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Hi guys, with this post, I try to share my ideas on how to improve the game strategic aspects. The 0ad player set of skills, requires now macro and tactical control. Simply, get the biggest army , get the metal of the map (wich leads to another problem, spawning points advantages, being very high in random maps. On the next post x)), get the best position in the engagements. Strategy isn't involved. If you have doubt about this, ask yourself these questions: Do you ever ask yourself what's your opponent thinking of doing?(or, what is he thinking you're thinking he's thinking? And so on, look for metagame http://it.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=metagame )How important is scouting?(is it important at all?)Personally , I think scouting is only important to keep control of enemy troops movements (tactical tool), and strategies viable are very few and don’t counter each other well , booming reigns supreme (boom son, and hope your opponent boomed less than you). /------------------------------------------------------------------/ Ok, now a bit of explanation. As 0ad is now, rushing → booming → turtling → rushing doesn't work. (→ means “beats”) Booming and turtling are too similar, and rushing is not a viable option. (In the spoiler I try to explain why). In a few word, a good defender who boomed ,beats an as good rusher, so rushing doesn't counter booming. I underlined “good defender” because is not an easy task what he has, he needs to have enemy cavs under control, have wood workers spread the most he can ,and be very concentrated because just missing the cav approaching to your wood workers and not retreating them in time, means the blitz will be deadly, and you lose those wood workers. On the other hand, the attacker can only rely on opponent's mistakes to get the advantage out of the rush. To fix this, it's imo essential to lower cc firepower and/or range, I suppose it was increased from a16 to a17 to make things easier for defender against skirm cav rush, in addition to actually nerfing skirm cav, a bit of a over-nerf to rushing imo. Other fixes to try delineate better rushing booming and turtling could be differentiating citizens and citizen/soldiers more. Lowering females health (they have same armor and health as ranged units in age1), so that they die fast, in addition they flee once hit ,so is very frustrating trying to kill them with less than 20 rangeds. And their recruit time: make the time bonus for batches of women bigger, so that if someone commits to booming (which revolves around doing big batches of women) he gets a decisive advantage on someone who plays safe and does the most men and the least amount of women possible.Doing this few changes, would improve the game strategical aspect, and encourage scouting. What you get from the current balance ,are long and boring heavily macro oriented games, without the possibility of early aggressions. /------------------------------------------------------------------/ But here is the more meaty idea, ( which might work in synergy with the above or be an alternative) what I'm suggesting aims to make strategy and metagames the core of 0ad ,without the need of changing units balance, but instead with a small change in the structures balance. CC producing soldiers slower (or not at all) than how a barrack does : this way ,coming in with fewer skirm cav before enemy has a barrack would be a viable option, and most important ,it would incentive scouting, going for a rush would require an early barrack, so once you scout it, you have an idea of whats in your enemy's mind, and given your mindgame intuition, you might be right...or maybe you're being bluffed...maybe you should scout more...but this would mean sacrifice your macro...( an early barrack,given its cost ,would also mean that you cant have a fast housing for big early groups of women, and therefore you aren't going to boom).All this, might require lowering men wood cost. Needs testing. This minor tweak would imo improve the game experience a lot , more strategies, more build orders (now all BO look the same! Rushing, booming, turtling: barrack pops at 6 minutes if you haven't got extra berries or fauna, and houses ,houses ,houses), more scouting. Keep in mind , many of the ideas I explained come from comparing 0ad to other most famous Rts ,mostly starcraft2. Ok , I hope I could explain myself. If something is unclear, I 'll be happy to explain, and if you like what you read, I have many other little concepts to beef up and sharpen the ideas above, but the post is already too long....so maybe a part 2 if you like. Mario.

Mention it to the moderators and they should be banned if your report is confirmed. More advanced host tools will most likely come at a later point.

Seriously, Apple is so frustrating sometimes. I know snow leopard is 6 years old, but from what I understand it still has a fairly large user base. I don't want to upgrade because of certain software and because I've heard different reports about problems upgrading with bootcamp. Oh well, I can still play this wonderful game on my windows partition. Thanks for the replies.

The ICU version we use on Windows is 52, so it is just too old to include that change. Updating libraries on Windows is a bit of a pain to do, but I've added it to #3004. I'd rather not change the casing to something that might not be correct in the target language just to make it look uniform.

The sound alert must be different, in AoE when a priest are trying to convert a unit or building the sound is different from the main attack. I know in this moment we lack about soun designer for have something appropriate. Edit1 --------- I don't like the idea to use attack move in buildings because is the same shortcut to garrison in to a ally building, I mean if you are losing the building to recover the CP ( capture points) you need garrison into your own building ( obviusly if the building have the garrison option enable). The other matter is use mouse cursor Like this I like this, is like a hand taking

He's two weeks late /o\

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.

Back on the subject of a18 feeback... Stone forts and CC's shouldn't be offensive weapons. Its a common tactic now for people to plop them down right on the border of a town, rather than attack with troops. They cost less stone than 2 catapults. I know the game is about claiming territory, but its absurd that they are best weapon for attacking towns. I know it was common for invading armies to construct wooden palisades around besieged towns, but stone forts took generations to build. -Make them well over 1000 stone and wood. -A limit of 2-3 of each or maybe 5 total between the two. So like you have to decide if you want to make more CC's, or more forts. -They should take way longer to build. Like 2-3 times as much. -Allow all civs to construct wooden defensive buildings in neutral territory to help with town attacking. Like wooden towers, palisades, and wooden forts like the roman ones or the outpost. -Allow all civs to make wooden army camps to claim territory. -Have a timer that prevents players from instantly rebuilding a CC when its lost, like 60 seconds or so. They are so cheap, that players just spam them all over the map. I just played a 50 minute game against an experienced player, and it wasn't very fun. He kept making CC's and forts all over the map, and I kept knocking them down. I tear down all his stuff on my left side, and he builds all over my right. I tear down his right side stuff, and he builds again on my left. I attack his main town, and he just lets it burn while he builds another somewhere else. He eventualy lagged out, and I had a 6 K/D ratio against him with about 2/3 of the resources he had. I won every battle and repelled every attack, but he just kept building and building. I know I could've won by doing the same thing he did by randomly building CC's and forts everywhere, but that's not fun. Chasing small groups of units who are trying to flank you with forts and CC's isn't fun. I've watched a few games between aggressive and experienced players become a complete and random mess of CC's and forts everywhere. The map looks like a modern art painting with all the colors and shapes everywhere, as players try to get CC's in every last nook in the map, rather than just fight and get the game over with. The game needs focus and a more clear objective. I like the idea of the game revolving around forts and CC's, but the spam needs to be reduced. Killing a fort or a CC should be a big objective and really swing the tide of the game. They should be big, expensive and powerful buildings, not cheap spammable cannon fodder. It should be a real accomplishment to build a CC with a few protecting forts, and losing them should be catastrophic.

Means no unified vision. Not everything is "easy." Must believe in the project to do the hard things even things that arent fun. and make decisions on applying minimal manpower. Need the presence of mind, what can be called situational awareness, to understand where your time and effort is needed, not where you want it to be but where it has the most utility (being a self-starter and team player--learnign when to sacrifice your own desires for the greater goal: the completion of a AA game). Creation is not always fun, but is done with hard work, and the finishe product is the reward.

imho, alpha stage is no time for balancing and I think current balancing effort is waste of time to appease community member with no patience. Focus should be on fixing bug and adding features. I am fool who knows nothing.