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Hey, Gaius, nice mod! I skimmed it - it's a lot of JS, which I don't know very well - and it's cool. You should make a display video if you want to show off the differences between your mod and the standard. I'm mostly interested in making the clustering / flocking behaviour without a formation more realistic, disregarding improving other aspects for now. In a strict implementation, I shouldn't have to actually end up modifying the costs of pathfinding though. Many more advanced crowd simulations are either based on a spring-force type model, or a velocity space model, and the path doesn't exactly change. The units will move a little differently, but their goal will be to move along the path, while the crowd simulation aspects (forces, velocity spaces, etc.) will keep them very slightly offset from the path. It should result in a better looking group movement without a formation.

Just to add my two cents as a newcomer (fresh perspective and all that), I just destroyed an AI player with 12 rams. Used nothing else, and finished with 5-6 rams intact. Granted, it was against a "very easy" AI as I'm still getting my feet wet, but I was surprised at the massive damage combined with the AI's inability to destroy the rams. Part of this might have been the civ I was playing against, I captured one of their civic centers and they did not appear to have anything but ranged units available. I'm not sure which one that is, but perhaps they are week on the "hack" units and that made it worse. For context, the AI did control half the map and was about as well developed as it was going to get on that difficulty (I like to let games play out for a while, especially since I'm learning). At any rate, I think lowering the speed would definitely help. It seemed that swordsman could take out rams, but everything else pretty much just fell down in front of them or ran to hide. It also seemed that they dealt quite a bit more damage than I expected (coming from AoE II), but perhaps that's historically more accurate than the damage in AoE.

It would be nice too to allow the drain to stop at 0. Some mods might not want it to go into the negative. Hmm, also, need a way to define the "consequences" of negative resources too*, but that's a much different patch. But that simple change to line 6 allows mods to play with it and yet doesn't negatively affect public mod in any way I can see. *For instance, negative food might start to drain the health of your units, so that you could have a "starving" effect. Imagine sieges and farm raids.

I am making Building set for te Aztecs for my mod, if you like the models you cant used

Ok, i just tried out the lastest version. Everything is so good so far but it seems battering ram speed is way too high and unrealistic. They have almost the same speed as light infantry. I don't mind the fact that it is hard to be destroyed and deals lots of damage to buildings but the speed is way too high. Please reduce it. Everyone who is familiar with history knows that battering ram is a very heavy siege engine, it should not be as mobile or move as fast as currently depicted in the game. Thanks

In what universe? 0ad's formations are extremely rigid. They don't turn or reverse direction properly, there's no middle ground between completely breaking down and maintaining the formation rigidly when attacking, and they can't handle obstacles at all. There's also no practical use for them besides keeping troops together. In total war formations do turn and reverse smoothly, they handle obstacles just fine, and you can do all kinds of cool and centrally important things with them like directional bracing, shield castle, and charging. Total war also has epic cavalry charges that are awesome for mowing units down. It also demonstrates why units need to be managed in batallions, because each batallion takes on the given formation individually, allowing you to place formations strategically on the battlefield, to flank and surround the enemy. Total war also has a vision penalty for trees, allowing you to hide units in forests to ambush the enemy. The realism and depth to total war's combat system is very impressive, and 0ad has none of that. 0ad also has none of the straightforwardness or simplicity that aoe2's combat system does, and at least aoe2's formations could maneuver properly and handle obstacles. It's literally the worst of both, with territory and citizen-soldiers thrown in just to trash up the gameplay even more and remove all kinds of interesting strategic options that were standard in aoe2. That's why people are playing aoe2 rather than 0ad. Two decades after aoe2 was released and they've still got people playing professional tournaments and we only have 2 high level players total even with all the improvements we have over it.

Article 1 is now uploaded onto the mod db page - link - https://www.moddb.com/mods/oniversalis-age-of-exploration It is currently unauthorized so will be readable to others in a few hours or 2 days at most...

Our combat system in general is not friendly to the sort of formations that we're trying to make. It just won't work. If we wanted total war style formations we'd need a unit production/unit control system that is more similar to total war. The current aoe-style combat system really can only support simpler aoe-style formations that don't need to stay together when attacking, which makes any sort of formation-based bonuses totally impractical. The devs keep trying to have it both ways with everything and the gameplay is already garbage because of it.

My bad with the terminology. It seems that I was mistakenly looking at a section referring to caetrati which also eludes to hypaspists. The point that I wish to make is a small distinction. Hypaspists according to my findings were heavily armed compared to peltasts, but less so than other phalangites. Essentially the point is that they seem to have served an intermediary role in the battlefield that would be cumbersome for others. Why prefer this to simply labelling them as the Macedonian variation of the hoplite, which seems to be the other camp for academics? First, it seems that, as I have hopefully shown, there is a moderately good amount of support for this. Why ardently take one side when the other position also has a good basis? Obviously it would be academically compromising to assert entirely that hypaspists were clearly armed in one way when the primary sources do not give an explicit description of their equipment. The main reason is to provide a consistent gameplay depiction of these units, which as I see would be designed to be used in a historically informed manner based on the tactics by which Alexander used them. I wish that I could say that I found more sources, but I haven't bothered looking for more. As much as I would like to show some pictures of hypaspists, the photos from that time are a bit low quality, but here are some extremely accurate versions of hypaspists from the critically acclaimed game Age of Empires Online.

