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Okay, let's talk about @wowgetoffyourcellphone I like this idea because of a certain implication. If you're a player like me, I favor map exploration. Asides from finding your enemy's farm and lumbercamps, and map treasures (which I turn off by default) I don't find map exploration very rewarding. From watching Aoe2 commentators, scouting the map for your first sheep/boars is very vital and encourages players to scout (both for animals and relics). For now, we have fruit trees and fruit bushes for that... but all of it is practically given by default in every starting match... your only real strategy is the build order (gather first or build first). I believe wow's suggestion gives such a rewarding feeling of possibly having an advantage against your enemy, and exploring the map.

Most classic maps indeed have more starting resources than resources in "hunting distance". The new maps by _kali in alpha 20 and 21 have much more animals in hunting distance. Hunting them can be invested into a cavalry rush. Some maps like volcanic lands don't have any food on the map and the gameplay is about 4-5min slower due to that. Not sure if there is a right or wrong in there, having diverse maps means less repetition and more thinking / player adaptation.

Respectfully, they are so broken that online players ban them in their matches. I mean, their current form is a decent stopgap to make the corral interesting until its final form is developed, but it's just a stopgap.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone : how can it be complex to have the fields decay when unattended and regenerate when attended? that's on the contrary something which looks natural to me, and certainly not less natural no more complex than having health regen when passing nearby a temple, or when idle if we have a medecine tech. Futhermore, while i understand that everybody can change its mind, it's funny how you can say the exact opposite of what you said previously in this same thread that does not support taking your opinion too seriously, at least up to the next change of mind @WhiteTreePaladin : why would you ever need to keep track of these rates? do you also try to follow the changes of rate each time a man comes near a female? hopefully not! a game should stay a game, not a mind torture. For me, the only useful information is the base rate (knowing that a female is x% more efficient than a given male soldier), this does not change because of tech, mill, auras ..., nor because of D227, except the female aura which you should then also find much too complicated! @niektb : as said before, no complexity here. And don't worry, nobody has asked you to give a yes or a no, my only demand was to test the patch for people to give a useful feedback Just to clarify what is D227: fields are built much faster (15s instead of previous 50s), but starts with a lower rate which increases with time. Typically after 2 mn, it reaches the nominal rate which won't change anymore as long as you have people working on it. As fields are long term resources, nobody cares about the rate of these 2 first mn. Then when abondonned, the rate that the field can provide decreases, and this "field rate" is visualized by the health bar (the field is destroyed when the health reaches 0). What it brings is that, when a field is half destroyed because of an attack, it looks more natural for me that the farming rate is decreased accordingly during the time the field is restored. And if when attacked, you garrison all your gatherers in the nearest cc, your fields will start to decay, which also looks more natural, but more importantly that makes raids against fields more efficient even if the defender has used the town bell.

Oh sure! I think the proposed mechanisms add too much complexity (and unnecessary too) for a game like 0 A.D. It might be funny for a realism / city building mod

Corrals are broken because they are extremely effective. Players soon get multiple thousands of food in their bank. So food ceases to become a resource. And everything which costs food is free. With bartering at market, it outperforms even Traders. There shouldnt be 2 infinite sources of single resource. Because it just means one of them is redundant feature. Being an alternate source which is micro intense is not a good arguement. There are less people playing right now so it may seem just doing fields works against a guy doing corrals. But it would not in more intense competitive seen. The more skilled players with higher apm will always only use corrals, and not build a single farm. And the lower skilled casual players will always build only farms and not bother with corrals. There wont be an option here. Good players will be forced to use corrals to not auto-lose. And Corral is just a time consuming mundane mechanic, the kind which takes the fun away. Even those guys who can macro it, dont enjoy it. Garrisoning animals is to give it a strategic option. Assuming that first herdables are made to have faster gather rates than hunts. After finding a random sheep/goat. A player has an option to either garrison it in corral for a slow trickle. Or eat it up quickly for a fast but limited spike. Both these options would seem favourable in different situations. Also the additional build limit to sheep from corral will make it a finite resource so theres no conflict with farms. Posted in wrong thread

You say it's not complex but your explanation tells different. It adds to the complexity of the farming concept without improving it (except for 'looking more natural') And of course people care about those two minutes that they need to invest before they get their nominal rate (these citizens can't gather anything else during that period). Wriatti mentioned that the patch is a go, hence my post that questioned wether it is a wanted feature...

