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These steps can be approached and mastered one at a time. By the end of it, you should be able to have a strong economy as you go from age I to III. Other aspects of gameplay matter too, such as specific builds, rushes, or tactics, but having a strong economy is the most important part. Don't fall into any of these early game traps: Farms go adjacent to your CC or farmstead, as close as they will go. I've seen many new players who put them a distance back. Don't do that. Don't use women for mining. Don't use men for food gathering. Use women or men for woodcutting. Cavalry are for hunting chickens or other animals. Only cavalry are good at this. Hunting is a very fast way to get food unless the animals are very far from the dropsite. If you have berries, build a farmstead right next to them and have some women harvest the berries. It's twice as fast as farming. Don't let your workers carry resources too far. Put the storehouse right adjacent to the trees when they chop wood. If your workers (except for hunting cavalry) are walking twice the width of a storehouse to return resources, they are walking too far. Don't make a barracks until at least the end of age I. A lot of noobs make a barracks way too early, or even more than one. Your CC can produce enough soldiers by itself. Don't make walls or wooden towers in age I either. Good players generally agree not to use walls, anyway, and plus in age I it's just a waste of resources that the enemy can simply walk around. Don't start mining anything until the end of age I. You don't need it. Practice until you can have constant production of units from your CC (Civic Center) for the first 10+ minutes. You should never let it be idle until you're in age III. That means: You need enough food income to produce women nonstop until population 50. You can produce soldiers after that. You need enough wood to make houses - and you need to make houses far enough ahead of time so that you don't get stopped by the population limit. In alpha 20 at least, once you hit age III the plan should be to make lots and lots of champion units. Practice not harvesting resources you can't spend. If you're ever thinking "I have more food than I need - but I wish I had more wood" then you need to transfer some workers from food to wood, and figure out some way to spend the food. (Actually, you probably needed to transfer the workers two minutes ago, but late is better than never). If you have 1000 of any resource in age I-II, you have way too much. If you have extra wood, a good way to spend it is on economy upgrades. The highest priority upgrade is berry gathering, then woodcutting, then farming, then mining. You want economy upgrades as early as possible so you get the benefit for longer, except for the upgrades that are super expensive. Adjust your typical build order so that you avoid having too much of the resource. If, last game, you had way more wood than you could spend, then this game, don't put as many workers on wood so early. And so on. This more than anything else is the mark of skill. You know you're doing it right when you have just enough of every resource you need, exactly when you need it, and little excess. Watch replays of good players! A lot of people don't know where replays are. From the starting screen, they are under Tools/Options. If you spectate or play a game with borg-, The_Company, or nobody___, then after the game you will have a replay of an expert. Switch to that player's perspective in the replay and follow what they do - what they build, when they build it, how many farms they make, when they get upgrades. Then try to copy them in your next game. If you're spectating a game with good players, you can switch to the perspective of the best player and watch them as they play, instead of going to the replay. Practice using Shift to queue up actions. For instance, don't just tell your woodcutter to make a house - tell him to make a house, then shift-click back on the tree! That way he will go back to woodcutting when he's done building the house, and he won't be idle. Work out exactly what you will do in the first minute. This is a "build order." For every civ, you want to put the cavalry on chickens and the women on berries, and the men on wood. You also generally want your first batch of 5 women to chop wood, and the next 4-5 women to harvest berries. The order in which you make a storehouse, a farmstead, get the berry upgrade, and make your first house can vary. Britons and Gauls can build a farmstead at the berries, build a storehouse at the wood, and research the berry upgrade. They will have plenty of time to get 75 wood and make their first house. Most civs have houses that cost 150 wood and grant 10 population. With these you can't get the farmstead, the storehouse, and the berry upgrade all at once, and still have enough wood for your first house. You have to pick two of the three. If wood is very close to your CC, you can get the farmstead and berry upgrade, and get the storehouse later. If wood is far away, you need a storehouse, so you have to skip the berry upgrade to have enough wood for the house. With these civs you will need to use 3-4 workers to make the house once you have 150 wood, so that it will be done in time. Iberians and Mauryans occupy a middle ground since their houses cost 75 wood but they don't have the population bonuses of Britons/Gauls. You can figure something out if you want to play these. Mauryans have an elephant, which can do the job of a storehouse or farmstead and help build houses. Ptolemies are weird. Batch Production. This is one of the secrets that separates the good players from the experts. borg- produces in batches of 5 almost all the time, and in batches of 10 when he has enough resources! Even a batch of 15 can be worthwhile. Batch production by 5 is 38% faster than producing single units. Batch production by 10 is 57% faster. Batch production by 15 is 72% faster. You need more food to batch produce women this way. That means more on berries (like 10), more hunting, or earlier farms. You need to plan houses more in advance, too, so that you have 5 or 10 population open when it's time to produce. Don't delay more than a few seconds to make a batch. It's better to just be producing 1 unit if you don't have enough houses or food for a batch. Some players have altered their javascript to let them batch 3 or 4 instead of multiples of 5. This is cheating. Use hotkeys for at least your production buildings, perhaps also other units. Select your CC and press Ctrl-1, and now you can select the CC again just by pressing 1. Your barracks can go on group 2. This helps you to keep production going smoothly even if your attention is elsewhere. Be familiar with rushes. There are many types. The primary purpose of most rushes is to deny wood from the enemy by killing woodcutters. The best way to learn how to do rushes is to watch replays of experts who rushed effectively. I recommend not rushing until you have mastered the normal economy boom from age I to III. Spartan Skiritai rush Ptolemy camel archer rush 3 minute cavalry skirmisher rush Briton slinger rush Roman swordsmen rush borg-'s 10-11 minute champions Not all rushes are "effective." If the rusher killed 20 women but lost 10 cavalry and was driven away, that was probably not an effective rush, since 10 cavalry cost more than 20 women. Check the attacker's and defender's economy scores and populations afterwards to see if it really worked.

