Yeah, A16 ,as A17 and A18 had only one viable strategy. Which means that the early game , say the first 10 minutes, were exactly the same in every game. Those 3 Alphas (which I played a lot) had each one an optimal strategy (the best strategy possible, which leads to the best result given the goal of winning the match), which didn't depend on what your opponent was doing, and that's why scouting has never been used as a strategic tool (since whatever your opponent was doing, the best strategy to counter his plan was always the same) and ultimately there's never been strategic thinking involved. As I said earlier, I played 0ad a lot. It has been the first Rts game I ever played, and i fell in love with it instantly, it was like discovering chocolate and candies at 20 years of age. I wanted to learn the most I could , so I played with the best players, watched their videos, spectated their games and so on, just for the sake of getting better at the game, because i loved it. I got some understanding of the game mechanics and ultimately became good myself, so whenever i say 0ad is a bad game, it has no strategy involved or that it's broken, I'm belittling myself first as a player more than anything else, I'm not attacking and criticizing the game because i can't play it , which is the kind of reason which, sadly, leads to most of the "constructive critics" ( more or less subconsciously) the game gets by players (just take as an example a16, where everybody was hating on rushing , just because they were frustrated of losing by it, and not because it broke the strategic aspect of the game). I'm criticizing the game even though I can play it, I'm saying rushing is not a sensible choice even though I 'm a macro oriented player who likes to boom, I'm saying rushing is not a good strategy even though the few times i tried to rush in a18 I always succeeded also against very strong players. I'm doing so because I still love the game, and I'm trying to give back all the good things the game gave me, I haven't got the skills required to fix bugs and such things, so I can only share my intuitions to improve the game, which derive from a quite deep understanding of it. So if i decided to write this post, it's because I thought that there was no awareness about this problem, and nothing was being done in order to solve it. The most important thing is to fix the overcompensation that happened from A16 to A17 in regard to rushing. Simply reducing the civic center damage output, might be enough, and the 3 strategies might find a balance. In addition to that ,I hinted how giving the barrack a more distinct role could add a lot of depth to the game. I understand how the big potential of this small change is hard to understand, that most people don't get to a certain level of play to even know what booming rushing and turtling mean, and that most of the community and the volunteers participating to the craft of the game are involved in art works , programming and such, but the gameplay experience has the same value of the above for the success of the project. I can't make a mod myself to show you my plan, if I could I wouldn't have even made this topic in the first place. The most I can do is to share my ideas with those who can. As always, I 'm happy to hear your feedback and so on. Mario.