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In the meantime you can toggle diplomacy colors, e.g. via the button left below the minimap.

As a player, I'd like to share a few opinions based on personal experience. Battalions are interesting and well suited for large scale battles; however, for smaller border conflicts, they're probably not suitable. The same applies to scouting, and lightning cavalry assaults probably require more flexibility and speed than a tightly packed group of soldiers. Historically, it's also more suitable for Rome, Greek city-states, and some civ around the Mediterranean; I find it less suitable for other civ. Therefore, I think it would be more appropriate as an option rather than the default. I'm new to this forum despite playing this game for 7 years, so I'd like to thank the developers and the community for creating and contributing to this game. I hope you all find more common ground and further improve the game.

The only reason people do this is because you can defend well with CS and use them as the backbone of your economy. CS gather 3 resources better than civilians, so there is little stopping people from just massing them and then gradually switching to champions when they bank on resources, as you've said. Let's see how you'll turtle when forced to expand and make actual military units...or risk the opponent out-booming you with better eco units.

Oh, you're the guy who revived HC, thanks! Looks like I haven't explored this game enough. I was wondering if there's a way to allow multiple players to choose the same color. You probably know how, right? Could you tell me which part I need to modify?

Snowballing happens when there is no diminishing return on something you can accumulate, like champions. Champions are also more resource efficient then their CS counterpart, as well as population efficient. There are no diminishing return with them, quite the opposite. Fast melee champions units have no counters, and can hardly be "outplayed" because they can pick battles they want, therefor securing an advantage you have with them is easy. Fast units contribute more to map control, therefore it is harder to recover if the enemy can just easily find and crush anything you try to rebuild. There is almost no limit to how much strength you can coil up with champions, as you replace workers / CS with champions, your strength can grow despite the population limit. The players that do play on snowballing don't send their CS to battle, they keep them on eco and replace them (even delete them) with fast units, be it champ cav, or cav. That makes me say that CS as workforce don't contribute to snowballing, instead they often provide an opportunity for defenders to keep eco, while the attacker is losing an opportunity cost of moving his army around. Turtling is often done like this : build forward defenses, force the enemy to move his army and waste time on defenses, while you keep doing eco with most of your population; therefore you can catch up with any economic disadvantage you had.

This is very welcome, but Tlthe main emphasis should be civ differentiation.

We're not talking about the balance here. We're talking about what happens when one player loses a lot of his units, either defending or attacking. Does he, assuming he has the necessary macro skill, have a chance at coming back into the game? As things stand now, he doesn't. That is snowballing.

Great work on this patch. The performance fixes are especially appreciated, and it’s nice to see older hardware getting smoother gameplay again. The Windows 7 support and the crash fixes for GPU Skinning and Vulkan will help a lot of players too. Thanks to everyone who put time into this release. Looking forward to Alpha 28.

AZTECS ANNOUNCED

I am 78 years old and started playing 0.ad I can play empire earth 2 ok and Civ 4 but I have real trouble with hotkeys in this game, that I don't have in the other 2 I look at the hotkey chart and I am lost because Ctrl can do 20 different things . It is odvious that you have to click or select something first then apply the hot key but I just wish this first function was put in the hotkey chart . I don't understand some games where you're attacked and your military units just sit there This is not realistic to real life at all . If a printed manual was more complete the game would be more fun for someone my age . Regards Bob Forrest

Not sure 0ad is having too much of a snowballing problem. The only case where it does feel like being the case this alpha is with fast, strong, cheap, melee units like champ spear cav and fanatics, because they have no counters and counter everything themselves.

The current release (A27) already made some strides towards this, by increasing the melee damage. Units need further diversification with pikemen having more HP but lower damage, spearmen having average HP and average damage, while swordsmen have slightly above average HP and good hack damage. Or we introduce counters to shift the current meta away from mass ranged units with melee meat shields. Needed to be done a long time ago. CS can already build and repair, in addition to fighting. Why do they contribute to the economy more than civilians? Where's the logic here? Some upgrades to specific unit lines can't hurt. For example, in StarCraft, there is a huge difference between an un-upgraded Zergling and a Zergling with both Metabolic Boost and Adrenal Glands upgrades.

Couple thoughts: Other factors contributing to snowballing: Promotion feature--this makes it very hard to fight back even if you have equal numbers. This is especially true if there are healers, which aren't much a factor in this alpha but have been in the past. Weak defensive building--I think this is the biggest factor in the current alpha. The current alpha has weak defensive buildings. As a result, players have a more difficult time going back to their safe space to regain strength. Cav dominance--cav are the dominate meta for a lot of reasons. But it's difficult to repop with cav because of cost, slow train times, and the likelihood of continued harassment. I would focus efforts on mitigating the factors that contribute to snowballing. You're right that it has a snowball effect but I don't find it to be problematic. This seems to be one of things where the advantage is earned. It is also most pronounced in early/mid game, which I am fine with since it is hard to kill a CC before p3. I don't find this a problem at all. It's relatively low numbers. (I actually think loot should be a bigger part of the game) Agree. Without commenting on the merits of these two, I think these are entirely separate proposals that may or may not have some impact on snowballing. You should also consider that, while these will be available to defending players, they will also be available to attacking players, so the snowball effect may become greater with them too.

