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I will bring up another point in this discussion, and that is the absolutely insane way that damage reduction works in this game. Just take a look at this post. An unit with 6 armor will have 47% damage reduction. So nearly 50% of all damage will be absorbed with just 6 armor! I think we all agree that this is most military units after a couple of upgrades. Most champions go above this value into 10 armor (65% DR) or more. It's no wonder that most players try to maximize high burst damage, using hard-hitting ranged units like javelin throwers and slingers. It's ultimately a product of the game's math. Another thing to consider is that many units have both hack and piercing armor at similar levels, so it doesn't matter which type of damage they take, they will have the same DR. Warcraft 3 has a similar system, but it also has proper counter system, so it is less noticeable there.

First of all: Welcome to the forum! The game can be played almost without hotkeys. When I started I knew only shift and ctrl as modifiers to mouse actions (holding shift or ctrl while clicking with the left or right mouse key). this is certainly not efficient but it does work. Also, If you prefer different set of hotkeys, there is a way to edit your preferred assignments from within the main menu: Open "Settings" - "Hotkeys" and double click on the setting you want to change. There will be an input box where you can define the key for that action. Hope this helps a bit!

It’s also fixed to this specific alpha. Snowballing has been around for a long time. This thread is evidence of that. There are underlying factors that contribute to that, which have nothing to do with cav/champs being too strong. It would be wise to listen to some of the old heads that have been around for a longer time that have learned the (often painful) lessons of previous alphas

I definintly agree with the idea of unit-specific upgrades (which would also contribute to civ-specific tech trees). Then you can also counter the tactics of your enemy (possibly nullifying their snowballing). For example, say the snowballer has tons of cav, research better spears, train spearmen, snowballer loses most cav. Then, as the now weakened player (who spent most of his resources on cav), figures out his opponent's tactics, he can counter (tons of archers an swordsman). Defensive buildings are a little too strong in some ways and too weak in others. They have too little life and resistance, and way too much damage (especially when garrisoned). This should be slightly reversed, so that towers can shoot less arrows, but take longer to destroy or capture. Fortresses are also very OP, though maybe that is a good thing. I think that the biggest thing involving CS is their lore and reason for existing. The idea is that they are everyday people who take up arms, not professional soldiers. But, professional soldiers are all champions which, A: doesn't make sense (champions, not professionals), and B: makes all actual soldiers too expensive and OP. For loot, I think the entire lootsystem should be done away with, and replaced with a treasure dropping system. I have two reasons for this. The first is that, in reality, in the middle of a battle how are soldiers carrying suits of armor and other looted items from the dead bodies, while still fighting unimpaired, and two, when I lose most of my army, it would be nice to have a way to get it back, by sending people to collect the treasure that both armies have dropped.

Okay. For your two unremovable objects, open the .xml file in a text editor, search for their names, and delete them. Second, I noticed that in the same .xml file that the players are garbled. The problem might stem from the fact that some players are pre-selected and other players aren't. If resizing the map fixes the problem, it might be too large, and need to be resized permanently. Yeah, I just tried, and the map crashed 0 A.D. strange thing, it did something that I have only seen it do once before, when I did something the engine coudn't have... Anyway, try out what I said and see if it works then. Let me know how it goes.

You're welcome. I just did some searching, if you want to make multiple players have the same color, there are two ways: A: Make or edit a Scenario map, making the team members have the same color. B: Edit PlayerColor.js. Not sure what exactly you would change, but it is doable. C: Do both, which would fix all maps to be how you want them. D: Do what @Gurken Khan said above: toggle diplomacy colors (which can be changed in Settings).

This seems like a narrow definition. With the points I brought up, I was talking about things that make snowballing inherent to 0ad gameplay. Anyways, with the next release, I would like to experiment with some changes along these lines. I hope you all will be willing to test stuff out.

There's clearly something between the game being a miserable turtle system and feeble defensive buildings that do little to secure a base and render many siege units superfluous. In fact, that system has previously existed.

You also said last time that when fort gave territory root, game was lame because it was forcing a player to spend even more time ramming all of the enemy's base. I'm pretty sure that this desire to have "stronger" defensive buildings is a bias, and that once I will be the case, it be lame and stall games. Defensive strategies should be viable (as is currently), not de-facto guaranteed to all players who built a fort to get their hero in the first place. I already know there is nothing I can do to convince players of theses facts. We'll have to go through a cycle of making defenses op again for some to realize them.

Defensive buildings aren't meant to just get kills. Defensive buildings are primarily meant to protect you from losing your base to an invading army. Defensive buildings perform very poorly in this aspect. Siege is rarely built because defensive buildings are so poor at their primary purpose. The game hasn't always been this way. Something is clearly wrong.

Thank you for the suggestion. I have renamed the files so they have the certainly the same name (like in the screenshot below) but the crashing remains. Tell me if I got you wrong and there is another file name that I missed. Though maybe you're onto something with your first hint. Perhaps it is not the terrain but the objects on them. I have two objects in my map I cant remove anymore. I even can't select them. They are the actors "structures/destruct_3*3.xml" or "structures/destruct_wood_3*3.xml", or at least in today's version of the game you can find the same objects under these names as "actors", and you can select them, move them and delete them. I placed them three years ago in an older version of the game. Do you think they can have a negative influence? I'm not that sure, since when I recenter the map to a smaller scale with these two objects still being in them, and I start the game it does not crash. Moreover, can you play on the map or does it crash in your case too?

Yes, definitively, more so, stronger and faster units should have also greater weaknesses. Agree with this too. I guess the difficult part is find the right balance to avoid encouraging turtling too much I think players say that because they expect turtling to be : "build a fort then you are safe". Turtling this alpha is a tone of fun and it's balanced. The attacker CAN make progress, and you have to think of your defenses as layers, instead of just relying on just having invested a very low amount of resources that would make you immune forever to attacks. Defending should be dynamic (and this alpha, it kinda was). There would be 0 fun if any players could just set up a base with a fort with swords garrisoned and a couple towers, and be rewarded with immunity without him having to do more. I would point out that defenses are really cheap and currently are already very easy to make worth their cost: A single tower can have 25+ kills over the course a game very easily. A fort with 80+ kills is common. A tower cost 200 resource or 2 CS, a fort 900 resource or 9 CS. Obviously not weak at all.

IMHO one of the things that contribute to snowballing is the lack of hard -or stronger- counters between units. Agree with this too. I guess the difficult part is find the right balance to avoid encouraging turtling too much

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.

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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.