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That's entirely dependent on what type of game you are playing/making. I do agree that it's most likely not a good idea for an AoE-like RTS though.

@DarcReaver: please mind your tone a little bit, will you? @Lion.Kanzen: if the only change would be to remove the CS concept than it would indeed be even more a AoK clone. However, combined with the other changes mentioned in this thread I think it plays quite differently

Hahahaha, always answer the same. is because the realism of the epoch. Only needs some extra stuff and you can convert your peasants in soldiers. Mostly of people that are new , are confused the first time. But with the time, the concept work from early, and in late phase you can mix soldiers with champions. Few soldiers are working. you can't expect all soldiers were medieval or modern full service professional with a commander in the battalion marching to the war. Confess you want a classic game with few personal preferences. for example if they removed SC this game becomes more to be a AOK clone. We can have a mode where soldiers only fights. why not? You still angry? Why don't search a conciliation by both sides?

Something that Danny and my ideas share is tying technological progress to physical structures on the map that can be destroyed and thus the technological progress lost. This seems like an avenue worth exploring whether pro-phase or anti-phase.

This discussion highlights everything that is bad about phases. Look at the posts endorsing phases, they are all about ways to restrict the player, and arbitrary ways to categorize things into phases. I understand that this is a game and things have to be simplified, and I appreciate the efforts of people to try and improve upon existing ideas (this is in fact more important than new ideas!), but I really think phases/epoch/ages have always been a dead duck in RTS games. A city/civilisation is something that evolves gradually, it does not jump from one age to the next, there is no reason why we cannot have this authentic feeling, there is no real reason to limit the game to distinct phases other than to emulate games that came before. I edited this part out because I went on a rant about how phases make no sense and seem to be completely detached from the game world, but I have deleted that and instead I will try to provide some alternative ideas. Knowledge as a Resource I want technology to be something tangible in the world, not a flowchart disconnected from the rest of the game. I will start by describing a basic settlement and how knowledge is accrued and used by primitive cultures. Each working citizen will accrue a trickle of knowledge while they work (this simulates the natural tendency to innovate and find more efficient ways to complete tasks). For every working citizen, the science score of the civilisation is increased by a small amount; the science score affects the rate at which knowledge is acquired over time. Advanced buildings and units require knowledge to build, however, knowledge is not spent like other resources, but also unlike other resources it must be maintained. The population itself is the basic and most vital store of knowledge, if your population collapses then your technology will disappear along with it! Libraries (as separate buildings or contained within other buildings, e.g. Universities) greatly bolster the civilisation's knowledge base. Buildings such as the Temple, Library, University and Observatory* are places that provide huge boosts to the science score and thus the rate of knowledge acquisition. So knowledge is not a static resource, it is not something that can be simply piled up but can change greatly depending on these factors of population size, libraries and science score. (For the more mathematically-minded amongst us I have attached an image of an equation that produces the desired relationship.) What this means in terms of gameplay is that knowledge (and thus technology) are bound to tangible objects and people that must be protected. * The effectiveness of the observatory depends on its elevation, being more effective on higher ground, like in real life. Technology Buffs & Building Upgrades Technologies like efficiency boosts would either be unlocked automatically past a certain knowledge threshold, or require a new building to be constructed (which would be unlocked by passing a knowledge threshold). You would not pay to unlock technologies as before; all technologies must be linked to either a specific building or the overall knowledge score (and ultimately the population of course). So technologies would be fluid just like knowledge. My thoughts on building upgrades is that they should be very limited if existing at all. Why? From both an aesthetic and gameplay point of view it seems a bit of a spoiler to simply click on a building and upgrade it. Instead, what is far more natural is to build new buildings alongside the old, or to demolish the old to make way for the new. In real-life cities, the mixture of architecture styles tells you something about the history of the city. I would love this to be a part of 0AD, being able to see how a city has evolved over time; you could look at a city and maybe you will see a clear divide between the old city and the new city as it has expanded over time, or perhaps the outskirts are littered with ruins from an ancient war or perhaps the ruins are simply old buildings that were demolished to reclaim building materials. I am getting carried away with this idea that would require tonnes of new art! Should Other Resources Be Volatile? I think so, yes. So you have 10 000 stone? What if I need stone, why can I not raid your base and steal your stone? Why can I not burn down your granaries so that your people starve? Resources are what most wars are fought over so why is this not the case in 0AD? I think I will have to learn this level of programming because I always have these grand ideas and then I sit around and wait and hope that somebody else makes them!

Messina

I don't get this ant size unit argument at all, formations are an integral piece of the puzzle that hasn't been fully fleshed out yet. Formations aren't fully implemented so units stay in formation during battle. 0 A.D. harkens back to the CnC and AoE/AoM way of doing things, with the twist of historically accurate citizen-soldiers and formations add into the mix. Healing may need some work, but the temple and healer dynamic is sound. Perhaps you are right about the training times being too fast, and things like making farms require farmsteads are good ideas, but other than that I just don't see most of the problems you see.

