Leaderboard

Anti-Spam Mechanic Suggestion For as long as I have been playing it, 0 A.D. has been having problems with balance. In each and every of the last 6 releases (or perhaps more) there has been 1 "op" unit. That unit got spammed, it's that simple. Some may argue that we need a perfect counter system, then we don't need such a limitation as the following proposed feature. But then again, even if a counter system is implemented, I think that it is more effective in team games for each player to specialize a certain unit, then help out accordingly. It has happened in other games with perfect counter systems. It's very good from teamwork point of view but in ancient times armies weren't composed of 2 types of units. Alpha 17: Sword cavalry op, spam them and down opponent's cc with a rush Alpha 18-19: Hazy for me, I myself spammed archer champions and downed buildings, easily outranging them. Alpha 20-21: Champion rush and later spam. Alpha 21: Slinger spam. Alpha 22: Cavalry skirmisher/archer spam. No cav games: skirmisher spam + melee as fodder Summary: meh Proposal: Each unit increases cost of same unit type by 0.5/1%. This stackable "aura" would make such spams not as profitable and would incite some players to search for other, yet just as efficient army compositions featuring several unit types. As a side effect, this feature makes larger batch trains even more attractive, since they are trained at the cost of next unit only, not all those after. Example: +0.5% per unit +1% per unit Why did I choose 90 units? In Alpha 22 after players banned cavalry they started spamming skirmishers, it became common to see such armies marching about. Why this kind of anti-spam mechanic? It's easy to explain this 1%, the area is drained of possible soldiers, equipment is needed etc. Overdemand, this is the word under which 0 A.D. takes a step towards a more balanced future. In this post I am not siding with nor necessarily supporting other gameplay suggestions, I feel that this isn't a big overhaul. Some will say that this isn't enough, others will resent the passing of age-old strategies. From battalions to slaves and nomads, 0 A.D. has a vast choice of future paths, each leading to something different, something unique. The team is careful, taking steps slowly - sometimes perhaps to the detriment of progress - but they are I'm sure familiar with the problem the game faces and they wish the best for it. I'm not saying that we should throw all the gameplay suggestions away, just that they all encompass several changes that drag a train of other modifications with them and the team might not want to introduce them at least for now. Implementation: Ah, the step where all the enthusiastic developers say "meh" and go watch dog memes. It could be done with each unit class having a a stackable aura, but we know that global auras are problematic - especially when they come in big stacks. I'm not familiar with code so I wont say anything else but I hope it is possible to find a way. If you are still unmotivated, please click here Last one

Temple:

Historically, heavy (melee) infantry formations dominated the battlefield and decided the outcome. Light (ranged) infantry was there for harassing the enemy; although they frequently outnumbered other troops, their numbers did not always “count”. Cavalry was almost always less than 10% of an army; they were often light in function, organized in squadrons on the flanks, and served for reconnaisance, protecting against enemy cavalry, and especially for chasing down fleeing enemies. Bigae (light two-horse chariots) more or less had the same function as cavalry, unlike quadrigae (heavy four-horse chariots), which were located in front of the heavy infantry formation and served to disrupt the enemy's; they were replaced with elephantry. An interesting characteristic of Hellenistic warfare was that, because of the rather standard army deployment: “in battles between combined arms forces, similar troop types tended to find themselves fighting one another – cavalry against cavalry, light infantry against light infantry, elephants against elephants, and so on.” (CHGRW 404)

Corral*:

i'm going for both types, so @Skhorn could make his constantinople map perfectly suited for the mod

These?

Patches commited between April 1st and April 20th 2017 for a commit freeze July 16th 2017.

Blacksmith (old blacksmith changed to armory for later eyecandy usage):

