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If the Village Phase is boring it doesn't mean that you need to abolish it. Why not make it more interesting? => Reduce LOS, make Hunting more viable (by somehow reducing the impact of the distance to the dropsite -> increase carry capacity just for hunting or something). Maybe even something in terms of a Player vs. Environment... I think that is much more fun than removing phases. If we remove every gameplay feature that's not perfect, we would be left with a bare-stripped game that's not fun to play at all. Better improve those features instead.

Here is the zipped files. The Aristiea mod looks cool. I got it into the mod selection window, but I couldn't run it. I think it was an error with version compatibility with 0 A.D. (most likely I just don't know what I am doing though) As far as the mod I don't mind helping. I'm not just sure how useful I will be. I have only been doing this stuff for three weeks. Also, I have other obligations so I can't commit to meeting deadlines, but I plan to churn out some more Assyrian characters. I want to work on an auxiliary infantry unit next, when I get this current model squared away. The Model: He is an infantrymen. His weapon would be a spear, but historically he could have two functions with a spear and sword. He is from the Neo-Assyrian Empire (early iron age). In 0 A.D. terms he wold be a professional soldier, heavy infantry, trained at a fortress or special building. AssyrianWarrior.zip

Not really, it's more that we are tired of making false promises =) There are always small things (and often big things like release blocker bugs), which makes it take longer before we are able to release the next Alpha

Ah, someone else mentions BFME. In BFME, maintaining the same units battle after battle was critical. There were more ranks available (1-10 in BFME1 and 1-5 in BFME2), so there was a large difference between experienced troops and regular troops. Also, all upgrades had to be researched at a building and then purchased for each battalion. You had to research the tech first, then have enough money left over to actually purchase it per battalion. Losing an upgraded veteran battalion was a big deal. However, it is too much effort to manage veteran units if they are all individual. It was similar for buildings because they all grew in "rank" too. (Buildings only featured 3 ranks.) They didn't gain rank by defeating enemy units like battalions did, they just grew after existing for a certain amount of time. So, if a structure was destroyed before you had a chance to research all the advanced techs from the building, it would be awhile before you could get another building up to that rank/level. However, you never lost techs that were researched, and you didn't have to keep the building to continue using the tech.The way they handled technologies made it feel more like you were involved in production. We just research and immediately all units are upgraded everywhere. Elite unit battalions could only trained from high level buildings. If you destroyed all of those, recovery was slow since you couldn't train advanced units for a good while. Of course, if a player was strong enough to destroy all of your advanced structures, they were generally going to win anyway. Really like the way things were handled in that game. (Heroes were ridiculously overpowered though, and the civilian side left something be be desired.)

IMO, the other ways of gathering food are being ignored because of the efficiency of farming.. Farming is a good and stable way to maintain food resource, but the gathering speed and gathering rate should be tweaked. IMO, so that players will consider other forms of food resource which are faster to obtain, specially during early game. Ex 1: 3 strikes = 1 food gathered , increase the starting carry capacity to 10 , so a long period 30 strikes will yield 10 food, this can help simulate that farming/growing crops takes time. Inability to complete 3 strikes yields zero food, counting does not resume, it resets every time it does not complete 3 strikes.If you like to rush, then farming is not for you, you should try breeding food-yielding animals or go hunting. If you want an auto-managed and less hectic way of gathering food, then you should stick to farming, but it can put you to a disadvantage, despite of its effectiveness as a food source.

Yes this is what I like about upgrading buildings: you don't have to. You can take risks. Say the first level CC is very weak: you may not upgrade it if you're just interested in making women and not techs or whatever, but if you get attacked early on you won't be able to defend. Or you can make it into a quasi-fortress if you pour enough resources in. I don't really think it'd be that much micro-management, and we don't have to make all buildings upgradable. I'm inspired for this by Tower Defense games, which I think have quite a few interesting characteristics, and also city-builders: I think 0 A.D. should be a little more about city-building. I do agree with you guys that if we keep phases, we need to separate them more and make them more interesting. There are a variety of ways of doing this, but they all end up running in a problem imo: we don't have that big of a unit roster. Most civs have between 5 and 7 different units. And start with 3 from the CC straight up. An issue with making village phase all about economy is that it's really really boring. Hunting doesn't work. Scouting is pretty darn easy with the huge LOS that units have and the territory mechanics. There's just not that much to do. The economic side of 0 A.D. just isn't that interesting, and to this day I regret that the original design wasn't waaay fancier economically. I remain unconvinced by phases. I believe they make sense in the context of games such as Rise of Nations. They had their place in Age of Empires since units really progressed (BTW this is also why AOE 3 phases felt weird to me: you didn't feel like you were advancing in ages). In 0 A.D.? I just don't think so. I kinda like the idea of allowing more specialization in gathering. It makes sense and it would give something to do beyond the early phases for economy. But we need to rethink a lot of the game for that.

