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The blacksmith tech cant be tiered like they were in Aoe2 games. Since 0AD is taking place in a single time period.

Even AoE3 had to use single tier techs in arsenal. Because the techs have to make sense, cant make them in tiers just for sake of it.

 

So I feel Blacksmith should have single techs each for - Infantry armor, Cav armor, and different weapon upgrades. With accompanying increase in unit cost. This could indicate that a working armory/blacksmith in city allows better equipments for the army.

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58 minutes ago, drsingh said:

The blacksmith tech cant be tiered like they were in Aoe2 games. Since 0AD is taking place in a single time period.

Even AoE3 had to use single tier techs in arsenal. Because the techs have to make sense, cant make them in tiers just for sake of it.

 

So I feel Blacksmith should have single techs each for - Infantry armor, Cav armor, and different weapon upgrades. With accompanying increase in unit cost. This could indicate that a working armory/blacksmith in city allows better equipments for the army.

I agree that weapon techs shouldn't be paired with city progression. Instead, unit training should revolve around training levels, similar to like you suggested. Basic, advanced, elite etc. to fit that larger cities were able to field higher qualitiy trained troops.

However, There could be additional techs, that don't increase the unit's combat efficiency directly, but makes training them more economic by reducing metal/iron costs for certain unit types. Those could be tied to "advancing" the blacksmith itself. I have something in mind like "capacity increase" or "metallurgy" improvements which allowed in ancient times to produce metal/weapons faster. Additionally, some civs could feature unique techs that allow them to research weapon types that were iconic for the civ, like "Sarissa" for Mace civ to name an example. Or certain types of special steel or whatever.

Edited by DarcReaver
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Well, an interesting  aoeish way regarding uniqueness of civs would be something like, in cavalry area, having 2 techs: one improve speed and another HP. Most civs should have available only one of them, bending to fast but more fragile, or slower and sturdier cav. Cavalry civs could have both. As example.

 

Would try to write my general gameplay proposal if there's some idea that can be borrowed or criticized (in my own topic). If it helps a little, i'm happy. 

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I'm still messing around with setting up the economy system - resources, their respective roles and how they interact with each other...

Haven't found a way to keep them all while not overcomplicating stuff. It's really hard to do.
Many thoughts but nothing that really "combines" them into something unique. I was actually considering to have "earlygame" and lategame resources split up (which would be something like earlygame: food wood iron" and lategame "stone silver" ... But not sure yet.

As of unique teching ways: I'm preparing a document launch on the military outline of Greek civs, if you have suggestions I'll gladly pick them up as I'm not 100% sure how to deal with everything yet aswell. Might become something like "best-of-all"...

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Regarding blacksmith tiering:

 

If you keep the phases as they are now, then if you decouple the blacksmith from these phases, you may introduce unnecessary complexity, or confusion, but certainly a tear in the concept of the game. If you have phases, then they must mean something. Unless... unless... The phases just happen automatically. For instance, if you build 10 buildings, then boom, you get upgraded to the next phase automatically, with a nice aural flourish and graphical animation. That way, the phasing is directly, more directly, tied to the number of buildings you are building rather than to the phasing tech itself. Building enough buildings becomes the bottleneck instead of the phase tech cost. So, you may still have a phase tech icon in the UI, but costs nothing and it's auto-researched when the prereqs are met.

 

So, returning to the Blacksmith, it can still have tiers of techs, but what you can do is present these tiers as blacksmith experience. I can imagine teching up your blacksmith from apprentice blacksmith to blacksmith to master blacksmith to royal blacksmith, each level unlocking more techs. Maybe make these tiers have prereqs like "Requires any 3 blacksmith techs" or something like this, in order to gain this "experience", see, and unlock the next tier.

Edited by wowgetoffyourcellphone
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19 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Regarding blacksmith tiering:

 

If you keep the phases as they are now, then if you decouple the blacksmith from these phases, you may introduce unnecessary complexity, or confusion, but certainly a tear in the concept of the game. If you have phases, then they must mean something. Unless... unless... The phases just happen automatically. For instance, if you build 10 buildings, then boom, you get upgraded to the next phase automatically, with a nice aural flourish and graphical animation. That way, the phasing is directly, more directly, tied to the number of buildings you are building rather than to the phasing tech itself. Building enough buildings becomes the bottleneck instead of the phase tech cost. So, you may still have a phase tech icon in the UI, but costs nothing and it's auto-researched when the prereqs are met.

