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This map is my first serious attempt at making a map for 0 A.D. and after spending some time on it I still feel like it is missing something. So I am here looking for some criticism, tips or whatever to try and make it a better looking map/improve gameplay. The map is loosely based of a height map made from the Firth of Fourth (Linne Foirthe in Gaelic) in Scotland: The map is not accurate in any way though and neither is the scenario in which the north of the firth is inhabited by 4 celtic players (2 gaullic 2 briton) and the south is occupied by 3 Romans and one Iberian (will probably change this...). Screen Shots (the AI has already began placing some buildings in some of these shots): Actual map files: FirthandFourthMap.zip Slightly updated version: FirthandFourth2.zip

Regarding Krita I prefer it over the GIMP the GUI is more Photoshop like for those on Linux there are two main ways of getting it from your distro's repos or appimage the appimage version is a stand alone static build and usually the latest version available the Windows version is also very useful the 64-bit version preforms better. Enjoy the Choice

Nice map mah dude, superb. I will think long and hard about whats missing but apart from this 'missing' thing. Well played.

+rep this man, +1 this map

nice map, will try it out tomorrow +rep

I personally love zooming in and out, to catch a glimpse of all those beautiful details, as well as getting a good overview. I'd even like the camera to be less restricted... Seen as 0 A.D. is a historic RTS, it's difficult to compare to many other RTS out there that really don't focus on realism. Exaggerated or overly stylised units would reduce the immersiveness of the current game. 0 A.D. is not League of Legends, Starcraft or Command and Conquer, and I for one am very happy it didn't take that route. I think 0 A.D. is much more beautiful because of it.

0 A.D. has never looked better. The problem is, at this point I don't play it very much, because I am really tired of the AI and random death balls of units as fast as possible. I also accidentally deleted my Empires Extended mod that ported the Epirotes and Thebans from Delenda Est when I installed Alpha 22, forgetting that it would delete everything when uninstalling the old version before installing the new version, but it wouldn't take more than a few hours to port over again.

The Kingdom of Kush: Unit: Kushite War Elephant 0 A.D. Concept art by Malcolm K. K. Quartey (Sundiata) Since becoming more familiar with Kushite history, ancient references and archaeological sites such as Musawwarat, it has become apparent that this civilisation wouldn't be complete without elephants (known as abore, in ancient Meroitic). This rather simple, war-elephant, occasionally fielded by the Meroites, would have been trained from Aborepi ("The Place of the Elephant"), known to modern archaeology as Musawwarat es Sufra. The particular type of elephant employed by the Kushites, was the now extinct North African Elephant (Loxodonta Africana Pharaoensis). The closest living relative is most probably the extremely endangered African Forest Elephant (Loxodonta Cyclotis). At only 2 - 2,5 meters at the shoulder, both of these species are significantly smaller than the enormous and more common African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta Africana), which is considered untrainable, as well as the Indian and Syrian Elephants. This unit, however strong, has one major weakness: other elephants. These small Kushite elephants were absolutely terrified by their larger Indian cousins. This is echoed by Pliny when he wrote "The African elephant is afraid of the Indian, and does not dare so much as look at it, for the latter is of much greater bulk". The size, smell and noise of Indian elephants makes "Ethiopian" war-elephants not stand against them, but rather turn and run. I based my illustration on the statuette found at Meroe (now in the Nubian Museum in Aswan), showing an elephant with mahout carrying a typical, East African round shield, strengthened and decorated with metal (brass) strips and shield boss. I added some javelins as the weapon of choice. The design of the blanket is based on the blankets worn by the elephants in one of the reliefs at Aborepi, sometimes referred to as "Apedemak's War Elephants". The mahout is also seen wearing a (brass) rimmed skullcap/helmet with nose-guard. Here are the written sources of the use of war elephants by Kushites, as well as the visual references: PS: For the other three illustrations I created, I made sketches first, digitalised them, and then adjusted and colored them in photoshop using my laptop's trackpad. For this war elephant, I created my very first, purely digital painting, using a Wacom sketchpad. As I am new to illustration, critiques, remarks and tips would be very much appreciated.

@Sundiata, helpful screenshots thanks. Although I think it was my laziness that's got in the way of using a more diverse terrain texture palette, I probably should have started with a smaller map to get better at this. It will probably take another few hours to get the all terrain up to the standard in your screenshots but I'll give it a go.

@AgamemnonPhlemnon, I am by no means an expert (I've only once attempted making a map in 0AD, years ago...) What I mean is that, many areas of the open grasslands only seem to use 1 terrain texture, which, when zoomed out cause these ugly, unnatural looking, recurring patterns. I assume this is the standard ground texture when opening Atlas? Overpainting them with a large variety of different, yet similar textures, randomly overlapping each other, makes it look a lot more natural. The finer you work, the better the result (I know, it's a painstaking job, but I think it pays off in the end) I hope this helps.