I'm enjoying reading this discussion Could you all please define what you understand as "light" armoured and "heavy" armoured /armed? I think that would help understand what everybody exactly has in mind, because right now I'm just guessing at what you mean exactly (show me some pics ).

Could you share us your work ?

Hello, all. I'm new to 0. A.D. and interested in contributing. Mainly, the crowd simulation and the way that units move by default without a formulation and the way they bunch at one location is quite unrealistic. This can be solved with the pretty heavily researched topic of crowd simulation. I've implemented Boids crowd simulation (a pretty basic one that looks reasonably good) before and would probably like to reimplement it for 0. A.D (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4183/faeef708a56b988742b5572fce9174caec7b.pdf). The codebase is pretty massive, and I've noticed that there is a lot of somewhat relevant AI code in source/simulation2/components. I'm mostly wondering if anyone can point me more specifically to where I'd look to begin modifying how units move and adding some better crowd simulation.

Also chek https://code.wildfiregames.com/source/0ad/browse/ps/trunk/docs/pathfinder.pdf and wraitii had started some pushing patch at D1490.

You wanna say @wraitii. 0 A.D. doesn't have the crowd simulation, only a path finder for short and long paths. You can find it in source/simulation2/, files that contains the "path" word in their names. There are also UnitAI and UnitMotion components.

Yeah, I also did that in my 0abc mod. Others might want to try it out too, which is why I proposed D1323 months ago. Maybe after the feature freeze is lifted :)

Yep, exactly like this. The <Delay> should be a lot shorter (IMHO), but that would of course be alterable.

I made a mod with better unit behavior, regarding chasing, attacking and capturing. But no AI is used, but for example some randomness. But i think formation is the best way to go, it has several advandages: like better to micro, looks nicer, more tactical and less cost of pathfinding. U can look at my mod: https://0ad.mod.io/formation-fighting-mod. And look mostly on UnitAI.js.

It's a bit wasteful though. I think what we have is better because I prefer the larger viewing area, but we do lose out on the corners. That could probably be fixed in C++, but I don't know how hard that would be.

something like that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLy87AhIXak (infra low vid quality) The design I used at the time I did that is the following: There is a convertable units with a Convertable component. Convertable component has: - ConverterClasses - ProtecterClasses - Delay - Range A unit is converted (change ownership or even change template) when it has a unit of the 'converter' class but no unit of the 'protecter' class during a said 'delay' in a said 'range'. (Obviously the range and the delay are tweakable by auras. So we can have a hero with instant conversion and things like that).

The easiest solution to hide hide the black corners of the minimap is to use à ring enough large. I began to implement the gui designed by Shyin. However, it will take me a lot of time.

We would be greatful if you could share your textures with us, but we don't really need the 3d models right now as we have our own.

I finished some more wildlife while I wait on Exodarion:

Good news! We have assets from other mods that we could share (Mostly unit textures)

Maybe we could have square water tiles, with obstruction. You wouldn't be able to sail on them though.

I totally agree with this. It seems insane that my infantry struggle to keep up with a ram that must weigh tons! It leaves factions that lack sword cavalry with effectively an invulnerable attacking enemy. Thanks for bringing this up @Thelegionare

So I noticed something... There exists a type of traditional (vernacular) architecture very similar in both rural Romania and Bulgaria. It's very clearly, pre-Ottoman, pre-Byzantine and even pre-Roman. It looks quite different to Slavic architecture as well... In fact, this type of buildings are very similar to the few reconstructions of village type structures from ancient Thrace and Dacia, and may have served as a source of inspiration for some of the reconstructions. This isn't be the only "remnant" of ancient times, take a look at the Bulgarian Surva Festival and see some pre-Christian traditions alive and well (and that clearly isn't Roman or Greek origin either). The Surva festival also offers a clue for priest/shaman? Anyway, here's lots of inspiration for you @stanislas69, just avoid the obvious modernisms... Wooden shingles (no ceramic roof-tiles), or thatch and even stone slabs. Lots of wood, but also mud plastered mud brick, rammed earth, wattle and daub and stone are used for the lower storey. 2 stories aren't uncommon (ground floor was often used for animals). Upper floor sometimes have a slight overhang. Relatively steep roofs. Often have a squarish ground plan (though not exclusively so) Like the CC and temple, I was thinking that their dock could have a more pronounced Hellenic influence. There were many Greek cities on the Black sea under Thracian "protection", and could/should be the source of their Hellenized navy. Essentially a Greek dock, but with wooden shingles to tie it in with the rest of the building set. We shouldn't forget that the Danube also runs through their territory and provided them with a Celtic connection, so their trading ship could be Celtic (looking). I think it would be nice to use thatched roofs for the storehouse and farmstead (only), emphasizing the rural aspect.

Heres a "Flag" we may use for the Aztecs, it is based around the historical symbols of the Aztecs and the people of Tenochtitlan