I don't necessarily disagree with the way 0 A.D. is going, I feel that in Alpha 22 the balance was only disrupted because of the last-minute accuracy patch which severely impacted skirmisher effectiveness. While no real candidate has as yet surfaced in Alpha 23, it remains to be seen. But one may be certain that cavalry will not be OP, archers will be more flexible, etc Also some OP heroes were rebalanced, hopefully the rest of the hero aura revision patch will be in for A24. This is all thanks to @temple, @Feldfeld, @(-_-), @elexis and several others who have relentlessly tested and patched. Cavalry roles are more clear now, with spear cavalry taking the lead and decisively defeating other cavalry types. Skirmisher cavalry will be more focused on raids and support, while sword cavalry are now the fastest and will likewise carry out raids, down siege and perform well vs. slingers. Finally fixed, bolts are now useable - alongside with catapults that promise lethal damage against ranged spams. Champion train time has been reduced to more palatable levels, with costs kept as they were to guard against overuse. While some will undoubtedly find faults and others will name it lacking in strategy, we may hope that this release will have the qualities of its namesake and not be such a "failure" as its predecessor. The best course is still for the team to import successful features from mods, for modders to experience, visualize and realize - and the other mods to kick, ban and mute miscreants from the lobby. Those lookers-on who merely type ideas on the forum but don't realize them should start showing that they can lend a helping hand in furthering the project. In the future, it would definitely be nice to have new unique technologies for every civilization, with pair technologies where players must decide on a course. Everyone is welcome to input ideas and proposals. Grander visions and more complicated features must wait. I agree that units should have designated roles but not necessarily that we need to jump on the hard counter system and do fast and brutal computing in-game to spam what and when. As a closing statement, I think that this recent conversation has gone off-topic.

Thanks! Almost finished... There's still some spelling mistakes and a few weird sentences that could use a re-write, but saving changes to the post has become a real pain because it's so long... The page times out while saving or something, often causing me to loose my progress... Oh well . I really hope to finish it today...

Eh, that's an opinion, not a fact. The other way is to decide roles for every unit and then balance. The problem right now is that no thought [AS FAR AS I CAN TELL] is being put into unit roles.

Elephant existed in China during the Shan period, but probably went extinct soon after. They were not used in warfare after Shang Dynasty until...North & South Dynasties (445 AD), if I remember correctly. In fact their uses were rare enough that the incident would get recorded down as if something very extraordinary.

It's come to my attention that there was an approved plan for dropping FFP and ARB shader support some 6 years ago, but the dev that was working on it left so it never got done, and we've been arguing about it on and off ever since. According to a survey taken some 3 years ago or so over 95% of our users have support for at least openGL 2.1 (shader version 120) and more than 45% have support for openGL 3.3 or newer, while a good chunk support 3.0 or 3.1 as well. So this is what I propose: - We remove all traces that FFP ever existed, from config, shader effects, and anything in the codebase relating to those things. - We remove all traces that ARB shaders ever existed. There is basically no one using them and no one working on them. The legacy support is cluttering up the codebase and making it more difficult to support newer and more useful things. Additionally, I propose we add support for: - Automatically detecting hardware GL version to support whatever 3.0/3.1/3.3/4.x features the user's hardware allows (and that we can find good use for). - Allowing for choosing different GLSL shader versions automatically based on GL version support. - Creating a config/command line option for spoofing older GL versions for testing purposes, so it's possible for devs to manually choose which shader versions will be loaded. - And of course support for draw-call reducing features from GL3.1-3.3, based on whatever the user's hardware supports. Since some things have lower version requirements than others it makes sense to allow such things to be enabled incrementally so users can get as much as their hardware can provide. Finally, I think we should establish shader version 120 as the standard for legacy OpenGL 2.x support, since basically no users have GL 2.0 graphics cards and virtually everyone has support for 2.1. GLSL version 120 supports a couple of very convenient features that allow for efficient shaders, at least as far as what 2.x supports in terms of performance. Not every shader needs to be declared as #version 120 (if it doesn't matter then who cares), but it should at least be made allowable without question wherever it's needed. Note that a lot of shaders will likely remain as GL2.x simply because there's no benefit to upgrading them. The water shader and postproc shader(s) and even the terrain shader are good examples. At the moment the only shaders that I'm aware of that would benefit from GL3.x are model_common and the particle shader, to support drawinstanced and soft particles.

Hi, I'm currently surrounded by Irish speakers (while I have a child in an Irish speaking school and know some of the teachers a little). I also have friends in Greece (including language teachers) and other countries. I worked as a musician/singer for ten years and have sold most recording equipment, but I have a Zoom H5 and good recording/editing software. Let me know if I can help with voices.

Heavy infantry includes citizen-soldier hoplites, and they were historically heavily armored enough that they could mostly shrug off projectiles of skirmishers, archers, and slingers. Most damage to heavy infantry was dealt during a melee clash with the enemy heavy infantry. Melee infantry should get a lot more pierce armor, and lower hack armor so they die quickly in melee but slowly to ranged.

