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lead slingers could outrange archers in the right conditions (up to 300 yards), but only lead slingers. Lead slingers can be reserved for mercenary/champion roles. Stone slingers may have a shorter range (60-80 yards), but they would fill the role quite fine as 'light archers'

We should be sparing with unit counters. Before the soft system it was all some units were good for, everything had a counter applied to it regardless of whether or not it was needed. Good discussions here, I like the involvement.

Indeed. It's like folks forget that this was all thought about years ago. Reintroduce attack bonuses and a lot of concerns like this are taken care of: "Macemen" were rare in our timeframe. But for units like the Mauryan Macedude, just give him an attack bonus vs. "Whatever" class and let his crush damage do its work on buildings. And your concern presupposes that slingers have to use crush attack. They don't have to. Everything is changeable.

I don't want to tediously have to Garrison everything in order to make everything work. The high pop cost already assumes a crew to man the machines

After sifting through the library I've sort of begun to understand how your painters and placers work now. The painters I can mostly understand although I haven't figured out what kind of values it expects for all the params. One thing that does bother me is that the fractal painter seems to expect a roughly circular area when placing. What then would happen if you fed it a non-circular area, like say a long wavy region produced by a path placer? As is it might be difficult to integrate usefully with existing rmgen library utilities. While I'm not sure if that's actually an issue or not, the interface is also nonstandard for painters. The area param should be moved to paint() and the 'nochiasm' param should be moved to the constructors. Beyond that I'd have to play around with it to see what it can do. For 'nochiasm' I can sort of see and appreciate how that works, but it also lacks a 'modify' type functionality like the current elevation painters offer, which is useful if you don't know ahead of time what the base elevation will be (for example when using diamond-square for initial terrain randomization). The placer interface is terrible. In the map you do some sort of weird raw loop to create a "monts" zone and some others which I don't really understand the point of. Reimplementing constraints and things from scratch in an even less intuitive fashion is less than ideal. It'd be better to extend the RandomMap prototype with that kind of stuff. Personally I don't really like how the current tileclass system works, since each tileclass is effectively defined as a random bag of points, which is particularly inefficient for checking constraints later on and also means that a given point may belong to more than one tileclass, which is kind of bad when you're creating a map by painting layers. However constraints are very convenient, or at least the interface for them is (which I've submitted a patch to improve even further). The current (rmgen) implementation doesn't handle slope hardly at all, which could definitely be improved as well. I can certainly see the usage of the road creating function although I can't really tell if it auto-flattens terrain to create a path if there isn't already one, but that would be nice. It seems like something that would need a lot of tuning but it's definitely a cool feature. The existing road function sucks. I cannot really figure out the purpose of the YPatchPlacer, or how it differs from any other sort of placer. Cramming all that stuff in with the TOMap doesn't make much sense. The TOMap should have its own interface, and the placement/road functions should have their own, possibly moved into gaia_terrain or wherever happens to be most appropriate.

attack rate/attack range/speed/armor(type effectiveness)/counter bonuses

It does not. (I know because the Faction-Specific Resources mod is mine, so I've been through the mod.io process already). There will have been an option that allows you to save, but not go live. In the meantime, you can return to your mod's page (https://0ad.mod.io/siege) and select the tick icon in the toolbar (between the pencil and the archive-box icons) to hide it and make it non-live. Alternatively, if you want to stay live, go to your mod file's edit page (https://0ad.mod.io/siege/edit/files/163) and add {} into the "Metadata" box at the bottom. Your mod will still be publicly visible on mod.io, (it might even appear as an option in 0ad,) but it won't be downloadable and verifiable in-game until you get a valid signature from @Itms.

Yes, and that's problematic. Historically macemen were highly effective vs armoured units and slingers vs foot archers (because they could outrange them). However, in 0 A.D. all soldiers have ridiculously high crush armour, which make crush damage units not very effective.

Maybe when workshops are fully implemented? Set it as a requirement for siege equipment construction in the field.

The battering ram came into my camp just taking out fully upgraded defense towers left and right in less then a minute and I had plenty of men attacking it, but is does not make sense that a wooden structure can take out a stone structure while being attack by 10 plus men so quickly?