As promised the concept. 6.100 words of pure gameplay related stuff. Note: As this thread digs REALLY deep in the gameplay development, please read the document carefully and try to comprehend what I've written. I don't want read one liner comments like "idea X on page Y doesn't fit my personal view". You have to look at the concept as a whole instead of nitpicking small details. The layout isn't set in stone, it's meant as an approach to get a red line into the game. And thus it's important to get connections between different game aspects. Edit: the current text layout still isn't 100% like I want it to be but oh well... I'll leave it "as-is". If there is a strange looking paragraph simply ignore it Have fun reading! Part I: Gameplay Analysis “From sticks and stones to an Empire: How to employ a civilization concept for a modern time RTS” Game: 0 AD example faction: Athenians Author: DarcReaver Date: March 5th 2017 Introduction This document aims to summarize the current game mechanics, compare them to the original gameplay/game design concept, identify differences and problems with the current layout and create a solution concept. As some of the proposed concepts and ideas require quite a bit of restructuring or addition of code this is to be taken as a serious roadmap that can be followed for all civilizations in the future. If there are technical difficulties are not solvable by volunteers I’d honestly suggest to start another kickstarter campaign to hire a couple of professional coders who are then assigned the tasks that the internal team cannot solve. I know that this has been done in the past and failed, but I think the failure at least partly has to do with the fact that there is no “greater aim” for the game in its current state. There is no direction the game, so there is no amount of code able to finish it, thus the money would have gone to waste anyways (note that this is my personal opinion). But before doing kickstarters, or hiring coders, artists or whatever there has to be clear in which direction the game is heading, which leads us to this document. I believe there has to be a separate discussion on the kickstarter campaign some other time. Don’t get the wrong idea, I know that the proposed concepts below require extensive work and testing. However, please keep in mind that I’ve taken the original gameplay document as reference and adjusted my concepts towards implementation of the intended features. It’s just that my personal believe is that 0 AD in its very heart is not intended to be a “mass up an army and throw them into battle” style RTS. And to be honest – why would someone need another macro oriented game? We already have Age of Empires II HD, Stronghold, RUSE, Starcraft II and a couple of other games which already please that kind of player audience. And trying to mess with those games will most likely lead to a defeat since they’re made by professionals with years of experience in the game creation and have/had huge budgets available to polish their products. The result of this should be clear: 0 ad has to follow its own path instead of trying to copy and combine aspects from other games. So, let’s move on and summarize the current status of the game: General observations: City Borders When starting a game, the player base is surrounded by City borders. Inside the borders, construction of buildings is allowed. The border range can be increased by techs, certain buildings and progression in the city phases. Resource system & starting economy Basic soldiers, cavalry and women can harvest resources. The earlygame revolves around building basic infantry or women and assigning them to resource spots. The training speed is fast, resulting in high counts of collecting villagers in the earlygame (more than 30 or 40 units with 8 minutes). Resources are used to create more buildings and soldiers and research economic and military technologies. Houses and other buildings have comparably long construction times. Various economic upgrades can improve different aspects of gathering processes and are fast to research. Gameflow Most essential military units are available in the first Phase, allowing very early rushes with a variety of units. Building times are very high for buildings and very low for units. Resource costs are mostly the same for all types of military units. The available buildings allow defensive gameplay (farms, citizen soldiers, houses can garrison). The capturing mechanic helps raiding by being able to take over enemy buildings. As the game progresses there are more units unlocked to use. Every building is required to tech up. Siege is available very late, until then the mixture of capturing buildings and raiding economy is the way to go. Synopsis, current faction content: Buildings: Phase I: Agora – main building - House – provides population - Sitobolon – farm tech building and drop off point for food - storehouse – economic tech building and drop off point for minerals, lumber - Agros – unlimited food production - Epaulos – tech building for herdables/huntables/cavalry - Watchtower – scout building - Limen – harbor building - Strategeion – main military building Phase II: - Blacksmith – military tech building - Naos – advanced tech building - Emporios – market - Pyrgion – Defense tower - Theilos – defensive walls - Stoa Hellenica – specialist barracks building Phase III: - Epitheikisma – Fortress - Wonder – wonder building - Gymnasion – advanced military building - Theatron – economic civic tech building - Prytaneion – economic military special building This is the complete building number that is available to a player when choosing the Athenian civilization, 19 buildings. To unlock Higher City phases a number of buildings of the previous phase are required. Units: Phase I: - Hoplites (spearmen) - Peltastes Thrax (skirmisher) - Prodromos (ranged spear cavalry) - Psilos (slingers) Phase II: - Rhomphaiaphoros (heavy melee) - Thyreophoros (heavy skirmisher) - Iatros (healer) - Hippei (melee cavalry) Phase III: - Oxybeles (scorpion) - Lithobolos (catapult) - Epilektos (phalanx city guard unit) - Toxotes Skythikos (ranged archer) - Toxotes Kretikos (ranged archer) - Epibatos (naval infantry) - Heroes (Themistokles, Perikles, Iphikrates) Right now, the player starts off with basic infantry (hoplites), basic cavalry (Prodromos) and a basic ranged attacker (Psilos) without any necessary teching. Building a barracks adds a basic skirmisher (Peltastes) to the mix. Phase two adds healers, a special infantry and a special skirmisher (Rhomphaia/Threophoros), available through a second barracks and cavalry (Hippeis) Phase three unlocks siege (Oxybeles/Lithobolos), a City Guard Phalanx (Epilektos), ranged units (Toxotes Kretikos and Skythikos) aswell as naval infantry (Epibatos) and heroes. Summary of current game mechanic issues (note: “tier” means tech level) City Borders While in theory an interesting concept, the implementation at this stage is limiting the game more than being a useful feature. - Expansion is hard to do (Agoras require Phase II and lots of resources/time to be built) - No good options to expand the city borders apart from spamming houses or barracks - on certain maps it’s impossible to place drop off points for lumber and metal near the first major forest, leading to a low efficiency lumbering early on Result of this feature: Cavalry rushes and booming (don’t expand and spam economic units) are the choices to pick when playing the game. As it’s hard to work towards resources in the center of the map it’s easier to stick to the own borders and produce food with farming and harvest nearby lumber while building more and more economic units. Cavalry is very mobile and useful for harassment. Regular units don’t do the job well because it’s not possible to chase villagers Buildings: - no interconnection of building types: This means that there is no possibility to limit the amount of unit types available to the player. Every unit is trainable quickly, that way there is no interesting unit transition like archers into cavalry into infantry. Of course it’s possible to first field archers then cavalry and then infantry, but this doesn’t require planning or build orders. Just build a barracks and you’re done with your military. - forced construction of building phase buildings does not allow flexibility, players always have to build everything to get access to higher tier: This is an issue for the game duration. There is no possibility to follow a fast tech into a high tier to finish off opponents with superior units, or to deliver a teching advantage. As an example in AoE there are civs which are fit to quickly advance through the ages (like Byzantines, Mongols or Saracens) to field superior units like knights. Combined with the lack of additional military content in phase II the city phase feels dragged out. It takes ages to get through this phase without gaining a significant difference or advantage from phase I. - Building cost- and tech-requirements are unbalanced i.e. a fortress only offers two siege weapons while requiring lots of teching to reach and lots or resources to build. This results in unbalanced strategic options for building progression. Players have to build overpriced or underpriced buildings to get benefits that do not match the initial price. The progression should be: the more important the building the higher the cost should be. Units - Too many units are available at the start Overall the game offers a wide number of different units, but the unit arrangement is strange. In a strategy game the unit strength is usually increased over time, either via upgrades for existing units (called scaling) or by giving access to stronger units. A player starts off with his weakest units and as the game progresses he unlocks more and more powerful units, ultimately with some type of specialist unit that offers a very large advantage in one area. Most units with specific strengths have specific weaknesses which create a so called “rock paper scissor” counter system. The more specialized the unit is the harder the weakness is applied to enable countering it. This is essential for a wellrounded counter system. - Unit upgrades gives too large gaps between unteched and teched units It seems as if the bonuses provided from teching are very large, while unupgraded units are extremely weak, upgraded units almost take no damage compared to them. This is bad, as it requires players to instantly upgrade their units to stand a chance against an opponent, limiting the choice to “mass” weak units instead of choosing to tech up to get a smaller force of more advanced, stronger units. - Heroes come late and require lots of resources for limited effects This is a separate issue and my personal opinion on this matter is that heroes have too little effect on the game. According to the design guide the game takes inspiration from Warcraft III in which heroes have a very large role from the very start of the game. Getting early heroes, leveling them up and fighting the enemy is very important and can decide a match early. The hero system in 0 ad doesn’t nearly as much influence the overall game, which makes me question the reason why heroes are in the game in the first place. - Formations are fiddly and micro intensive The Formations are interesting, as they provide tactical options for fighting, like forming a phalanx to attack melee warriors. It’s a logical thing that there is a necessary minimum of soldiers to form a formation. The problem with the formations right now is that it’s not possible to select units in a formation and ignore units that are not included in the formation. Since units in 0ad are pretty small in a battle there is a constant reforming of formations since new trained units rejoin the formations on double click selection if you reassign the formation. - Unit training times are too quickly, massing troops early game is absolutely possible. Rushing with units from the town center is possible. This dumbs down the game. There is no strategical choice between building a military building path to unlock certain units and an early economic boom defensive playstyle. Instead it’s possible to train relatively potent units from the very start and the “man-spam train” is on track. While creating variety in the early training order this dulls down the tradeoffs that have to be made in the earlygame by players. In a good RTS there is a variety of choices to make. Either train melee units early, train ranged units or try a mobility approach for harassment like cavalry units. Each path means that the other military units are delayed by X amount of time and there is a tradeoff between having more pressure on the enemy or have increased economic power. Since cavalry can also collect food, there is zero disadvantage in training cavalry compared to training economic units. In 0ad there is no delay for fielding other types of units (except for the time to collect the required resources and building time), so army compositions are very flexible. This renders tactical advantages from training certain units useless as they can immediately be countered. I got the feeling this is why there is so much cavalry rushing going on. A mobile early cavalry army allows to put pressure on an enemy, and can only be countered by other cavalry as regular units are too slow to catch up. The mobility of ranged units is high; most skirmisher cavalry and cavalry archers available to the civs at the start. Ranged cavalry can outrun their counters and pick off single units. In RTS players who can choose their battles are in an advantageous position.

