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The Council is both happy and proud to announce a brand new release!!! Rise of the East What is it? Rise of the East focusses on one faction the Chinese, during the Han Dynasty to be precise. With it's fancy theme this is surely one to mark! As a release name we've chosen Sun Tzu. This person is renowned for writing The Art of War. We've chosen this name because of the huge changes with regards to the army (check the What is new? section). What is new? With the help of some Chinese historians we (especially Stanislas69) have turned the Chinese Army upside down. A lot of armors and helmets are completely reworked or brand new. This was because the old ones where not historically accurate. Also the balance is updated towards Alpha 18's standards. Some examples (note that these won't be visible during standard games as promotion is disabled in Alpha 18 and those new armor variants are mainly for advanced and elite units): Current features: - One playable faction: Han (No worries, the civilizations from the main game are still playable) - 2 Custom Random Maps: Loess Plateau and Gobi Desert (made by Spahbod) Who are we? The Council of Modders was formed up of two small modding teams and a few newcomers: Aristeia (about the bronze age) and Millennium A.D. (about medieval times) CoM aims to create a umbrella for all wannabee modders and help everyone needed and of course create their own projects, one of them is Rise of the East. Rise of the East was added to the project list in early-2014 after an agreement with Scion's lead Rob Kimball. That having said: We owe a large one to them for having paved the road for us to continue in their absence! How to: 1. Unzip the download but leave the inner archive intact. 2. Place the unzipped folder into <installationdirectory>/binaries/data/mods. You'll see another folder there called 'public'. 3. Alpha 18 requires one additional step to play the mod due to a packaging oversight: In the public.zip (which is in the public folder) there is a mod.json. Copy it and put it just outside of the zip file. (so you have 2 files inside the public folder: public.zip and mod.json) 4. Launch the game and enable the mod in Options>Mod Selection. Press 'Start Mods'. 5. Enjoy the mod! Download: han_china.zip mirror: http://www.moddb.com/mods/rote/downloads/sun-tzu-18 Help needed! In the last few months some members retired leaving us shorthanded. We are currently especially in the need of artists. So if you're a talented artist with a passion for history and you would like to help us out, please contact us using a PM or (preferably) in this thread: http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18412 Thanks in advance! Our thanks go to everyone that helped us to achieve this mod through contributing, play testing or in another way! If you have tips / suggestions, feel free to let us know. Also if you find bugs, let them know too. Support 0 A.D. if you like us: http://play0ad.com/community/donate/

The Assyrian Battle Scenes The King in battle upon his chariot Assyrian soldiers besieging a city I think. Logistics people to the left Assyrian soldiers attacking from the right and they would build fortifications of their own to combat with the enemy like any proper siege combat would have. The spearmen in formation. I took a close shot to show the smaller details. Cavalry prisoners of war if I can remember. I took the picture because I have no idea what is on the prisoner's backs. Its hard to spot the detail in the picture, but these guys are wearing footgear, and do have a good amount of armour coverage compared to the guys in the lion hunt scene. The texture on the back of the shields are interesting too. Sorry I didn't take more pics, but my family did not have the patience to stand in the British Museum forever like I would, so I was in the mad dash to take as many pictures as I could for artistic purposes later. From the pictures, I believe people under estimate how much armour people did wear for war and not just your tunic and the occasional helmet in the Ancient and Classical Eras.

Trac.wildfiregames.com would normally the place to be for tickets and patches, but unfortunately you profiled the old pathfinder where there already is being worked on a new one. (https://github.com/na-Itms/0ad/tree/pathfinding?files=1) I think it would be a better idea to contribute to that one

I wish we could give animals some ambient sounds (growls for tigers, cries for peacocks). Game also need ambient sound emmitters very badly, for waves, trees rustling, sand storms, etc.

From some releases some siege units (mostly those melee) are extreemely powerfull and it's not easy to destroy them. Bad for the oponent if he only has ranged atacks (no fire arrows?). In general such mechanical machines should require man-power to work, and should be disabled if that man-power is killed (even capture enemy siege unit). Attacking wepon operators and not the weapon itselt should be possible.