I'd like to suggest a slightly different direction. The phases already seem to represent increasing levels of population/organization. This could be expanded upon. Village -> Town -> City -> State As the civilization expands it allows greater specialization for individuals, due to economies of scale. Earlier phases offer a few general purpose units that, although they are versatile, are mediocre (or maybe even straight up bad), at everything. They shouldn't be able to counter anything, but should be easily countered by units in later phases (probably not until city phase, to avoid allowing the first person to reach town phase from effectively insta-winning). Something like: Village: - Citizens, crappy melee citizen soldier, crappy ranged citizen soldier, and a mounted scout. -- These are little more than conscripts using whatever weapons and armor they can get. Town: - Access to first professional cavalry units. -- These are the early elites of your society. It takes a certain level of organization and wealth to support a noble population, especially one that can afford their own arms, armor, and horses. - Ability to upgrade your crappy citizen soldiers to passable. -- now they get some training and equipment provided by the state, but are still basically conscripts. They shouldn't have quite the crippling weakness to the City phase professional soldiers that the crappy citizen soldiers have, but they'll still lose without a sufficient numbers advantage. - Access to several tech and service buildings; blacksmith, mill, etc. - Early defensive structures; wooden towers, palisades. City: - Access to professional soldiers. -- These are pure military units with no ability to do menial tasks. They should be much stronger than the citizen soldiers, and equally more expensive. - Some cavalry specialization. -- Horse Archers? Chariots? Light Cavalry that excel in harass tactics? - Fortress access (?) - Basic siege weapons - Heavier fortifications -- stone walls and towers - may want to introduce support units here -- something like priests in AoE 1/2 or Druids in R:TW State: - Upgraded professional soldiers. -- Badass++ Pay++. Should be a ridiculously hard counter to village citizen soldiers, and a hard counter to town CS. - Specialized infantry. -- Pole-arms for anti-cav, skirmishers, etc. - more specialized cavalry (?) -- I don't know what kind of specialized cavalry might have existed in ancient times New technologies should obviously be introduced as they progress. Not just another +1 to A/D, but more exotic bonuses (especially in the State phase) should be made available. Taking some inspiration from AoK, things like Murder Holes, Herbal Medicine, and Ballistics were great techs that went beyond a boring (but effective) +1 to X stat. One possible technology, which takes the theme of Generalist -> Specialist a step further, would be to make your citizen soldiers unable to build anymore in exchange for increased combat effectiveness. This tech would have to improve the Citizens as well (perhaps beyond giving them access to constructing military buildings). You could take it even further by removing the distinction between citizens and citizen-soldiers until a technology is researched that unlocks professional soldiers and "dedicated" laborers/engineers. The specialists would be much better at their jobs than the previous generalists. You could also have this tech automatically researched for certain civs that have a caste system in place. Lots of ways to go!

Hey! I am one of the authors of this paper. I'd be happy to answer any questions about Castle. fcxSanya is right about the general idea behind the system. The idea is to use video games to establish covert communication channels that are hard to detect. This WIRED article did a good job of explaining the ideas behind our system: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/app-hides-secret-messages-starcraft-style-games/ There's more to come from Castle! We're specifically targeting making Castle a Tor pluggable transport by the end of this year. A little note on the relationship between 0 A.D. and Castle: 0 A.D. is our go to game for demos. While we have Castle working over other big titles, we cannot release that code for legal reasons. However, we do not recommend using Castle over 0 A.D. in the real world, due to the lack of encryption and authentication of the move communication channel. The good news is, Castle is highly adaptable and can be moved over other RTS-games in about a day, if required.