I have read various opinions on this topic like 1. Metal and stone usually are placed directly next to the CC. It should be more risky to mine them and therefore they should be placed farther away. I agree, my suggestion actually is to encourage more risky gathering, but still provide the opportunity to gather savely in the base which will be punished by other means. 2. Balancing of food resources like fishing for villagers (is not really possible at the moment due to some citizen gather range / size of fish resource incompatibiltiy I think), fish and berry regeneration (don't actually know why it wasn't implemented - I guess some disagreement on design?) or making hunting more viable and nerf/change fields (also discussed, but again disagreement on design I think). I agree especially with the fields: they shouldn't give an infinite supply (and a reseeding queue really doesn't require that much work like in AoE2 if we allow batch "training" like for units - alternatively we could give the option to reseed automatically as long as there are enough resources). And till this day I really haven't understood why on earth something should grow on a field if you throw some wood on it. As seeds are no resource, I would say fields wouldn't require any costs except for a relatively long build time (perhaps 1.5-2.0 times longer than now) and some shorter reseeding time. This would also encourage hunting in the early game as building a field would be really demanding. I would also like to make field efficiency depend on the ground texture (buff on green and fertile ground and debuff/prohibition on desert, stony, snowy/icy ground). This would make decisions about building placement more interesting. I think Stronghold Crusader did this very well and this was also a reason why this game has been the most popular of the entire Stronghold series. Ok this is a interesting topic, but I won't focus on this further at least for now. 3. I think I once read a ticket about the option to make the amount of resources adjustable in the game setup. E.g. on "low" a tree provides 100 wood, on "medium" 200 wood and on "high" 400 wood. Sadly I couldn't find it again (still need to look at older tickets). If I remember right already some work has been done for it which should be finished and included in the main game because it's a great idea IMO (at least for non-professional / non-ranked games). A bit off-topic, but still affecting resources gathering: 4. Actually same thing as with the fields: why do I need wood to construct some stone buildings??? IMO building costs should be (more) civ-specific, e.g. greeks, persians, seleucids, carthaginians, seleucids, iberians and romans would have a high demand of stone whereas the celtic tribes and perhaps mauryans would use more wood for most of their buildings. The exact costs would actually depend on the current model used for the building. Of course this would need a lot of balancing, but I'm sure this can be done and adds to the uniqueness of the factions and thus leads to a better gameplay experience. Probably stone slabs would need to provide a bit more resources to fit this increased demand. Even more off-topic, but interesting: 5. Make trader garrisoning more viable, see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3428. Actually trading is an extra topic, but I just want to raise some attention for this problem which is quite obvious, but still nobody seems to care about it. 6. "Mod for modders" to add/remove resources easily to/from the game. https://github.com/0ADMods/resource_agnostic I think it may be considered to include this mod into the main game (if it's finished?). Not because we need it but just for better modding support. 7. Starting resources vs. max population display in the game setup: either we should use numbers for both (e.g. resources: "300", population: "200") or descriptions for both (e.g. resources: "medium", population: "high"). Just for consistency. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thinking about point 1, some additional ideas came to my mind. Apart from treasures, we actually have a relatively huge variety of food sources (fish, fields, hunting, berries) and trees (different kinds of trees and also size, e.g. baobab gives more and some "wood bushes" give less). In contrast, you can just mine one kind of generic metal and one kind of generic stone. At least for stone there are also ruins and pyramids and I think it's OK if the stone mines just fit to the current environment as they do now (they somehow represent different kinds of stone). Still it would be nice to give them some specific names like "sandstone" for desert, "marble" on mediterranean maps, and so forth. That's not a big deal actually. Edit: IT SEEMS I CONFUSED SOME PEOPLE WHO THINK I WANT TO INTRODUCE NEW RESOURCES. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. I JUST WANT DIFFERENT SOURCES FOR THE SAME METAL WE USE NOW. Have a look at my mod. Now, the intersting part is about metals. Metals have very different properties (much more variety as stone - if you speak about chemical composition it may be the other way round, but I mean the macro scale). They can be very rare, heavy and noble like gold or quite light, abundant and reactive like aluminium (though it wasn't possible to extract pure aluminium at those days). They can be even poisonous like mercury to a higher or led to a lesser extent. So all in all I think we should somehow represent that variety in-game even if we stick to generic metal as a resource (like we have differerent food sources, but one food re-source). My suggestion is to differentiate between gold, copper and iron sources/ores, at least by giving the existing ores appropriate textures. This would actually be the chance to introduce some advantages and disadvantages of the ores and thus add some strategic depth. My ticket http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3635 gives a bit more detailed description of what I think. In a nutshell: you should have to decide if you want to slowly and safely mine iron, which is quite abundant also next to the CC, but quite inefficient OR if you want to expand your territory towards risky places with gold deposits which can give you a strong advantage in metal gathering if you are able to defend your gatherers against attacks and distractions. For existing maps we could either exchange existing metal ores with copper (which should fill the gap in between gold and iron) or leave the generic metal ore as it is and use the new ores only in new scenarios/maps. Extra: there are templates for small metal ores, but I can't remember to have them found once on a map. At least in Atlas you can create them - the textures are not always fitting to the big ores. Is that the reason? So what to do? As historic_bruno said it's best to do a small mineral mod for this. More or less I have only modified templates so far and do not have that deep programming skills. However, I would give it a try. If the whole thing works I would probably need some guy for making textures (new meshes would be even better) because I'm not experienced with this topic either. Thanks for reading, I would be glad to hear some opinions about my points (numbers are roughly priority) It would be also be helpful to collect more links to the tickets refering to one or more of these topics.

