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This thread is public but only reply to it if you have the skills needed to contribute something useful. Any posts that don't add anything to the thread will be deleted! The game is getting to a point where the speed is really killing us. We need to find ways of speeding up the game, and doing so within the next release or two. Lag causes players to give up and leave. We need to start attracting fans to play regularly. So the point of this thread is to discuss, collect, and action on ways we can actually speed up the game. Found a really slow part of the game? Post where it is and some ideas for improving it. Working on something to speed it up? Post about it an get feedback early. This is now top priority for all developers. Other work can continue, but you should be working together to get the game faster. Communicate, collaborate, contribute.... Here are some ideas/tickets to get things started. Finish developing the new path finder - http://trac.wildfire...com/ticket/1756 The new pathfinder is designed to be faster and give closer results between long range and short range path finding. CCmpRangeManager optimisation - http://trac.wildfire...com/ticket/1707 Implement an Octree - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree Rewrite the AI base system in C++ - AI are very slow. From what I understand, several systems are implemented in JS when they would be much faster in C++, e.g. building placement needs to copy data from C++ to JS and then loop over the data. Move as much of the AI system to C++ for speed. If we keep the javascript AI system then a fairly simple improvement is to make the entity collection updates use the heirarchy of entity collections to save significant work. boost::unordered_map is potentially faster than std::map in some situations. This is now serializable so should be very easy to change (it won't even break multiplayer sync because it serializes as a std::map). I don't know if there are any situations currently where this would help though. (Except for CCmpRangeManager, but the proposal in the ticket is better for that). Here are things which could be done but hopefully won't need to be. This is just a list we can come back to near when we release if we still need to improve: Disable the ability to have arrows hit units other than the one they targetted, this would save looking up entities near to the arrows hit location.

Hello TheMista, welcome to the forums! I'm a surprised to get suggestions for balance changing so quickly. You said you first downloaded the game about four days ago... how much did you play 0 A.D. since then? What I expected (or hoped to get) was a proposal for a general direction/plan of balancing in the next weeks or months. For me it's important to underline that there's not just one good solution for balancing a game. There are a lot of different directions that can be chosen and each of these directions will affect how the game plays and feels in the end. I'd say you shouldn't start suggesting specific changes before you are able to describe an outline or a concept of your balancing efforts. I'm a bit concerned that you are trying to apply a pattern you know from other games without thinking too much about alternatives and without knowing 0 A.D. very well. Your fast and in my opinion not very founded proposal seems to confirm that concern. You should not only look at how the game is at the moment, but also check our planned features (but they are re prioritized at the moment) . Please don't take my critical answer personal. I think we can benefit a lot of your experience and I'm glad you are here to help!

The current system gives each armour type a value and is subtracted from the attack value of the incoming attack. Look at it like this: Each armour material in real life has its own tolerances. Linen armour will absorb X amount of force, while bronze armour will absorb Y amount of force. Beyond that, there really is no protection. If a sheet of bronze can, say, block 100 lbs of force from penetrating it, then if 110 lbs of force will penetrate, but 80 lbs will not (but will still cause some minor damage, I think 1 hp of damage in our case). If a rock comes sailing in at 1000 lbs of force, then your armour in this instance should be of minimal use (it only blocks 100 lbs of that 1000 lbs). If a percentage is used, then suddenly the amount of force that a piece of armour can absorb changes based on the amount of force being applied. What space-aged materials are our soldiers wearing?! In a percentage system, if a soldier has, say, 25% armour, the piece of armour absorbs 25% of the 110 lbs projectiles and 25% of the 1000 lbs projectile, or 250 lbs of the latter and only 27.5 lbs of the former!However... I'm okay with a percentage system since it makes it "easier" for some people and I've experienced it playing Age of Mythology.