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People (team or not) who keep following http://irclogs.wildfiregames.com/ know what's going. It's something which everyone ought to do, but can also be time-consuming (as one cant find some little detail to comment everywhere and then gets caught up in some argument about something that still is a detail). Of course we also have internal staff forum threads, the trac roadmap (https://trac.wildfiregames.com/roadmap), the ReleaseProcessDraft and sometimes staff meetings (logged at https://wildfiregames.com/meetinglogs/) for scheduling. As a byproduct of the Phabricator irc bot, I had scripted an semi-automatic summary of activity on Phabricator. It could be polished and become full-automatic (weekly or user-determined-timeframe reports). But I had put it aside because it can be and was mistaken as a presenting ones ego. I'm attaching an example from the past. Of course an overview of the most recent commits and the trac.wildfiregames.com/timeline also helps getting a summary of what happened. The development reports on play0ad.com themselves maybe more digestable to the distant player who wants to know a summary in 2-5 minutes. But they are really lacking a lot of information. We probably want weekly reports with screenshots and twitter and facebook, so that all work (including server, forum, lobby and team administration) has a place to be mentioned. (But that also means that it will be very visible when people receide and there might be some infighting for the fame and the hearts of the groupies) Generic Progress Report for Wildfire Games in the time between Mon May 1 08:00:00 2017 and Sun May 7 22:00:00 2017 elexis: fatherbushido: fcxSanya: FeXoR: Imarok: Itms: leper: mimo: scythetwirler: wraitii: Progress by non-team members: bb: borg-: causative: Grugnas: Hannibal_Barca: minohaka: Phormio: Polakrity: s0600204: sacha_vrand: Sandarac: Stan: user1: vladislavbelov:

An attacking eagle or falcon is maybe a bit exagerated, I don't think there is any account of this. But a scout unit, either a lonely bird or a horseman with a following bird, with huge vision and hunting bonus, it is justified from historical accounts.

Currently it seems that territory is lacking in giving anything very meaningful to 0 A.D. Granted, I like the concept of territory and have no wish for it to be removed. It provides a sense of logistics to the game and makes players feel rewarded when they construct a fortress on their frontier. That said, for such a graphically obvious thing, it's strange that its function seems to only relate to buildings. I would personally suggest that the territorial borders play a larger role in the game to justify their presence. Being inside of home or allied territory could confer a benefit to units such as increased armour and movement speed. Being in neutral and enemy territory could provide movement penalties, and particular civilisations known for scorched earth tactics could possibly even make hostile units slowly lose health when standing in their territory. I particularly like this concept since it would make healers, extremely underused units, have more relevance to extended attacks. Mercenaries and potential unit types could actually have bonuses outside home territory. These are just a few ideas I came up with on the matter; I'd be interested to know what other thoughts people have.

. Yes, i play Sparta just because they look cool. But if i want to increase my probability of winning in a 1v1 , i play Celts. Why ? Because with Sparta, unless i success basic rush (which is counter by some slingers) i barely reach P3 while the brits/gauls/ptols have already Castle + Hero and some siege (-10% pop) Against Ptol, its possible to resist the very hard 1 wave attack and wait enemy to have no more metal .. but with gauls/brits .. their eco are just too good for sparta to resist endless spam of hyper-mobile slingers + stronger celts eco (farm bonus, cheap barracks) over sparta eco (-10% eco and extra building to get hero). Sparta has to rely on late P3 to push back with all upgrades .. but often its already too late ; slingers are walking all around, retreating at will with no casualties (while spartan units are stucked by obstacles) , destroying towers .. and Sparta rams are counter by fast sword cavs .. slingers are massively used coz they are just too easy to use ... and often reach <<< veteran grade and finally are even able to destroy CC alone. Also, when you see stats of units, the slinger is just situated midway between archers and skirmishers .. but seriously .. how can a little stone can make more damage than an arrow or a javelin ? I would suggest the devs to make slingers the fastest infantery (more than skirmishers) but also, the less shielded and less harmful. n.b : i just discover recently that SParta has +10% building time and Celts -20% .. thats huge gap

I would like to see a weather simulation in 0 A.D. It would be nice to have weather events such as rain, dark clouds, bright sun, snow and desert winds. This would produces an entirely different feeling in maps. However, weather simulations can become annoying if they influence the map or game play to much.

