Leaderboard

An interesting idea. It does seem appropriate that the most central / core building should be upgraded both visually and in effect. We do the effect part to a limited degree with the LOS increase per phase, but this is a somewhat weak upgrade. Most is left to new research or newly available structures. In BFME2, you upgraded your fortresses (combined fortress / civil center). They had upgrade slots that you clicked and chose an available upgrade (defense turret, etc.) They also featured general research upgrades like increased vision or armor. The upgrades always had a visual affect so you (and your enemies) could see at a glance what you had chosen. Perhaps we could combine some of these ideas? Upgrades make the structures more valuable (because of the additional time and resources needed to create). Advanced units and technologies could be available from the most upgraded structures rather than just the most "advanced" structures (like a fortress).

The Chinese, Chinese (Taiwan), and Japanese font/translation mods are available at http://releases.wildfiregames.com/locales/.

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.

If autoupdate system comes some day to 0 a.d, it would be nice to be optional, but I think that's a needed feature for the Beta

Good for you. Got an idea of how to fix that or is this just another pointless comment?

Victory! Much thanks to stanislas69 niektb Lion.KanzenThank you for helping me!

I googled for it and it seems that I (or any repository admin) can hook 2 mail adresses to a commit notification system. We haven't used it till now so I personally don't mind if your mail address is one of those 2. (just send a PM with the e-mail adress you like to have your notifications at)

Many, many thanks for the new pathfinder! Now the game performs very well! I wasn't able to play it with my friends in the past since it started to stutter with a certain amount of units. Now it does work very well! I'll do a lot of advertising in linux forums as well as german hardware and games forums now. Hopefully we'll get more attention, players and maybe some donations. I'll donate a few bugs, too! I do agree with Andrettin: The game should be on Steam NOW since it's very nicely playable! Maybe you could upload snapshots over there after they have been tested by the community! @Andrettin: Under Linux the package manager does Update the game which is very nice! You should try linux! If you don't want to check out Chocolatey [1]. It's more or less the same thing for windows. You can update quite a lot of programs with that one - like Firefox, Flash, CD Burner XP, etc... [1] https://chocolatey.org/

This should be fixed in r17347. It will be effective on next autobuild. Thanks for the report.

I'd like to point out I suggested that in my opening post. I completely agree that it would be an interesting experiment.

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/17344 Slowly adding Delenda Est feature to main game I see. Delenda Est version: { "pair": "pair_defensive_01", "genericName": "Murder Holes", "description": "Murder Holes allow defenders to fire or drop projectiles upon enemy units huddled along the base of the defenders' wall.", "cost": {"food": 0, "wood": 200, "stone": 100, "metal": 0}, "requirements": {"tech": "phase_city"}, "requirementsTooltip": "Unlocked in City Phase.", "icon": "murder_holes.png", "researchTime": 40, "tooltip": "Towers and Fortresses no longer have a minimum attack range.", "modifications": [ {"value": "Attack/Ranged/MinRange", "replace": 0} ], "affects": ["Tower", "Fortress"], "soundComplete": "interface/alarm/alarm_upgradearmory.xml"} n Okay so I think Im make the Principate Romans have to build Temple of Vesta to unlock Town Phase instead of a Triumphal Arch. Right now they have to build 2 Triumphal arch, 1 for Town Phase and 1 for City Phase, but I think it would be more interesting to build two different things insteead. Any thoughts? I think Principates should stick to 1st and 2nd century. Dominates will be later.

If you post your texture (and the cached version in-game) I might be able to tell you what goes wrong.

Just FYI, I wouldn't make a full copy of default.cfg, because sometimes the options change from one release to another. It is better to copy only the lines you want to change

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.

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.

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!

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.

Corral

Civic Center.

I don't know for what reasons we shouldn't have both. =) I don't know if the saxons had many boats, but I was thinking maybe we could only have the wooden structure on the last image for the docks. It would give a village look.