Here's to another one of my random "we should remove features" ramblings. I will in this post argue for removing phases from the game entirely. Let's begin with "why phases are broken". Why phases are broken. It's really quite simple. We have 3 phases. They simply are not different enough. The second phase brings the market, the blacksmith, new CCs, and some towers which you can't really use for offensive purposes. The third basically brings fortresses. And it feels like we could just make fortresses way more expensive and have the same effect. There's not a lot of strategical finesse either: rushing isn't reliant on phases, and any other strategy is going to involve champions which means fortresses. Town phase is sort of an awkward in-between, necessary but never "enough". You really don't want to stay in town phase. Why is this worse than in other RTS? Well for one thing phases don't really make sense as they did in say AoE or RoN, where they represented huge technological advances, so you could completely upgrade units and stuff. In 0 A.D., the idea is that you're simply… having a bigger town, I guess? We don't really "unlock" that much nor upgrade our units a ton, so it all feels very forced and not really that useful. As I said, you just want fortresses, there's really no reason to stay in town phase. It's no castle age or anything. Another oddity is that they really aren't that costly compared to units and buildings. Particularly since the in-game economy tends to be super easy to boom, you quickly end up with fortress age being limited by the speed at which you build the required buildings (which can be somewhat big as you hardly need them in town phase), not by ressources. So what do we replace them with? That's of course the more difficult question. We don't want to go back to earlier alphas where the winning strategy was just to make a fortress straight-away. I see one course of action: upgrading buildings manually. You'd start with a small town council, upgradable in a town center then a town hall or something. Each time, you unlock better techs and abilities (say, batch-creating villagers, more citizen soldiers…). But those upgrades are quite costly. Same with the blacksmith. Barracks. Temple? Whatever we can think of, really. The idea is also that the top buildings, techs, and upgrades should be more costly and tied together. Can't build fortresses until eg you have upgraded your town hall enough (sorta simulating phases but differently) or you have enough barracks, or you have unlocked some tech, or you can straight away but they're sorta weak and useless until you pour more ressources in, and champions have a super long build time until you research tech. But why? This would have several adantages: it makes it way easier to diversify strategies. Want to focus on champions straight away? Well it's going to cost you a ton of ressources but if you do it properly and the opponent doesn't scout you it's game over for him. Want to trade right away? Doable. Basically it allows going way crazier. Individual upgrades of buildings also give more info on what your strategy is (particularly if we go with specialization, such as for example allowing a barracks to specialize in ranged or cav units), so that properly countering your opponent's strategy becomes more reliant on scouting. Overall I think this would be a positive change for the game, making gameplay both more unpredictable and more strategic, while also removing a completely artificial system in favor of something that makes a little more sense. The biggest drawback would be of course multiplying our art substantially.

Hi. Let's remove dropsite ability from the Civic Center. Why would I propose this? Forces building storehouses and farmsteads from the start of a typical match, introducing the concept early. Refocuses the Civic Center on its primary purposes: training citizens, upgrading your settlement, and claiming territory. The player places new Civic Centers for optimal territorial claim, rather than as a forward dropsite which more often than not is not an optimal territorial claim. It's a soft encouragement to place farms around the farmstead instead of around the Civic Center. I can get rid of the "Civic Spaces" farming penalty. I know that there's also the defensive benefit to placing around the Civic Center, but it's a step in the right direction here.

With the help of furun 0ad and furub ubuntu fr, I got to delete the line in local.cfg: Room = "arena21"; Default MUC room to join I then tried to join lobby and visibly it works, Thank you all

hello, Thank you for your advice and patience;) I'm not easy with computers. I went on the wiki page, and I do not see how to check arena 15 or 21. On the wiki it details for windows, os, and linux, I'm on ubuntu, Would you be able to explain how to do it, please thanks again

If the line is in local.cfg or user.cfg remove it instead of changing it.

From the logs of the lobby, it looks like you are joining the Alpha 15 lobby, though your screenshot indicates that the rest of the interface looks like Alpha 21. Can you check your default.cfg, local.cfg, and/or user.cfg and look for the line the says room = "arena15" and change that 21? You can find the file by following this wiki page.

"I don't think you can put x application on the SSD and y application on magnetic disk in Linux" Yes, you can You can even install them in the default location, move them wherever you want (accessible to your PC that is ofc. ^^) and soft-link to where it was installed (Doesn't work that well for network sources though). So even if the installation process doesn't support installing on drive x/y one can easily change the locations of program data without much risk of breaking anything.

Not quite, I would like to see seasons because the seasons played a huge role in warfare in ancient times. There are a whole load of ideas for seasons but that would be appropriate to discuss in a separate thread.

