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Ancient Empires is a mod for 0 A.D. Empires Ascendant, aiming at historical authenticity and gameplay rebalance. Currently I'm working alone on it, but if you are interested in helping out you can contact me. Feedback and brainstorming are very welcome as well, you can check the specific threads and add your suggestions. The mod's main goals, changes and features are listed bellow. Gameplay: The mod is closer to Age Of Kings than any other RTS game, to which the tech-tree layout and parts of gameplay are pretty similar. However many concepts from 0 A.D. have been maintained, together with ideas taken from other games, the community, as well as several of mine. The game pace is slower and a bit more macro focused compared to the main game in almost every aspect. Counters (mostly soft) are reintroduced in many cases, inspired mostly from historical unit roles. For more details check here. Civilizations: For now no new civs have been added, as balancing the existing 12 is already hard enough. The tech-tree is made more clear by having a majority of common techs and units available at standardized structures and Civ specific ones available at the Fortress (with a few exceptions clarified at the history screen). Each Civ gets a mostly new set of bonuses and champion units, which are now changed as a concept. Links to Civ threads: Athen Brit Cart Gaul Iber Mace Maur Pers Ptol Rome Sele Spart Units: Unique units, the replacement of champions, aren't necessarily the most powerful units a Civ can have. Each civ gets a historically determined base rooster from the shared units, which range from cheap Skirmishers to powerful War Elephants. Unique units often come to fill missing unit roles or add new ones and are chosen from rare units that were dissimilar in function to other, more common units. So there won't be many unit duplicates per faction, like Spearman and Superspearman with the exact same role, only different in power and cost. Some exceptions exist, as this is a still a work in progress feature. Besides unique units, some Civs have slightly varied versions of the common units. For example, in place of the weak, basic spearman, the Athenians get the more costly and powerful Hoplite. Random Maps: The mod will focus on random maps instead of skirmish maps, to reduce copy-paste build orders and keep scouting important. Major Changes: Some core features of 0 A.D. have been removed or majorly altered. Citizen-Soldiers are gone now, to make raiding the economy a more valid strategy and allow for bigger price/attribute differences between units and civs without breaking balance too much. Female citizens have been replaced with male ones until a possibility for different sexes per unit is implemented (see help needed). Structure capturing was never implemented in the mod and probably won't be. Territory influence has a softer function. It is needed for the construction of some structures and prevents enemies from building in it, but most structures can be constructed outside of it. Line of sight and attack range are generally much lower than in the main game. Starting stone and metal mines are moved right outside of the players starting territory in most random maps instead of being close to the civil centre. You can find many more ideas here (not all of those fit with the mod's concept though).

I've added the dependencies and now there is a zip for the release (0.0.17) and the svn (0.0.18), rev 15952. Both work in parallel folders in the user folder like .local/share/0ad/mods on Linux. It would be great if there was a hook in GuiInterface.prototype.GetExtendedSimulationState() so that these 2 lines don't make so much work.

Currently, no standard version is available (the first one will probably come with Alpha 18 19), but you can get the current work in progress one following the instructions bellow. To install the mod: Get a working installation of the SVN version of the game.Follow this link.Click on "download zip" (at the bottom right).Unzip it into binary/data/mods of your SVN installation.To keep track of changes without having to re-download the mod every time, you can follow this guide. (You need an account, cloning the directory and then sync to automatically get updates)Keep in mind that the mod is far from done. Many concepts are partial, balance isn't ready yet and bugs exist. The mod might even be unplayable until fixed if SVN updates break something. Known Issues: - Using the in game Structure Tree will result in an error (no crush though). According to Leper this is a strange issue on the engine's end, so nothing I can fix now.

Before starting to work on my mod I'd like to get some feedback and discussion on some of it's aspects. The mod would cover the same era as the core game, being by far my favorite in history and at the same time having a solid base to work on. It will probably carry on with the extremely original title of my Warcraft III mod, "Ancient Empires", possibly something like "0 A.D. Ancient Empires". Depending on the final changes decided, my free time and motivation and any possible help I can gather, it might be out soon or take a good while. The goals are: Bringing gameplay closer to Age Of Empires II, while keeping several 0 A.D. mechanics and throw in extra ideas of mine, as well as some from the community and other strategy games.Creating a game with civ attributes and unit roles heavily inspired from history, even more so than in 0 A.D, without overdoing it with complexity and keeping a steady look on balance.Keeping the game slightly macro focused to suit my personal preferences, without totally neglecting micro possibilities.Adding a few extra structures, many more techs and altering how recruitment works quite a lot. Overall the tech-tree should be at least 50% different in the end.Editing a few core mechanics. Ranged units should be weaker and cheaper, buildings tougher but deal less damage (especially garrisoned ones), melee units slightly tougher, cavalry stronger but more expensive and goes on. Workers/builders might separate from soldiers (with very few exceptions) to allow for bigger price/attribute differences without breaking the economic balance and making raiding more important. Territories might be removed. Mercenaries will be completely reworked into a separate, major part of the tech-tree. Big units will be done justice but cost more pop.Population cap might be reduced to 200 to reduce pathfinding lag. If it's done this way, farms might get 1 worker only (with balance changes), to free up more space for military units and keep the combat part of the game almost at the same number of soldiers.Quite a bit more, but let's keep it simple for now. You can find many of them here (not all of those fit with the mod's concept though).Any feedback and ideas are very welcome:)

Curious about that skirmisher train time of 8 seconds. Civs without skirmishers get a huge eco disadvantage, especially in earlygame; ptolomies are (imho) op in a17 (especially village phase) cuz of that 8 seconds train time of their nubian archers. 2 questions: - Iberians: Ever thought of removing their village walls? - Champions: Health should be increased drastically. They should have more than any upgraded citizen soldier (?). Will further play/test your mod when its done. Have the feeling that balancing civs might get pretty hard/impossible due to your unique features, but as mentioned earlier, maybe this isn't your intention.

I'm so fast I finished it over a year ago! http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17409&hl=auroch I didn't make it as extreme beast as some of these images in this thread suggests though. Critique is of course welcome, and I can tweak it. Regarding the comment; "Size comparison of an auroch vs domestic cow (wikipedia)" ^ I'm pretty sure that picture is showing a male and female auroch. I used this as the reference at least; http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Aurochsfeatures.jpg

> ai should be able to deal with saved games and this has been implemented in Petra Mimo, that's news of the year! Expect thorough feedback very soon. To begin with the saved games have a human readable and a machine part, any chance/tool to grasp the latter?