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I hope the feature would make targeting accessible/interesting enough that it would be a desirable part of the gameplay. That's a bit unfair given the explanations and illustrations provided. --- I think you are imagining that there is a "auto-sniping" thing out there that sort out battles without any user input. Let's assume that it is the case. If a player that would use such "auto-sniping", some of the decisions and improvisations he would be normally be able to do would be removed. Likely resulting in fool-plays, or predictability that other users could take advantage of. On the other hand, trying to make available some features that efficiently translate user inputs into actions, that stay general enough not remove possible plays, would make them very competitive against it. The above isn't the goal of the PR, much more like a QOL feature, that would make micro in battle more interesting. Making targeted volleys of projectiles would be much more rewarding if you can define a area where they are thrown, then if you they just all go on the first closest enemy for example.

Yeah, might be too technic. Maybe this commentary in that PR describes better why I think could help on this: Oh I understand and I think you are right about "Attacking ranged units beyond melee and then running away when ur melee is all gone will remain." The way I see it, targeting ranged units to eliminate them first (given their higher damage) is somewhat part of combat micro skills, just like sniping a Hero, rams, or other high-value units. And this probably wouldn’t be as necessary with a different balance for combat units (e.g. melee units stronger against projectiles). That’s why, from my perspective, when we talk about the sniping problem in 0 A.D., we’re referring to the repetitive action of targeting units with a group or using Alt+click to pick them off first. Which creates that “whoever clicks more wins” dynamic. But I can be wrong.

Needing to add units to ships for firepower meant that investing in water would require many of your land soldiers. This means players would get flotillas full of soldiers and they would hardly ever return to fighting on land. Moving soldiers between ships and land to optimally fight on both land and water was unnecessary tedium, and usually players just didn't do this. Furthermore, with the guessing game about how many soldiers are in your ship versus the enemy ship, it was difficult to strategize (not to mention the random arrows). Lastly, requiring soldiers for ship effectiveness meant you always had to deal with the clumsiness of garrisoning different ships with the right amount of soldiers in order to fight.

That would not make the mechanic obsolete, it would just be an easier way to snipe. Attacking ranged units beyond melee and then running away when ur melee is all gone will remain. Significant balance changes would be needed to actually make it obsolete.

Thanks, @guerringuerrin I may be missing something, but the description there isn't very clear. It doesn't really say the over-all goal of the PR, so I'm a little disoriented. It also doesn't describe how targets are selected within the group. I think it would have to be an extremely clever system to completely eliminate the advantage of auto-sniping.

Unfortunate that adding (ranged) troops, such as archers, does not increase the firepower of ships. In "real" life, archers can easily fire from ships thereby adding firepower. I get a kick of of that. The ships, in a sense are too large for the game. I have ended up with the ships getting tangled up in a knot and have a difficult time untangling them. There have also been a few occurrences where the ships are so "long" that it is difficult to move troops (by ship) from one shore to the next when the shores are too close together.

Hey @RangerK!. You might be interested in taking a look at this PR. Basically, it would allow targeting groups of units using the selection box, which could make sniping as a gameplay mechanic obsolete.

The Attached Screen shot is analysis from a recent TG. You can see a HUGE disparity in the frequency and intensity of concentrated attack commands. This can be evidence of Sniping, as I see @SaidRdz do manually in many of his Youtube videos. Or it can evidence of using some game mod to automatically snipe for you. Tatyana17's 13 attack commands per second isn't necessarily evidence of cheating, as game seconds are longer than real seconds, also, maybe all the commands were given during a pause in the game, though I don't remember having one. Regardless, it's a little sus. Playing with even the possibility of cheaters is very demoralizing. I suggest TWO features: 1) Throttle the # of allowed attacks per second which the game will accept. Either 3 or 4 seems good. And if there are additional attack commands, they are either ignored or processed in the following second. 2) Show statistics exactly like those in the image as part of the post-game data.

Techs from Farmstead are also being researched. This includes all techs that affect resource gathering speed, with the exception of baskets.