Why not instead make construction sites drop sites for the materials required? This would mean you could place construction sites for buildings even if you don't have the resources at hand to build them immediately. Would that mess with the game? So the Civic Centre would only have a dropsite in phase 1? Then changes abilities through the phases? Interesting idea!

Yea, put seasons in an RTS. And let's rename the game to "Farming Simulator 0 - AD" while we're at it.

You can clearly see following facts: a ) color BLUE units are not color RED's units b ) units from BLUE are clearly not the same as RED c ) there are units with huge axes/hammers/logs that obviously attack close range, while BLUE's units seem to have rifles or something similar And no, my examples are not based on good micro. And you're still not understanding the difference. If you don't use formations is obviusly you don't. You can do that in 0 A.D to form units but you are using the examples at your own convenience.

Once more. Every game you mentioned had a distinction between unit types. Each unit is easily. 0 ad doesnt have it. Citizen Soldiers concept sucks @#$%. Healing is useless, yes. And apart from that your statements make it pretty clear that you don't have a clue tbh. Compare this to: To this Units are easy to notice, contrasts are in between the unit types, and the models differ from each other enough to create an overview. This is the main reason why lots of RTS do not use "authentic" unit skins by default.

While danny's idea does sound interesting, that's going to take a back-breaking amount of artwork for all of those building variations. A good first step I would think to take would be splitting the barracks into three buildings, which of course brings us closer to an AOE clone, but allows for that decision making that makes for interesting strategies.

Your trying to bribe the man not give him a tip for good service. Enjoy the Choice

In the game settings, you can set the victory condition to "conquest buildings". Then you'll only have to destroy all buildings to win. The regular "conquest" settings only defeats a player when there's no theoretical possibility to win anymore. So as long as there's a unit available that can either construct buildings or attack something, it's still possible to win, and the game isn't finished. It is indeed true that the AI will never surrender explicitly, and act a bit like an annoying player.

What is the point of this topic? It sounds like spam from a quick look, but I doubt that you would have registered and participated in the forums just to eventually post something that doesn't apply to most people visiting the forums. So I am confused

Yes they commerce with that, Dacians for example change slaves and resources with Romans when Domicianus was emperor in order to bribe them to don't sake Moesia. Yes I never ear or know about slavery into the Iberian society. but The Empires was his engine of do mostly of things not only economic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts

I've been playing a few games with dropsite removed from the civil center. I had to modify several things in the AI. (I didn't realize farmsteads are only partially treated as dropsites.) Also, I added a minimum range for farms. This made the AI create farms in a radius around the civil center. I was hoping that computer player would clump them around drop sites, but it appears to place them around the center even when resources cannot be dropped off there. I think the minimum range idea has some real potential, I like the effect of the minimum distance for farms even more then removing the dropsite from the civil center. It creates cities that actually look and function like cities should. The surrounding farmlands look great too. They look even better when grouped around the farmsteads. You have to spread out more to place the farms and you don't end up with city streets that need mowing... If someone knows an easy way to get the AI to place farms around the farmsteads, it would be appreciated. I ultimately ended up adding food dropsite to the storehouse to make the AI competitive because the AI wasn't building farms near the farmsteads.

My personal preference would be for a new storehouse building, that you could build somewhat quickly and cheaply, and would allow collecting any of the 4 resources, perhaps with a special new component that would give you only 75% of resources you deposit in it or something (without tech?). I think it'd open new gameplay avenues and mitigate the issues with our current system. An alternative I would consider quite viable would be a technology, unlockable in perhaps town phase, that allows dropsites to be built in neutral territory.

I would personally set it to 1 per tree. Can you imagine two guys swinging axes that close together? Scary groves do add a lot of opportunity, I'll have to admit

Perhaps then that each civic center casts its own territory, and new ones you build aren't at the highest tier, but are village centers, then are upgraded to town, city, etc. There's not one giant contiguous territory added to by civic centers, but rather dynamic provinces created. Your outer provinces are villages and towns, while inner provinces are cities.

Make capture more special. Capture the civic center and gain all of the surrounding houses too. Decisive. Important. Have merc camps around the map to capture for special merc units. Points of contention.

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.

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

You're making an RTS, not a city building game. There is one type of resource to be gathered: food. So it's logical to only have one type of economic building to supply food. Introducing multiple food sources for civs doesn't reflect this. In theory, if you're doing multiple farms, there also should be additional ways to harvest lumber or mining minerals. Which leads more towards a city building gamestyle. Infinite resource gathering is used to create a simple, automatic process. If you make the gathering process less automated this process is automatically more complicated while not serving its original purpose (generate resources). Thus you automatically disrupt players from other game aspects. I'd suggest to play a couple of matches in AoE I and then reconsider why it's annoying to have to replant farms (which is similarly disrupting from a gameplay perspective). @feneur is right that extending the game mechanic with another building type doesn't have enough benefits up the game. Of course fields could be different in appearance from a random variation (some fields contain olive trees and some don't). Alternatively, there could be additional models for berry bushes. Or roman civs start with a certain amount of olive trees around their base as an additional food source early on which can be gathered quickly (similar to how Incas on AoE II start with an additional turkey).

While I agree that a "coin regeneration rate" works similar to a hard cap, it opens up the option to build markets closer to each other while not increasing the total trade amount possible. Question is whether distance between trade posts should take effect or not. As far as I see it, the trade distance manspam train looks odd, even with hardcaps applied. That's why I suggested it. About the discussiion about finite <> infinite resource tradeoffs I agree aswell that your proposal creates more variety in terms of eco management, thus creating a need to have both regular gathering and using trade as an additional bonus. However, I'm critical to the implementation of the mechanic in general as it's highly conventional and taken from AoE II.

I'll have a look, first thing is to ask "what should trade accomplish and why is it necessary in the game". From my observation it was most likely put in "because Age of Empires has trade aswell" without further questioning it. Thus there are problems with it. another example of gameplay in action.

@Tiber7: I would rather go for a complete redesign, not a punishment for using the existing system

@shieldwolf23: children units are more suited for a city building game, not for a combat-driven game like 0 A.D.

I think this adds uneeded complexity and houses with higher pop is good enough for addressing repetitive interactions. If women should have a bigger role, I think it should be in a different way. I like the proposal. Even there are some things that I was initially against (splitting iron resource) but you made some good points about the reason behind adding it.

