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Hello everyone, This is a short announcement, to tell you that the release candidate packages for Windows, Unix, and OSX, along with the mods for ja, zh and zh_TW languages, are ready, and were uploaded to https://releases.wildfiregames.com/rc/. You can download them and check everything works as expected! Please note: this is a release candidate and might not be the final version. It would be safer for you to uninstall it and reinstall the release version when A20 is out. Thanks in advance for testing and for reporting any issues

You can define garrison in map XML file in the following way: "Garrison": { "holder1": [ent11, ent12, ... ], "holder2": [ent21, ent22, ... ] } See example in Sicilia_Nomad.xml#L88. You have to do this with a text editor for now, Atlas support is planned, but not implemented yet, see #3008 (Atlas should handle garrisoned units).

Simple: play multiplayer. When you see someone who plays like a king with a higher economy score and more champions than everyone else, go to Replays (from the first screen: Tools & Options: Replays) and study what order they built things and harvested resources. Then, build things in that order yourself. A good player should be able to get to age III from low resources by around 12 minutes, with over 100 population, and then immediately research champions at the barracks (provided they have a civ compatible with that) and start producing them. It's not very difficult to learn a build order that will achieve this. Here is an example of a Briton build order, assuming a 200 population cap, chickens, and berries. Make 5 women (shift-click at your civic center, or CC, to make them) Use your first 4 women to make a farmstead by the berries, assuming you have berries. Have them get berries asap. Put your cavalry skirmisher on chickens, assuming you have chickens. With your 4 men, build a storehouse by the nearest big forest, and set them on chopping. Use your dog to explore (hold down shift and click repeatedly on the minimap to give him a path to explore, you want to explore the edge of your base first and then concentric circles out from there). Set a rally point on wood by the storehouse so that the first 5 women you made in step 1 will go there Queue up some more women one at a time as long as you have food. When the farmstead finishes, research Wicker Baskets (berry upgrade) and make sure the women who built the farmstead go to berries and not chickens. This will put you at about 0 wood from low resources. As soon as you have 75 wood again, have one of your woodcutters start making a house. You will want to constantly be making 1 house at all times, to keep up with your CC production. So, when this builder finishes, you immediately have him make another house, and so on until age III. You can queue up multiple houses at once by shift-clicking, however note that this uses up the wood for future houses immediately so you can't use it for anything else. Keep making women and putting them on wood until you're at maybe 22-25 population, then start having new women build fields. Fields should be placed as close to your CC or farmstead as possible. Five women go on a field. You'll probably end up with like 6-8 fields before it's time for age II. When you have wood to spare (that means you don't need any wood to immediately make houses or fields), research the first farming upgrade at the farmstead. When the berries run out, the 4 berry women make a field. When you have wood to spare, research the first woodcutting upgrade at the storehouse. When the cavalry skirmisher runs out of chickens, he can go help the dog explore. Produce women 5 at a time whenever you have enough food. It's faster. When you have enough wood, make a barracks. If you seem to have enough farms and wood you can switch your CC to producing men instead of women, and put them on stone and metal. Build a storehouse at the stone and metal. If you seem to have more food than you need but not enough wood, make women and put them on wood. If your woodcutters are too far from the wood, make another storehouse closer to the wood. You probably want another storehouse for woodcutters in a completely different stand of trees, anyway. At some point around when the barracks finishes, you should have enough food and wood for age II, and somewhere around 50-70 population. There's no reason to rush going to age II. Don't interrupt your production of workers just to save up for age II. The barracks should produce skirmishers that can either go on stone/metal or on wood, depending on which you need more. With the barracks and CC both producing units, you may need more than one worker making houses to keep up. When you reach age II, you may have too much food. If so, you can take 5 or 10 women off of farming and put them on woodcutting instead. When you reach age II, your first priority is a market, which you can make with a bunch of women. The market should be placed near the back of your base, on the side farther from your allies so that you can get a long trade route. When the market finishes, immediately trade any excess food for some stone and metal, whichever you have less of. Hopefully you were first to market - britons are fast - so you can get good prices. Research the metal mining upgrade, the