In COH1 maybe because of my cpu/gpu being amd and not nvidia, all sfx for example explosion, gunshots would show a pink box outline that glitches, the young me at that time didn't mind lol since I've completed the game on my brother's PC. But a worse case is me trying to play an old game but its unplayable because all of its visual is black and it effects only amd users... I even tried playing my childhood game Empire Earth 3, its very buggy visually, crashes upon completing campaign and is laggy. I guess I could get a refurbished Thinkpad laptop since I heard its like brick that I can throw to someone just like Nokia and its cheap and reliable~

Probably to make you build more ships for naval battles.

Not sure about armour (arrows can be designed specifically to work against chainmail, but afaik not against plate) but shields are good against pierce - which is another way to make units differents.

Why has this been removed ?

I'm actually one of the first who understood what you're trying to introduce to the game. That's why I've reacted the way I did. I'm sure the developers understood, as well. Your incoherent, strawman analogies and personal insults have prolonged the discussion and pushed it on to a different path. It's good that you're acknowledging this. There's nothing more to add, honestly.

All infantry types used to increase ship firepower before Release 28, not just archers.

Thank you for the update. Could you change the colors/textures of civilian units so that they look different from soldiers? With many civs it's impossible to distinguish between soldiers and men civilians.

This makes you look like a cheater, If your have only question is to setup three barracks. Enabling auto-queue doesn't eliminate the resource supply. If you came to my topic to stretch it to 5 pages, so that even the developers refuse to read it, then you are a troll. Choose for yourself. Poking the barracks every 30 seconds is not a game, it's the job of an elevator operator. I want to manage the war, not the queue in the cafeteria.

Oh lol. I don't play romans that much in the game. Didn't know they already existed

I don't know about this part. I haven't played AOE2 in so long that I can't say anything about it. AFAIK borg and Valihrant were also good AOE2 players. I don't think one should change the complexity based on the current skill of the lobby users. I think it would be interesting to see statistics of nr. of players over the time. How a releases draws in players, how it may go down over time. Maybe with elo ranges. For myself I can say that I don't have as much of a competitive drive as before "enhancement mods" were around.

i am not sure I undertand 2nd paragraph. Regarding 1st one: I don't think there's "best" balance. It really depends on what type of game you want. I think you can automate a lot things and still have good game. For example , (extreme) example: you have FreeCiv/Cilization or Heroes of Might and Magic 3 games - you don't have micro and APM requirement at all there, but it's still good game. It's extreme example, but you get point. Thing is, if you remove mechanical requirements, you need to add complexity elsewhere. HoMM has many resources, upgrades, location and possible decisions. FreeCiv has many tech paths, city improvements, units, etc. Mechanics doesn't help there. You need to read and learn a lot there. For 0AD, I really think we need to constantly look at AOE 2 but keep 0AD unique and not just bad copy of that game. But those fundamentals need to be taken into consideration. Also overall 0AD players skills are lower then AOE 2 - so it's good to keep that on mind and make sure it's not too APM demanding. With time, as players' skills progress, you will need to switch more towards mechanical demanding game to make sure top players are not bored.

forum these past few days: 20% other things, 80% auto train argument

Yes, existed in A26

Please do. My honour!

The result is tolerance of macro mistakes. If this feature gets in, all I have to do in the first 10 minutes of the game is set my CC and Barracks to produce certain batches of units, set Auto-train to ON and never touch those buildings again until I get to the City phase to unlock champions. I don't know about you, but this simply awards laziness and kills the fun of actually managing your production.

I think the best balance is to have rudimentary automation features. Leaving those automated features un-optimized allows a player to manually outperform it if they decide to allocate their apm and attention to the task. A good example is auto-scout from aoe2. It has known behavior, like trending toward the bottom right corner of the map. One could think of many ways to optimize the path taken by autoscout like using map script knowledge to scout likely other high value locations, automatically avoiding danger ect. Some modders of 0ad would call these changes “quality of life” improvements, but the result is the destruction of gameplay.