I took some time and read through the threads, there are some interesting points being brought up, and most interestingly they seem to cover with my own views even though I did not know about the topics being discussed before. One thing I disagree about is the dynamic line of sight taking too much performance. Warcraft III, released back in 2002, 15 years ago, already had this mechanic that buildings, cliffs and trees limited the sight range of units. This is more a matter of efficient coding than a real obstacle. Of course you need someone who can code this efficiently. But there we're back to the kickstarter option. To get into the post: -Call to Arms: the tradeoff is that you're loosing resources while fighting with units that could normally gather resources instead. I actually think this is enough of a tradeoff already. but your suggetion might be an alternative. Although I think that a permanent upgrade system a la AoM norse gatherer -> ulfsark is a way to circumvent the issue as a whole. - Women: my initial thought was that women serve as a cheap support unit, yes. Applying indirect economic bonuses like pop cap or training speed are actually interesting aspects that improve the role differences between male and female gatherers. After putting some more thought in this it might be necessary to let women farm/collect food and harvest wood, aswell as providing indirect eco bonuses. This way there is a tradeoff between a male civilization setup and a mixed economy with weaker defense but therefor better cost efficiency. This should be discussed more in detail in the future. - About the Metal: well, I just thought of AoE for names. Their resource is called Gold aswell, so I thought Silver and Iron would fit. Silver coins were used as currency in ancient times and most weapons are made out of iron. But regardless of names, the idea behind the split up is to make a difference between a "teching" resource and a "production" resource. Depending on your strategy you need either one of these first, and if your enemy scouts that you're harvesting Iron in the beginning he could anticipate that you're planning an early attack. Mining Silver on the other hand means that the player is planning to tech up, so an early attack is worth the effort to disrupt the economy and delay the teching. Similar to how in Age of Empires players scout for early gold mining which means either fast castle strategies or a Men at Arms rush. - territories: yes, they need more thoughts to be put in a useful game feature instead of just being there. Ideas like forcing farms outside the city create map control concepts which I like. As a sidenote, the first Battle for Middle Earth had a map control element where players could create farms/eco buildings outside their main base (the mainbase had a slot system of max. 8 buildings). Those outer settlements produced resources at a more efficient ratio than eco buildings in the main base, so they were raided and contested all the time. Stronghold Crusader, like you mentioned in your topic about Metal resources earlier, also uses this concept. This would make territories certainly a more potent gameplay feature. Me gusta. Edit: one more thought about territories: I general I like the concept that players cannot build anywhere by default. I personally dislike that it's possible in Age of Empires to create a bunch of barracks next to an enemy base and then rush the city from behind out of nowhere, with soldiers that are magically teleported in the middle of enemy borderlands. So, this feature is not bad by itself, and there should be put some thought in it to keep it.

I'm not god and I'm not responsible for the crude mixture of game features currently in place . City borders usually fit better in City building games like the Settlers, in which military buildings are used to increase the territory available for construction of buildings. In my mind it could be interesting to use city borders as a system to employ defensive bonuses to fighting civs. As an example, in the Settlers franchise (namely Settlers III and Settlers IV) units in friendly territory fight with 100% battle power, while they only fight with 50% or less on enemy or neutral territory. The battle power could be increased with collecting and producing gold (Settlers III) or with the overall amount of buildings (Settlers IV). This made early rushing risky as you have to maintain numeric superiority against an opponent. Edit²: As I wrote about the endurance system: it might be interesting to provide a bonus to exhaustion for units that are in own or friendly territory. Units resting in a city regain their endurance faster and makes city borders a further defensive mechanic. As for the "other non Athenians" civilizations: I did this on purpose for one civilization, simply because doing a gameplay analysis for 10 civs was too much work for me and would have bloated the text into a PhD conception. Many concepts that are mentioned will apply to other civs aswell, although I have some ideas for a "barbarian" civ concept with different gatherer concept and military structure. This will be for a future text, as I need to check out in which areas my ideas would work or not. The "engagement" concepts are going more into depth and require a separate discussion imo. How to find technical solution to the proposed ideas is a different matter afterall. However, there are games on the market which apply similar fighting concepts and it's possible to look at how their solution looks like (total war series for example). The endurance system is actually meant like you described it - utilizing speed to get a tactical advantage over the enemy, or alternatively to allow fast army transitions into allied cities to help defending. Leading exhausted troops in a fight are not so great afterall. The endurance stat should simply avoid that players set their army to sprint around everywhere. Edit: about the citizen <-> women concept: While I do agree it would be possible to remove women altogether I'd like to bring up the point of unit costs and training speed. Women could be trained faster and cheaper compared to citizens and thus provide more efficient gathering of food to free the men up for mining Silver, Iron and Stone instead. Overall the total amount of gatherers is reduced anyways. An alternative solution would be that women can collect food aswell as wood. My personal view is that women are unfit for mining because it's a bit odd to imagine fine ladies to work in dirty mines. In Age of Empires the differentiation between male and female gatherers is just optical afterall, so it doesn't matter as much. Yes, this Call to Arms concept is based on a mixture of Warcraft III human "militia base defense" concept combined with the gatherer -> norse Ulfsark system from AoM.

I really like your concept of "Call to arms", feels some how like the Ragnarok of the norse on age of mythology, plus your point of view of heroes, they should have a higher rol in the game and the battallions training.

