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Update (v0.5): Added the classic desert's oasis, dust particles and treasures :D Made dunes smaller and shorter and some water color retouches.

The purpose of this topic is to show in a simple and basic way how to improve your skills in 0a.d with 20 simple tips. 1- SHIFT button. Extremely important, mainly for order of buildings and micro. for example when picking up some wood collectors to build a house, hold the SHIFT button and right click on the house and then again on the wood, so immediately after finishing the house, they will automatically collect wood again. Your enemy is dancing in front of you, and your units missing shots, then select your units, hold SHIFT button, and select the stopped units you want to hit, so after killing the first selected enemy unit, they will fire in the next, avoiding that you shoot the dancer. You have selected 40 units, and you need to select more, keep SHIFT Button press, and select the 15 units, so you have 55 units selected. If you have enough wood and want to build 10 houses, keep SHIFT pressed, select the house and click 10 times in map. SHIFT greatly facilitates the construction of walls (make a test). 2- CTRL button: mainly required to select units. Let's imagine that you have 10 archers, 10 lancers and 10 women, you select them all, then in their interface show 3 small squares in the center with 10 archers, 10 lancers and 10 women. If you hold CTRL Buttom and click on the square of the 10 women, then you take the 10 women out of the selection, stay only 10 archers and 10 lancers, its is very important especially when suffering from harassment. CTRL button is also a shortcut key for storing units in buildings. Select the units, keep CTRL button press, and right click on the building. 3- U buttom. Shortcut button so that the units exit from within the buildings. 4- Two left mouse click. Press two left-clicks on mouse on archers for example, then all archers in your sight will be selected. 5- H button. Your units attacked the nearest unit. 6- Dance: the units automatically attack the nearest units, then select a unit and send it to the front, then click with it from side to side, you can use the SHIFT for this. 7- Storage. Must be made as close just to wood, fruit and hunting as possible. Metal and stone must have a distance that fits the units between the metal/stone to the storage. Doing too close will make your units have to walk a unnecessary distance. If necessary, make two or three. As your wood is cut make new Storages. When there is enough space for a new storage. 8- Outpost: Vision wins game, simple as that. Have vision so you will not have any more surprises. 9- keep some women close to the men, so that the collect gain 10%. 10- Tips for using with CTRL and U. I'll use an example that I only use at the moment (I did not see anyone else use until then). you are playing with iberians, and you are collecting outside the walls, so your enemy attacks you with some horses, you have no way to defend, and the gates are too far for you to run, what do you do? Select your units, press CTRL and click for units to enter the tower of the walls, then quickly click the U button several times so that the units exit quickly (Do not forget to select for the tower to unload the units inside the city). The same can be done with several types of constructions, in several occasions, use your imagination. 11- manipulation of animals: some animals can be manipulated in your favor. If the animal is too far from its storage or CC, hit him, and continues to walk behind it (no more hits), this will take the animal to the desired location. Walruses are aggressive animals, so if you hit a shot at him, they will go after you. then it is important that you select a unit and walk on the map giving a one hit on each,(preference ranges unit) and then send your unit back to your city, all walruses will follow. 12- Buildings within the radius of attack of the CC. An important tip especially for the beginning of the game, keep your houses and other possible constructions within reach of your CC, if your enemy rush you, he probably could not convert his constructions (If this happens, you probably lost the game). 13- Avoid fighting within range of towers and castles. Just fight if it's in your favor, if that does not happen, fight in another region, or make small attacks in multiple places at once. This is a regular mistake among beginners. 14- Whenever possible, make economic upgrades. Serious error between beginners and good players too, and plsssss, baskets upgrade are very, very important, basically you reduce 50% of walking time (first upgrade). 15- In fights whenever possible have melee/tank units on the front. Has already been proven in several tests that melee + ranged can win fights vs only ranged (Of course this depends on several factors). 16- Use constructs like houses/barracks to reach some resources beyond the edge. 17- keep in mind some basic things about factions / units. You are playing on Mauryans and your enemy is Romans, you do not know what strategy he used, but you should avoid some. Example, If he is a smart player it is likely that he will use spear horses against you for the simple fact that archers can not stop them, so what should you do? Make some lancers instead of archers, this will block it. 18- Preferably to armor upgrades rather than attack. Armor upgrades are cheaper, and reach more soldiers than attack upgrades. 1350 for +1 armor for melee and ranges units or 1500 for 20% attack only ranges units? 19- Balance eco. This is the most mistake among all players. Try to keep your economy always balanced and in progress. If you are collecting fruits, and they are running out, do not expect them to end up for making some farms, make before. If you are going to attack/defense, do not use all your units of a particular resource, only in special harassment and specific strategies. This will cause your economy to stop, you will have to switch resources, and this will see a snowball. 20 -keep an eye on the time. Minutes are important so you knew how well or how bad it is going. For me, for example, I know that if I'm in the minute 14 and I'm still in phase 2 in a game without major problems, I'm late, If I am playing against a good player, I can be in serious trouble. Maybe I even have a larger population, but if it has some rams or elephants, this can complicate me. I memorized some schedules, this facilitates my games, I know when to attack, pass phase, and i also know when the enemy probably attacked me in a probable rush. Well there are several other tips, but I hope that in a simple way I can help raise the level of the gameplay. Tips from other players are very welcome.