Hey, I profiled 0ad with Very Sleepy and the following code path was causing the majority of my lag: CCmpPathfinder::ProcessSameTurnMoves CCmpPathfinder::ProcessLongRequests CCmpPathfinder::ComputePath ProcessNeighbour (CalculateHeuristic, but it is not in the stack, as it is inlined) isqrt64 The following patch basically eliminates this whole path from my profiles: https://gist.github.com/yeerkkiller1/b02d32c09e7f6c2685d9 . Basically the CFixedVector2D is unnecessary, as is using any sort of sqrt. I changed it to just return the distance squared, which still appears to satisfy the constraints of the function (it is still a heuristic). I played with this a few times online with someone else that has the same change applied, and I didn't run into any issues with this change. Lag will still occur with enough units, and the time is still spent in path finding, but the new bottleneck is inside ProcessShortRequests, ComputeShortPath, instead of ProcessLongRequests, ComputePath. Is there a place (other than this forum) I can submit this patch for review? Thanks! -- yeerk

Not all red water causes are fixed atm, see #2692 where a patch is awaiting for review. When it's committed it would be nice to see if it fixes your reproducible test case.

This is really helpful! Thank you, Lion!

Well, i did some tweaks last night, but never got around to post them. I have considered dropping the existing texture and just make a high poly version to bake from, but that also seemed like a lot of work. But then again, all the time i spent on this it would probably have been faster to just model it directly. (granted, it was a learning experience as well). So, seeing how you are already well into making an awesome high poly model to possible bake from, I can't help to feel that I've wasted time trying to cut corners (only to end up un-cutting all the corners step by step). I have diffuse, specular, and normal/displacement maps finished now. I'll upload them to some google drive or something

Skirmish map. for 4 players. Enjoy Dependencies: I tried to use little stuff of mods. But i really don't remember. What im really not sure is the height of the mountains as i used the script, check it here -> http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19775#entry3061057 If you find any bug, please tell me. Aphrodite's lust.zip

I returned back from a trip to England about two weeks ago. I was visiting the British Museum when I thought of the 0 A.D. peeps. Here is what I took of the Assyrian exhibit: I thought the body armour was interesting. The lamellar has a weird shape to it. I would not consider these guys to represent the military. This was part of the scene of the King's lion hunt. They were probably some kind of guard or extras participating in the lion hunt. I took a picture of this scene so you don't confuse them with the actual battle scenes. I forgot what the horses were for, but the workers to the far left were building a sort of arena for the king to immerse himself into and keep the lions in the vicinity if that is what I remember. Another lion hunt scene that is to the right of the picture displayed above. King's Lion Hunt Scene King during his lion hunt whom the archers in front of him are shooting lions displayed on the wall left of this image. Notice the king is not dressed for battle like he would be in the battle scenes,

I made it from scratch using Gimp and sculpting 6 highpoly variations. No photos used.

Impressive map, allow me to say. Just a little more randomness in tree placement (avoid clumping them into squares) while varying elevation in the plains (more hills and/ craters) would make it perfect, IMO.

It could be interesting if "garrisoned" units in siege weapons were grouped or propped to walk with the siege units. There is a risk of adding too much micromanagement though.

Example: (it's lit for showcase purposes, the baking is only calculating AO for shadows between the tiles)

Looking good! It didn't take long until someone started using the increased limit for terrain elevations (mountains).

There was a big difference between a16 and a17. Average game time in a16 was around 30-40 minutes, with some rushers winning in under 10 minutes. Some games were ended early by skirm cav rushes, while others went on for an hour and became gridlocked by forts. I really liked the balance between rushing and booming in a16. The skirm cav rush became pretty popular near the end, but I never had any problems countering it by being careful. Average game time in a17 was less than 15 minutes, with long games being 25 minutes. You could kill a CC with maybe 20-30 troops, so there was no reason to hit age 3. The popular tactic was to do a population boom until around 10-12 minutes, start age 2 upgrade, and then send your entire 110ish man army over to attack. You would hopefully hit age 2 right as your troops entered the enemy town, which gave them a 20% boost. Average game time in a18 seems well over 35 minutes, with short games being around 25 minutes. A normal game seems around 45 minutes. The CC is tough to kill, and even stronger players have to hit age 3 to get siege equipment to finish off weaker players. It could take 100 citizen troops at age 2 in a frontal assault to kill a CC even against a newer player. I did manage to defeat an experienced player once by rushing cav archers, but it still took 20+ minutes to frustrate him enough before he quit. I like the strong CC, but having the other buildings be weaker would help with rushing, and might cut down on game time. Maybe the skirm cav dynamics could be changed? I like them having low health and armor, but they should be the kind of unit that would charge in, chuck one javelin, and then run away. Maybe they could having something like 50+ pierce and 15+ crush attack, but only at one attack every 3-4 seconds? That could reward players who micromange. If you left the horses standing there, they would get killed pretty easily. Skirm cav shouldn't be able to stand on the front lines and fight like they could in a16. It would also be cool if you could use them to kill buildings like storehouses. As far as game time goes, I think a16 had the right balance. Strong players could finish weaker ones off within 10 minutes, but a game between two even opponents could last for an hour. So if you play for 3 hours one night, you spend most of your time in a fun battle against evenly matched opponents.