Regarding other forks in discussion in this thread... Berries seem fine imo. But I agree the fruit trees are alway confusing. Maybe a change in graphic could make them easy to spot. About cavalry being trainable from CC. I'm of the opinion that no military unit should be trainable from CC. Since CC is the main source of eco units. A player wanting to go for early aggression should have to a build a separate structure for military. Anyways merging eco and mlititary buildings make gameplay too convenient. the player never has to decide between investing in one of the above. Every decision which we remove from player, it makes game more casual and lose strategic depth. The same goes for having a single building for both infantry and cavalry. Citizen soldiers- again :). The current implementation is ofcourse not good for competitive gaming. But as you can see in my mod. A change in implementation is going to solve the problem. All you need to do is make sure soldiers like cav dont outperform a specialised food gatherer(woman) in food gathering. Soldiers who are meant to battle should be more profitable fighting than gathering. Being realistic- in those days no king would keep his soldiers gathering if there was a war to be fought. And would gather only when fighting was not required. But due to mechanics in the game currently. It is more efficient to just keep gathering and let the enemy come to you. Except some naked, commando or jav cav rushes. The citizen soldiers should never be best at gathering any resource. There should be a 2nd eco unit which can replace them for stone and metal gathering. Just increasing the train time, or make corral being a requirement is not going to cut it to balance cav. Lastly, even if it is still alpha, the player base is still important. Since it has accumulated slowly over time. And has started getting the game more attention recently. Which will be good for the future of the game. The game is quite playable already. Currently a gameplay mod with smaller changes will cause a sudden burst in players, if it makes for a better in-game experience. And with the increased popularity a second kickstarter campaign or something similar can be done. Will get a better response if players like what they see. And the remaining development will be completed much faster. Trying to completely rework the basic mechanics of the game- if alienates the players and many of them drop off. It will delay the development cycle and it will be apparent very late that the changes done made it better or not.

Hi, I'm interested in helping out with the game. I'm not very familiar with it and its codebase yet, however that can be changed. The ticket list seems a bit intimidating since I don't know which one would need more and which one less work. I would love to contribute with something small first, so any pointers for which ticket to choose and how to assign it to myself would be welcome.

Welcome in our wiki you can found some relevant info, for beginners. http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedProgrammers http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Coding_Conventions http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/CodeQuality and finally : http://trac.wildfiregames.com/query?status=assigned&status=new&status=reopened&keywords=~simple&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=component&report=16&order=priority Here are all tickets and you can select it by type, simple are for beginners , etc. http://trac.wildfiregames.com/report

Never experienced such a rule. Who is doing this?

Never seen someone banning corrals, why would they?

I do think location of farms would be much simpler to keep track of and more fun for players. Rates are not visual. I have enough issue keeping track of the difference in gathering rates between citizen soldiers and civilians. Then there are the techs that increase the gather rates. Honestly, a variable rate doesn't sound like much fun. It's not terrible, but it's fairly mediocre. I don't really see what it offers for the complexity that it adds. I'd much rather choose a respectable spot to place a farm using some visual aid to help choose the location (e.g. an efficiency percentage displayed when hovering to place the farm, etc.) This adds a visual element rather than forcing the player to keep track of all the abstract information in their head.

D227 sound like an unnecessary complexity. You guys care about this kind of stuff too much, like the hundred or so posts spent on trying to make berries variable and regenerate. What player should need to care about is placement of the farm instead of whatever you're trying to achieve with D227.

Well, in a new founded colony away from home, berries have sense in aoe3

I like this. One issue I have with capturing civil centers currently is that the houses, markets, etc. are all destroyed before they have time to convert. Stronger buildings like towers and fortresses last long enough for me to claim them. I think we should fix it so that those other structures have time to convert. (Or we could just automatically convert buildings under the influence of the civil center.) I personally think building conversion is a feature as important as the citizen solider concept. I do think it would be nice to have a mode (gui button or hotkey) that can be set to quickly change the default action between capturing and attacking.

I don't think we need to remove berries, but we don't have to place them at the starting point on every map. We could increase their gather rate and they could serve as a food "treasure" with a non-zero gather rate. The fruit trees might be worth removing as I always get those mixed up with regular trees.

I like the seasons. Hmm, let's say in 0 A.D. if it had seasons, combat would be nerfed somehow in the winter, as well as food production, so large attacks are difficult and booming pop in Winter becomes problematic unless lots of food stored up in the summer. So, each match gets a rhythmic cycle. I like clean the UI btw.

