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In any case, I would PR for what this poll gets us. There haven't been any reason given for the poll proposals to be rendered invalid. The result of 1. would make capturing more difficult then my own taste but whatever...

As a starting point, it seems fine to me. Still, I think that in some normal circumstances, capturing is still a bit too quick/easy. Maybe 1000 points are enough. We’d need to test it.

Every turn, a structure losing over 200 pts would resist better to the remaining capture pts it is meant to lose. This would be clearly aiming at making capturing faster less then a certain amount of time, much harder, without making any changes to normal capture difficulty. In other words, nerf fast capturing, without impacting at all normal capturing. And without introducing a complicated technicality players would need to be aware of. Already indirectly the case, since capture speed is increased by how much a structure has lowered hp.

But what would be the effect of this? What's the difference of having a linear decay followed by an exponential decay, with a slower linear decay that results in the same capture time? There would be a difference only if actual (not total) capture points have an effect on some other stat. If the idea is that it would be noticeable on structures with a lot of capture points, then just give them more capture points (for the linear decay to catch up with the linear+exponential decay), unless I'm missing something. Something else I don’t know how it works is the effect of siege engines on capture points, which they should have to make their use make some sense besides destroying things. Since an army made only of soldiers or only or engines should have a very difficult time taking on a Fortress, I’d say that engines should increase the soldiers’ effect on capture points (not by proximity, but when actually taking part of capture), that way a mixed army would be more efficient.

Glad you're not thinking +1000 capture points isn't too much. We can go over some calculations for the CC that has a base of 2500 pts, we are increasing it to 3500. So a 40% buff. Without accounting for any regeneration, a 5 second capture would be increased by 2 second or 10 turns. In comparison the existing buff you provided of +25pts/sec would provide on the same scenario ~125 pts. So a 5% buff. On the same scenario this would provide 0.25sec so about 1 turn. So this +1000 pts addition is 10x more effective on fast capture scenarios then regeneration, and the break even point happens after 40sec. A minimum of +2 sec in worse case still gives a bit more room for the defender to react. I see a lot of ideas. But most of them increase the difficulty of capturing across all scenarios. Ideally, we would mostly impact the "worse" scenarios where capture happens just too fast. A suggestion that I'll be willing to implement is to have diminishing effectiveness of capturing over a certain rate. For example, if you are capturing a CC with a total of 500 pts per sec (~125 Romans with Marian reform), the CC lose the first 200 pts normally, but the last 300 pts strength are nerfed by exponential decay. Seems like a solution that could makes minimal changes, introduce little new technicalities and impact precisely the "worse" cases. Basically you could define in the template that capturing faster then Xsecs get exponentially harder.

We would need to evaluate only the best case (all techs, best units, etc) to work back from a minimum capture time. Other reference cases can be used for better calibration, like, if all are archers, how much time should it take, and so on, but just a very few cases should suffice to have some control on capture time, I just don't know the formulas. And can't the number of units capturing a building be just fixed? Same as the number of units working a field.

One could consider a system where capture points and garrison capacity scale with population. That said, it would likely introduce additional complexity. Even if feasible, it might be preferable to tune fixed values around reasonably standardized scenarios. That could work, although there are additional variables to consider. Capture time will always depend on the size and composition of the army. Are we talking about basic or elite units? Melee or ranged? Are heroes involved? Yes, that seems like a relatively simple solution to implement. As for collisions, they already exist. As shown in the video, when no formation is active, many units are unable to capture and instead try to find alternative paths. I think a certain degree of overlapping is actually beneficial for battles (though not for capturing), otherwise unit behavior can become somewhat clunky. It’s probably a matter of fine-tuning the parameters under specific circumstances.

"Another potential solution" is the opening of my text, and it’s perfectly clear to any English speaker that it’s meant as an additional idea. It doesn’t replace anything, it literally says “another.” It could have been “instead,” but it isn’t. You seem to enjoy these little internet arguments, don’t you? lol The Roman Army Camp can hold 20 units. Strangely enough, when you destroy it, an additional capacity of 30 units appears.

Exactly. "Isn’t 20 soldiers too few for a fortress?" is not the correct approach, but "which percentage of your max population is 20 soldiers"? Then it's not a small garrison. Just increasing it doesn’t seem right. What is worse, if one increases the pop cap, leaving the garrison caps fixed, all considerations of what is big or small are out the window… unless collisions are used. This always fixes the max amount of units trying to take a building. It also helps in fixing capture points, after a decision is taken on how little time capture should take (it cannot be that it’s not known if 5 seconds will become maybe 5.5 or 6 seconds, things should be calculated the other way around, first deciding an acceptable minimum capture time, and working backwards). And it applies for buildings that don’t have any of the mentioned Fortress or Tower defensive techs. If there’s a formation exploit, then I guess better if that’s solved, instead of collisions removed. If I understand correctly what’s happening from the videos, couldn't formations be temporarily disabled when units are taking on any of those tasks? Whatever needed since collisions does seem a step in the right direction. Collisions seem necessary, but maybe not sufficient, thus: I agree with 1. because of the regeneration problem pointed out, but disagree on how to exactly implement 2. because it doesn't seem very common that a given tech does more than one thing. On the other hand, someone said recently "the two techs for towers for greater range and more default arrows" "are also too expensive to be viable during the period of the game when towers matter", so I'd remove the Arrow Shooters tech and give that range increase to the Stone Tower for free, because, if I understand correctly, with no techs both it and the Sentry Tower have the same range (10 to 60 m, even when it’s taller). If Sentry and Professional Garrisons are not interesting enough, I’d make them do more of what they already do. Regarding increasing capture points +50% to Towers and +100% to Fortresses, I’d either give this for free, or have a mutual tech that gives +50% to both towers and forts, and from the start give forts for free whatever is needed to complete the +100% wanted.

