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I tried some games lately just to see. My mood was "hey, how is alpha 19 going if I want to put some LAN with it?". It is about 3 things: capturing, general balance (in fact unit design) and pathfinding I never finished a game either. I stopped at phase 2 with a few rush against a poor AI (even in very hard) and being stuck around an empty civic center. Capturing is making raiding more tedious. Capture, select, destroy, repeat. It is still very fun to capture a defense tower and use it to protect your raiding party but raiding a 5 pack houses and depots is boring. In enemy territory, you can't keep them anyway.Village phase is anemic. Even if I think units are superfast I don't really get the point of rushing. Much much much micro to do with broken skirmishers (with the fake throw prepare time) and unkillable melee units. I reanabled auto-micro with minimum range for some tests and I was more pleased with the result (less dumb-heroic thing of a skirmisher trying to fight an armored swordman in front of him)No formation, fast units. It's an arcade game for designing targets and managing your troops with a very high action per minute. I even get troubles clicking on moving units . And as I don't really get the counter scheme well for now I just get melee = shield, skirmishers = damage. I use cavalery skirmishers a bit before raiding for scouting and luring some troops away.Just for comparison, I tried Delenda Est a few weeks (month?) ago, here are what I preffer: Outposts: as you can build your depots outside your territory and are encouraged to do so, village phase is more dynamic with early encounters around outposts. Even if the civic center is untouchable. Still early game battles can give an advantage on long term.Capturing becomes then more interesting, by capturing outposts (thus line of sight and territory) instead of buildings around the civic center that couldn't be kept anyway unless the player is anihilated.Game pace is slower. Both with unit movement and training time (and cost). Your choices are more visibles, line of sight get very valuable. Along with formations, the overall game is much clearer (and more eye candy)Obvious counter scheme: even if I'm more for a soft counter scheme, the hard counter scheme make it clear how you can defeat some troops and give roles to your unit types instead of rushing them all and see what's happening.I made some suggestions in balancing to stick more to the design document if you want some concrete things. It goes toward something more like Delenda Est though. Regarding capturing, I don't really know. It works well with a few cases like defense towers and maybe civic center. I must check but I think women reduce capture, which makes it very hard even if there are no military unit around. Maybe it should be a spartan bonus only. About the pathfinding I don't really know. There are a lot of bugs in the current state like units being stuck or abording their job but it's not suprising with a rewriten from scratch thing. If the performance is much better, it must not be thrown away. Maybe alpha 19 is technicaly ready in some way (capturing enabled, improved performance, new UI stuff) but not mature enough? Or maybe I'm an old frustrated player that don't want an antic Starcraft

Not at all. I thought this topic was a technical complaint about the pathfinder's current state, sorry for that mistake. On the technical side, I pushed a big change and informed you of this in this topic: http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=20032#entry309026

I pushed an important change to the unit motion that should get rid of all "stuck unit" cases. Please give me feedback If everything works fine I'll test formations to see if they can be reenabled, I understand this is a must-have for players.

Yes, and IIRC, someone else before me also suggested to switch the default action to destroy instead of capture in buildings.. (It is your choice (ctrl+click) if you want to capture the building or the siege engines, making it less hectic.. specially if you do not really want those buildings/siege engines..) The victory goal is basically annihilation, territorial dominance is just a possible strategy to achieve it. Just some idea for the line of sight, I don't have any idea if this is achievable or if it is hard/easy to implement.. Just a suggestion.

I suggest people on forum talk about it. Or should every opening post come fully formed with pages of concrete ideas?

I don't have real problem with the pathfinder really. I'm happy that Itms puts so much effort in this game including such difficult topics as the Pathfinder.What my problem is that I liked how 0 A.D. played when I joined up on this forum (that would be around Alpha 14) but that gameplay was radically changed in Alpha 17 (and IMHO not to the benefit of the game)

And what do you suggest?