Apparently that's a good source for Animations Wijitmaker recommended it https://books.google.fr/books?id=_ETCAgAAQBAJ

Ok, done (Y)

These might also be useful then:

i mean the side seen from inside the city, but yes i will make both walls (maybe the 3). Btw thanks for the picture its better than the one i have

If you give me a list of exactly what posts would go in there I guess I could, but maybe just start a new topic with any conclusions after the discussion is gotten to a point where you have a conclusion. This topic is messy as is, so it can just as well be used for the discussion =)

Do you still plan to record voices ?

The problem is those civs had really specific building shapes so it's hard to stay accurate while following the shape. You might argue we did that for the new stables buildings and you'd be right.

I think there's nothing wrong in given some ideas, discussion or feedback if is a positive tone. Overdone discussions? sure. Although I agree that some of us should try to contribute with active modding. Mod.io seems a easier way to share gameplay mods with a broader community, and then, a way to have a better vision. Maybe unifing the damage could lead to an easier design, but probably would lead to hard-counters. BTW, I thought that damage and armours were agnostic, like the resources.

Thanos is that you ? Perfectly balanced 0 A.D. i'm thinking more on Rise and Fall pc game but i see your point, AoE don't have heroes whitout campaing leaving the regicide mode only for heroes and choose your hero at the start of the game like Hyrule mod.

Could help too if the counter system is for unit type: Spears > Cavalry Swords > Spears Axes > Swords Archers > Axes Javelin > Archers Slingers > Javelin Heavy > Light > Skirmishers > Heavy (Size of shields) Big Shields > Big defence, low rate attack, low speed, high HP Med Shields > balance between defence and attack, regular move speed, regular HP Small shields > Low defense, High attack rate, fast move speed, low HP And maybe reduce the duration of heroes by reducing their life, they are like tanks with that HP and breaks immersion looking 12 units killing him taking some time, maybe reducing their hp but increasing their aura strenght and reducing the range, this way player could value more the life of the hero and use it more wisely and with captured hero mechanics maybe after died he won't died at all at the 1st time he could be capture and move it to the closest enemy civic center or frotress allowing to be rescued by capturing or destroying the building and if its killed 2 times permanently die whitout chance of train again.

The number of limited workers, who working on field is 5. Other units do nothing if they go on field when the field is occupied by 5 workers. Build more fields for good food economy or build stables and get meat by cavalery units (gather boni).

Actually, they would need the accounts on Transifex, not here. How much time do you want to spend really doing boring copy/paste? It might also become problematic coordinating that with people who work on Transifex directly.

While waiting for A23 to come out I got hooked on MP games. It’s quite fun playing with fun playing people but in the end spamming of units is the only strategy. From P1 until P3 the activity is the same just gather, build (as many structures as you can) and spam units. Then in a few minutes the game is over because either you are rolling over the opponent or the other way around. There are so many things suggested already like one Barca is suggesting (I suggested to do something on spamming too like RoN) but I think they want to stick to AoE or AoK thing. Some even say oh limiting on anything is not possible. With these unique ranged units firing unlimited amount of projectiles and easily spamming it with infinite number of structures producing units I won’t wonder anymore on my previous game when Chrstgr was rolling over me/us with an average of 100 skirmisher and a couple of rams. As Nescio said it’s nice that melee battle should be the main battle. The range units role are just not real. Later.

First post. Nice.

Indeed, but ripe for experimentation via modding.

Rise of Nations had a similar system (although more like subsequent units ramp up at 5% and structures at 10%), which worked great there, however, it also had income limits and all resources were infinite. 0 A.D. is a different game.

> You do not create a counter system to balance OP units, you balance them all then make sure each got their role. There is the property that every unit has a counter which should rule out a single unit being able to become OP, such as the examples you mentioned. Also for the OP history part, you forgot Ptolemian Camel rush until Alpha 19, Mauryan Yoddas downing buildings like sword cav did, champions having had values like 70 attack, invisible bolt shooters with massive crush damage, ships that fired up to 43 arrows. I don't really think that skirmishers + spearmen are the only choice in alpha 22, nor how the relative cost would improve it. I'm just waiting for the day where the opponent might be scared by you if you built the hard counter to his massed units that can wipe out his entire army, even if outnumbered.

