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My opinion on the trade vs resources debate: I agree that resources should be faster when they are still present. However, I also believe they should be faster given equal technological investment, ie upgraded trading might be faster than basic resource collecting, but not upgraded resource collecting. I also believe that trading should be able to replace resource gathering somewhat efficiently when resources are depleted so that the game doesn't slow to a complete crawl. Finally, with that particular implementation, I think it might be worth it to have a civilization where trading might get more interesting than gathering overall for some resources not necessarily all of them though), for example the Persians, which are supposed to be a trading-strong civ (in SVN they get 25% more from their traders, here their markets are 25% more efficient). So say maybe for Persians, they don't have access to the best (say) metal gathering techs, but trading can compensate. Also worth noting is that trading rate currently depends on your trade preferences, which may or may not be a good idea, because if you focus entirely on one resource, you will get a much better rate. Perhaps players should no longer be able to determine what resources they want to gain from trading? I do agree that it would be interesting if players could raid markets, but it would require quite a lot of changes. In the meantime, perhaps markets should ungarrison units even when only slightly damaged or captured.

I'd like to have a side to side comparison between "The Vision" and the current game. I think the whole game would benefit from it. I mean not just seeing the text, but like a list of features we are missing.

As a follow up, since r17412 postproc, smoothlos and all water features are also enabled when using a OpenGL4+ compatible card (cards released in latest 4 years should support it). This is only effective if you remove any reference to these settings in your config files, otherwise the settings there have a higher priority. These will also be effective on next autobuild, you may get some warnings until that. After the autobuild please test and report any possible problems. Still missing is enabling materialmgr.quality to 10.0 but this should be done after having a GUI option to let users disable it (ticket #2596).

Most of the team (at least those who played a bit) agree that the current "champs only" win strategy is boring as hell. We're looking at ways to change it.

