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Both these ways are compatible and difference of mechanics isn't big. And don't need change something in engine to balance game. You could change units/building/etc settings to setup the balance as you want. Perhaps, you need give more detailed suggestions instead of volumetric discussion.

Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of “0 A.D. Alpha 20 Timosthenes”, the twentieth Alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This Alpha features 10 new maps, core functionality for a cinematic in-game camera, the ability to share dropsites with your allies, and more! The skirmish map “Golden Island”, new in Alpha 20 Easy Download and Install Download and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. 0 A.D. is free of charge and always will be. Although you might find some people selling copies of 0 A.D., either over the internet or on physical media, you will always have the option to download 0 A.D. completely gratis, directly from the developers. Moreover, you can redistribute the game and modify it freely as long as you abide by the GPL. You can even use parts of the art and sound for your own projects as long as you abide by CC BY-SA. No “freemium” model, no in-game advertising, no catch. New Gameplay Features in This Release New Random Maps: “Ambush”, “Empire“, “Flood”, “Frontier“, “Hell’s Pass“, “Island Stronghold“, “Lions Den” and “Stronghold“. New Skirmish maps: A 4-player skirmish map named “Forest Battle” and a 2-player skirmish map named “Golden Island“. Use allied drop sites: After researching a technology you can use your ally’s storehouses, farmsteads, docks, CCs, but not Mauryan elephants, to drop off resources your units have gathered. The ally needs to allow it for each drop site, so it can’t be used to “steal” all the resources in the area. Murder Holes: Research a technology to let towers attack units standing underneath the tower. New technologies for fishing: Research technologies to improve the gathering efficiency of your ships. Loot resources that killed enemies carried: Now you will automatically get the resources that were carried by units killed by your armies, in other words: kill wood workers to get wood, farmers to get food, etc. This is in addition to the normal loot you get when killing units. The “Ambush” random map added in Alpha 20 Graphics and User Interface Improvements to game options menu: New graphics quality setting, which allows you to easily change the quality of graphics from within the game (previously you had to use config files), as well as some cleanups and bug fixes. Higher quality graphical effects enabled by default on higher-end computers. If your computer should be able to handle higher quality graphical effects they are now enabled by default. You can of course change to a lower setting manually if you want to improve performance or prefer not to use them for some other reason. Idle worker button is now disabled when there are no idle workers, so you don’t have to press it just to check whether or not you have any idle workers. Credits screen: Check out who contributed to the game, everyone from managers to programmers, from artists to donators, from translators to composers. We have tried to include everyone, but many have contributed over the years, so if you have contributed but don’t see your name in the list please let us know. New trees and variations: There has been new models and textures for the acacia tree, Aleppo pine, oaks, dead oaks, generic dead trees. Plenty of improvements for observer mode and replays: Among other things you can now watch the match from the perspective of a player, see the Summary screen during the match, and now the fog of war is shown in observer mode. Matches also support up to 16 observers now. More information about players in a multiplayer match: Show who lags or has a network timeout. New Seleucid barracks: Under the Hood Cinematic camera for rendering cut scenes: The ground-work has been done to make it possible to control the camera for cut scenes. There is still some work needed to make it easy to use (for now camera paths has to be set by entering coordinates), but it’s a solid foundation to build on for the future. Plus many smaller changes, for a list of all the interesting ones, please read through the changelog. Getting Support Please see the “Get Support” page on our website to find ways to get help from the active and friendly 0 A.D. community. We are well aware there is some room for improvement in 0 A.D. Some known issues are: Lag, visual glitches or textures not loaded, missing animations and more. When you provide feedback, we would ask you to focus on some of the other points that could be improved. Thanks. Please Contribute! We are seeking volunteer contributors in programming, art, sound, documentation and more. Programmers are especially welcome and can get started immediately. Interested? Log onto #0ad-dev on QuakeNet on IRC and meet the developers. Also, you are invited to register on our forums and start participating! Why “Timosthenes”? We name our releases according to development status (“Alpha” or “Beta”), successive release number (1, 2, 3, …) and a word relating to the ancient world, in alphabetical order (“Argonaut” for A, “Bellerophon” for B, …). “Timosthenes” relates to 0 A.D. as it is the name of an Ancient Greek cartographer, and this release adds a lot of new maps. For the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter U. Keep it original and related to the time frame portrayed in 0 A.D. (appx. 500 BC – 1 BC)!

This question is not relevant to 0 A.D. The important thing is to have a coherent grand vision, and then create it to the best of the ability. Kowtowing to the whim of random players on a forum is not the way to realize grand coherent vision. A scattershoot unpolish game design will not make the game mainstream popular or underground hit.

