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The unpairing of techs in A17 is a great thing, in my opinion. Also, you get more of them. Big fan of this change!

Hey A17 has been released! Nice timing, I have a week off. I'm going to be playing around with A17 and see what you excellent developers have made for us. Much love, thanks for A17

hah, nice reference thanks for the information!

Any ETA on when A17 non-svn gets released?

Are triggers implemented?? That's actually very interesting.

A task worthy of bacon. Nice work

Is that what Artillery, the gaming company, uses? https://www.artillery.com

I like this change, nice step in the right direction, thanks.

Loaded up SVN after a while; WOAH what's this new start menu?! E: game doesn't start: now it works

This is some swell work you're doing, thank you Yves.

Oh yeah for sure, the nuances of which stats to trade are definitely good topics, open to discussion. I just named a few random examples. no biggie!

Going to drop in and say this is completely false. It's worth dropping in just to drop this post and disprove this notion. I will whack away at anyone who says this time and time again. Allow me to explain myself. The more tech upgrades a player has access to, the more options he has. The more options he has, the deeper the strategic depth of an RTS. Think about it, if you have to choose between two technologies, say +2 hack attack or +2 pierce armor, doesn't that limit what you can do with your units? It does, it does limit what your units can become. I'm going to make things really, really simple in this example but hopefully this proves my point. Imagine that I can choose to give both +2 hack attack and +2 pierce armor to my melee cavalry units. This means that I can choose to spend my resources in a way that gives me some very nice cavalry. I can base a strategy around getting a certain amount of cavalry units out on the field at 10 minutes for example. I make my strategy so that I have both the maximum amount of Cavalry units AND both the cavalry upgrades at a certain time. This gives me, for example, a certain strategy. Now, if I'm forced to choose between attack or armor and I can't get both, this strategy suddenly becomes much less powerful. So, limiting techs such as these only limits strategic depth, it doesn't contribute to it. Another reason that makes it bad to pair up technologies is that it limits ways for players to get ahead. For example, imagine that player A gets a good engagement. He wins a fight. This means that, temporarily, he has the advantage. He has the initiative. If player A is a good player, he'll be looking for ways to take advantage of the initiative he obtained to "get more ahead". Technologies is an excellent way to do that: if I win a fight, my opponent can't attack me during a certain amount of time. So I'm going to use the time I gained (by winning the fight) to invest my resources into expensive technologies for example. Another reason that makes me against the pairing of techs is that it limits what you can do, as a player. Players are going to eventually figure out which tech is better (for example, I think it's been proven that the wood gathering upgrade is better than the wheelbarrow upgrade, if you manage your drop-sites correctly). After they figure out which is better, they're going to go for the better tech every game. This means that instead of having two paired techs, you just have one tech that is good and the other is non-existent. It also limits strategic options, as I said in the earlier part of my post. If you're going to prevent a player from getting every single economic tech instead of allowing him to research them all, then you're making it very difficult for a player to a play a defensive, economy-oriented style. Stylistic play is much more difficult if you limit strategic options. I could ramble on, but I won't since I think my point has come across. There are some instances where I think pairing technology could be interesting. e.g. You could pair the two following techs: ranged infantry move 5% faster but lose 5% health -OR- melee cavalry have more 5% HP but have 5% more training time In the case of this pair of tech, you're trading unit attributes. This doesn't limit strategic depth, given that you're making an actual trade (as opposed to a tech, techs are ALWAYS good to have). If I go with the infantry route, then my infantry are going to be slightly faster but, my cavalry units will also train faster. So going with the infantry route means that I might be able to pull off a stronger rush in the early game and during the rest of the game my ranged infantry will be more mobile. However, they're also going to be weaker. Researching one of these techs isn't going to be something that will be ALWAYS good. It's a trade-off. That's why you can pair these, unlike economic techs for example, or any "straight-up bonus" techs.

You should have played Aoe 3 TAD Nr40. Walls, EVERYWHERE

Disregarding design features right now, I would like to know how performance is doing? Namely, multiplayer command lag, has it been fixed? Has performance in-game improved during A17? I read somewhere that there were a couple of changes that might have been possible to make path-finding a task that scales with more threads. Any update on any of that? I'm calmer than before about the game but I'm still pretty excited to see where this is going. I do believe that the performance issues are the most pressing ones.

So the balancing branch went through to SVN in A17? That's nice to hear. So, can some of the testers talk a bit about how the game now plays out?

That's a nice map! Which one is it?

4 villagers with berry upgrade and 1 cav hunting gives you constant 5 batch villager production, I've found.

I did the math somewhere, making 5 vills at a time is actually better in the long run. You should pretty much always make batches of 5, don't sweat it.

Then you could re-phrase my question into "why is ping so bad in 1v1 in 0 AD compared to aoe3 or starcraft 2 or even games like il-2: clod, where i have 120-150 ms of ping and not 1000" ? I think this is the answer to my question. I'm sorry for being such a scrub when it comes to these matters, but could you elaborate on this point? I think this makes sense in that the connection I use to play aoe3 and the connection I use to play 0 AD are the exact same one, aoe3 is just much more reponsive overall. 0 AD offline (vs ai) is also very responsive and has a nice feel, unlike online play. so you're probably touching the issue at hand here, i think. whatever a turn is, if it's too big then I can see it not being a problem offline but being a problem online.

I personally don't like it, I often time try to make a house and end up rotating the screen. I use the cursor to scroll around. Of course, I admit that the use of wasd keys is somewhat unique and I can see it being nice for other users. Customization would be nice, however I think that building hotkeys are much more important than camera hotkeys. It doesn't make sense to use both mouse cursor and actual hotkeys (hot hotkeys in that they're where the left hand is) for the same role, in an rts you're generally trying to spread the work-load around as much as possible.

i'm talking ping

I can see why some people wouldn't like these changes, and I'm not going to say they're good. What I am going to say however, is that on paper they look all right. However skirm-cav vs deer needs to be fixed. I think people need to play a lot of games on the current build and see how things go from there. the meta-game has, for sure, been thrown upside down. so it's pretty normal for old strats to not work anymore.

I'd proposed a hotkey set-up some time ago. Really, there's nothing too complicated about the hot-keys for building buildings. As long as E is for houses that is, that'll help get you aoe players to play the game. Honestly, besides that, just make sure that you use the qwerty asdfg keys before the other ones. Hotkey customization would be great as well.

Why would I have the same lag? This is the most important question to answer. In starcraft 2, I can play with American players, while being in Europe, with very little command lag. The same can be said for aoe3, which is a dream to play with few players. Latency and connection issues kill 0 AD much more than skirm-cav ever did. This isn't a whine or anything. I'm just saying, the most pressing issue with 0 AD is the multiplayer performance. When I play with my units offline, they respond very nicely and the game feels very nice. When you hop online, the amount of command lag you get pretty much kills the experience and pleasure of playing, not to mention it makes micro irrelevant. Which is something quite horrible in an RTS. Is it due to the way commands are transmitted? In a sense, does anyone know how games are hosted in multiplayer? If it would be possible to use some other way to connect?