I need to say here, thanks for A23! Increible work at Jebel Barkal ! I need more like that... The release video is one of the best seen for 0 A.D.

Yes, leper suggested few solutions for this. The main idea is to load fonts (.ttf), but not prerendered atlases. Also we need to support system scale (I have a patch for it) to prevent a blurry image. Why there are random lines? Because it's a standard problem for all systems that are simply positioned in DIPs. First of all we need to refactor GUI for it.

AO is a pain, and possibly expensive. There are filterable versions that are promising, but still a pain. I might play around with that eventually but the extended feature freeze has pretty much forced my work to a halt.

And why this game's gameplay has stagnated.

Not all gamesetup options are present in the Atlas editor. These have to be changed in the XML file of the map.

Then vote the opposite? lol The poll was mostly facetious anyway. Point is, other games handle this muuuuuch better than 0 A.D. from a gameplay standpoint. It's annoying for units to go berserking after lions and tigers unless those entities have shown to be a threat first by attacking a nearby unit. It's just annoying to me to see my guys run off to go kill a bear when I've placed them in an ambush or scouting position. See the unit behavior in AOM for example in regards to this. What happens in AOM is that crocodiles and lions, et al., are ignored by military units within range until those animals attack a soldier or villager, then nearby soldiers are triggered to go attack and kill it. Partially it's the core game's massive vision ranges, and partially it's unitAI behavior. Yes yes, stances stances stances, I don't think you should have to mess with stances to prevent something so mundane. Stances should regulate your units reacting to enemy units, not a wolf that wanders into view. Just my respectful opinion.

