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I now have some grip on map analysis and play around with village layout. This is the current status: Each centre has a no-build here zone with a radius of 40m. Also Hannibals trys to detect possible streets. It selects 48 points from an inner circle and 48 points on an outer circle and runs the pathfinder on each of these pairs: Cells visited by the pathfinder multiple times qualify as street-cells and block buildings. Hannibal launches 4 builder groups for houses. The groups build the next house near the last one, but may start from different points, hence the "clumps" in the maur village. The find-a-free-place algo allows to define a border with of size 0, 1, 2, 3. A border of 0 doesn't work with random building angle. In the villages above the maur build houses facing north and a border of 0, all other face centre with border 1. The spart have always face centre and border 1. Also interesting on small maps is facing map centre. In mind a have an agora for the greek cultures, may have a monument or a tower in the middle. Also, idle units can met here or healer do their stuff. I think, a few simple rules might be enough to layout a complex looking village. Ideas, proposals below

Many times in a game I find that I need more population room. However, in the late game the pop cap basically means that there simply isn't enough space in the houses. To prevent "deleting" your own civilian units to free up space for the more powerful units (this would apply to soldier units too), I suggest we implement decommissioning. The Delete Unit button would be replaced with a Decommission button. Units would simply disappear when decommissioned (or maybe use a simple particle effect). This would represent sending off units when you don't need their services. The unit would return all items received during the course of employment. This would be realized by adding the loot (equipment) values of the units back to the player's resources. To prevent killing all the enemy civilian units, I suggest two changes: First, that we make female citizens non-conquest critical like traders and priests. This requires removing the ability to set Civil Center foundations. Second, to avoid having Gaia units just sitting around after a player is defeated, we could implement automatic Gaia ownership changes based on proximity like in AoK. The proximity ownership change takes away most of the difficulty of figuring out which player actually defeated the other player. Any thoughts?

Maybe try something tlike this: In something like this you have many paths you can take, but player can restart or branch off new paths whenever they want to. I don't think there need to be fewer tech but they just need to be made to be more interesting and whcih ones to choose should require more thoughts on the players part. With something like this you start on a path. If it is not working for you thwn you can try a new path but time and resoucrs is wasted, so there is inherent risk of targeted (narrow path) approach. You can try broad approach, but it takes longer to get the higher quality techs. Another idea to go along with this is to have techs that depends upon different biomes or maps. This alters the webs a little bit adding a little bit of variety. I like the idea that some buildings can act like a tech. This is done in my mod with aura. For instance, Temple of Vesta for Roma gives a boost to nearby building (right now the aura and tech effects are limiting, so I await the day when features are worked on again). I have adjusted my mod to include the new wooden defense towers in Phase 1, but I go one step further than this by adding a Stone Towers tech in Phase II to upgrade them back to full stength Defense Towers. Swaps the actors from wooden tower to stone tower (but the building preview and fogging ghost remains wooden tower, a bug). If you add a IV Phase and move all of the big tech to that, and move civic center expansions to Phase III, you then have a Phase II that includes an element of city building and defenses. Build a long city wall or use that stone to fast Phase III and use the stone for civic centers expansions? Add a real usage for Wonders and make 1 Wonder prerequisite for Phase IV. Go Phase IV and now you have uber techs for siege and elephants, fire arrows, and all that stuff,

I have explored this area that is why the black map is lifted. The behavior is new. I could build in the fow before, but now I cannnot. Why I ask if bug or intention. If intentional, it now means extra micromanagement to have to move a unit to the area first, even if I had already explored it... almost no other RTS require this, for good reason.

I agree with you that the deathmatch feeling has to do with the fact that citizen soldiers can gather (and generally, with other points you have stated). Benifits in one resource type can be 'converted' to benefits in another one quite easily by training gatherers that cost first type of resource. But because of this i'm also afraid that the proposed solution will have undesired consequences: we'll get better wood gatherers that cost only food and train faster, so again, more resources and more possibilities for the same time. With the last version the situation with resources has developed from 'in 0AD, you normally don't severely lack any kind of resource' to 'you have lots of everything, a dead army is np just train another'. I am convinced that this is caused by techs changes which give higher gathering speeds eventually. So it would be good to try to lower techs' effects first (increasing cost of units/buildings will have the same effect just with some multiplier, and the default pop cap, which people hurry to reach, obviously has to stay the same).

Thanks

Looks normal to me. Why would there be info you cant build in unexplored terrain if it was a bug.

a big thanks to ffm, mario, supertux and mandrillatore for letting me record and comment their games

Resources (like today money) have no direct value on their own. The values are defined in each individuals mind. Resources have an indirect value in a society in which most individuals share about the same set of values (especially resources/money) so one can give things that have a direct value an indirect value (e.g the price). In a game of warfare like 0 A.D. the highest direct value is the capability to fight. Resources don't grant that but can be used to get it. So it's like: Gather resources (generate indirect value), train/build/research (convert indirect to direct value specifically the strength to fight). Resources are mainly that successful in human history because many direct value items are not likely to last long (especially food). So it does only make sense to generate overproduction to a limited extent. After that (to generate further safety of supply) other longer lasting items have to be considered (that's where resources for later production and money come into play). In short: Having many resources in a real-time strategy is bad because they don't have any direct value on their own - it's only a potential one. So using your resources in the most efficient way and ASAP is the winning "strategy" - not saving them. And I have to strongly disagree that this mindset comes from Starcraft. IMO it's very sad and the other way around in the present days: - PPL have widely lost their self-confidence/sense for own values and fuse into society with the given "values" - "Value" and "price" got nearly indistinguishable by that - That way "value" can be generated by simply adding new "values" to the mindset - without the originally needed individual and direct value - The "health" of an economy is now (more or less) defined by it's over all net worth and it's rate of growth (though actually no real value has to be produced for that "growth") (That doesn't mean that no actual "values" can be added to an economy these days - but it's not needed to increase the net worth of an economy - and that's quite sad, misleading and can be - and IMO is - misused) - On the other hand things that are actually valued alot by many PPL (like e.g. the access to knowledge like in Wikipedia) add very little (if anything at all) to the net worth of an economy (and so is vastly underestimated by economically oriented PPL) In Short: In realtime strategy games the relationship between resources (prize) and strength to fight (value) is roughly conserved (though in a very simplified way). It's our everyday life in an economically oriented society that obfuscates the relation. It's like changing an inequation to an equation: The outcome is simply wrong Edit.: And by the way, I agree with your repeat production queue idea!

In deathmatch mode you'd be better off building a few extra barracks and spreading the queue across them.

There is a small interruption in our lobby server today, on no day other than friday the 13th! I can assure you it has nothing to do with bad luck though. In the past month we've been migrating Wildfire Games services (the website, forums, the autobuilder, irc bot) to a brand new server. Because we've been suffering from a lot of downtime lately, due to all kinds of different issues, we've decided to move all services to one central, reliable place. Today we've moved the lobby service to the new server as well. So presumably this will be last downtime for a long time (*knock wood*) for the multiplayer lobby. :-) The lobby is currently working without issues on the new server, however the DNS for lobby.wildfiregames.com may not have updated everywhere yet with the new IP address. If the lobby server isn't working for you at the moment, please be patient; it should start working again within 24 hours at most.

I understand that "wasted time is wasted" (my philosophy, thief!) But sometimes, Time is of the essence, you need 20 spearmen NOW, and then you need to train the last 80, because 20 will hold off the enemy cav rush. It's situational, don't just say "ITS A BAD THING DON'T DO IT EVER EVER", generally i agree with you, but i find that a small batch before a big batch if i need troops IMMEDIATELY is good. Just saying.