Carved some space with scythes permission and committed it: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/18483

Also it might be nice to have the option of custom icons instead of the 3 rank arrows (to represent f.e. 1st and 2nd tier rank upgrades, or different paths or whatever)

I think the red cross can be a bit bigger (so it extends to the corners) and without dropshadow

@elexis: the tooltips show the time it costs to train 5, 10 or more units (when holding the shift button)

Thanks for the guide. Barracks in age 1 still makes sense if you have enough food and wood income, especially if you don't need quick age 2. Shouldn't we reduce the wood gather rate of females from 0.7 to 0.5? You forgot to mention early scouting, often done after the initial chicken. IMO sometimes it is even important to do it earlier. First of all to find berries in and near near your territory, so that you can avoid to build fields for some minutes. Secondly to check whether you can hunt there. Third of all to check where your enemy is, how many metal mines there are, whether they are close to the enemy. If they are, try expanding your territory with houses and barracks there (instead of placing houses just somewhere in your territory) and build a house wall around the exposed mines. This way enemy towers will hit the houses and not your miners and you can safely build a tower in front of the mine behind the houses. This often needs to happen in the first 2-3 minutes. In team games you also need to figure out whether you're in the pocket position or on the frontline, which allies are on the front and might need early economic support to build towers before the enemy does. Batch Production we need more tooltips to show those numbers instead of having to look up the code to figure out how it works (= cheat?) Some players have altered their javascript to let them batch 3 or 4 instead of multiples of 5. This is cheating. -> In alpha 21 everyone can, it's a choice not a cheat. Rush: Killing units is great, but not killing can give you a substantial advantage too, if you can just make them walk around all the time / idle instead of gathering. With ptolemian you can't do much if there is a tower, but you can still force your enemy into building a tower in every single place of his territory and thus drain him economically.

To be honest I often choose one of the slowest game speeds. I play the game more for optimizations (e.g. winning without losing a single unit) than just for fun and I'm really bad at multitasking. This is also the reason why I don't really play multiplayer (observing is interesting though). It's like a kind of chess where more time to think and react leads to less errors. 0.1x for pure optimization (and unit microing during a huge battle) 0.25x when building up economy 0.5x for late game when everything is set up and no huge threats can be expected 0.75x feels like the most realistic game speed to me

Nice Guide Causative, I have a few point to add: - When Hunting, use shift click and click behind the animal you want to hunt then click on the animal. That way the animal you hunt will "escape" in the direction of your CC --> faster gathering - Have a control group for your guy making houses, it helps a lot - When you get rushed, always keep in mind that your enemy has a bad economy so if you succeed you'll be ahead! - You can make a lot of villagers kill with two spearman cav (they two-shot villagers, so one-shot with 2 cav). Just run and click "H" near a villager, they will one shoot her and you can move away. - Watch Alekusu's video for build orders. Wait what?? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjMIlqRx48mSLOQo98VygJQ I'll make videos again from a21, my builds are a bit old now but there are many tricks in it

I had it successfully working once but as the code base of 0 A.D. moved on that feature became incompatible

0.75x when I try to find new detailed build order in solo games (this is actually my favorite part of RTS) 1.25x to train the above build orders 1.00x the rest of the time

Hi guys, I've been playing lately on a20 and I would like to suggest something about champions. I think that the fact that some civs have champ available in barracks, some in temples, some in fortress is a huge unbalance and won't be easy to make it fair. Until now I thought that the solution could be to have all civ able to produce champ from barracks but playing on a20 made me change my mind. On a20 basically people rush for champions and it is kind of boring. So I think that instead of putting all the champs in barracks, no civ should be able to produce them from barracks. All civ should have champs only available in fotress (or unique building). It would be more balanced and would reduce the champs race that we can see on a20. What do you think? Alex EDIT: I just saw this: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Alpha21?version=43 Looking forward to see the balance on a21, the new train time on barracks is really good for the gameplay I think. My suggestion above might not have any sense on a21..

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/18481

Don't worry I'll fix it today. The units actually try to use the broken charge attack.

A mysterious video appears suddenly. is our engine? Our game? look the source evolution.

The software used for this videos is gource: http://gource.io

Hi wraitii. Could you do this for enhancement of patch? I think, for an example if I upgrade a wooden tower to stone tower it should make the tower complete sound when done upgrade. So, when object switch to new entity, the training complete or building complete sound can be heard. Either that or have a new sound group for "Upgrade." Another enhancement I just think of would be to have a "Upgrade" animation type. For many units, can use the same anim as promotion, but can be 2 different types in the actor just in case.