I saw this in AOE official forums. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XMFVhx-bJQJ3PbZEbJ4C4Bpw1CY5dKFiE6sr9MWpJME/edit?usp=drive_web

I look forward to playing this map! Nice work!

Thanks for the advice @Sundiata, I'll try to make the shore a little more realistic. Any tips for making textures more realistic?

The map looks nice :-)

Calling a single map India is a little bit confusing. India has many different landscapes from mountains, to deserts, to forest and sea areas. Maybe it would be better to name the India map after a specific area.

If I'm getting it right, the counter system is more tactical than statistical. Units that have been granted x3 against Cavalry, and are very tanky against all other infantry have the cost of being very slow. That means that players going against pure spearmen builds are forced to hit-and-run tactics rather than making head-on collisions. If this is where the developers intend, then I can adjust myself to it. But what I want to know is do OTHER players like it? *As a sidenote. Have you guys realized that slingers are essentially human Siege Weapons? I just saw the patch.

well ok then there you go

I can put them on the roof if you like. the temple is already longer than the standard greek temple footprint, ive seen some images of braziers on the eaves of the pediment, though i dont know how accurate they are.

Nice new profile pic That guy seems sad tho :/

they only run if they are chasing, fleeing, or catching up to a formation. do we have formations still? idk

I tried krita for a bit, didn't care for it much. It does handle more like physical paint though, if that's what you're after

@Sundiata Regarding drawing of pictures, did you look at Krita? It is a free and open source tool for drawing artists. I am not an artist, but I think it is very helpful. In addition, it is always nice to see if people are able to produce content for open source projects with free and open source tools.

@Sundiata Good work regarding researching all those information about elephants. You provided some evidence about how they where used: "But against their centre, which he heard was the strongest, he set himself and his elephants with towers on their backs, together with the men-at-arms of the Blemmyes and the Seres, whom he instructed what they should do when they came to fight." However, it does not say anything about how they influenced the battle. Did the Kushites use those elephants to scare or to fight? Where they used against specific units, for example against cavalry? Having those additional information would help to make the war elephants of the Kushites even more accurate. But the results of your research will make the Kushite war elephants already very unique :-)

I think there are different logics to look at this point: I agree with most of you, that realism is something a lot of games miss and that this game is a beauty in its own sense. I see it from a gamers point of view, who likes to maybe play a game competitively and my concern is coming out of that corner. At some point, the graphics are not so important anymore, it's the gameplay which will be key when you play like that. I also see it from the point of an observerfriendly experience. Most games I personnaly like to play, are also games which are nice to spectate, to watch replays and streams; if you don't recognize the units easily, it becomes quite hard on the eye. But I really understand the points you made :).

I agree with @Sundiata, zooming is the good tool to overview all battlefields, cities, how they look like. Also I don't like many player's colors on units/building, it looks too cartoonly and oddly. I've never met topic restrictions with visualizations, usually I have selected units in a battle, to see what's happening. Also zoom out isn't bad for mircoactions, because you could control the greater number of units/building (what I do usually) and see the danger faster. My opinion is also in parallel with these two guys.

A square masked off.

I'll give 6 replays that were played in the start of a22. Enjoy ! 2v3 skirm cav in hunt map.7z 2v3 : Feldfeld, merlin1 vs Pretension (JC), Chronical, echotangoecho. Map : African plains This game, a bit imbalanced shows the strentg of skirm cav when massed in such a hunt map. 3v3 Arctic summer trade map.7z 3v3 : Feldfeld, Emperior, kjager vs Pretension (JC), Grugnas, Chronical. Map : Arctic summer Seems like Arctic summer is confirmed as a tradespam map, as there is few wood. If i recall well, there is wood treasure at the start, but this time treasures were disabled. 4v4 skirm cav in hunt map, and leaving.7z 4v4 : Feldfeld, merlin1, Uran238cz, realNoobNoob vs Grugnas, kjager, yunk2, Pretension (JC). Map : African plains Shows once more the importance of skirm cav in this map (and the weakness of spear cav civs in early and middle game in such maps). The game ended after some ppl leaved, and couldn't be replaced (is that possible with the use of STUN to host ? Or i just gave wrong ip ?). So don't be surprised with a major suicide, and a resignation that seems at first sight not justified. 2v2 ele stealing.7z 2v2 : Emperior, Feldfeld vs Dizaka, Emperior. Map : Mainland With the accuracy rework, elephants are easier to hunt. They were even called "food treasures that follow you home". It becomes important to try to steal as much as possible. Elephants are crucial and decide the games they're in. 3v3 strength of skirmisher cavalry.7z 3v3 : reek (ragnar), temple, mapkoc vs ITRELLES1, chrstgr, Feldfeld. Map : Frontier This replay shows the strength (OPness ?) of skirmisher cav rush in hunt map. If they're massed enough early game, what can stop them ? 3v3 army composition.7z 3v3 : reek (ragnar), mapkoc, chrstgr vs Feldfeld, _jr_, ITRELLES1. Map : Frontier I called this replay like this, because i think that gauls have a very weak late game army composition, and that now they're one of the weakest civs. As always, you can download all replays in a pack : pack.7z. This post may not respect the rules of the subforum, but i would find it pretty boring to create a thread for each replays i want to post, so i made it like this. I won't do it again if i'm asked not to.