Okay so it's one o'clock in the morning and I packaged three mods. For some reason it would consistently crash on windows but it didn't on linux, so I guess there is something fishy with lineendings or something similar. Possible bugs: There should only be three civs in Ponies Ascendant, but deleted folders do not seem to work. The tweaked Terra Magna skeletons might break the shark and crocodile, this needs to be investigated. Get ready for anything, but please report them here, and only here. terra_magna.pyromod millenniumad.pyromod ponies_ascendant.pyromod

As it stands, Rams and Siege towers behave like tanks on the field instead of strictly siege units, as they ought to be, I would propose a similar fix as is had with catapults and bolt shooters, a vulnerable mobile stage and a painfully slow attack stance. Moving packed siege across large swaths of territory wont be as tedious if we were to just drop unit speed to something more realistic, something we can save for its unpacked variation. Discuss if you would, I have a long standing gripe with rams and haven't played A23 enough to get a feel for how their latest iteration is, so my opinion is likely both biased and outdated.

We haven't for any platform right now, we are testing the next release of Millennium and Terra Magna.

Dellingr was the mod for A22 we are working for A23 version. We are deleting mode that aren't qualified for A23.

Wasn’t one of the complaints the fact that there weren’t any counters? If we go and re-implement unit boni, then the problem is solved. I never understood why people didn’t didn’t like hard counters.

Caesar spent years campaigning all over Gaul (about 8 years, I think), as opposed to spending probably no more than 6 months in Britain (both campaigns combined), barely going inland at all. His descriptions of Britain including the specifics about the war are far less expansive and detailed. If anything, he says that there is little difference between the British Celts on the coast and the Gallic Celts (except for chariots for example). And a logical fallacy. I wasn't arguing that Britains used the bow because Carthaginians, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Mauryans or Romans, used the bow. I was arguing that they used the bow because their immediate predecessors (yes, partly ancestors), used them, as well as their culturally very similar contemporary neighbors, the Gallic Celts. Yes, of course, but expecting tangible evidence in the form of organic remains from more than 2000 years ago, or written records from a pre-literate society is kind of silly, isn't it? Interpretation of circumstantial evidence becomes necessary in this scenario, and I believe that a "lack of archery among British Celts" is the wrong interpretation. Archery being present, but probably not playing a big role in warfare seems like a much more tenable and nuanced position, than a lack of archery altogether.

Yes, I'm aware; we've already established Britons shouldn't have archers (and Gauls should). Caesars frequently mentions the Gauls using archers. However, he also invaded Britain (end of book IV, start of book V) and describes several battles there; he repeatedly states the Britons use chariotry and cavalry, spears and javelins, but he never mentions they had archers, bows, or arrows. It's not a fair comparison, it's an exaggaration My intention was to show why I prefer "there is evidence they had", instead of "there is no evidence they had not".

When you register for the lobby you have to agree to the terms and conditions, which clearly states this, so it should not be a surprise. Especially since ours are short enough to read without giving up =) Done (Y)

Units doesn't collide with themselves (can go through other units) AFAIK, that makes the problem much easier. Challenge accepted

@elexis, so you're telling me:

In case this was about clickbait: Wow, 19.333 entities in 0 A.D. rendered at the same time, 60FPS in 1080p... This 1 minute scene on a giant Jebel Barkal map (set 1080p) was rendered for about 6 hours on my computer (until it crashed) and 1 hour on Imaroks computer: It took between 10 and 30 seconds on my computer to advance one second in the match. But the video was rendered targetting 60 FPS and 1080p. We can further increase the number of entities in trailers as long as the CPU or GPU don't melt (it did for bb when creating a trailer scene), maybe to 100k too sometime (but that were overadvertizing the game performance by a factor of 100).

Well, I don't know. Cossacks could easily handle tens of thousands of units without noticeable lag on an ordinary pc in 2001.

@user1 has dealt with this issue so far, I will not intervene If you are telling the truth, we convey our sincere apologies. If you are not being wholly sincere, please state so and help clear this situation up

Sounds like clickbait. lol.

