Forums

Like this?  

The gigantic pull request: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8881

Plenty of times? How many times—10, 20, 30? What number would actually be needed to consider it truly representative or a majority? Do negative responses to that claim, even from SP players, not count? And why couldn’t a “normal” level be challenging? (even though it really isn’t…) I personally never found the normal level challenging; I lost a couple of times and then started beating it. You yourself have said you didn’t find it very challenging. So how should it be, beatable on the first try? And I’m pretty sure that the newbies who didn’t find it challenging didn’t go to the forum to comment on it… For me, moving from Normal to Hard in StarCraft II took quite a lot of matches… It’s a much more challenging and intelligent AI, with vastly better combat micro than in 0 A.D., and also superior economic management.  And regarding the excess of clicks, this game is far less click-intensive than AoE 2 and SCII, starting with the auto-queue feature present in the vanilla version, which drastically reduces APM when producing units.   What’s the evidence? Two friends: one who may or may not have stopped playing, and the other who apparently kept playing on medium? Okay, now let’s move on to your reviews about the fast-paced: This guy wasn’t even used to playing RTS games, and after his third match he began to feel like he’d gotten a handle on things. Great, the guy recommends the game and gives it a positive review.   Another person who recommends the game and says it’s very addictive. He explains that the pace is determined by the difficulty: if you want a relaxed experience, you play on easy; otherwise, you increase the difficulty. The mention of pacing is quite conditional; he says: “I tried playing medium level and the enemy advanced faster and attacked faster. So it was more of a fast-paced game than a slow leisure game.” In his own words: “So far though, this game is pretty addictive as it's only my 2nd day playing it and I have only tried Acropolis Bay. I definitely look forward to trying more and even the one with 1v4 game play.” Great! he loved the game. Two days in and he’s already hooked. Playing on Single Player only for 2 days, counts as a casual for me.   These three posts include suggestions from other players giving advice on how to win, along with guides. Do those testimonies count as well? Or are they all tryhards???   An experienced RTS player who always loses against the Petra bot on easy, come on man… read a guide, watch some videos... I do take this from that last frustrated player, though: “0 A.D. has such a hard time explaining its mechanics clearly and providing a proper easy difficulty that it makes it really hard to get into, and with the game's low popularity, it's hard to find up-to-date guidance online too.” A good tutorial is necessary so that new players don’t jump into fighting the AI blindly without understanding not only the basic game mechanics, but also more advanced concepts. And I think achievements are great. As for balance, I do think it’s primarily shaped around PvP, and that’s for obvious reasons seen in many other RTS games. It’s natural for balance to evolve based on different playstyles and strategies that players discover over time as they refine techniques, explore units and civilization-specific features, and push the gameplay in different directions. It should also be possible to separate both realms to some extent. In the SP environment, there can be technologies and units that don’t exist in MP. This is quite common in many RTS games too and adds an interesting layer to the single-player experience. And it’s not really the case that multiplayer being only for “tryharders”. While it’s true that there’s a group of very intense tryhards like myself, you can also find daily matches that last for hours, with very laid-back players who just play and have fun without an overly competitive mindset.    This is what I mean: you keep referring to the game as prioritizing multiplayer as if that were a deliberate design decision and it isn’t. There have been campaigns in the past, but they’re difficult to keep updated from version to version due to technical constraints and the very limited manpower available to maintain everything. There’s currently one person working on updating the old campaign, and another developer working on a more advanced narrative system for creating campaigns. I understand that some people may have told you that, but it’s not a premeditated design decision at all. If the proposal is to set the easy level as the default, fine, that can be done very easily. I don’t see why the developers wouldn’t accept it. I’ve seen in another post that you have some knowledge of JavaScript; you could make the PR yourself in very little time. Now, reducing the normal game speed to 0.8x and trying to set 1.25x as the “competitive option” seems like a terrible idea to me. But it’s not as if this is there because it’s designed with multiplayer players in mind.

I think around houses/storehouses, etc. could be more dirt-like. Otherwise, nice direction established here. 

That makes sense to me Maybe the nearest structure? That would be nice at least, because they are pretty vital and carry a lot of resources, and I wouldn't want to loose them