 

So, returning to the Blacksmith, it can still have tiers of techs, but what you can do is present these tiers as blacksmith experience. I can imagine teching up your blacksmith from apprentice blacksmith to blacksmith to master blacksmith to royal blacksmith, each level unlocking more techs. Maybe make these tiers have prereqs like "Requires any 3 blacksmith techs" or something like this, in order to gain this "experience", see, and unlock the next tier.

I really like both of those ideas. Especially the auto phasing based on building count. It never really made sense to spend resources to advance in phase. Going from a village to a town should just be based on how many or what kind of structures that you have. I think it was just a holdover of the ages from AoK.

The blacksmith levels sound very interesting.

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  On 16/03/2017 at 2:02 AM, Hannibal_Barca said:

0 A.D. features each civilization at it's prime.

DarcReaver "Which is? *drumroll* Iron Age mostly I suppose?"

Yep, makes sense, so that would include the germanic tribes at their iron age peak well before the germanic - norse split and Roman incursions. However that's the Pre-Roman Iron Age (5th/4th–1st centuries BCE). New archaeology and very interesting.  
It would include Israel, Hittites, Scythians, Who else? 

If the Han are thrown in eventually then so should their great rivals were the Xiongnu, but tactically and technologically they are similar to the Scythians. 
From 500 BC to 500 AD in many cases the units you can talk about for a given civilisation in this kind of game are more or less the same. Technologies come and go but in some cases reinvention. 

Still doesn't help with the game play problems DarcReaver's cited.  Crazy new inventions needed. 
The AI is owning me at very easy setting! Waaaaa :(

 

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On 16/03/2017 at 6:52 AM, drsingh said:

The blacksmith tech cant be tiered like they were in Aoe2 games. Since 0AD is taking place in a single time period.

Even AoE3 had to use single tier techs in arsenal. Because the techs have to make sense, cant make them in tiers just for sake of it.

 

So I feel Blacksmith should have single techs each for - Infantry armor, Cav armor, and different weapon upgrades. With accompanying increase in unit cost. This could indicate that a working armory/blacksmith in city allows better equipments for the army.

The challenge then is to differentiate the civilisations. Right now with the exception of a few elephants and the celts naked guy, all the armies are a little too similar and in some cases the AI owns you before you have time to do anything interesting with the blacksmith anyway. Diversity is the mother of complexity. You can't get one without risking the other; ie. over complexity.  

PS I'm most of the way though the art and modelling guides. Nice writing.  

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On 16/03/2017 at 8:32 AM, DarcReaver said:

I'm still messing around with setting up the economy system - resources, their respective roles and how they interact with each other...

Haven't found a way to keep them all while not overcomplicating stuff. It's really hard to do.
Many thoughts but nothing that really "combines" them into something unique. I was actually considering to have "earlygame" and lategame resources split up (which would be something like earlygame: food wood iron" and lategame "stone silver" ... But not sure yet.

As of unique teching ways: I'm preparing a document launch on the military outline of Greek civs, if you have suggestions I'll gladly pick them up as I'm not 100% sure how to deal with everything yet aswell. Might become something like "best-of-all"...

Would this mean that wood and Stone would give you different quantities of the same building materials. wood giving a bit and stone giving a whole lot.  We have a clear wood to stone progression in the walls and towers that would be broken if stone disappears. 
You've said it's been argued that going beyond 5 or 6 resources are hard to track. I doubt the person writing that originally was counting population. Do you have a reference? 

I suspect that food, wood, stone, iron, silver and population will work ok because population is a different type of resource. And if we are making battalions we will need higher early pops anyway.  It would not be one pop per battalion. 

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
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  Citizens – they do no longer start with their weapons, instead they only work as male collectors. They collect food, wood, metal and stone faster than women, and they can hunt with spears or bows. They have the option to be “called to arms” to receive their weapons but lose their ability to collect resources (in case of Atheneans: Citizens turn into Hoplites). The upgrade is permanent. 