You're assuming the 7th C BC Iberians are the descendants of the 7th M BC "cave-people". That's a big if. History is not static. People can migrate and a lot can happen in thousands of years. I don't know about Spain specifically, but in most of Europe the "original" populations have been replaced more than once over the past five thousand years. Again, same problem. The Britons were Celts and Celts only started to migrate to the British islands gradually after 800 BC. What others did in Neolithic times is irrelevant here. Yes, they do. Slingers are different from archers, but they can counter them. To clarify, I'm not opposed to Briton and Iberian archers per se, but I'd like to see a reference first. Failing that, I agree it's better they don't have archers until then. I vehemently disagree with your radical idea. Archers and slingers were quite different units. Archers were typically massed and thus quite effective vs massed targets (including cavalry) but also vulnerable themselves to projectiles. Greek sources repeatedly state slingers easily outranged archers and that slingers were loosely organized (they needed space for swinging their slings); they were effective vs archers but vulnerable to cavalry. Slingers could sling anything from large stones of over 500 g (high impact, shorter range) to lead bullets of less than 5 g (too small and fast to see or dodge, highly penetrative, very hard to extract) and everything in between.

Yeah sure just not like next week Well it complaining about a missing mud file in the packaged version. Sure. You need to add the rudder while you are at it. It's better to not rely on whatever is done in the public mod. Notice I added a few skeleton files to make sure none was missing. Also it's better to let my script handle the making of those than to make them by hand.

Serbian archaeologists find sarcophagus with two skeletons and jewellery in ancient city https://www.reuters.com/article/us-serbia-archeology/serbian-archaeologists-find-sarcophagus-with-two-skeletons-and-jewellery-in-ancient-city-idUSKCN1IW1JB?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews The Viminacium site, near the town of Kostolac, around 70 km east of Belgrade, was a military camp and the capital of the Roman province of Moesia Superior, dating back to the 1st century AD. It had a hippodrome, fortifications, a forum, palace, temples, amphitheatre, aqueducts, baths and workshops. According to historians, it could have been the home to some 40,000 people. So far, only about 4 percent of it has been explored, said Miomir Korac, the director of the site.

The main problem with Bowmen starting civs is that any civ starting with skirmishers has the advantage of having strong economy and attack power. Skirmishers high movement speed give them the title of best economy-friendly units. They grant fast expanding, fast resources delivery, fast raids. Usually players reach 60/70 population before phasing up, and 35% of that population is made of skirmishers if available at beginning, which can choose the time and the place for a battle. Swordsmen are effective against rams only if massed (20 sec each to train vs 30 sec each to train), as they are the first target of any ranged unit.

Building on this, maybe showing the match info in the loading screen would be useful. These quitters are more and more frequent, and it's annoying as hell. A complete loss of time. I think the situation is getting out of hand with only manual reporting via forum. Some possible solutions that come to my mind: If a player disconnect from a rated game, game is paused and cannot be resumed while he is absent. If a player is disconnected from a rated game for more than a certain time limit (say 1 minute) he loses and points go to the other player. Maybe have an indicator for each player of number/ratio of unfinished rated games that he's hosted, so we can avoid playing with quitters.

@Alexandermb, here's the brown and black zebu, again, tested with the Sanga mesh so I hope its ok:

And I've just written a mod to show my suggestions: siege.zip Feel free to try it out yourself A very good question! Because I had no idea either what would happen, I play-tested how 0 A.D. would handle it. It turns out the unit training is paused as long as the trainer is garrisoned; a sensible solution.

I'd rather we figure out a way to allow soldiers to build these siege weapons in the field.

It doesn't make historical sense for a ram to have to unpack. They were built on the site of a siege, not transported in a packed form, and once built they could roll around on their own without unpacking. Same for siege towers. Better to make rams unable to attack biological units, and do something else for siege towers.

@Alexandermb, made a zebu texture using a different reference, but I used the Sanga cattle mesh to test, so I don't know what its like on the Zebu: I might try the brown one later

