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I think we should make 0AD visually appealing in parallel too, when you are done optimizing game performance and 0AD looks like an old game you have to go back to visual details may be we attract 3d artist and make them work for 0AD and 0AD give certification for their work.

Han minister To my understanding the name currently in use ("官吏 Guānlì") is a collective term for government officials ( which is obviously not wrong, as ministers symbolically represent the entire government). However, after all, the unit is still called "minister" and limited to nine at a time in reference to the Han dynasty's nine ministers. And these nine ministers (/ chamberlains) were called "九卿 jiǔ qīng" with "九 jiǔ" translating to "nine" and "卿 qīng" translating to minister(s) or other high ranking officials. Here is the change I am suggesting: Guānlì -> Qīng Sources:

Great. I'm interested. Sounds like it's still in development, though, and has awhile to go before it makes it into primetime.

I'm saying there is a pretty basic principle where walk speed should correlate to damage, which should correlate to range and we should color within those lines. Archer balance may not right now (and it wasn't right before). Cross bow balance is worse (and always has been terrible). But making archer dmg equal to sling or jav dmg is certainly wrong. Same goes for walk speed. Implementing changes outside of those principles creates problems in the long run. If a solution can't be found when coloring within those lines then something else is wrong. I think, at a minimum, there needs to be some sort of "auto-sniping" built into the game. Pre-melee rebalance shows that is necessary. If "auto-sniping" and corrections within those principles don't help then there is something else wrong. I've been saying it a long time but balance is off post-melee rebalance. It rightfully changed the meta. But a meta isn't balance. Changing the melee rank up helped a ton (which itself was an artifact of a quick fix that was implemented outside of principles and caused problems down the road). But there is still something not quite right. We see a bunch of small problems with balance where things are just a little bit off. I can't put my finger on the exact problem or a solution but I think there is pretty wide agreement that balance isn't quite right.

@chrstgtrare you saying that archers are viable right now? Since sniping has been nerfed archers are now worse than they were before the melee rebalance. Its not a usage issue, people don't snipe because its simply not as effective. This is especially the case when you consider that melee units now do so much more damage and are worth killing. I understand being concerned with increasing walk speed of archers because that was one issue in a24, but there's been plenty of changes with turn times and acceleration since then so there's probably some walk speed increase that can work. @ChronA as for the walk speed, the eco buff it gives can only be as big as the speed buff that we give them. For example gauls already have skirms which walk the fastest, so the eco won't be this drastic change that you suggest.

yeah ive done some tests and it works pretty well. I need to set up the precision value in the templates, and then test for OOS. Then there's also the performance side of things.

Hopefully. But… D1971 looks dead. I think I discussed elsewhere on how it’s imperfect. D5282 is really just a concept right now. It also seems designed for balls of armies, which won’t help in small army fights. Maybe it helps where there are long lines. So a partial solution, if that. But obviously helpful if it does deliver. It just won’t be a complete solution. (Have you run any tests yet? Last I’ve seen was all technical discussion.) Just saying we need something more.

@chrstgtr 2 developments re sniping: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D5282 https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1971

None of these make sense to me. Dmg should correlate to movement speed, which should correlate to range. Increasing archer dmg runs entirely counter that. As does increasing archer speed. Changing projectile speed is just a shell game for changing dmg value: it makes a change in the least observable field that isn't even listed in unit stats. The fact that archers were (arguably) the best unit when used for sniping (even when compared to sniping with other units) shows that the problem isn't anything to do with archers stats and instead has to do with how they are used. So, what is the solution? Sniping. But sniping is annoying. So, let's make sniping less annoying. Let's put in an area attack option. The area attack option should mimic sniping micro. It will serve the dual purpose of balancing archers and eliminating the annoying micro tactic known as sniping. If an area attack option doesn't work then I think we need to seriously reconsider whether the melee rebalance patch uses the correct mechanism to balance melee/range units.