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.

Okay, myself included, I see a lot of threads talking about units, balancing, and gameplay mechanics. But I think that we as a community (and the devs) need to think about is what type of game do we want. Do we want a popular game? One that exploded into relative popularity, and has a decent chance of the creation of a competitive, and maybe even professional scene? Or are we looking for the hidden gem of gaming? One that isnt the most well known game, and if it is, there isnt, if at all, a large competitive scene. Just a casual game for those that love history and gaming. This needs to be decided before the engine is finished, because the two options have very different mechanics and balancing. Our current setup is the latter of the two choices. To get a really competitive game (look at anything Blizzard has made) the factions need a VERY different feels for each faction. The Carthaginians need not only a different roster or strategy from the Romans, they need to feel and play different. No two factions should be able to play in quite the same way as each other. Look at Starcraft and Warcraft as examples. Its virtually impossible to play the Protoss the same way as the Zerg. This is something that needs to be decided.

@Dade I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I was merely pointing out that in my first post I was not talking about professional competitive play, I was talking about just normal competitive play in matchmaking. I do agree with you about competitions, in fact I never said that the devs must do the ideas I proposed, I was simply answering the question of the title of this thread, in a forum called General Discussion & Ideas. It is simply feedback that they can take in consideration, or if they want to they cannot. Nonetheless I completely agree with you about tournaments, they should be small and simple, something for just the time being. In fact having tournaments isn't needed for competitive play, having teams/clans is good enough. As for SMITE I think you misunderstood me as well, I was using the games variety of gods (the characters available in the game) as an example that variety does not necessarily mean unbalanced. By unbalanced, I mean having a civilisation (or in this case a god) that is by far much better than others. Finally, kowtowing to random players is indeed the worst thing developers should do, but that does not mean that they should completely ignore feedback and ideas. And I don't see how AssaultCube is an example for kowtowing, in fact its the opposite. a large portion of the devs did not listen to feedback and made changes which made a lot of people leave. For example, they reduced the maximum map size by a lot, basically decreasing the mapper community to null. Furthermore in the next update the devs want to get rid of a bug called "hax jumping" which is a collision bug that causes players to jump slightly higher, this basically annihilates the GEMA community, which is like 30% of the user base.

Sounds good, I've committed it

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Manual_Settings

@Dade CSGO actually didn't do bad in its release, actually it attracted more old CS 1.6 players that barely played CSS because CSS was so bad, and there was competition at the start, just not Professional competition. But there were many people in matchmaking trying to increase their rank, that's competitive play. There is no need to have a huge tournament with professional live-streams, casters and a large price pool, that's absurd. No one is talking about large scale competitions yet. I'm just saying that 0.A.D already has a potential to have a small competitive scene because it is already pretty balanced. Also variety does not mean unbalanced, yes that is the case for many games, but dedicated development can lead to a pretty balanced game. A perfect game to show this is SMITE a game with tons of gods, yet there aren't even top 10 gods out of all of them, yeah some gods are underpowered (2-3 of them), but a skilled player with experience on that god can beat any other god. Every time a new god comes out its either overpowered or underpowered, but the SMITE devs are pretty close to the community and listens to the community a lot, so they usually balance things out in the next update. Such large scale of variety is pointless for a game like this, but making all civs identical would make the game extremely boring. However I agree with you that variety is something for the future, devs should not focus on that right now. @wowgetoffyourcellphone Devs don't have to do anything that we say, this is just simple player feedback. They can take it however they want.

The Battle of Salamis was a naval battle opposing Greek allied forces (mainly Athens and Sparta) to Persian float in 480 BC. The battle did set in the Saronic Gulf, very close to Athens and especially Piraeus (the actual marine dock of Athens). The battle is famous in that despite largely outnumbered (the float was 5 time less), the greek allies did win the fight. Here is the area of the Battle: And here is my map: The battle did begin in the start of the dawn. It has been described by classical authors to happen with this configuration: So I decided to reproduce the battle as close from this. Beside Persians battleships, some Egyptian (Ptolemaeus) warships did support the fight against the greek faction, by holding position in the north area of the battle to intercept any greek ships eventually trying to escape the battle zone. I just had to reduce the number of total ships for technical reasons, but the ratio is the same. Some screenshots of my scenario: Because of the unbalanced ratio between the greek allies and the persians allies, I did use a garrison system in order to have some greek battleships more powerful compared to persian battleships (that was a nightmare, but thanks @fcxSanya for the procedure ). I still need to set up some nice scripts to make an interesting naval fight. Is there any published scripted battle in some scenario yet, to get inspiration ? Or maybe will there be some new maps like this in the next A20 ? Also, I have some display issues with such actual environment settings (I needed to set up a dawn atmosphere): because I need a very low sun inclination, I have some artifacts (a large shadow that comes from the out limits of the map area), in the east and in the north. Is there any way to fix it ? Will there be any new features in A20 that would allow some interesting naval fights too ? Thanks for the information and feedback.