Part II: Solution Concept taking Atheneans as example civilization: Excerpt from design doc: “Developers do not seem to be content to further the traditional RTS in the same vein as Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, Red Alert, and Warcraft II. Though some are fleeing, we are going to stake a claim in the RTS genre. There is still much innovation to be made. This for us means: A. Less tedious/mindless micro-management B. More strategic thinking C. Greater stress on planning, formations, and tactics D. Choices, Choices, and more Choice ” Right now, none of this is actually present in the game. 0 AD combines all negative features of the game combined with a broken gatherer concept to make the whole game more “unique”. This is a problem and really unfortunate. We have lots and lots of unnecessary micromanagement, almost no strategic depth, no real planning. Only thing already implemented is the use of formations and tactics like flanking of a Phalanx. My aim is to create gameplay patterns that match the points above: - removal or repetitive and unnecessary micro management - employment of battle tactics in conjunction with formations, trampling, surprise attacks, flanking and directional combat. These battle tactics make up for the fact that there are less total units on the field. There is more tactical micro in place than strategical micro - The fighting duration between units is increased. This reduces the need to permanently replace units lost with the “manspam train” - set the waypoint to the battlefield. Newly produced soldiers move towards the battlefield every couple of seconds and after a while this looks like a train moving along the map. - Enforcing a teching pattern that allows a greater diversity in army compositions, and to make certain “cookie-cutter” unit combos harder to reach. - Creating variety in combat. The outcome shouldn’t always be the same. This is accomplished by varying weapon damage and directional combat and creating small amounts of luck based chances. - Making units more durable allows constructive army micro. I.e. more options to heal wounded units. Unit preservation becomes more important and easier. This punishes mindless suicide raids and rewards taking care of units. General earlygame changes: 1. Remove all units from the Town center except for women and citizens. All units are trained in batches of different sizes (the exact number is up to discussion, I’d say we start with 2 women and 2 citizens per training interval. Training time and resource costs are increased accordingly). Gathering rates are changed, this is covered in a separate point. House pop cap is increased; fewer houses to provide more population. Reason: less repetitive micro required by lowering the amount of clicks to get the eco going. Increased gathering rates allow less gatherers to get the necessary resources. This is also important since military will not be able to gather, too (see below). Less houses for progress means less spam to build them. House walls are less attractive and palisades become the choice of defensive building at the start of the game. This all frees up time for the player to think ahead of how he’s going to setup the game while maintaining a relatively complex economic system. I’d strongly suggest of battalions with multiple units in a single entity. This allows less individual micromanagement (-> “clicking speed”) and allows a better implementation of formations. Additionally, battalions create a better atmosphere of managing armies and an empire, not a bunch of ravaging soldiers and a couple of farmer’s daughters Depending on the eco setup the gathering processes can be tweaked to match the size of women “battalions” and Citizens. I.e. maximum gatherers are 4/8/12 for small/ medium/ large resource spots. 3. Slow down everything. Women speed, soldier speed, cavalry speed. It’s pretty obvious that the game runs like a turbo random map game in Age of Empires on double speed. Way too hectic for a game with such a detailed economy and military system. Instead, the focus should go more into automatization of processes to allow more strategical planning. This also makes “fast clicking” less of a requirement to manage the game well. This will improve the game pace massively. 4. Citizens – they do no longer start with their weapons, instead they only work as male collectors. They collect food, wood, metal and stone faster than women, and they can hunt with spears or bows. They have the option to be “called to arms” to receive their weapons but lose their ability to collect resources (in case of Atheneans: Citizens turn into Hoplites). The upgrade is permanent. Alternative: Citizens “call to arms” is a timed ability. When activated Citizens run towards the Civic Center (or Blacksmith) and receive their weapons. When leaving the city boundaries or after a certain time they drop their weapons and become gatherers again. Reason: having an army that can collect resources is problematic. As soon as a player decides to attack, the player loses resources from not gathering resources. To limit the negative effects of this the Citizen speed must be high so travelling to the enemy doesn’t take too long. This makes units look ridiculous when they sprint across the map. The amount of units collecting resources makes it necessary to slow down individual gathering rates, so unit massing is important to gain economic bonuses. The “call to arms” concept allows players to react to early attacks by calling their citizens to defend the city. Raiding economy easier with regular units, as the gatherers cannot fight back efficiently. There is a tradeoff between military force and economic force. This conceptual change still contains the spirit of “Citizen Soldiers” that the game favors as a core element, but in a less problematic way. Military units should not double as resource gatherers. 5. Women can only collect food, and the efficiency aura is removed from them. Gathering from herdables, fields and berries is significantly more efficient. They cannot hunt efficiently because they are not able to use a bow or spear for a ranged attack. They can still collect from them if a Citizen first kills the animal first. A mix of Citizens and Women early on is more important as both units synergize well. Mindless massing of women is made less attractive, since the amount of herdables or berries is limited early on. On the contrary it’s an option to gain an advantage from taking free food on the map with high efficiency by having women collect wild berries and i.e. protect them from raids with male, called to arms citizens. This also allows players to expand early on and increases the necessity to keep scouting the map for assault targets. Being sneaky by collecting hidden resources rewards players with saved resources on early fields. 6. Neutral gaia herdables on the map: herdables can be captured (copy from AoE II, I know. But it’s good!) and then fatten over time. They can be moved around and be gathered from citizens and Women. 7. Starting units are reworked: Atheneans/civs in general no longer start with a mixure of units. The starting units are limited to two Women and two Citizen. The citizen either serves as a scout or can help with hunting to improve food gathering. Since Atheneans are a defensive civ a fast ranged cavalry scout and Psilos are unfit as starting units. Atheneans should be slooooow. Resource layout: Any good RTS needs a clear role for each type of resource that is available. Example: Company of Heroes features 3 resources – manpower, fuel, munitions. Manpower is used for training new units, teching all kinds of upgrades and reinforcing squads. Fuel is used to bring vehicles on the field and tech global upgrades, for example enable the usage of grenades for Riflemen. Munitions are used for squad specific upgrades like giving an MG gunner to a tank or adding sight scopes, or to give a Panzerschreck to a squad. Munitions also are used for usage of active abilities – artillery strikes, Air raids, smoke barrages, tossing grenades and so on. Something similar is in place for Warcraft III, too: Units require gold. Items and combat enhancing features require gold aswell. Teching, buildings and specialized units require lumber as a second resource. A pattern like this should be enforced for 0 AD. Players need to know that if they want to do X they need resource Y. My proposal would be following: - Food is used for training gatherers, melee infantry and cavalry. Military techs and combat enhancing techs require food. - Wood/lumber is used for construction of non-military buildings and required for economic upgrades. Training ranged units requires wood. Wood is also needed to progress city phases. - Stone is used to create military buildings. Walls, Towers, barracks, Fortresses. The creation of Siege weapons requires stone aswell. Stone is needed to progress in the next city phases. - Concept proposal : Metal is split up into two resources. One is called Silver, the other Iron. Silver is used to tech economic upgrades and army upgrades. Iron is used for training soldiers. Advantage would be that there are more options to customize the gathering process into “unit massing” or “teching progress”. Silver is a teching resource, while Iron is a production resource. Elite units like Chariots, Elephants or mercenaries can require Silver as training resource to mix things up for additional gameplay depth. - Alternatively, Metal is a combined military production and teching resource. It’s used for training every military unit that is fielded. Military techs and combat enhancing techs require metal. Economic techs require metal, too. Upgrading city phases requires metal (or silver). Building layout for Atheneans: Phase I: Buildings built by women: houses, farms. Buildings build by Citizens: Apotheke, Strategeion, Sitobolon, Epaulos, Blacksmith, Naos, Pyrgion, Limen Proposed building dependencies in a picture: Conceptual changes: Apotheke: can be built anywhere, drop off point for lumber, stone and metal Sitobolon: unlocks the option to build fields, contains economic upgrades for harvesting and gathering berries Epaulos: this building contains upgrades for hunting and gathering from animals. This building provides upgrades for the overall performance of cavalry units. It no longer trains sheep or goats (the training herdables will be used in a different way in a different civ concept, will be covered in the future). Blacksmith: contains military upgrades, and unlocks ranged units. Limen: a basic shipyard that contains fishing boats and transport ships. Transport ships can be garrisoned by soldiers and then used to capture enemy ships. Strategeion: by default, it only enables to train Hoplites Athenae. Further contains Peltastes Thrax and Prodromos (require City phase) Naos: contains healers and heroes. Yes, you read correctly, I’d suggest heroes and healers are put in an earlier stage of the game to increase their influence on the gameprogress. Of course, considering that they join the game earlier they will work in a different manner and have different stats. Hero units will be featured in a separate position below. Pyrgion and Palisades: defensive buildings for a defensive styled civilization, cheap, fast to build, but easy to destroy Phase II (600 Wood / 400 Stone/200 metal, requires 3 buildings to be constructed): (all constructed by Citizens) Emporios: Market building, contains upgrades that allow trading, increase economic efficiency (that means: upgrades in here allow resources to last longer, especially metal) Gymnasion: Advanced military building, trains Pikemen and contains upgrades that increase infantry effiency (more hitpoints, better attack, better speed etc.). Also trains Hippeis and thus provides a gameplay focus on infantry units and to make them more versatile. Additionally, cavalry helps out the immobile Phalanx formations by protecting the flanks and applying pressure to the enemy. The disadvantage is that this building does not contain hard counter units, and thus it’s necessary to provide the correct army composition to make use of the units from the Gymnasion. Hellenic Stoa: Advanced military building, contains Rhomphaiaphosos, Thyreophosos and Toxotes Skythikos/Kretikos. This building serves by providing a mixture of dedicated hard counter units that hit hard but are specialized. Also contains upgrades for said units. Agora: main civil building that expands the command area and creates further colonies. Trains gatherers and allows to advance through city phases (mostly like it is at the moment). Theikos: improvement of wooden Palisades. Those walls cost stone and have better stats (obviously). Can be built anywhere by default. Defense Tower: building that shoots arrows (obviously) Phase III (700 Wood/ 1000 Stone / 500 Metal, require 2 buildings to be constructed): (all constructed by citizens) Epistoklisma: Fortress used as ultimate defensive building, contains upgrades for military units in general (i.e. training speed). Furthermore allows construction of various siege weapons. Theatron: economic boost building. This building increases all gatherer speed and efficiency in the civic center radius (similar to the Wheel technology in Age of Empires) Prytaneion: Government building, contains techs that affect cavalry units and provide bonuses to general infrastructure: faster construction of buildings, population efficiency, unit costs, ships and so on. It basically boosts the economy indirectly. Example for Athenians: Reformations of Iphikrates that upgrade regular Hoplites to Naval soldiers and replaces Toxotes Skytikos with Toxotes Kretikos. Wonder: serves double as a victory condition and boosts all military unit’s performance significantly (the wonder is a proud sign of how advanced a civilization is, and thus the population will greatly try to keep it that way) Limen Megalos (military shipyard): Upgrade for the regular Limen, alternatively an own building that enables construction of large ships.