Alternative: Citizens “call to arms” is a timed ability. When activated Citizens run towards the Civic Center (or Blacksmith) and receive their weapons. When leaving the city boundaries or after a certain time they drop their weapons and become gatherers again.

That bad idea, I'm imagining the units doing this very far both sites, when they return , the civilians are dead.

batter automatic.

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  • 1 year later...

I'm nobody relevant in this community and also I don't know if this thread is still in use, but I would like to say a few things.

First I don't think 0 A.D. completely lacks a distinctive feature. Just go online and you will see an active community of players everyday. Whenever there is a match involving some of the top players there are 4, 5, 8 people watching (I know that is nothing compared to AoE2 online standards, but hey... this is an open source game in alpha stage, no advertisement, etc.). There are people cheating in MP games to avoid losing rank. All this for me shows how the game is a success already. Besides, it is, as far as I know, the best open source game out there in any genre - if that is not success, to be the best in your field, I don't know what is. It is a bit pointless to make comparisons to multi-million dollar titles, unless they are constructive.

I have been playing everyday for a month or so. The game is very enjoyable as it is, and I wouldn't be shocked if it was released as 1.0 already. It is certainly better than most open source games at 1.0. The commonly repeated line that it is a weaker AoE 2 clone is false. Just because it is difficult to summarize in one sentence what 0 A.D. is about doesn't mean it doesn't have its qualities. First, it is possibly one of the most accurate historically. Second, it comes to fill a gap in the open source gaming community: a good RTS game. What is the other alternative? I have only seen Mega Glest, and I think 0 A.D. is light-years ahead. Third, the replay feature and observer mode are really nice, and the ease to mod, with the guarantee that it can always be improved, definitely leaves many AAA RTSs behind. I love AoE2, but single player with that AI just sucks, and there is no hope of anything better, unless in 100 years MS decides to release the code.

I don't think balance mods are a waste of time now. Some experienced players have volunteered to contribute this, and it makes the game massively better for now - just enough to keep the fanbase slowly growing.

Now, after reading this thread and other ones for the whole day, and building on what others have pointed out - both suggestions and issues with the game - I list here some suggestions, taking into account that 0 A.D. is heavily AoE2 inspired and that straying too much from that should rather be a fork of the project than a change, after all this is alpha 23 already - I assume radical changes are off the table. For example, I think batallions would better fit in a fork of the game than in some next alpha, since probably would require months or years to implement, and would completely change it from an AoE style to a Total War style. Anyway, some suggestions (hopefully easy to add to the game):

Markets: I like the idea of trading between CCs because it is realistic: you won't have caravans walking inside the city but between them. It should be required that there is a market in the CC area. About trading being OP, I think it could just be reduced the gain (just balance).

CC area: connected to the previous point, CC area of influence should be reduced. This would make the CC look like a city center, with all city stuff close to it. In fact, with this we could just use trading between markets as it is, and make the markets limited to one per CC (or not, but prohibiting trade between markets in the same CC area).

Farms: what prevents a poor peasant from having a farm in the center of Athens? I would say the price of land (?). So what if we make building farms in CC territory of influence cost, say, additional 100 metal. That would encourage building farms far from CC. The reduced CC area of influence also helps with this.

Endurance: I like this idea. If soldiers are not in own territory after some time they could start slowly losing health. At some point they have to come back home - this could be circumvented with Military camps and outposts for example, where they could rest in an advanced position.

Women, population and unit recruiting: One interesting dynamic that game could have is nobody is born in a village without women. Killing all women should make your enemy unable to increase his pop. Maybe women could also be capturable, solving this problem for a only-male horde of nomads. Also, people are not born in City centers, but in houses. Houses could train women and citizen soldiers, but only if there is a couple (male, female) in a certain range (or tied to that house, or in the CC territory to which this house belongs). To avoid increasing even more the spamming of units, training time could be drastically increased, since now we would have tens of houses making units. CC would only serve as provider of territory and universal dropsite. Training villagers from houses would also stimulate building houses near worksites, which I assume is realistic (villages of miners, lumberjacks, etc...).