second woodcutting upgrade and the second farming upgrade, whenever you have enough wood. You might get the metal mining upgrade during age I if you have enough wood. Make the other buildings you need for age III, with several workers on each. I usually put down a defense tower, a blacksmith, and a temple. Sometimes I skip the temple in favor of a second defense tower. Make at least one more barracks, maybe two. By the time your buildings finish, between trading and mining, you should have at least 750 metal and 750 stone. If not, just trade for it at the market and go to age III. If there's another metal mine within your territory, now's a fine time to build a storehouse and start putting some men on it. Keep your barracks producing and putting skirmishers on mining or woodcutting. You'll probably reach age III somewhere between 11-12 minutes if you've been alert about not letting your workers stay idle, building houses ahead of time, and keeping up constant production from your CC and barracks. In age III, research champions at a barracks. Trade for the 500 metal you need if you don't already have it. If you have extra food, keep producing women 5 at a time at the CC. Maybe stop making women and skirmishers when you're at around 120 population. You might want to pull some women off of woodcutting and put them back on farming at this point. You might need a few more fields as well. A rotary mill and the third farming upgrade will help your food production, because you'll soon need a lot of food for champions as well as metal. When you've finished researching champions, start making brythonic longswordsmen 5 at a time. Rally them all to a single place so you can more easily manage them. When you have 1000 stone, pull your stone miners and maybe some woodcutters and make a fortress near your CC. As soon as the fortress finishes, make Boudicca and put her with the champions. With 30 champions and Boudicca at around 14-15 minutes, it's time to think about who you want to kill! For extra backup you can send some skirmishers out with them, although I usually don't. Don't take a fight you think you will lose, if retreat is an option. Use ctrl-q-click to tell your army to kill units but not buildings. Once the enemy units are dead, your priority target is an enemy CC. Ctrl-click on it to attack, then when it gets to low health, regular click on it to capture. If there are metal mines out on the map, you might choose to build a second CC by them with like 20 skirmishers. You will probably be attacked but if you can get 5000 metal out of them, it's worth it. If you're feeling secure about the number of champions you have, or if you just have the resources to spare, it's time to research upgrades for your champions (infantry attack, and infantry armor) at the blacksmith. This costs a lot of wood and metal so it's best to have several dozen champions first. Also, "battlefield medicine" at the temple is important. If your metal mines are running low (before they have actually run out), stop making champions and just be defensive while you make traders. Set the trade setting 100% for metal and rally the traders to the market or dock that's farthest away, while still being somewhat protected against enemy raids. You can trade from one side of your base to another if you have to. You want to shoot for like 30 traders, maybe more if the game goes on for a long time. Protect your trade routes with towers, fortresses, and troops. If you're running into the supply cap, you can delete some of your workers to make room for more champions and traders. I usually delete women woodcutters preferentially. If the supply cap is low, such as 150, then it would be better to use corrals instead of farming. You'd have to use a whole different build for that, though. It's much more difficult to get a good corral start than a good farming start, and they require more attention throughout the game to keep making sheep. If you are low on metal and well below max supply, but have thousands of food and wood, you can mass produce cavalry skirmishers. They're nowhere near as strong as champion swordsmen and will die in an eyeblink to arrows, but they can serve as backup to your main force. They are mobile and can help defend against enemies raiding your base with cavalry. You can garrison them in ships or buildings to produce more arrows. They can also be used for scouting and killing enemy traders. If you later acquire enough metal for champions you can just suicide or delete them.

I don't know about multiplayer, but in skirmish, I find walls to be somewhat difficult to use, to both block off choke points alongside the terrain and rebuild, especially when an end or corner wall tower is destroyed. This has always been a problem for me beyond just 0 A.D., since AI often attack end or corner wall towers, going back to both the Battle for Middle-earth and Age of Empires. Of course, I don't generally need walls anyway, since garrisoned fortresses do great work without a wall and AI is notorious for not being very effective at conducting a siege.

@BrynnOfCastlegate is doing these videos. But I'll have to disappoint you, and say that the current release won't have a video. Mainly because not a lot changed on the graphics side, so there's not a lot that a video would help to showcase.