Aside from any specific build orders, there are some basic economic concepts. The two most important things to keep in mind are these: Your CC and workers should never be idle as you advance from age I to III. You don't want to "float" too much of a single type of resource without spending it. If you have a lot of one type of resource but can't usefully spend it, rethink what you're doing. If you're really on the ball, all four resources will stay low. If you can do those 2 things, then it's hard not to have a good economy.

I like the idea of making palisade walls build able in neutral territory. That is pretty realistic to the time (Alesia). But I would suggest that maps should be bigger and catapults should have 200-300 range like in actual life. The range of arrows can keep at 100 because that is historically accurate. Also how come this problem never happened in Age of Empires, or Rise of Nations?

True, but we would probably have to make the maps really huge to balance the difference. Also what will the oxybeles range be, because they were probably 200-250 meters? That won't be good for balance. Edit: Change oxybeles to litho bolos

Erik the Red or Leif Ericsson? Since both are characteristically considered as explorers/colonizers, therefore having similar hero bonuses. We could keep Erik and drop Ericsson, since Erik's settlement stood longer than his son's, and that he had more combat experience..

I think I should chime in here since causative is referring to a game we played a few weeks ago. The game is, indeed, an excellent example of why walls are often not allowed in multiplayer games. If one were to watch the actual replay of that match, there were some serious missteps that led to a situation where I was able to wall myself into 1/4 of the map. I didn't have a serious wall system until the 40 minute mark. At 35 minutes causative's ally, mapkoc, had utterly annihilated my ally (named enemy, who was also Ptolemies) with a mixed force of champion swords and maces available to the Mauryan civ. For some inexplicable reason, he then retired that army to a fortress for at least 10 minutes before making a move on the second entrance to my base, which by that time I had fortified in a hurry; for I thought that he would have immediately advanced on my unprotected flank. Other missteps by my opponents include a failure to scout, doing so would have revealed a few opportunities to destroy me. Still, the presence of the extremely dense tree stands at either entrance to the base (which also existed for the other players in their little entrances) made the map extremely defensible. With only two entrances that, by the nature of the map, reduced movement, the meat grinder opportunities were exceptional. I intentionally tried to avoid wall tower spamming like Mr. Monkey showed in his screen shot. I even deliberately built many palisade walls in order to avoid any accusation that I was abusing the wall tower placement. I should also make it clear that the replay would show I made quite a few attempts to attack by various means throughout the game and didn't just sit inside my base from minute 1 building an ultimate fortress. The trees, which I tried to cut on many occasions, also wound up killing many of my own units too- everything from large units like elephants and catapults to cavalry and infantry. Ptolemies are actually not that well suited to defense, IMO, because- although you can build the military colonies close to your main CC or fortress- they lack a champion infantry unit to garrison with. Only having the champion cav means you gain the anticapture bonus, but lose the arrow bonus that every other civ has with their champ selection. Ptolemies also lack the critical "punch" for offense, so unless you do a camel rush (which I was unaware of at the time and have since realized is possibly the only way to play Ptolemies online), you will have your work cut out if you want to win. If I were able to post the replay (I don't know how), I think it would make it clear that in certain map situations, walls are indeed over powered. Just this week I played a game where "unknown land" generated a map that was mostly impassable cliffs with each player starting in a small valley with only one entrance, which opened to a large circular middle with trees, one metal mine, and lots of stone. We had said "no walls/wonders" in the game lobby before launch and I reiterated the point once the game started, revealing the map situation, precisely because I remember the game I played against causative and didn't want a repeat. To make a long story short, one player became frustrated and put up a stone wall blocking the entrance to his starting position which not only broke the rules set at the beginning, but also changed the game dynamic completely. In these kinds of situations, where a few pieces of wall, in conjunction with natural map features, can totally shut down every strategy beyond direct attack, walls are currently simply too much. And that is a legitimate reason to ban them IMO. In any open map situation, which the majority of maps are, I feel walls are only borderline overpowered. Their absence leads to mass champion swords zerging around the map capturing or quickly destroying enemy CC's, which gets quite old to play against. While champions are another topic, they do need to be thought about when discussing walls. While garrisoned walls are extremely powerful and need to be toned down, I think that in all but the most exceptional situations (which usually relate to how the map was generated), the "wall ban" has more to do with the dominant strategy of choosing Britons and training Boudica + champion swords and flinging them at the enemy CC as fast as possible. I've seen too many people quit games they had the upper hand in simply because their first couple of zerg attacks fail against a defended position. It is much easier, then, to ban walls entirely (including palisades, which share few of the stone wall problems), facilitating the dominant play style. That play style, of course, works because currently citizen soldiers are so quickly and easily replaced with champions. For changes to stone walls, I would suggest: -Increase wall segment build time slightly. If stone walls took longer to build, one might see more palisades. -Reducing the damage and range of wall towers. They shouldn't have nearly 100 range, greater than regular towers. I think it should be the same or shorter than a free standing tower. -Add an attack bonus to rams for every garrisoned unit. One would also need to normalize the garrison count for rams as some are 5 and others are 10, but otherwise the stats are equal IIRC. -Add a crush armor bonus to rams for every garrisoned unit. How much, I don't know, but testing could be done to see that a fully garrisoned ram can at least hit a gate a few times before, say, 5-10 hits by stone throwing catapults. -Oddly, give civs the ability to research a tech allowing palisade walls to be built in neutral territory (which automatically self destruct after a certain period of time) to allow entrenched siege positions around catapults. Maybe once formations are working again, that won't be necessary, but currently it is very difficult to block enemy champion units from gaining access to either capture or destroy your catapults. I currently find sieging any enemy fort with catapults to be slow but doable. -If possible, add a repair debuff aura to siege. The problem with increasing their repair time, IMO, is that it is already often a better proposition to simply delete a wall segment (especially gates) and rebuild it. If the presence of a siege engine would slow down repairing, I think that would be much better because during a lull in the fighting there is a chance to repair. I've also had situations where two or three garrisoned siege rams failed to destroy wall segments due to repairs, which is simply ridiculous. -Think about giving certain buildings (faction specific) an ability, on a timer, to "inspire" troops for a short duration. Once walls are breached, if garrisoned wall towers are brought into balance, it would be easy for an attacking army with siege equipment to lay waste to the remaining structures. Having some kind of "anti bell" in the CC for a final defensive stand could be useful and fun. -Lastly, map options that will not generate the kinds of situations in which walls are overpowered. If I wanted to play a scenario where enemy units are flung against a single position, I would. Don't get me wrong, I like maps where you can use the terrain to benefit your defense, but maps with only a single (or two) narrow choke point made by impassable mountains are not fun. Anyway, those are my ideas for now.

