but I didn't start it. I just adapt.   Yes, but while it must be trivial to tell the engine to have rams do more damage if the target is a wall gate (given this is a specific entity), there are no real gates in towers and fortresses, so where would you aim your ram at? As for catapults, the problem is not all civilizations have them. Many just have rams, others have the whole lineup, rams, bolt shooters, stone throwers, towers, you name it. It's one of those cases where (relative) realism goes against gameplay richness. AoE chose to give everyone everything, no matter how strange, 0 A.D. has decided that there is a lowest common denominator (rams) and lots of exclusive extras. I'm undecided if that was the better choice: As a player I regret it, as a history buff I find it okay. Anyway, the siege part (just like the rest BTW) could be extremely rich (from a single player perspective). Example: Some civilizations have fire arrows, and fire should do quite some damage to wooden siege engines. Means your siege engines have no chance against those civilizations? Not at all, just develop the "Wet Hides" technology, and their fire won't do any damage anymore. (Needless to say you don't have to develop it if your adversary doesn't use fire.) Now somebody will come and tell this will break the balance, because you'll need to spend some additional time developing that technology, putting you at an disadvantage compared to an adversary not needing it. Sure, that's why I specified "single player", where richness of gameplay is the only important thing, and civilizations don't need to be perfectly balanced (you know what you're facing when you're a primitive/poor civilization going against the mighty ones...).   (BTW, thanks for fixing my bug! I was wondering indeed, but given I don't know where this is processed I left the defaults)

It's kind of in the name though, on easy AI it should be easy. With that said pretty much everyone knows AI can improve but it's also a difficult task to get right. AFAIK we only have 1 person who is/was working on AI. Well the game is still in alpha, so the bar shouldn't really be that high imo. That's not an excuse but people should also have realistic expectations. Your posts sometimes can come off as belittling, like this quote for example. You are mostly among adults but in any case, even a teenager can make a point. Just saying age doesn't have to be a factor at all, you can learn from youngins and vice versa. So far i've only seen people get into a (positive) genuine discussion with you. My advise would be to not take everything personally. Yes, that can be difficult, but you get better at it the longer you stick around. Which i'd encourage you to ^^. It's obvious that 0 A.D. can be rough around the edges (there are 1441 open tickets atm for example), and everyone can have a different vision for the game (open source curse). But the moddability can almost cure anything (open source blessing). I like this idea and was something i wanted to do with my mod aswell, give them a bonus damage to gates. Making them less efficient against walls, but buffing catapults against walls is something that can be quite interesting aswell.

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/6873

True. The AI is (and will be for the foreseeable future) kind of stupid, and needs some adaptations to be a worthy opponent. That been said there is another aspect to it too: A single player AI would not be anyway similar to a multiplayer bot AI. The requirements are totally different, and it would/should proceed completely different. That is my beef with the current AI: It's more of a multiplayer bot AI.   Yes, because I was expecting the rams to be roughly similar to the AoE ones, i.e. vulnerable. 0 A.D. rams are terminator-like behemoths, especially when you play a civilization with few swordsmen (Brits only have a champion swordsman) and you do not know (because obviously no documentation) that only blades affect rams... Throw as many spearmen at them as you want, nothing happens. The second chapter was when I tried rams myself and, due to their near-invulnerability (and probably the fact I was playing at (very?) easy difficulty back then), I could easily win the game just by building one arsenal and flooding the AI with rams. No need to train any soldiers, just build some fortifications to mop up incoming enemy raids.   No, apparently the AI knows how to cope with them quite well, but it obviously doesn't know how to cope with the crazy ideas of a human, like flooding it with dozens of rams. At standard difficulties rams kind of work right now, but they're (IMHO) far from perfect yet: Attack timing needs improvement and their pathfinding is quite perfectible too, given they can remain blocked by 1-2 trees for a while till they find how to get around them. Actually pathfinding is their biggest weakness: Put any unit in front of them, even a non-combatant one, and they're stuck... Anyway, my point earlier is that Rams shouldn't be some kind of medieval tanks, they should be a very specialized tool for a very specific task (breaking doors actually, but okay, let them breach walls too, else it becomes too complicated/realistic). They should actually be very easy to destroy in melee (not ranged), and you shouldn't be able to send them all the way across the continent: Ideally you should build them (like all other siege units) in the immediate vicinity of the target, and discard them after use because of their extremely limited mobility. 0 A.D. has chosen the AoE way of having a "siege engineer" building, I would had created a special unit ("siege engineer", veeery expensive!) who builds siege units locally, like you would build a house. Obviously you would have to protect those units as they would be a prime target for the adversary. Okay, that's just my opinion, feel free to disregard. This is not a demand. It's food for thought, if you guys want to think about it. If not, it's just wasted time on my part.   

At last someone calm and reasonable! Thank you! I am fully conscious that my postings set things in motion, and that was indeed my intent: Make (general) you think about the game, beyond your little habits and compromises. Because I am assuming you want to improve it, eventually, am I wrong? As I said repeatedly further up, while I don't make any claims for myself, chances are other people will be put off by the lack of single player features, and will lack my capacity to learn a new game engine in a week and adapt the game to my liking. Now if that's a reason to attack me personally, I'm out of here, I'm too old to frequent school yards. I was assuming I was among adults.   I almost noticed...