Let me go to bat for the corrals, just this once, and see if I can come up with good pro argument. Corrals as they are now are broken and not good, this is universally accepted I think. But... but... Corrals as they are now are not what they are intended for completion. Here's what they can be/should be use for: storing relics. Wait, the game does not have relics? The relics are herdable animals. No one says relics break AOK or AOM. Herdable animals are the relics of 0 A.D. So, you capture them and then garrison them into the corral to gain their benefit, just like a relic from AOK or AOM. These are not meant to unbalance the game, but to give the player a small edge, like relics did in those games. They provide a nice little benefit of scouting before the enemy does, just like relics, and add a nice little layer to the game. Just remove the animal training aspect from the corral and readjust the techs toward this new paradigm.

I'm all for removing stupid features, and could name a few (corral, imo capturing, I'd do away with anything that's not some type of farms for food, tbh…) , but I feel like you're getting it wrong on citizen soldiers. First: the point of citizen soldier is, first and foremost, the historical goodie. If we were to remove something, it should be the women, not the fact that military units can gather. I'd like to add that departing from the classic RTS formula isn't necessarily a bad thing, AoM had military units that could make buildings and that was a refreshing change. Your point about resource explosion is a little silly. Units can either gather OR attack, and that doesn't change from other RTS, so I don't see why it'd explode any more than another game. It's the fact that we start games with a farcical number of units and fast gather rates, as well as units being fast to recruit, that leads to apparent "explosiveness". Now, your calculation makes it sound like attacking is not worth it. But the math could be inverted rather simply if we lower gather rates and raise unit costs (including training time). If your attack takes 10 guys away from your eco (let's say for 120 food/minute, which would be far less than we get now, admittedly) and you manage to kill 3 enemy units (let's say each cost 50 food), then you're coming out on top by attacking. Other things must be factored in (buildings efficiency, how easy it is to garrison in 0 A.D. - imo by far the poorest design choice), but it's nothing structurally broken like you make it seem. Likewise, progress from weak to strong units has nothing to do with citizen soldiers and everything to do with how we (haven't) implemented technologies correctly.

Isn't finished yet.

But Factions on SC 2 do not have a second type of Vespin Gas generator per faction, or another type of resource gatherer that does the same as probes but faster. Or a 2nd type of Headquarter that allows faster gathering. (Which is what's proposed here) The usage of Chrono Boost or Spawn Larvae is more in line with Mauryan Indian construction elephants (-> use additional micro to increase building speed). The only mechanic that works differently from the default SC 2 mineral gathering are the "golden minerals" present on certain maps on exposed positions which can be harvested faster. However, that's a map control element and not a gathering micro trick. In 0 Ad it would be equivalent to farms producing more food when on some sort of "fertile land" that increases production in exposed positions.

IMHO, since this is in alpha phase, this is not a strong consideration. You are developing a pc game that you hope will be played for years to come by thousands of people. Focus on what you want the end product to be, not on satisfying the couple hundred of people who play the incomplete alpha releases.

There is a middle ground, it just takes some fine tuning to realize. Gathering cavalry is not the issue here, its the snowball effect of cavalry gathering the resources necessary to make yet more cavalry in such a way that doesn't hamper economic growth. Another easy fix would be making cavalry take up two pop slots and giving them a slight combat buff and price hike to compensate. Else make them cost a resource that skews village phase gathering. There are several ways to go about fixing the problems presented that dont involve dismantling playstyles. A good question to ask is how extreme can we make our changes before we alienate our current player base? I don't bring this up over something as remedial as pushing raiding cavalry a phase forward, but you seem to have a distaste for citizen soldiers on a whole, which is one of the standout gameplay features of 0 AD.

it rewards micromanagement, which would mean competitive players wouldn't build slow fields and new players would be forced to do so as well to stay on par. Which would mean slow fields would be redundant outside of campaigns and casual single player games. it'd be a no from me

Day 10 of 500? of noone caring about reviews of this patch. Creating an account and doing a quick test will be faster, even if it means overcoming imaginary boundaries

Well, this contains the main reason why I don't like this idea so much: More attention for higher outcome. There are enough excessively micromanagement dependent RTS games out there. I'd like 0 A.D. to be more the "convinient" type of RTS where the more boring/repititive tasks are automated, not so much the "hasty" kind where the faster clicking player wins (Being faster still helps ofc., it's a large army RTS in the end).

It adds unnecessary micro IMO. We already have a micro-intensive alternative to farms in corrals. We should aim to simplify econ tasks for the player and have top level players focus on battles while only using hotkeys for most homeward econ management.