I'd like to revisit this topic to see if there are some ways to limit snowballing. Obviously, if you gain the advantage, it's rightfully yours, but the opponent should have more opportunities to win it back. And I think there would be more fun/creative play by increasing these opportunities. Here are some mechanisms that contribute to snowballing: Citizen soldiers: This means that gaining a military advantage is often accompanied by a proportional economic advantage. Also, by training economy units from military buildings (and military units from the CC), the military infrastructure is largely the economic infrastructure, and vice-versa. Loot: Resource and experience loot leave the victor with a military and economic advantage. However, promoted units are somewhat slower to gather, which partially counteracts the other advantages. There are other features that could arguably contribute to snowballing as well, like preventing construction with ranged units, but these contribute much less. Ideas to reduce snowballing: Unit diversification and counters: by implementing more sophisticated relationships between the units, we can decrease snowballing by allowing smaller armies to beat larger ones if they have a better composition. we will need to vary more factors that are often held constant for whole unit classes in 0ad, like price, train time, and HP. Shift economic contributions more towards civilians (formerly women): This would benefit 0ad by partially deblurring the line between military investment and economic investment, and by decreasing the economic opportunity cost of sending citizen soldier (CS) units to battle. Alternatively, a new eco unit could be introduced to complement civilian gathering abilities, such as a more metal/stone specialized gatherer. Unit-specific technology tree: By providing players ways to selectively buff particular units, strategy will emerge in the prioritization of "teching into" certain units based on the civ matchup, map, and resource availability. Developments in this area will compound nicely with unit diversification. feel free to comment some thoughts and suggestions.

You can already do this. In a skirmish or random map, just set the civs of all desired players to the same one, and put them all on a team, then select Lock Teams.

UPDATE: Version 0.11.0 Added calendar (bonuses to gathering speed depending on the season and month of the year) A separate bot with support for new features has been added to the mod ( bot PETRA Expert Volatile Market) More details in the first post

Previously, I tried to make an AI player much larger, like increasing the population limit, making them build more clusters of buildings in different places to simulate an empire with multiple cities, but I could only modify the C++ files by changing a few values. I'm not even a programmer; modifying JavaScript files is beyond my capabilities.

I’m actually not very familiar with coop-mode or Archon mode, so I wasn’t referring to those. As far as I know, those modes are about multiple human players controlling a single player slot. What I’m talking about is AI-only. Several separate AI players of the same civ, each with their own economy and territory, but behaving outwardly as one large coordinated bloc — sharing the same diplomacy and roughly the same strategic stance toward other players. The idea is simply to create the feeling of a massive empire without having to make one civilization overwhelmingly strong or unbalanced.

You're talking about the coop-mode? Something like Archon mode in StarCraft 2?

I’m exxplore the idea of representing a large, multi-regional empire in 0 A.D. by using several allied players of the same civilization. Something similar to how some historical empires often worked for example, loosely coordinated regions within the Achaemenid Empire, the Habsburg realms, or other multi-centered polities that acted as one bloc toward the outside world. In gameplay, this concept could be interesting, but there’s a major limitation: even if the players are allies, each AI still makes its own diplomatic and military decisions. They may treat other factions differently, choose different war targets, or behave in uncoordinated ways. So the “empire” doesn’t actually act like a single entity. My idea: Would it be feasible to introduce an optional AI mode, separate from standard “ally” behavior, where multiple players could: automatically share the same diplomatic stance toward all other players, follow the same external military target or general direction of attack, and optionally share the same color to reinforce that they are parts of the same overarching power ? The goal isn’t to merge them into one player, but to let them behave outwardly like one unified empire while still being technically separate players. I’d like to ask the developers and AI experts whether something like this is achievable within the current AI system, or if it would require deeper changes.

Pay attention to the story next time and I promise you will love its complexity lol

sure, just download the newest release candidate for your system here: https://releases.wildfiregames.com/rc/ If you find a problem this is how you report it: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/ReportingErrors

Can i help in testing?

Sorry, this really cracked me up. Please continue...

True, I didn't pay much attention to the story. However, the part I did pay attention to (the end), is my main storyline critique. Why does Franklin have to shoot Michael or Trevor (I took the third option, but...). A much more fun option would have been to be Trevor and shoot Michael or vise versa, with the third option remaining the same. Then it would have made sense that T and M are friends afterward, since they chose not to kill each other, or that there is no bad blood, because one is dead.