In real life, sling stones fly significantly faster than arrows. Realism is important. Also, past experience has shown that changing units movement speed has massive economic side effects. Thus It is too chaotic to use for balance. A. A small amount of hack added to archer damage. This could represent the ability of arrows to more precisely target and cut into gaps in armor, due to the static release of bows, versus the more chaotic dynamic launching methods of the other projectiles. More experienced or well equipped opponents would be able to cover these vulnerabilities, hence units with hack armor negating the advantage. (Contrast with slings, which defeat armor coverage directly using blunt kinetic impact, modeled by crush.) B. Buffed archer accuracy, and maybe a small nerf to sling and javelin accuracy, so that slings and javelins will have some noticeable damage fall off at their maximum range. This could represent the superior willingness of archers to shoot to kill targets of opportunity, rather than just to suppress. Bows and arrows are expensive weapons systems compared to slings or javelins, thus bows are more likely to be wielded by committed combatants who are highly invested in victory. C. A small amount of extra health, to represent greater willingness to stand and fight, for the same reasons.

There is widespread agreement that archers play poorly since the melee rebalance mod. Prior to the melee rebalance, archers were bad unless players sniped with them. The melee rebalance effectively nerfed the extreme combat value of killing ranged units first, and this affected archers disproportionately since sniping was necessary to make them useful. We can always simply add some damage to make the unit on par with slingers and javelins, but there are more creative options that could lead to a better gameplay result. reduce slinger/skirm projetile velocities (this is different to speeding up archer velocities) increase move speed for archers + whatever people can think of

Yeah sorry that's because when running in that mod it doesn't read configs from the old location so it acts like a new install. If you move the folder to another PC though since all the config files are in that folder that will never happen. With regards to the slowdown my guess is that it resetted the graphics options so it might have set the quality too high for your hardware. You can copy the old config from the appdata folder and put it in binaries/logs/ If the savegame took longer to load and you're moving from an ssd in c:/ to a hdd: in d:/ yeah that might explain the loading speed

A good question one should ask is whether all the calls to that function are justified, whether they can be cached or batched.

Wow thats huge. I tried replacing the isqrt64() in FixedVector2D.Length() with my isqrtEst64() with P=1 and got teleporting units and a game crash. In theory, the new sqrt with P=1 should be exactly the same as isqrt(), so maybe Ill need to compare the two to figure out what happened above.

Thanks Stan, When I started the game there was a dialogue box saying this is a beta version or something I dont remember, but it said do you want to show this message again. Its as if it were a new install. This isnt a problem but the game runs slowly, is this because its running the saved game from the d:drive. Also the saved game took longer than usual to load

In a non visual replay iirc isqrt takes about 1% of a match.

Yeah, i think slightly worse, but its hard to say. It would be great if @wraitii could profile it. I modified EntityDistanceOrdering, which is used by all the different range queries, so its possible this version could be used in less locations. Also, I do whole division after finding the square root: u32 r2 = isqrtEst64(d2,P)/(100000*P); but it might be faster to find the sqrt after whole number division.

You should put it after not before

So... It's worse than without the patch?

Hi Stan, I have modified the target field in the properties dialogue box. It now reads -writableRoot "D:\Program Files\0ad\0 A.D. alpha\binaries\system\pyrogenesis.exe" However when I try to apply it I receive the following EM

Just doing a couple rounds of combat demo huge, I found roughly 13-14 minimum fps go down to 11-12fps. The video was at P=10. I added a pseudorandom tie breaker so the fighting looks like this now (P=3): p3tiebreak.mp4 I think 3 is ideal for archers. I bet 2 would be good for slingers/han crossbows and 1 for skirms, melee units. I suppose the next thing to do would be to figure out how the unit templates can determine P. I guess it involves modifying the UnitAI schema and adding P as an argument to the query setup calls in unitAI. Also, if someone wants to apply the patch and test, that would be awesome.

Wow, that's so much more simple than I hoped for. It even allows to get the actually displayed size for GUI objects directly as well. Thanks.

let screen = guiObj.parent.getComputedSize(); let h = screen.bottom - screen.top; let w = screen.right - screen.left; let iw = h * 2; Just pick the highest element in the page you can grab.

Is it possible to read the screen resolution from JavaScript scripts? If so, how?

Good idea. Or maybe 'Tiger Guard Spearman'. Much better (and more unique) than just 'imperial/palace guard spearman'.