You do not create a counter system to balance OP units, you balance them all then make sure each got their role. You're right in stating that this fix merely minimizes the problem, I agree with that. But in the end the spamming of a unit doesn't necessarily mean that it in itself is OP, just that it is the most efficient in the task designated by the player. Why would skirmishers + fodder be good? Why reduce the Melee class to something inferior and just trained to get as many missiles stuck into them as possible? Sure, a counter could be invented against it, but it's already flawed at the core principle. But this isn't connected to the proposed feature, maximum that the skirmisher spam becomes harder to acquire and replentish

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, please excuse me. Does the Comma hotkey works? When ever I play with the Iberians (barracks) or I group together multiple buildings into a hokey group I can't train the units that correspond to the comma. I'm using Linux (Ubuntu) build out of source.

Add a reminder in the app calendar of the cellphone.

Please remind us in alpha 24, we could have easily committed that

Honestly, the lack of sticking with the general shapes of the buildings in public is the major visual flaw of this particular mod. Those Saxon and Carolingian and other buildings should be redesigned for recognition sake. Just my opinion.

Definitely metadata.json in the replays

http://www.mywizards.com/catapults/onager/ A pretty decent article. In short, an onager bucked wildly when fired. If it had wheels, the bucking and momentum of the throwing arm would cause a swaying motion that would reduce the power of the throw.

I'm not stanislas, but I think it's ok if I did it =)

Market

Farmstead: None of the other buildings have followed the schema besides i don't have enough imagination for make it similar to public

Storehouse:

Byza dock

Okay... that's not exactly true... There is no debate about the fact that "Aithiopia" primarily refers to the areas directly to the south of Egypt in Antiquity. Only later does it become more widely used, as the true extent of Sub-Saharan Africa started becoming apparent. Aethiops means something like burnt face, and refers to black people in general. The vast majority of black people in the Mediterranean of antiquity, however, would have been from Kush or its periphery, by simple virtue of geography and recorded history. Areas further south of Sudan only become more widely known to the Greeks after Alexander, but even then, direct contact between the Eritrean coast and the Greeks of Ptolemaic Egypt was mostly limited to the city of Adulis... Herodotus is not the only one who referred to Kush specifically as Aethiopia, even naming Meroë specifically as the "capital of the other Aethiopians"... Strabo narrates the Kushite-Roman war (in his Geography, Book XVII, 54), and specifically refers to the areas south of Egypt as Aethiopia, including "Aethiopian cities" like Pselchis (Dakka) and Nabata (Napata). How about the words of Emperor Augustus himself? He too, leaves no ambiguity about what he meant with "Ethiopia": "On my order and under my auspices two armies were led, at almost the same time, into Ethiopia and into Arabia which is called the "Happy," and very large forces of the enemy of both races were cut to pieces in battle and many towns were captured. Ethiopia was penetrated as far as the town of Nabata, which is next to Meroë" - Emperor Agustus - from the "Res Gestae Divi Augusti" (The Deeds of the Divine Augustus), the funerary inscription of the first Roman Emperor, giving a first-person record of his life and accomplishments, including the invasion of Kush. Even the Bible refers to "Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians" in the New Testament story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:26-40). Kandake was the Meroitic title for the queens of Kush, including the ruling queens of the 1st century AD... Notwithstanding that the Ancient Hebrew term "Cush", from the Old Testament is invariably translated as "Ethiopia" in the Greek version, for example: "King Tirhakah of Cush" became "King Tirhakah of Ethiopia". Obviously referring to the Kushite King Taharqa... The specific facial features of most Africans portrayed in Mediterranean art (including Greek and Roman), usually referred as "Ethiopians/aethiopians", clearly show people of Nilo-Saharan ancestry, as you would find among the Kushites, not people with Afro-Semitic Habesha features, as you would find among the Afro-Asiatic speakers of D'mt or Axum. Axum only becomes dominant in the horn of Africa from the 4th century AD, and they definitely had some Byzantine influence, but you shouldn't conflate the more narrow meaning of Aethiopia in Classical Antiquity, referring to the area directly south of Egypt, with the broader meaning of Aethiopia from late Antiquity and the early medieval period onwards, referring to black Africa as a whole. Only later still, does it become more specifically associated with the modern day country of Ethiopia, which in itself was primarily known as Abyssinia until 1935-ish.