Barracks: this is more radical but I was thinking if we should not limit training of units only to houses, and for training military we had to garrison civilians in barracks. Or, less radical, citizen soldiers could start weaker than now, and be garrisoned in barracks to gain experience - and lose gathering abilities.

Blacksmith: similarly, citizen soldiers could be garrisoned in blacksmiths to simulate that they are working there. Each worker might provide a cost bonus for military units. (maybe this would be too micro intensive, another alternative would be resource "weapon", or simply ignore this item).

CC Territory again: should be reduced (as said before), and represent only the territory of the urban area. So any military or dropsite building should be not only allowed but also cheaper out of the territory (cost additional metal in the territory). Normal buildings in the territory would be civilian buildings: houses, temple, market, blacksmith... This modification would conflict with ideas like the military colony. Maybe it could just be allowed to be built out of own territory, but without territory influence. Building dropsites out of territory and houses as a way to train workers more easily would be common. Maybe houses out of territory could be of a cheaper kind and provide less pop (representing houses of poor workers instead of richer urban citizens).

Destruction of buildings: I think the possibility of one-click building destruction is wasting a lot of potential of the game, given the capture mechanics. Buildings cannot be destroyed by swordsmen, unless they are made of wood maybe. So they should only be vulnerable to siege. I don't know how demolition worked in antiquity, but I would just not allow deleting buildings. The worse is when 5 horses rush to your base, capture a house and destroy it. No way 5 knights can put down a stone house. Palisades should also be vulnerable only to siege and maybe hack (I don't know how realistic it is to destroy a palisade with swords, but it is certainly not possible with arrows).

Wall of houses: setting a minimum distance between any building should be enough to avoid this. This and the previous observation should make palisades and walls in general more useful.

Of course these are just suggestions and I would be glad to hear what you all think. At some point I would also like to collaborate to the game development, but I would have to either take a good look at the code first or learn how to make 3D models (are Blender models compatible with 0 A.D.?). For now I limit myself to playing a lot and suggesting one or two ideas from time to time.

Edited by coworotel
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Personally I think the ideas presented here were awful in general. There were a few good ideas and a lot of really, really bad ones that would have serious unintended consequences that would basically destroy the game.

I think the game could definitely be made less eco intensive, and more friendly to fighting rather than sitting in base ecoing up to p3. I think reducing housing cost both in terms of resource costs and the effort needed to constantly spam them would be beneficial. I think that allowing the construction of eco buildings outside of territory would make the game less rigid and eliminate a lot of the nonsensical things people currently have to do to reach resources on some maps.

Aside from that though, better not to fix something that ain't broke.

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  • 2 years later...

you have to consider this again, love to A23, which was a somewhat flawed version.

But that these mistakes attracted fans ...

 

I want to re-analyze the gameplay of A25-27 under this optics.

 

I know, those alphas do not exist yet but the ideas are in the forum.

 

We must put together a coherent gameplay in the next alphas.

 

@wowgetoffyourcellphone

 

I know you got ideas from here for DE.

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On 05/03/2017 at 10:46 AM, DarcReaver said:

This is an issue for the game duration. There is no possibility to follow a fast tech into a high tier to finish off opponents with superior units, or to deliver a teching advantage. As an example in AoE there are civs which are fit to quickly advance through the ages (like Byzantines, Mongols or Saracens) to field superior units like knights. Combined with the lack of additional military content in phase II the city phase feels dragged out. It takes ages to get through this phase without gaining a significant difference or advantage from phase I.   

this is interesting and something can be done with the technologies.

 

For example basic Infantry could receive an individual Boost, the same cavalry.

It would only affect basic per class.

In phase I, it would be like an upgrade, but from the barracks.

The same in phase 2 for Advanced and those that follow in the line of experience.

 

The classes that it would include would be the common ones, such as archers, slingers, javaliners, sword and spear.

 

I don't know whether to include Elephants.

 

I need to make a graphic outline. Instead of forcing the unit to upgrade, I do it through technology, without removing the experience system.

 

That would be in phase 1 and 2

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