I find this autostart argument pretty sad, and I have heard it from several players. Are you really that hell-bent on making the fastest possible start just for such a small gain? I think players should accept that it is impossible to achieve the "perfect" start, and instead put in effort to learn a fast start that works for them. The point is not that autostart gets you such a massive gain, it doesn't, its that the principle behind it is depressing.

Oh, so that's how I could have added oars while keeping the sail & sail animation?

This is an assumption that one player makes about 7 others. And when they find out they lost because someone was cheating, the answer is "chill out its just a game". Awesome argument guys. Usually all 7 other players are unaware that this advantage exists, and even the minority of players who know that such mods exist do not grasp the magnitude of advantage that automation scripts provide. The discussion about the game being "non-competitive" is very convenient when cheaters use it to downplay the negative gameplay consequences that results from cheating. Funny enough the "competitive" nature of 0ad has been used to justify the same automation scripts by players who claim that their mouse can't click fast enough to compete with players who have "better" hardware. No player can click faster than even the cheapest mice allow, and some players even prefer not to have a mouse. Even more funny is that an auto-clicker which people have claimed to be in-use in 0ad would be considered an automation script and therefore cheating. The hypocrisy is mind boggling. I also totally reject the car analogy because in this case the automatic car is simply faster.

Obviously, this makes you a better player because it masks your flaws. Being better or worse than another player requires several evaluation points, and one of them is the ability to manage everything that happens on screen, especially in an RTS game. If you use a script that does these things for you, it's obviously an advantage and shouldn't even be discussed. Your analogy exemplifies exactly what I said. A manual car may not be faster than an automatic, but there's a chance of shifting into the wrong gear and breaking gears in a manual car, which isn't possible in an automatic. That's exactly what you do when you use scripts to mask your mistakes.

While working on a PR to incorporate hotkeys for building placement, building selection, and unit selection, I created this mod that—on top of building placement and selection—adds hotkeys to select several unit classes not covered by AutoCiv: all infantry, cavalry, champions, mercenaries, healers, heroes, and even dogs! It can be used alongside AutoCiv, although I haven’t tested it with its latest versions. There are still some features left to add, but I’d really appreciate help from anyone willing to test it and help catch any bugs I might have missed. I’d also love to publish it on mod.io, so any help with that would be greatly appreciated! To install it, just unzip BuildingHotkeys.zip and copypaste the BuildingHotkeys folder into your mod's folder Here's a demonstration video: BuildingsHotkeys mod.mp4  

I like the car analogy. The first analogy I came up with was shoes; when you play soccer (or any other sport during which you run around a lot) with your friends, neighbours or acquaintances, there are no rules for which shoes you use. And the shoes are how you interact with the ball and the game, so they're like a GUI. If you want to, you can play in high heels and make it extra hard on yourself. Or you play normally, with general sports shoes. Or you are very competitive and you get yourself special soccer shoes. Only when you start playing your sport professionally, youll begin to encounter rules regarding your footwear. And autostart is like cheating in a race by starting 0.5s too early; in a professional setting, youll get punished for that, but when you're just running around with your friends nobody cares.

https://mod.io/g/0ad/m/select-all This was ported recently, if you want hotkeys, as an alternative to autociv (that is also available from mod downloader).