Ranged units are currently designed in an ahistorical manner, encouraging players to field forces that are almost entirely ranged. In part, this is due to a number of issues. 1. Ranged units are accurate and typically faster than their melee counterparts, encouraging players to kite with them. This makes players micro their ranged units much like in starcraft. Since 0 A.D. does not wish to have this kind of gameplay, this should be addressed. 2. The proportion of ranged to melee units is historically inaccurate to my understanding. While I think that there should be the possibility of using skirmishing armies, these should have a proper place in the game based on historically informed unit compositions. Here is a general analysis of army compositions during 0 A.D.’s timeframe. An article from wikipedia argues that Alexander the Great used 31,000 heavy infantry, 9,000 light infantry (ranged), and 7,000 cavalry in the battle of Gaugamela . The opposing Persian side had only 1,500 archers in an army that numbered between 52,000 and 120,000. These statistics are not extremely unusual, but they would be in the case of 0 A.D. Here are a few suggestions to address these problems. 1. Ranged units should be much more inaccurate, having the ability to hit targets they did not aim for, making it also possible to have friendly fire. In most cases with at least firearms, it has been common for soldiers to not even aim at a specific target in battle situations. Assuming that this was also the case before gunpowder, the game should attempt to emulate this. Missile trajectories should arc more, and accuracy should dramatically fall off as the distance increases between them and their targets. Highly experienced and champion units could perhaps do better, but these things should at least affect them in part. 2. Most heavy units, especially those with shields, which do a fantastic job of deflecting things like arrows, should be much more resistant to ranged attacks than they currently are. If directional armour is introduced, I think that the idea of them taking more damage from flanking missile attacks would be a nice option, yet for the most part, shields should play a much larger role in calculating defence against ranged attacks. These are just a few options for addressing what I find to be a problem, and I'd be open to suggestions.

Another idea is that you can train light, medium, and heavy versions of most types of units (affecting speed, armor, attack, cost, etc.), depending on your tactical needs and overall strategy (and the amount of coin in your purse; if you're low on funds you can still train light troops to hold the enemy at bay until your treasury can be refilled). Only light is available at first and you have to unlock medium and heavy options at the Blacksmith by teching different armor and weaponry options. Would take a little GUI work, but not bad; imagine clicking the swordsman icon at the barracks and you see the 3 swordsman options quickly slide up. And while I think this should be moved to the Gameplay Discussion forum, I don't think Empires Ascendant is going to change much in this regard, so whatever you want to do will probably have to be part of a mod. Unless your goal is to join the team and implement some of this stuff into EA.

Hmm, perhaps some better explanation. What does "actual" mean in this context? Some examples would be nice too. I imagine you mean by "actual" is just the current Empires Ascendant way. "unlocking next tear of the same unit and improving it by that" would be the Age of Empires way. "having basic unit and choosing its path (light vs heavy)" would be like starting with a generic soldier dude and then customizing it. So, you'd start with a generic melee dude with a knife, then you can choose a path from spearman to hoplite to pikeman, or from knife dude to light swordsman to heavy swordsman. A branching way. Or a generic militia knife guy, you can branch from melee options or ranged options. This is kind of cool, but feels kind of generic to me. Perhaps have a meta "soldier customization" feature/UI that's done before matches, not in real-time. This would go well with battalions, because you could customize your battalions with different kinds of historically accurate kit, and their costs and stats change accordingly. "unlocking light / heavy unit but could train all of the types after unlocked" so basically is a tech barrier to melee and ranged branches. Kind of the least inspiring options. I think by building an archery range that kind of implies you should get access to some kind of light ranged units without having to tech them.

I personnally think it is better to have a dependancy with a horseman. It is easier. You kill simply the horseman to get ride of the falcon.

But how can enemy units kill him? I don't think archers have the precision and the range to do it, but maybe I'm wrong

I still do . Quoting myself: It's an abstraction, but a small one, in my opinion. Especially considering the million other abstractions that make no sense, eagle scouts seem more than intuitive enough. And fun...

