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Reported to FeministMovement.org prepare for 100's of angry women waiting for you. ^^ Jokes aside, iirc I read somewhere that soldiers construction or gathering rate is boosted if female units are nearby. Don't know if i'm mistaken or it's not implemented. But yeah, I think soldier's construction rate should be faster too, but from a flat rate, nothing fancier than that.

I agree with this, the problem with keeping multiple AIs around is that it increases maintenance, every new feature that is added needs to be added to each AI separately. For example: walls, gates, technologies, healers, trade, bartering, to name a few, are all "new" features in the sense that AI development has not kept up the pace, now who wants to add support for these features to each of at least 3 AIs? Since we are still in alpha, we can make these decisions. The only reason some AIs appear to be easier is because they are broken or incomplete, as far as I know JuBot was not intended to be an "easy" bot, nor was qBot intended to be medium, but both were supposed to be very challenging state-of-the-art AIs. I don't think trying to pass off a broken AI as "easy" is a good decision because players will notice the quality of the AI, not only how challenging it is to defeat the first time they play. What makes a quality AI? Challenge - yes, but also coherent and varied strategies, unpredictability, use of various gameplay features, minimal impact on performance, adaptability to different maps and situations. If it were up to me, these would be on the chopping block: testbot, JuBot and possibly original qBot if we have a replacement. No offense to the developers of these AIs, they served their purpose and have maybe led to better AIs, let's not be afraid to move on It's better to focus our resources on one great AI then spread it out over a handful of mediocre ones.

I think the territory line-styles is a great idea. I used to love how the buildings would change between eras in aoe. Although I understand that you don't want any drastic changes in the buildings (and that you don't want to redo every building that can be build over multiple phases) but people will expect and want to see their city change over time. When I showed 0AD to a friend of my sister not very long ago he was like "Coool! and it's free?" but he was disappointed when after going to the second phase he didn't notice anything had happened at all. He'd been hoping to see his buildings change. I'm convinced we should show the player somehow that his city has advanced to a new phase. We might not mind the absence of phase-change indicators very much and we might have gotten used to looking at the buildings our enemy players possess in order to know what phase they are in, but for a new player this might come as quite a big defect in the game. An idea I would like to propose is to have a special house model for each phase. I'll explain what I mean and why I think it would be a good idea. I would start by posing you a question: What does it mean when a city grows? It means that more and more people are moving to the city, so more houses are necessary. In the game this means you'll be building more houses, but in history this has lead to the construction of apartments. If we made some secondary models of the house and used these in later phases as a replacement for houses build within a certain radius of a civ center (a house in the middle of nowhere should not be an apartment ... it would look wrong) Houses are by far the building you'll be seeing most in the game, so you'll notice changes in them for sure. Another idea I would like to propose is that of bigger markets and possibly docks: The increase in commerce that generally accompanies the growth of a city could be represented by a growing market. As the building size cannot and should not be changed, the activity (probably number of props) could be changed, but having different models would be even better. For the docks it's exactly the same. In phase one I would suggest something like: a lot of pier, a little building where they build the boats, and maybe a half-finished fishing boat on the side. Phase two would have a bigger 'construction yard' and more props on the piers. (Maybe some of the piers could be made from stone?) Phase three would have an even bigger 'construction yard', more props on the piers and the piers could be made of stone. The place where the ships are constructed should get bigger as you can build bigger boats and the props should show that commerce is increasing. Switching from wooden piers to stone ones would show the city is getting richer. I think it is very important the city looks richer every time you go to another phase (and my sister who's reading over my shoulder is seconding this). Not all of these are my ideas, it is a resume of the options that have been mentioned with what I think about them and some of my own suggestions: -Changes in the civ centre (would be nice, but it should at least be combined with some other changes) -More props (would change the look, but people might not tend to be counting the props all of the time) -Banners (nice for civ center, and special buildings (barracks, market, ...) -Bigger markets (seems logic, as the city grows, so does the commerce - although in real life it would be in the other direction) -Bigger docks (seems logic too, for the bigger boats to be build and to accommodate for the increase in commerce) -Border-styles (obvious, unambiguous, clear, ... but it does not satisfy the eyes and you can see what phase another player is in before actually meeting them, therefore a bit unrealistic) -Paving (sound absolutely great, but again it should be combined with other options) -Texture changes [more decorations, building techniques that were more expensive, ...] (quite satisfying, models don't have to be changed, can be based on historical knowledge) -Houses (most numerous building, historically accurate changes should not be too difficult) -Statues and fountains (would look wonderful, but I think it should be combined with other stuff) So my final point is: Give us a change in the outlook of our cities. It might not seem like an important thing, but then: does having those nice 3d models we have now? I mean: you could play the game with red, green and white squares couldn't you? The answer of course is yes; you could, but no one would be playing it. People will want the nice transition changes between different stages, just like they have longed for the beautiful graphics we already have. If we want this game to beat all other free strategy games and if we want it to be able to compete with commercial one these are the little details that get it to the top. Gameplay is one thing, but satisfying the eyes of the players is just as important. Now that we can satisfy the eyes of people who generally play commercial games with our screenshots, let's make sure they'll also be satisfied when they play the game themselves. When you play a lot of open source games you tend to forget how critical the gaming world can be over such small details and concentrate more on the experience of gameplay. I agree, that is the most important part of a game, but if we want to acquire a big community and improve the ranking of this game we should try to go for the full deal: gameplay and graphics. What we have now is amazing and awesome ... in screenshots. For a great in-game experience I think we should implement some of the ideas I listed before. Rgds, Ilya