You should usually have to raze a fortress to the ground, rather than capture it. While that may not be historically accurate, it makes sense given the style of RTS, rather than something like Total War.

If I recall correctly, Roman Army Camp used to be able to hold 40 soldiers. Granted, when the collision issue (or just the formations exploit) is fixed, a full Fortress will be almost impossible to capture at full health, which might be a good thing lol.

From this initial post you made, it doesn’t come across as an additional idea but rather as a solution to the problem of buildings being too easy to capture. That is: instead of increasing capture resistance, allowing more units to garrison inside. That’s why I responded the way I did. What I mean is that, from a gameplay perspective, it seems much more interesting to improve the capture points of buildings and be able to keep more units outside, actively engaged in combat. If you garrison 40 or 50 units out of an army of 150, the enemy will most likely be able to wipe out the remaining forces due to overwhelming numerical superiority. I’m not opposed to increasing the garrison capacity of forts/CCs or other important buildings per se. But when it’s proposed as a solution to the issue of rapid capture, I think it’s better to directly strengthen capture resistance instead. As for the historical aspects, I understand them, but this is a game and, as such, it relies on certain abstractions.

Calling the fortress just a single building overlooks how central it can become in many matches. There are moments when players feel like they’ve lost the match the instant they lose it. Historically too, it is far from a simple building. It is a defensive structure placed in strategic locations, capable of shaping and altering the course of events. Whether I choose to implement it or not is another matter but it would make perfect sense for such a defensive complex to be able to hold 40 or 50 units especially in a game where the single building Wonder can already accommodate up to 50. Here is The German Wonder, which is just a ruined Roman camp, can still garrison 50 units, roughly 33% of a 150 soldiers. P.S. I’m not against the idea of increasing capture resistance.

This is what we are talking about with formation exploit: formation capture exploit.mp4 And this: formation gathering exploit.mp4 The problem with this approach is that, if you need to garrison, say, around 40 units to prevent your building from being captured, out of an average of 150 soldier units you might have in a 200 pop game, you end up dedicating 26% of your units just to guarding a single building. It makes more sense to increase capture resistance.

I agree with that. The issue of too many units capturing one building in the first place.

This was already the case, adding regen rate just shifts the curve rightward. Also, I don't get how adding 1000 points would help that much in the cases you bring up. 5 seconds to maybe 5.5 or 6 seconds?

That’s a nice move. 35 and 50 with an upgrade sounds good. I’m not exactly sure which issue you’re referring to, but in any case, 20 is a low number. Increasing it would make sense. Let’s say it’s better not to stack all your hopes behind one fortress.

That would be one of the easier balance corrections, but it wouldn't fix the issue. What if a player attacks you with 200 Marian Roman Legionaries? That are magically stacked in a corner of your Fortress. The end result would be the same. No, the enemy needs to surround the Fortress, and you can't surround it with 200 units.

Remove disbanding formations… thereby turning formations into battalions. Bad idea. I personally have never encountered this exploit everyone is mentioning, and it doesn’t seem like it would be much of a problem if we just fixed collision.

We have done that on Classical Warfare AEA. Lowered dmg a little, but garrison is 35, up to 50 if you get the tech.

Another potential solution that came to mind is increasing the number of units that can be garrisoned inside a fortress. Isn’t 20 soldiers too few for a fortress? Historically, 20 soldiers is already a very small number, it feels the same in game as well. A temple can hold 20 soldiers too. A fortress and a temple having the same capacity doesn’t feel right, maybe this could be adjusted. (It’s also interesting that theaters, which historically hosted performances for thousands of people in ancient times, can only hold 5 units.)

I expected (before knowing about capture mathematics) that capture points of garrisoned units value with a bonus factor. Defenders with fortification fight from advantageous ground so one soldier is of higher value. This would be one option to strongen Buildings. Another possiblility would be to give a malus depending on the amount of attackers. So that capture points can not be massed the way it is possible now. Like the slower building process with more simultaneous workers. (Just my 2 cent....; but yes at the moment 0ad is an attackers game)

Not the cleanest game, but Zagros Mountains is really a good map for these skirmishes. Population cap set to 200, to avoid massive lags in late game. Mace_VS_Rome_H.zip

totally, there needs to be some pushing. Or just remove the option that stops formations from being disbanded as it is pretty much only useful for the exploit.

There are quite a few ways to do this but ideally first fix the limitations that this behavior tries to compensate for.. +8 is generally elevation bonus to range, aka the height of the turret itself. If you look into the selection tooltip it will show you total elevation bonus, which include how high on terrain the tower is (on a hill for example), however I found out recently that this wasn't correctly applied (see proposed fix for it). With arrow shooter tech it become 60base +8tech +9elevation total bonus (IIRC vanilla show them merged so +17). Stone towers also have higher base elevation bonus..