For this release we've actually not prepared a release video There haven't been many changes that felt necessary to use a video to highlight. The release announcement will be full of images though (+ there might be a video highlighting the work done to make it possible to program the camera to move in a specific way (for cutscenes and the like), but since it's mostly ground work thus far it's still a bit difficult to do so might not make it) Usually it's @BrynnOfCastlegate who does most if not all the work on the videos (in some cases there has been some specific footage recorded by someone else, and then combined and edited by Brynn). We'll talk about getting a more general promo video or something similar done between now and the next release, so the Youtube channel isn't empty. And hopefully we will begin preparations for the video for Alpha 21 in good time (we have been a bit late in asking for it to be made, so it's really remarkable how well Brynn has managed to get them in the short time she's had for it).

The way meta-games develop has always frustrated me, since I almost exclusively play skirmish, I can usually get away with playing a completely different way than most players in a multiplayer setting. Which never helped me in StarCraft, since most people on Battle.net, unless they are in the ladder, only play custom games nowadays, so I was never in a position to learn how to play "proper" StarCraft. The massive 100 population boom into champions play style in 0 A.D. I keep hearing about is alien to me. Age of Empires has apparently developed a vaguely similar meta-game, at least in regards to the population boom aspect, but I don't play that way, because I can get away with strategically located garrisoned fortresses with cavalry to deal with siege weapons. The AI could attack an unguarded flank, but if I do it right, there won't be an unguarded flank to exploit. As much as I like the idea of fighting armies in the field, I rarely do that, because the AI almost cannot handle my most from the least approach to army composition, where I have a small army of the best troops that covers my siege engines. In 0 A.D., this usually consists of spearmen supported by archers and skirmishers, since swordsmen are so much more squishy, which makes me far less effective with the Romans and other civilizations where swordsmen are the default melee infantry. Combined with my defensive approach, and I can pretty much outlast the AI, because I don't spend all of my resources like a good little RTS player is supposed to. The Spartan Skiritai Commandos are actually technically Champion Swordsmen with the elite rank to differentiate them from conventional Citizen-Soldiers and Champions.

As noticed by elexis and scythewirler, there are many issues and it's not only a stat matter.

Funny enough I posted in a similar thread talking about how walls are pretty balanced. And although my main stance on the matter has not really changed when concerning one wall vs an army, there is a "hidden method" which really makes them OP. The method takes advantage of the fact that you can spam wall turrets extremely close to each other, and since the defence tower upgrades affect the wall turrets, it is extremely OP. Here is a screenshot of the first match where I had ever used that technique, i had been rushed pretty early in the game, and I couldn't be bothered to build up again, so i decided to try out something which I had theorised previously (I had used it in a small scale before) both of my teammates had to go, so it was a 3v1 situation, the game lasted hours, I made 2 of the enemies rq since they had lost so many troops, one eventually beat me by using catapults, since I was basically AFK and could not be bothered to build units. Notice the number of champions killed in the third screenshot. I do not use this method anymore as it is simply over powered, and if you actually produce units you are unbeatable. However one of my friends uses it a lot and has perfected it pretty well, and it annoys people XD. So yeah in my opinion a the walls themselves are not over powered, its just the fact that you can spam them. Devs, please fix.

I have two claims. My first claim is that citizen soldiers are much less important than champion units in battle. My second claim is that it's not worth spending metal on citizen soldiers. I make these claims because champion units are supreme, and cost metal. Among good players in multiplayer, most armies consist of large numbers of champions. Citizen soldiers sometimes provide a little extra damage in battles between armies of champions, and are important to help garrison ships, fortresses, towers, and civic centers. As fighters by themselves, though, they are not worth much, especially as champion counts rise. 50 or 100 infantry champions can slaughter huge amounts of citizen soldiers with minimal or no losses. Almost all citizen-soldiers have low HP and very low pierce armor, and therefore they can't walk into a fortified and garrisoned enemy base without immediately dying. All champions cost metal, and metal is scarce. The limiting factor on how many champions you can make is the amount of metal you have; by the time you are making champions you usually have plenty of food and wood. Therefore, any citizen soldier that costs metal, prevents you from making more champions, which overall weakens your army. The only exception to this I've seen is the Spartan Skiritai Commandos, which only cost 10 metal and have extremely good stats for a citizen-soldier, so that it sometimes makes sense to make them. Still, an army of Skiritai Commandos can't stand up to an army of champion infantry. If you want distinctions between citizen-soldiers to matter more in 0ad, perhaps the game needs a low limit on how many champions you can have at one time, such as 25. But then we need a solution to the problem where citizen-soldiers can't approach garrisoned fortresses or CCs without being slaughtered.