There is indeed something new. A19's capture mechanism changed the whole meta-game. Right now there is one single predominant strategy, that is build tons of swords champions, storm in the enemy's base and capture the CC, and build more champions. All the 1400+ score players I played with use Britons and use this strategy, and anyone who does not use this strategy is defeated very easily. There is no more siege, and nothing else matters. Personally I find this new meta-game unbalanced and lacking in diversity. (Another strategy demonstrated by ffm and Wonox above is fast rush and economy skirmishing for game under 15 minutes. OK, this is pro level build order and economy managing, I don't enjoy it and don't have time to practice for it). The basic fact of this mechanism is that, ordinary soldiers have 2 capture power per second, but champions have 5 capture power per second, which can be further boosted by heroes to at most 7. Normal buildings have 500 capture points, CC's have 2000 capture points, fortresses have 4000 capture points. This means with 50 champions CC would take 6 seconds to capture an undefended CC, or 11 seconds to capture an undefended fortress. What happens after capturing the CC is that the CC now generates the attacker's territory and all buildings in that territory get "captured" by "territory pull" 7 points per second, which means all the infrastructure is very quickly finished. Swords champions are able to do this because they have the highest stats in the game: (when fully upgraded) 12 hack armor, and 12 pierce armor both negate 72% damage, and quite high DPS (24.1 hack, or 29.1 if boosted by a hero), and they walk almost as fast (13 meter/second) as the fastest infantry, skirmishers (14). Britons, Romans, and Iberians have swords champions, but Britons' hero offers an additional 25% walk speed boost than the standard +5 attack +2 capture. This is why Britons is the most popular civ now. Spear champions are strictly inferior to swords champions because of lower attack and slower walk speed. Champions are expensive, but it is not very hard to build 100 champions in under 25 minutes by just gathering. There are several implications from these facts: The high capture power of champions decides that towers and fortresses are easily captured and useless for defense, with any number of normal soldiers in garrison. (Unless the defender has an equal number of champions to negate the capture power.)The high armor stats of champions decide that they can walk in and out of heavily tower defended areas unscathed and finish capturing before dying off. This also means archers and skirmishers civs need a huge number of ranged troops to deter (but still can't kill) swords champions, and this army composition is strategically bad for attacking defense structures.The high attack stats of champions decide that even if the defense structures are garrisoned by champions, they can still kill the buildings by brute force relatively fast. This further adds to the uselessness of defense structures. Capturing the CC is now a straightforward job to destroy the opponent. And the only real defense is to also use Britons and build an equal or more number of swords champions.Siege weapons are as fragile as paper, easy to capture, very slow, and in general much more inefficient in offence compared to above. So they become pretty much irrelevant to the game.Using temples to heal champions is now considered an economy strategy, because champion casualties mean massive economy loss.Walls and turrets cannot be captured, and they may be used for blocking champions. But they are mostly passive and stone is often hard to come by too.A side meta-game derived from the main meta-game is now to deny the opponent access to metal, first scout the map, locate metal deposits, and expand there and defend it. Stone is pretty much irrelevant because fortresses and towers are irrelevant for defense. I am a long time Romans player since a15. Romans have specialty including siege towers, which costs only wood instead of stone, and can be built in neutral and enemy territory, and Scorpio, bolt shooters, which attack invisibly, have splash damage, and used to have the highest DPS (90) in the game. Unfortunately both were seriously nerfed. Siege towers are much slower to build and much more expensive, Scorpio's have much slower rate of fire (DPS now: 49). I personally prefer Romans' melee infantry core, and kept fighting with Britons' slinger rush before. This replay demonstrated my base defense against champion spam. It's a 3-way FFA with julijan (Athenians), imrobbyg (Britons), and me (Romans). Ignore other twos players who were irrelevant. This one is fairly long, one hour, so you may want to use fast forward setting, and Alt-D change perspective. Outcome (everything below is spoiler): I built 300-400 siege towers, which posed a clear deterrence and attrition to champion spam and forced them to retreat many times. Romans siege towers cost 100 wood and 130 seconds to build, have 2000 HP, 17 hack armor, 37 pierce armor, range 96, shoot 1 arrow (DPS 10) empty or 4 arrows (DPS 40) fully garrisoned. Also, it has much less surface for melee champions to attack. A thought experiment: 30 siege towers fully garrisoned kill 30 swords champions in 18 seconds. Important times and events from my perspective: 17 minute, imrobbyg economy skirmishing against julijan.20 minute, imrobbyg started champion production.25 minute and so on, imrobbyg destroyed julijan with champion spam.~40 minute, I built 100 swords champions (I could earlier, but was building towers), and through some strategic maneuver luring away his champions, I attacked his main base.I captured his CC, but forgot his wonder also generated territory. His infrastructure was not converted, and my 100 champions failed the mission and died. I had no more access to metal.I destroyed two of his outer bases.imrobbyg initiated siege ram and champion combined attack. I lost some towers but as soon as I had melee infantry on-site I was able to defend. The siege rams are very quick to kill off, and the champions garrisoned inside cannot afford to go out to defend the rams and endure massive arrow fire. I was focused on something else and didn't bother.I built 100 more spearmen (twice), and through some maneuver, destroyed one more outer base, and captured one fortress at his main base. I should not have garrisoned the spearmen in that fortress because it was very fast to get captured back by champions while the fortress defense of 20 arrows per second did minimal damage to the champions.I destroyed his wonder with a sneak team covered by maneuver elsewhere to attract attention.At this point, I resigned. I could still defend indefinitely. I could build 300 more siege towers, and I had the reserve to deter him from throwing everything and emptying base defense. But generally siege towers alone lacked the strategic initiative compared to concentrated champion spam, and siege towers are too slow to build offensively. So this was a losing battle. TL;DR: Use Britons, build 50 swords champions in 20 minutes, 100 champions in under 25 minutes, become unstoppable.Scout the map, capture metal deposits, deny metal access to the opponent.If your opponent use champion spam, seal your main CC with walls, move farms elsewhere, and do not build defense towers and fortresses anywhere except your main base, and metal deposit.Don't even build defense towers in your main base, which get captured fast. Build wall turrets only, which is strictly better than defense towers for defense purposes (no distance restrictions, cannot be captured vs 500 capture points, 4x/5x HP, 96 range vs 88, half the arrows though you're not gonna have the garrison in time).Do not build any siege weapons except siege rams garrisoned with 5 champions.Do not garrison any building after capture if you opponent have champions. Just destroy it (except CC, wait for the territory pull).britons-vs-romans-ffa.zip

I found this article that may be interesting, excerpt (our way ) quoted below. Read it all here.

There is a planned features page on the wiki, I try to keep it updated. But it doesn't really state if this follow the vision or not.

Agree on Stan. That would really help envisioning as well as taking a look on what we still need to do with the game. People like me who are really on and off with the game and its development would also benefit in that we could track visually the progress of the things made and where we stand now.

Uploaded an updated patch to a trac ticket.

The only other overlay that fixes this in a release build is the realtime overlay. The problem might also be due to a buggy driver - I can't play anything that uses OpenGl 3.1 (e.g. SuperTuxKart, Pioneer).

Dang, did I upload the wrong folder!?! Well, after all we're in alpha The error and the warning I mentioned are fixed in the dev version

Based on the currently provided facts I would guess that Ctrl + Num is bound to some desktop environment/graphical shell (GNOME, Unity etc.) and SDL2 respects such system bindings more than SDL1.2 (used in A18 package) did. @frita, please check whether Ctrl + Num allows to switch tab in Firefox/Chrome (someone reported a possible related issue with cinnamon here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/554597/bind-the-ctrl-number-keys-to-firefox-in-ubuntu).

I can't see this too AMD8750M

Hey Xfs thanks for the review that was a really interesting read.