If you get neutral with an AI competitor, send traders to their markets. After that, many offer an alliance proactively after some time or if you offer one to them they agree (or still want some tribute).

Those things don't have to be related, since one doesn't even have to move the XP slider if one doesn't want to, and just use some default. Exactly the same as what happens with batch training size, there's a default in Game Options, but it can be modified in-game, which can have its uses. It's only adding the possibility to do what I previously described.   Same as above. By "replace" I mean enhance, not remove. The wounded unit health in Game Options would be the default, which one could modify in-game if wanted, since one might want to control what amount of units to actually select, and not so much what % of HP should they have (which could be useless in certain situations). Nothing is being removed.

Getting to a hundred pop a minute faster beats any of this optimizations hands down.   Indeed, much more useful.

That's quite helpful. Here is my current theory what's happening: While we don't use mTLS, there is support for that in ejabberd (the XMPP server we're using for the multiplayer lobby). Part of that is instructing the client (0ad) to optionally send a client certificate if it has one available (SSL_VERIFY_PEER option for SSL_CTX_set_verify of OpenSSL). For most Windows users that's not the case, as they never used client certificates. However, for users which have client certificates installed, SChannel (the TLS-library used by 0ad under Windows) picks an invalid certificate and sends it to the server under certain circumstances. As it's invalid the connection gets terminated, resulting in errors when trying to connect to the lobby. As sending a client certificate to the server is optional and not used by us, that should be an avoidable problem. @Shad_: Could you do me a favor and figure out what's considered a valid client certificate by SChannel in this case? Is it just any client certificate or does it have to have certain properties (like being issued by Let's Encrypt for example). That would help us to find a way to work around the issue in 0ad or the lobby server so users don't have to manually take action.

I had this problem recently, it might be your issue. I have many security certificates installed by various programs in my Windows 10 Personal Store.  When 0AD tries to connect, it uses wrong info from the first 'valid' certificate it finds, whereas having none at all connects fine.  Reinstalling Windows, Creating a new Windows user or removing the certificates in the Windows 10 Personal Store does the same thing to fix that issue.  To check, just hit Win+R and type certmgr.msc and look at the Personal/Certificates folder.  If you have  certs in there, it may be the issue.  I was able to back them up and remove them to test it out. How to back up security certificates May be an issue with how mTLS interacts with Windows