Sergiu is only a basic player, but he has fun commentary.

Haha ok thank you mimo too then That's a really useful feature, especially to set up naval battles!

Thank @mimo for gathering all the details in one ticket

@AtlasMapper There is no harm in having the different option, maybe base on American video game rating: Mature or Everyone. And since it is only actor changes probably can be made to be compatible for all players (multiplayer). In Delenda Est I plan to be a Mature mod. Gaesatae will be naked. Mauryan women have bare breasts. I was thinking of adding blood splashes too with particle. lol. But a mod is optional, not core game.

Look, if you don't want my feedback (which seems to be the case), say it directly. Then I'll stop giving feedback unless specifically asked.

I didn't say that you should exactly copy the Sporades Island settings (I said that you could use it as a good starting point), nor did I say that every Greek Island should be foggy and with a sunset. But the environmental settings are currently one the weaker spots in the aesthetics of the map IMHO and there are a lot of maps that do it better. You also might want to increase the murkiness of the water a bit to hide the texture repetition on the deep corrals (or something that results in the same fix). Geography looks nice, the terrain itself is a bit busy to the eye (because you use quite a lot of shrub textures) (but that's not necessarily a dealbreaker)

That's what happens now, they get expelled from the structure, or killed if there is no valid space where the units can be placed. But killing shouldn't happen often on land, but it would happen if ships could be captured in plain sea, and also happens when ships are sunk. In any case, as the game is now, the units never convert to the enemy. Now about the thread in general In my original patch, I even disabled attacking buildings for units. I found it very unrealistic that a few units would just be able to destroy a structure like they do. But anyway, players can now chose to either capture or attack, and the choice ultimately depends on the defence of your opponent. If he garrisons his important structures, it will probably be easier to destroy them, otherwise, capturing would give you more advantage. So it is a strategically important choice you need to make, and we're making a strategy game after all. I do understand that there are some problems with it, and there are some nice suggestions offered here (I particularly like the aura to protect siege engines). But I'm not very good at balancing the micro game, so I won't (f.e.) make a decision on what buildings should be capturable. Though I do still have something l don't like about capturing: That's when players use the capture-and-delete tactic. They don't want to take over the base, but they want to deal economical damage to the opponent. And because the opponent can't defend all buildings, first capturing the undefended buildings, and deleting them when you own them becomes faster than destroying them through the attack command. Another problem with delete is when players delete their buildings just before they lose control over it. Removing the "delete" option isn't possible either. When you've gathered all trees or mines in an area, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to delete that storehouse, and use the space to build something else. Certainly in dense maps this is often necessary. So my choice is now leaning towards a "slow delete" or "deconstruction" model. Where the player can choose to delete any building he owns (even if he lost almost all his capture points), but where it takes time to delete the structure. Adding yet another unit command to "deconstruct" buildings sounded like it was very bloated (another hotkey taken, other units occupied with certain tasks you don't want, ...). So I opted to keep the delete button, but just make it slower. In the mod below, when you press delete, a timer will start that will continuously take health from the structure, until it's destroyed. But if the structure gets captured or reconverts to the territory owner, the timer stops. It's still very early and unbalanced, but it should give you an idea. I think that this will make the capture vs. attack choice even more strategically, and I hope you like this change. To install the mod, unpack it in your mods directory ( http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths ), so you have the path mods/structureDestroy/... And then enable the mod in the game by going to "Tools & Options"->"Mod Selector" (don't forget to save your changes). structureDestroy.zip