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Hello, I've tested this game yesterday when I saw it on sourceforge. Great work, congratulations! Beautiful graphics, epic music and good sound! Here are some suggestions from my side: - Forum: You should have different categories (subforums or threads) for suggestions here in this forum such as content, user interface, graphics, AI and so on since a single thread with 95 pages is too hard to read. - User Interface: It would be great to have some of the user interface features that spring / supreme commander have and that make the overview over the game in these games so great: - Zoom: Apart from the strategic zoom with units turning into strategic icons which perhaps does not fit in the age of empires style, it would be good if one could zoom out a litte bit more, but if the camera angle increases as you zoom out, i.e. the view turns to a more top-down view for a better overview. - Command Queue: The waypoints of units should be shown visually when pressing shift or some other command modifier key. The individual waypoints should be deletable and draggable. Also, it should be possible to queue up attack commands (didn't work for me) and build commands. - Patrol - Content: - When moving in formation, and changing formation/direction, some units move much faster to get to their new position in the formation. However, it seems like there is no way to order units to move that fast on their own. I don't think you should use this 'speed hack' for keeping up formations but rather slow the other units down.

Some more pics http://imgur.com/a/w6Aji

Here's a more recent game that has nice trees: Here's how I think it can be done (without even modifying the tree models): there's a global wind direction/intensity shared by all trees each tree vertex knows its height from the ground vertices higher up sway more (in the wind direction) swaying is done by adding a sin or cos wave to the vertex positions maybe there's some randomness to make different trees look unique All this can be done in the vertex shader, so the performance cost is probably minor. Same effect can be generalised to also do things like moving grass, cloth etc.

Hmm, I disagree, wouldn't it be a bit melodramatic if one of your scouts ran into 10 enemy soldiers and this epic battle music started? I mean it's something you want to know about, yes, but I wouldn't say a battle was impending. I'm leaning toward Pureon or quantumstate's ideas of using damage or unit death rates to trigger a battle. Once we have that implemented, it should be easy to playtest and find reasonable thresholds. We could also make them configurable, so players choose how severe a situation is before they get notified. Whereas with some of the more complicated solutions, you don't have that simple means of tweaking the behavior.

about the showing stats yes/no discussion: it's a matter of fact that unit panel can't host all infos about the unit(s), because the space is limited. So, basically units has two tasks: build or fight. At the beginning the build task is the most important, but after the first 5/10 minutes (depends from player style and map), the importance of the fight task grow rapidly and became the principal. In a game, how many buildings do you build? 20/30? and probably more than half in the first 10 minutes. So, why show a large panel with buildings when after 10/15 minutes it becomes less important? So here is my idea: a hotkey and/or a button to quickly switch between the current buildings panel and a new extended info panel about the unit(s), where you have the space to put not only attack/armor stats, but also all the others: speed, accuracy, visibility, etc What do you think?

We have finite space to show information, we have to be very careful with how we use it. Actually last night it occurred to me that even the two-row attack/armor stats are insufficient, because some units have multiple attack types (e.g. melee and charge), so it gets even more difficult to squeeze in everything. Others might disagree, but here's the crux of my argument: attack/armor stats are static data, they are fixed for every unit with the exception of applying technologies and maybe auras. They are also only a part of the combat stats for a given unit, which includes attack range, timings, speed, bonuses, priorities, accuracy, splash damage and such. Why should we cherry pick one subset of that static data and devote a large chunk of the UI to it, when it's not useful for most players and can be presented in better ways (tooltip, tech tree, stats table)? By comparison, we have to expliclty show dynamic stats - the user can't guess HP, XP, stamina or resource count, and they are as important or more for new and casual players than experienced ones. The new mockup does show more information than the old design. It shows the generic and specific names, ties XP more visually into the rank insignia, shows the player's name/civ/color (legibly!) at a glance, and labels the stats bars. Even if it didn't, there's nothing wrong with revamping the old style