lol patreon, patreons don't work unless you have a captive audience of over ten thousand people who like your stuff. If you do open a patreon you can charge by completed model instead of monthly.

I'll plug battalions as a solution for this, among other things of course.

I agree with @Sundiata, zooming is the good tool to overview all battlefields, cities, how they look like. Also I don't like many player's colors on units/building, it looks too cartoonly and oddly. I've never met topic restrictions with visualizations, usually I have selected units in a battle, to see what's happening. Also zoom out isn't bad for mircoactions, because you could control the greater number of units/building (what I do usually) and see the danger faster.

@borg- @sphyrth by the way put some descriptive title to the topic.

Lovely map indeed... Maybe some more variation in ground textures, slightly thicker and diverse forests, and a little more naturalism in that round sea side mountain/plateau (more irregular, jagged edges, and rising less abruptly from the surrounding flats). I'm assuming that's castle rock?

This is one of the main criticisms that Darc has with the game.

I was unsure about this, but I checked the code, and both work.

Can't say. Sadly there isn't much I can do to help you. I can only say this though : the more you play the easier it will be to distinguish your units. At first it'll be a messy and then it'll be your mess. Hope you'll still have fun with the game and if you are bored feel free to try out gameplay mods and content mods. You'll find more in the modding section of this forum.

If you want to take a look at the code, the components that are relevant for this are RangeManager and Fogging. The former handles the fog-of-war (FoW), line-of-sight and other kind of unit ranges unrelated to the FoW; the latter handles hiding changes to buildings in the FoW. It's a complex part of the code, that needs a good number of optimizations so it doesn't become a bottleneck. Maybe our implementation is not ideal for your mobile platform target. You say it looks bad so you might actually be wondering how we render it - that's not my area of expertise but we render a FoW texture on top of everything that is inside it. The code is here: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/source/graphics/LOSTexture.cpp

Hi there, I'm the Lead Programmer for Empires. If you guys got any technical questions, feel free to ask me.

Babylonian Spearman

You certainly can sell them. And while we might not have stated it recently we have at least previously had the opinion that the creator of something is free to decide if he/she does something else with the content. (Obviously you would have to abide by the license if you are e.g. using an existing texture etc, but for something you have created from scratch.)

No. The question is also whether they make their art available under the same license (or at least any art that is based on cc-by-sa art, exactly what happens when you combine art with different licenses is too complicated for non-lawyers to discuss generally =) ). :-P If they only use art from others I guess that point is quite moot though. *rolleyes* But generally speaking they are allowed to use our art, as long as they give credit and make anything they create based on it available under the same license. That doesn't go for non-free/CC/OS Art though. That's a clear violation of the law.

Well I figure out how to get the main menu animations to work, check it out: https://www.dropbox.com/s/n4b4r6wggoxg4u7/HyruleConquestMenu2.mp4?dl=0 Here's the the static image:

What do you mean by urbinizing?

The Horses of Kush Lisa A. Heidorn (PhD, Archaeology of NE Africa)

isn't the game already structured in that way? I mean.. Ranged units have the advantage to stay in range while melee units have to reach them, thats why Archers for example have advantage over swordmen btw they die easly vs cavalry

Historically for civilizations without massive siege engines, slingers were the siege engines. I remember reading somewhere the Gauls would stone their opponents off their walls before sapping them, besides, it would be nice to have low tier siege weapons to grade out the harsh jump between town phase siege warfare and the inevitable city phase siege-and-champ blitz

Skin wobbling around would be excessive IMO, there needs to be a bone for each part that we want skin wobbly parts and I think there's no need for such detail in a RTS. I've added more weight to the head, animated the mouth, flapping ears (not too much since they don't have inner geometry), and fixed the tail movement. There's some stretching in the lower part of the chest that I couldn't get rid of due to the mesh topology, but it shouldn't be a problem from the game's camera perspective.

Using what I learned while animating the rhino into good use...