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Here's to another one of my random "we should remove features" ramblings. I will in this post argue for removing phases from the game entirely. Let's begin with "why phases are broken". Why phases are broken. It's really quite simple. We have 3 phases. They simply are not different enough. The second phase brings the market, the blacksmith, new CCs, and some towers which you can't really use for offensive purposes. The third basically brings fortresses. And it feels like we could just make fortresses way more expensive and have the same effect. There's not a lot of strategical finesse either: rushing isn't reliant on phases, and any other strategy is going to involve champions which means fortresses. Town phase is sort of an awkward in-between, necessary but never "enough". You really don't want to stay in town phase. Why is this worse than in other RTS? Well for one thing phases don't really make sense as they did in say AoE or RoN, where they represented huge technological advances, so you could completely upgrade units and stuff. In 0 A.D., the idea is that you're simply… having a bigger town, I guess? We don't really "unlock" that much nor upgrade our units a ton, so it all feels very forced and not really that useful. As I said, you just want fortresses, there's really no reason to stay in town phase. It's no castle age or anything. Another oddity is that they really aren't that costly compared to units and buildings. Particularly since the in-game economy tends to be super easy to boom, you quickly end up with fortress age being limited by the speed at which you build the required buildings (which can be somewhat big as you hardly need them in town phase), not by ressources. So what do we replace them with? That's of course the more difficult question. We don't want to go back to earlier alphas where the winning strategy was just to make a fortress straight-away. I see one course of action: upgrading buildings manually. You'd start with a small town council, upgradable in a town center then a town hall or something. Each time, you unlock better techs and abilities (say, batch-creating villagers, more citizen soldiers…). But those upgrades are quite costly. Same with the blacksmith. Barracks. Temple? Whatever we can think of, really. The idea is also that the top buildings, techs, and upgrades should be more costly and tied together. Can't build fortresses until eg you have upgraded your town hall enough (sorta simulating phases but differently) or you have enough barracks, or you have unlocked some tech, or you can straight away but they're sorta weak and useless until you pour more ressources in, and champions have a super long build time until you research tech. But why? This would have several adantages: it makes it way easier to diversify strategies. Want to focus on champions straight away? Well it's going to cost you a ton of ressources but if you do it properly and the opponent doesn't scout you it's game over for him. Want to trade right away? Doable. Basically it allows going way crazier. Individual upgrades of buildings also give more info on what your strategy is (particularly if we go with specialization, such as for example allowing a barracks to specialize in ranged or cav units), so that properly countering your opponent's strategy becomes more reliant on scouting. Overall I think this would be a positive change for the game, making gameplay both more unpredictable and more strategic, while also removing a completely artificial system in favor of something that makes a little more sense. The biggest drawback would be of course multiplying our art substantially.

I don't think phases are broken as a concept, but a lot of things derivating from it are. Even if there can be an other way to have a similar effect. Each phase already gives an advantage in theory, but not maybe in current implementation. In village phase you only have the basics. With the addition of wooden towers you also have a few defensive abilities (considering they should be part of a strategy and not a always do or never do, with proper advantages and drawbacks). In phase II you unlock the ability of having better soldiers, either with new classes or technologies, better defenses and better economy. In phase III you have the same power upgrade that can outclass phase II. On that point I have a different view from wowgetoffyourcellphone, not unlocking new strategies by phasing up but unlocking other -and more efficient- ways of doing them (why excluding diversity from early game?). So if you phase, you unlock things that can overwhelm the previous one, but you need to spend resources on it (and can be overwhelmed by just number). In theory it's a cat and mouse, a race between exploiting phases bonus and costs. I agree, currently there is no real reason to stay at a low phase. It's just going up to town phase, build a CC and towers and attack with towers (offensive towers? Isn't this a siege weapon?), untill you go city phase, get champions and fortresses and wipe everything. Which I feel is way more broken than phasing and to be deeply linked to it. At least it's how I see the latest svn games I played, I would be truely happy to be proven wrong and wouldn't have started Sibyllae Vox otherwise. If there would be some way to fight in early phases (and things to fight for), it would be harder to spare more resources for phasing. Then phasing cost is just a matter of finding the right cost. You are providing interesting ideas like more diverse buildings requirements and building upgrades. But I don't know if it will open more strategies, it will surely provide more build orders. To the extreme, Warzone does specializing at a huge size, and because you can't really switch from a strategy to an other, it's still rather linear (once you have made your first choices, you are really stuck in them, switching is losing). I really don't know about this, it a matter of finding a good balance between choices and destiny and invite you to develop it a bit. I don't have made my mind, I was thinking about extending village phase in sibyllae Vox, to make it not just a sub-phase, but a full entity, like you can already play a lot of things in town phase (well, in Sibyllae Vox) and make it last a bit longer (say if an average game lasts 45 mins, have more or less 15 min of each phases and not phase III at 15 min). Thinking it the reverse way, phasing being the effect of growing and not a requirement (you can get town phase once you already have a town, and not be able to make a town when phased). Thus the "step", requiring investments (resources and time) may add one choice more to do in the global strategy, instead of flowing by itself. It may be a bit artificial but it seems to work (maybe the cost is having a strong will to evolve politicaly and set up the tools for a richer and broader civic life). I don't know about it, for now I'm for keeping it, just not to reboot the game (and deal with it, which with time often make sense of the feature but not always) but if someone convince me that it is far better with a more linear progression why not? Finally, I may be locked in my concept to implementation way of thinking, when you say "I want to focus on champions", isn't it "I want to focus on a small unstoppable strong army" that translate to training champions (but is not the only way)? The argument of making more diversity isn't in fact revealing the current state should have more? And there are tons of way to deal with it, the phases concept is one of them. Not saying that it won't be modified at all, but are we trying to solve the right thing?

Perhaps the problem is that we are not looking in-depth at how functional games do it. Upgrading buildings seems a bit strange; in Starcraft there were building tech trees. The same could be done for 0 A.D. the Civic Centre would unlock barracks, which unlocks more units, which in turn unlocks the fortress after a tower has been constructed. If we are talking about phases still existing, I would look to Age of Kings as an example for our framework and move from there. In Age of Kings the Dark Age could see rushing, but this was mainly just simple harassment. The actual contact would come in the Feudal Age, in which fighting could occur with soft counter units used offensively and the hard counter ones defensively. The alternative would be to wall, a practical option, and jump to the Castle Age, when crossbows, knights, and siege revolutionise the battlefield. In the Imperial Age real power could come to play with unique units, trebuchets, and gunpowder, yet the army compositions would also have to be balanced with cheaper trash units as the game continued since resources, being finite, would continue to limit the purchasing abilities. The point is that there must be a point to the phases, and Age of Kings did that job extremely well. While everything seemed coherent, it was also distinct with one age to the next. Currently 0 A.D. lacks those distinctions, so the purpose is lost. I personally would advocate for the ageless concept. It may seem avant-garde, yet it works for the current vision of 0 A.D.

No. We must only limit the military units per class, and add basic military units. First phase a cavalry explorator male and female basic unit, the citizen soldiers should come in the second phase, but not all classes Skirmisher/ slinger , cavalry spear, cavalry ranged, spearman and hoplites/ swordsman for Romans limited the experience to reach. Third phase the rest of units and add a 4 phase. The first phase units can't build farms without a farmstead. Wooden towers The second phase only give blacksmith , and (barrack?)and market, towers and palisades Third phase give temple fortress and advanced defenses and special buildings 4th phase give the marvel and the second sp building.