0AD is a historic game, and the only one of its kind that spends so much attention on historical details, which is amazing in itself, and greatly appreciated by many who can't find this level of historicity in other classic RTS games. The general idea is to stick to what is known about the 500BC to 1AD timeframe. Most of the civilization in this timeframe (and there are many) were inter-connected with each other, if not by war, then by trade, culture and art... Just to show how far flung these ancient connection went: Galatian mercenaries served in Ptolemaic armies, so Kushites may well have faced Celts in battle, its not as far-fetched as you may think... There were Greeks living in Meroë... Galatian mercenaries also served in Seleucid armies and may well have faced armies of the Maurya Empire. Carthaginians allied with Celts and Iberians and Indian mahouts served in the armies of the Seleucids, Ptolemies and perhaps even the Carthaginians, or trained local mahouts, and Indians were also present on the East African coast and even Anatolia.. Numidian cavalry from North Africa was used by Trajan in his conquest of Dacia (Romania), Greek colonists from Phocaea (Turkey) founded the Greek city Empuries in Iberia... Long story short: All the civs in-game knew all of the other civs in at least some capacity, and often traded or warred with each other, or even served side by side as mercenaries in foreign armies (think of Indians, Kushites, Egyptians, Greeks, Thracians, Assyrians and others, in the Persian armies of Xerxes, fighting Athenians, Spartans, Corinthians etc... during the Persian invasion of Greece). The level of interconnectedness in antiquity is often overlooked, or misunderstood... But its absolutely delicious once you start seeing it. The ancient world, from Britannia to China was a giant interconnected network of trade routes, that were often fought over by mercenaries from all over "the known world"... Adding, say, Genghis Khan to this mix, or Montezuma would totally break the immersion, while throwing 15 years of attempted historicity through the window... You can also set matches up yourself so you can go for purely historical map/civ combo or do your own thing (especially with mods, its totally up to you)... I'd agree that a more flexible timeframe would benefit 0AD, and more (historical) civs are always welcomed by myself (especially the Eastern ones), but anything outside of Iron Age Antiquity would totally spoil one 0AD's greatest selling points.

Hello and welcome to the forums. The reason we "stick" to this time frame is to be able to properly depict history. If you start adding the XIX century English to a mod about antiquity, that's retarded. Even if you make Britons evolve to that. How much history are you gonna skip ? There are already 13 civs, while it was decided 12 was enough so there is still hope for new civilizations in that time frame. I'm also gonna say we are open source, our art is open source, we are not paid for this, and we do this on our free time, mods included. Also a part II is planned when part I is finished, and part II will cover 0 - 500 AD. I have no clue what you are trying to say here. However Terra_Magna adds Zapotecs, Xiongnu, and the Han Dynasty to the game. A version will hopefully made available soon. If you wanna go medieval, just look at Millenium AD that covers roughly 500 - 1100. If you make your own mods, you can add as many civs in the game as you want.

Not sure which civilizations you consider, but I'm sure they were invaded by rome.

IMO siege weapon capturability should be removed completely. It causes units to do extremely stupid things and is basically useless since killing the siege weapons is almost always faster, by several times. Also I'm pretty sure that every civ has a ram already, and if not rams then elephants which are basically the same thing just with a different weakness. However not every civ has a catapult, which is more problematic since catapults are basically the only ranged siege weapon and the only thing that can shoot over friendly and enemy units without being blocked by meat shields. Siege towers and bolt shooters don't even qualify as siege weapons, since they barely do any crush damage and take forever to kill buildings.

Swordsmen and elephants take out rams quite efficiently. In an emergency, even women can be used with some degree of success. I agree that its a little ridiculous though, the speed at which unprotected rams take out structures even when a considerable army is attacking them. I understand that archers should have a hard time with them, but its currently not possible/realistic to take out rams with ranged units at all... At least make spearman more capable of dealing with them? Obviously spearmen should be a lot better at taking out a ram (by killing the operaters) than swordsmen, who wouldn't necessarily have the reach.. The current system isn't intuitive, especially not for new players...

I personally enjoy turtling against an overwhelming enemy oftentimes because of the epic last stand kind of feel, but I am starting to think that turtling is kind of OP in most situations (aka when you are getting attacked by a normal army, not 100 very hard ais). I think what makes it so OP is that it is practically impossible to capture town centers unless you have a monstrous amount of soldiers if there are soldiers garrisoned in there. Which means that if you get everyone to hide inside of the town center, then your enemy's push going to be defeated unless they either have a laggily big army or siege engines (which might get killed by the arrows before they can unpack), good luck getting any capture points on a town center with units in it to regenerate capture points really fast and shoot arrows everywhere killing your units before they can even get close to capturing it. This may be because I do not use a lot of siege engines, but even then the above example is *without walls*. I suggest some kind of better siege mechanic, where the player can turtle but their units could get starved out like in real ancient sieges. A way to fix this could be adding in where units consume food (which I think would be good for much more then fixing this, as it just makes sense and means you need to have good farming infrastructure to keep your army fed), and do like delenda est does where farms can be constructed outside of your city borders with a debuff to gathering from them if they are built inside.

Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse.

AI banter: The (enemy) AI sends scripted messages during the game: aggressive/arrogant when attacking, Valiant/confident when defending, begging/pleading when near defeat. Could be a nice space for some creativity and humor. Could be (partially) civ-specific/historic. Since it's "just" written sentences (taking only few mb's), we could have hundreds of them. Lot's of variety. Everyone in the community could come up with some Messages along the line of: "By Jupiter, I'll have you flayed for this" (after a successful raid on a Roman AI) "Carthago Delenda Est" (anytime a Roman AI attacks a Carthaginian player) "Vae Victis" (after Gaul AI destroys a Roman CC) "I'm sure we can find a way to settle this little squabble somehow" (when AI is near defeat) "By the gods, have you no mercy?" (when killing AI women) "I will erase from memory, your very existence" (when big AI army attacks) "Your walls will not protect you from the might of Ahura Mazda" (when Persian AI sees your walls) "You're town looks like it needs a remake" (when AI attacks) "Zeus will not abandon us" (when attacking a Hellenic AI) "Just because you do not take an interest in politics, does not mean politics won't take an interest in you" (when you refuse an alliance with Athenian AI) "The only true wisdom, is in knowing you know nothing" (when Athenian AI utterly destroys a player) “Spartan woman are the only ones who give birth to men” (When Sparta AI attacks) “He is richest who is content with the least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.” (random, passive Athenian AI) “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over the self.” (Hellenic AI when defeated) "I shall make Egypt taste the taste of my fingers" (when Kushite AI attacks Ptolemies) "where they make a wasteland, they call it peace." (When Briton AI is defeated by Romans)

I would like the wars in the middle east to end.

We need discuss first how balance that, we have a patch in progress with secondary attack between ranged and mêlée combat.

Diplomats? What would be their task? In a23 we have nomad on all random maps (besides survival of the fittest)

Changing the Loot/er code should be easy, but not sure how to implement the garrisoning if it's not a treasure. Players often look at resources of allies, then decide how much donations are needed. But if it takes a half a minute or longer when one is suprised by a fight, then it might be hard to coordinate. If the unit has to travel, it might be too dangerous to transport. That might be considered a feature, not a bug, but I'm dubious.

A good point to have in consideration. That's the players ask to mostly RTS. Empires Apart is a good example. polish mechanic adding feature is a good thing if helps to macro.

So basically Treasure unit moving from one CC to another. The only downside I see to it not needing to be garrisoned is that it can be abused by people putting friendly units near each other CCs. It could work with a ship version too though a unit from the shore would have to come collect it and there is no way for the enemy to intercept that.

Yes, 0 A.D. is quite similar to Age of Empires, as are Command & Conquer, Cossacks, Empire Earth, Rise of Nations, and many other games, which is probably unavoidable. Citizen-soldiers, capturable buildings, and territory are rather minor points. There are just two fundamental differences: 0 A.D. is free and open source (and available for many different operating systems) and can thus be adapted, modified, or serve as a basis for future games. 0 A.D. has been in development for years and is unlikely to be finished in the forseeable future. Those looking for an end product might regret the second point; personally I think it's actually the greatest strength that the game is in constant development and will possibly never be finished. 0 A.D. can always be changed, updated, improved, and expanded, unlike commercial games designed for profit, which have to be released at a certain date and won't be changed afterwards. Yes, 0 A.D. is far from perfect, I'm the first to admit that. However, keep in mind it's still an Alpha. Nevertheless, the game is already playable, enjoyable, and modifiable, which is simply great. We should be grateful for everyone who has contributed in the past and for everyone who's currently helping to improve the game. Yes, 0 A.D.'s “Empires Ascendant” default distribution certainly has to be improved. However, different people have different ideas, and in group projects such as this it's often quite hard to find concensus on how to change the status quo. Far more important than the actual content (art, factions, templates, unit statistics, etc.) are the efficiency and performance of the underlying engine and the need for a capable and flexible AI. Everyone who watches https://code.wildfiregames.com/ can see that every day several people work on improving the game. Undoubtedly many persons have left over the years, but others are still contributing, and new people are always welcome. As long as that remains the case, progress is constantly made, and 0 A.D., which already is a great game, can only get better.

@Pureon @LordGood