Replays only contain command sent by human players. The commands AI players order are determined at runtime and are not present in the replayfile. The Pyrogenesis engine is deterministic, which means in theory the replay should always compute the same state and serializing/deserializing (=rejoining a multiplayergame or saving+loading a game) should too. If it computes a different state sometimes, it's an "Out-of-sync" error, which is one of the worst errors that can happen and a release-blocker bug as it breaks multiplayer games and replays. In order to verify that there is no such error, the simulation state is hashed (you can see the hash in multiplayer replay files commands.txt). I'm wondering if we shouldn't add hashing for singleplayer replays too for that purpose (replay integrity). AI bots are not deterministic, they are Out-of-sync, because they create new plans upon each deserialization (savegame loading, multiplayer rejoin), rather than serializing and deserializing their plans. Fixing that is important as we can't play multiplayer games with AIs currently - players will drift into parallel universes when playing with AI currently if one of the players rejoins the match. (Also performance of AI is tough) Replays starting from savegames will probably work with my patch hack linked above. If you're not familiar with patching and reading code, lobby to have me commit this replay+load commandline option, otherwise wait (possibly some years, or put a high enough price on the feature for devs to prioritize finding some solution). Notice that savegames can be 2-10MB or something each, so there can be an accumulation problem if its stored for every replay starting from a savegame and every replay of a match starting from a rejoin. Otherwise that what smiley said.

To be fair the Mongols are still very good falconers but apart from magical communication with the bird what's the point just good for hunting. Enjoy the Choice

Uhm, yes... I mean, have you never seen Mulan??? That's totally a legit reference, right?

Can't run the game well in a VM. Trust me I tried. Can't ask people to use VMs on Mac anyway that's even worse because of the technical gap there is ( Not saying that Mac users are dumb just that the average Mac users didn't buy a Mac to spend time fixing stuff) Dropping mac support would be terrible. It's not like deprecating the game on a platform. We will fix the game on Mac with the help of the Mac devs that came back and that might take some time yes. But if it wasn't for Mac support you wouldn't have had the Kushites.

Hello balduin, I'm sorry but I don't have much time these days...I'm working full time and my week ends are mostly spent outside (this saturday being an exception!) What I can say though, is that I've never given up on anything yet, so I will most likely dig deeper into the Anuradhapura kingdom history, when I'll have time. I agree with you, for a civ to be of interest, you need more materials, more distinctive features. That's what I'm looking for, features that would distinguish sinhalese ancient kingdom from the mauryas in terms of military : units, tactics, etc. Unfortunateley, I haven't found that yet...

Oookkkk... (still not through the code...it's quite a read ) Roads: AFAICT you first paint textures, then you paint roads taking the textures painted into account. This means you are overpainting existing textures. What about defining areas instead of textures you can than take into account for the paths to be placed, then you place paths (again as abstract regions, maybe an inner one for the part textured and a second, larger one for not placing terrain entities - and not containing the tiles of the inner path [if you want to you could also add a 3rd - again not containing any of the inner areas - that can contain entities and maybe avoiding start and end point by slightly more than it's own width to generate something like @elexis had in mind]) and then you paint the textures (with all the other map generation stuff in between ofc.). That way your approach will still work (weighted path search) but you don't have to overpaint textures and you can avoid entities close to the path and @elexis can have alleys (if you avoid forests or other entity rich areas because this is likely what is wanted). And I'd say try 5 tiles unobstructed path width (or 3 tiles from centre). Domestic animals at start locations: You can just place them after line 194 like "berry bushes" or "starting trees". Did I miss something? (And what issues does which newer placement method cause?) Large areas covered in water and ramps that can't be build on: Making the water deeper and the ramps flatter would do IMO. I don't get the entire main landscape procedure yet but maybe non-linear scaling (e.g. with square root) of the heightmap ("before" mountains are added - yea, it's in one go but in different sections) could change this without having to change much else? (on the other hand there should be an exponent scale factor for higher and lower terrain anyway IIRC) I can live with it as is but really think at least deeper water would be nice - and more realistic BTW (If the water level is set before the main landscape procedure one could also change those areas separately ) Roads avoiding water: Yea, no big deal. Still strange looking to me and AFAICT easy to avoid in placers.js line 513. Textures: Not looked into, yet. To tired ^^ Well, I hope you can make something out of this rather chaotic set of suggestions. Keep it burning @Pyrophorus EDIT: After a closer look you do most of the suggested stuff in "roads" already. Additional Area types (e.g. road_clearance and road_border) and changing the texture placement might be enough.