I could try rendering a new normalmap based from real geometry placing the tiles following the texture, do you think that may help? or just actually render the geometry to get a new un-shadowed roof texture? (the biggest problem with generating the geometry for the roof is that the parallax/heightmap is quite difficult to achieve when baking) By the way, there's a better way to make the roof without mirroring, since the roof texture tiles, it's just a matter of getting the correct column of tiles where the left-side roof ends.

I agree that the CCs and Fortresses should be special, not spammable. More expensive, take longer to build, stronger. Also, defenses should be for defense and units for offense. That not to say that novel stratgies should be impossibru, but as game designer you should /design/ things to be within an overall plan or vision. So coming up with way to force defense towers to be used defensively is perfectly fine and then you can maybe design some edge cases into the game leaving open door for novel, but very risky, usage, but that come later.For now, have an idea of how things should be used and design them to do that thing. Fortress should be the forward base structure. Max 3 or 5. Buildable in neutral territory, cast no territory effect. With minimal number you must place them strategically. Design ways to make walls more useful (and easier to build, not just cheaper and quicker, that's lazy design; unit should automaticaly spread out when section of wall foundations placed, building the towers first, then filling in the wall segments; design a button in wall foundation UI to summon all nearby citiens to build it; give that same button to the Wonder). Make civic center territory radius smaller; give the game some no-man's land again.Implement farmlands and let players build farms and storehouses outside terrirory. Now you have strongly defended cities and weak countryside you must fight over--instead of sprawl like now. Traders must now travel through danger no-man's land between markets defended by cities. Move those mines away from the CC already... this isn't Starcraft. Then you have tower spam/push again? Right up against enemy territory? At least with Fortress in neuttral terrotry you can limit them to 3-5 and make them longer to build, so if they are used for push then there is time to spot the foundation. Just idea anyway (see Delenda Est). Instead, wooden defense towers should be Village Phase version of stone tower. Use upgrade and actor swap to make it stone tower (see Delenda Est). This game needs more of that kind thing. Enjoy the choice.

Hey KingAJ, I didn't play a lot lately but I followed your suggestion with interest and agree with you for the most of it. As for your last post, I really agree with the limit of CC and Forts. However in my experience, someone over expanding can be punished if you go fast phase 3. But I agree on the fact that once both in phase 3, the game is less interested/strategic. PS: KingAJ I'd like to play against you, contact me in PM to arrange games.

I agree the wooden tower needs be different from stone tower, and it can be build in neutral territory

Well.. this was as tedious as it could ever be, but at least it's more or less done now

Anthony posted on the EB forums quite a bit as two different people. For the first while as Ranika, until he submitted blatantly fabricated sources, quotes, and other information to the mod. It created a big stink in the EB forums. After that happened, Ranika began posting saying that he wasn't in fact Ranika, but Ranika's cousin, Anthony. Who appeared as soon as Ranika suddenly falls off the face of the earth never to return again. With Ranika's password, and the same interests. Finally he created a new username, but you can still find some a-historical and non-sourced posts by Anthony on the forums. His username is just Anthony. This is a much-talked about thread from EB's earlier days... The island that he claims to come from doesn't exist and there hasn't been a monastery in that area for 600 years or some such. You can decide the validity of that post for yourself. See: http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.p...ighlight=quotes Also see http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=89631, where someone systematically shows that Ranika is full of BS, before being derailed with ad-hominems. Nothing here is flat-out darning, but all together it makes a decent case. Honestly, just ask this guy for sources on some of his fantastic stuff. I just don't want you guys to get duped by this mofo. [edit]Wijitmaker: your concerns have been noted - Note that if this topic strays from the intention of this thread, it will be closed[/edit]