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No I don't mind the off-topic since this is the off-topic section anyway. And I went off-topic myself too. Unless we go really off-topic I'm not bothered. You give some nice points what makes Starcraft 2 enjoyable. Though I can't figure out why it is rated so high. Even the first game was not rated a 9. Yet this one is pretty much the same (not to say the improvements aren't good), and is rated very high. The bees, funny that you mention that. I was almost going to buy a book called "Sixth Legged Soldiers" which was about insects used in war. I read reviews and parts of the book that were free to read and bees was one of the things. I read that because of the Romans, the bee population started to shrink. Have you heard of the snakes and scorpions in pots used on ships? Hannibal was the one using poisonous snakes. Bees would be very nice to have and unique by the way.

I would call Starcraft an "arcade RTS" or "action RTS." Super-fast clicking and hotkey management, insane battle micro, and simplistic build orders and countering. It's all meant to push the player into a frenzy of break-neck decisions that, to me, puts it into a kind of "arcade" category. Yes, there can be complex tactics and strategies, but those usually only come to play in the long game where players are evenly matched. In reality, most matches only last maybe 10-20 minutes and one side gets completely annihilated very quickly by the other side because the winning side executes the right build order with fewer mistakes. Resources and maps are also very very symmetrical and are specifically designed for tournament play. HuskyStarcraft game casts aren't good examples for what actually happens in most games between most players because these professional casters only cast the very best match-ups with evenly-matched top tier players. Starcraft is all about action and a few simple mistakes makes you very very dead. In Starcraft's chosen type of gameplay, you won't find a much better example. Whether all of this is good or bad depends on what kind of player you are and what you want from a strategy game. I think it all works just fine for the genre and theme of the game: fantasy/sci-fi, but doesn't work well for an historically-themed game like Age of Empires or 0 A.D. I suggest those who want to play a Starcraft-style game to go ahead and go play Starcraft. 0 A.D. is meant to be a game where you build towns and cities, grab territory, and progress through stages of development. I generally feel very cheated if an Age of Kings or 0 A.D. match lasts less than 20 minutes, but 20 minutes seems to be around the upper range for a Starcraft match. That's not to say we couldn't learn any lessons from Starcraft's game design and gameplay. The balance is excellent, even with unique races, so there are lessons to be gleaned there.

Having played all the AoE series games and also all the Starcraft series games, I must say that where AoE series tries to immerse in the epic history of mankind, Starcraft focuses on unprecedentedly fluent and balanced gameplay. This is why there are so many tournaments for even Starcraft - Brood War, which is 13 years old. Combat itself isn't horrible at all. It's actually very well balanced in the sense of every unit having some sort of counter unit. Due to this you can formulate a strategy or 'build' for your game. Learning to improve and adapt this makes for great strategic play. What makes it fun to watch is the quick pace of the game - the early pushes usually happen around 4-5 minutes into the game. So it's not about turtling. It's about great tactics and strategic decisions - making it very fun to watch if you can follow what's going on. In the end of the day though, all people have different tastes. I personally really enjoy all sorts of different strategy games - all for different reasons. For me comparing AoE vs Starcraft is like comparing Rome - Total War vs Total Annihilation.

Please wait a bit, Gallaecio is working on bringing a translation system in place, and Redfox has a library ready for improved (UTF8) character rendering. So characters can be hotloaded. Btw, if you have further technical questions like this, it's best to ask at the #0ad-dev irc channel on quakenet.

I don't know if this is what you have in mind, but while you're at it: If you look at a video like the one below, you will see that when units come under attack, a short animation is played over the minimap to attract the player's attention to the location of the attack, even if they are currently looking somewhere else on the screen. In this case (AoE3), it appears to be a cross-hair expanding in size, then receding again, but different games use different animations. We currently have a WIP patch for attack notification here, which IMO works really well, but it does lack this touch of "guiding" the player's eyes towards the point on the minimap where action is occuring. You currently will sometimes need to scan through the many dots on the minimap to see which ones are blinking, which can be distracting in the midst of battle. I don't know how easy it would be to implement such an animation, but maybe it is something you could consider.