Sorry if I explained myself wrong, but I didn't say slingers wins games alone. Whenever I loose, it's either my fault or the opponent is better than me, period. I am just saying there's a dominant choice: civs with slingers. Either to thrive stronger economies or directly smash the opponent. How many non-casual players have you ever seen in lobby playing Spartans, Macedonians or Persians? Hell, Kushites looks awesome and on paper they should be THE counter to slingers/rams civs (swordsmans and sword cav), but I hardly see someone playing them. My point is pretty simple, Rome conquered almost the entire known world with gladius, not throwing rocks to their opponents. Same probably applies to any other civilization. I never heard of an ancient castle siege with only ranged units (you can include bolts shooters here too) supporting their siege engines and I doubt I will ever will. Actually on 0 A.D., that's the current meta of 95% of the games also because its much easier and safer - most of the time - to destroy structures than conquer them, which is completely illogical from my point of view. If we consider this is an issue, there are many but I am trying to update myself on 0 A.D. development before saying something which is already planned.

They sure are pretty, those Zapotecs...

If you are looking for some mercenaries, I found very cool siberian pictures: https://www.realmofhistory.com/2017/05/30/siberian-warrior-armor-reindeer-antlers/

I think individual devs must be provided with necessary gadgets and if the team/funds can’t do then fund raising can do. For me if a dev member needs some funds for use in the development of the game he just need to say so and see how people can contribute. PayPal should be easier. Dev members and even mod members must be rewarded and motivation is not just passion. When it comes to this kind of endeavor there has to be a definitive goal. You can’t just keep on doing hundreds of alphas up to eternity and the game is still a WIP. Sell the game to a good developer, make money, reward the team members who contributed so the game can be completed. It’s not like we/players are at the mercy of what the dev will do, can do or can’t do and the game is not at it’s potential still to become the best or one of the best. Don’t treat this game as like a school project/experiment which a contributor jumps in and out and everything remains unfinished. Yeah we/players have a choice... and honestly I’m onto a last skirmish map (3 player Cycladic Archipelago)that I found to be interesting for my SP games. If OS X is one reason re-release is held up...I may feel sorry for some people/friends using it but as one guy said you can use old version... go ahead release without OS X testing, rebundle, debugging etc. if it works fine if not it’s fine too. At least it works on other OS.

DM me and I'll buy you a bigger SSD.

I think his point is that in many competitive games particular ranged units provide the platform to victory. The Britons' slinger and the Ptolemaic camels in particular come to mind, seemingly being overused, if you look at their historical roles. Both were historically support units, to my understanding, while they are currently used as the primary unit. For the Ptolemaic faction, and most if not all of the successor states as well as Macedon, the primary unit should be some kind of phalangite. For the Britons, from a historical perspective it should be shock troops like noble swordsmen and chariots or something. Of course the player should always be free to compose the army as they see fit, but the gameplay should be tailored around historical unit roles, and when it favors support units instead, there might be an issue in the mechanics somewhere. It's not an easy fix because it's one of those balance things which causes eternal discussions each alpha again, although this alpha it seems to have calmed down a bit.

I agree with Thorfinn. Total War struggles with the issue, but it is one of the finest battle simulators ever created... 0AD would do good to attempt battle mechanics more akin to the Total War series (battalions & directional stuff). Not a blanket copy, but a simplified arcade version (Total War Arena-ish). It might be challenging, but considering the many thousands of units in TW-games as opposed to the few hundred in 0AD, it might end up being "easier" to implement in 0AD. It would also help 0AD move away from the AoE/starcraft type microing of individual units, into microing platoons, battalions and armies, at least for most combat.