@MrShiney don't worry we'll fix it whatever it is. I realize I forgot to ask: What version of the game are you using ? I attached two files that might or might not help. The direct connect is in case you do not have access to the lobby, ie, school firewall. 0 A.D. Lan Tutorial.pdf 0 A.D. Direct Connect.pdf

I think it would be better if there was a dedicated campaign mode where there was taxes, and all of that city management stuff, then on the actual RTS map there should be the regular RTS functions. In other words it would be like the BFME 1 and BFME 2 campaign maps. Also, if you don't like the idea then maybe there should be a happiness system like in Stronghold 2. More taxes means less happiness, which in turn makes soldiers fight worse (because we can't have peasants leaving the castle in this game). The happiness is the rate in which soldiers fight. More happiness means that soldiers get stat bonuses and buffs.

I think we can have both, if having both won't be much of a bother. That way, we can let players choose what suits him best.

Yeah, it can certainly be done. I'm just saying that in my opinion it doesn't add enough to warrant adding another "building", and that we might want to be careful about adding more buildings in general since there is quite a few without that much difference already.

@jkufner: Yes, that would be huge fun!

Had a better idea, so I changed the mod. Previous idea wasn't very elegant after all. New version, partly inspired by ffm's comments: -Markets generate income. -Markets garrisoned with workers generate more income (ungarrisoned markets only have 20% efficiency). -Markets generate income based on "connections" with other markets. -Traders increase this "connection". -You can only build one market per CC. Basically the way it works is that traders link markets together, and the more markets a market is linked with, the higher its efficiency. This means you don't need 100 traders, you need between ⅔ and about 10 for the most distant markets to keep a full connection at all time. This is also modulated by distance: the efficiency bonus from a connection depends on distance (specifically, I'm using the log of the distance/100). This means that it's better to trade with far away markets, but moving them 10 meters from one another won't change much. Another modulation is that for each market, the total efficiency is sqrt-ed. Ie the more markets you are connected to, the higher your efficiency, but there are diminishing returns. It's quickly better to make another market and connect that one than focus solely on one market. The effect overall is that: -You need more markets. -You need a "web" of connections and not a straight line. -You need fewer traders but more workers so the overall pop is the same. The good thing is also that the income rate is very easy to manage and control. There's also plenty of opportunity for technologies: traders could increase the connection more/go faster, so that you need even fewer, markets could leverage efficiency better… Please try it, I think you'll agree with me that it's a much much better idea. Note that I probably broke naval trade but that's not a big issue. TradeModv2.zip

IMO the main issue is that your settlement growing isn't represented by well by a research. It would make more sense if the phase functionality were instead attached to upgrading the city center building itself (i.e. Village Hall -> City Hall -> Palace).