I'd agree with Mr.Monkey, but remember the game is in alpha stage and doesn't even have some features enabled which will turn guides and tactics into some 'use this (exploit) / (forgotten unit balance) until next version', and then people crying because in the following version this has been fixed and they get wiped again (which, btw, is the story of AC from 0.93 to 1.2.0.2). And please, by all means, do not take AC as an example of absolutely nothing if you wish any sort of success to 0AD. My main suggestion, if there is a plan to open pandora's box (aka Multiplayer Forum) is to think about clear forum rules, give moderators shiny and fancy ban hammers and make it clear for players they can't cry on forums each time they loose a game about balance or who ever is hacking or not. I'm not against multiplayer or 'competitive scene' (if you like more this term), I just don't want devs to feel pressed and commit mistakes just because there is noise on forums. One last though, before getting into competitive 0AD as a way to attract new players, I think we really need a full and deep revision of the game balance, unless we want to see only the dominants bretons/macedonians in every match, or things can really get nasty.

I sent 540 champions to their death, and many rams as well. The position was impenetrable. Rams, as I mentioned, can only approach one at a time due to the trees, and were easily killed one at a time by the catapults regardless of how many champions were with them. The champions themselves were slaughtered without killing any walls. I would send in large numbers of champions - at least 50 each time, more than 80 a few times. They would be slaughtered by arrows while damaging one wall... halfway. At one point I tried an endless flood of champions (brythonic longswords), with the initial flood backed up by constant production from 20 barracks at once, with pathetic results. There was a moment towards the end of the game when my opponent messed up and left a gate open, allowing me to flood in with 50 champs and capture and kill most of his catapults. He was able to mop it up before I could take the fortress or military colony, however, and quickly rebuilt.

The OSX bundle is up and should be tested!

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.