This thread will be used to document the development of the new mapgeneration script that should become a proper successor of Danubius and Jebel Barkal, i.e. a procedurally generated scenario map for arbitrary amounts of players, mapsizes with a scripted opposing city with fortifications depending on a difficulty setting. The theme of the map are the forests of Gaul, the opposing enemy village is an Oppidum again. Map Design The design is the most decisive step during feature development. I start with the terrain design and show how it shapes gameplay. Since the primary aim is to create a better map than Jebel Barkal, I first analyzed what made Jebel Barkal a success. You might want to take a look at the Jebel Barkal - Illustrated Walkthrough in case you are not familiar with this map yet. The below sketch displays: red: fights (location where fights occur frequently) green: trade (location where fights rarely occur, that are safe for women and trade carts) blue: expansion (locations that are feasible to build new bases at or expand the current base progessively) white: barriers (here irrigation canals that allows quick and effective walls) We record and evaluate the observations about the map design: Most maps are circularly symmetrical, which makes them one-dimensional and so the gameplay becomes one-dimensional as well. Most maps consist of a random composition of natural resources, trees, lakes and hills. This means there is no information, no meaning, in the terrain, no essence, nothing shaped by man, no points of interest. On Jebel Barkal, there are four distinct areas with a unqiue biome and different meanings / use cases for players to reside there. Water: Low Risk / High Reward Fish is faster income than fields Collect wood remotely in a safe location Transporting siege engines quickly and directly to the enemy base Survival on the water after being wiped out on the land Fertile Land Low-Risk/Low-Reward: The only location with feasible amounts of wood, even abundance Farthest distance to the opposing city Irrigation canals allow easy walling. Allies very close by to help out quickly and effectively. No mines and few space to build, one has to build up trade or expand. Desert: High-Risk/High-Reward Very attractive as mines occur in abundance and other places don't have mines at all Very unattractive because the occupying units are dislocated, there are no natural barriers, no wood, no neighbors. So the location is an easy target for the opposing city, hard to defend and maintain. Hill: High-Risk/High-Reward: Conditional Use: Since the hill is heavily defended an since the home base is usually already established, the hill can only be captured in games that last long enough for one player to be lose the entire home base, but have enough of an army left over to wipe out the large number of troops on the hill. It can and does occur in Diplomacy games more often than in team games. Once the mountain is conquered, one can pickup treasures and build a base that is extremely easy to defend. The city in the center of Jebel Barkal is the most significant difference to every other map due to the following gameplay design traits: Balancing factor: Military buildings spawn different attackers per building, so there is proportional reward for the player to take out individual buildings. Surprise factor: The city is composed of different buildings every time. Eyecandy factor: Since the city is not created by a player after the gamestart but at map generation time, the terrain can be changed in accordance with the city, i.e. there are different ground textures in the city and for paths, there are trees and ditches. This is currently the only way to show how men shaped their environment and makes everything appear much more naturally, resemble actual cities or villages. Problems of the Alpha 23 Jebel Barkal map (see also #5150): There is no victory condition or other sufficient incentive to invade the city on Jebel Barkal. Players have to play with the general Conquest and other conditions. So it is economically much more feasible to destroy the multiplayer enemy rather than the opposing city. We see the city only being taken out in rare diplomacy games where one player claimed the hill. Balancing is hard and has to be derived experimentally. Examples: Hardly varying Soldier count is by far not as relevant as Elephant/Siege Engine count varying drastically. It should not depend on map generation (randomly 0 to 10 elephant stables on a normal sized map). Lag: Since there are much more buildings and gaia units around (up to 8 * 150). Formations make it quicker, but can also have separate problems, especially pathfinding ones. In the next post I will show an idea I had after the above analysis and set aim.

I just realized I forgot to answer the statement I agree with the statement. It's particularly annoying at the beginning of a game. However will those animals attack first ? Or will it always be on the player to trigger them ? If they do decide to attack there should be an ally trigger range. I guess the size of the woman aura or a bit bigger would work.

I tried, it doesn't work (it does nothing).

Thanks nani for contributing!

We're not alone

- Text corruption - Visible bounding boxes around text on buttons - Random lines - Unit selection rectangle not visible These problems in this video don't look serious on when watched on a 1440p screen, but they look very noticeable if you watch on a 4k screen I'm not expecting this fixed anytime soon, I think 4k users would be about 1% I hope you have a nice day System Information

Thanks

Yes, the game has 4k problems, but I don't see how that's affecting graphics... xD

You can't even agree to fix such a nuisance? Others would call this a bug. lol... Ofc friendly fire and wildlife interaction needs to be fixed. Just like in every other RTS game on the market from the last 10 years...

@aeonios @vladislavbelov Anything we can do ? For fonts leper suggested to use Cairo to load ttf fonts on the go.

No woods?! :0

Thanks for the report. Please note that your image link has expired for some reason. The issue comes from the remastered version of the Persian Texture made by @Enrique which, while having a significant number of improvements have some new issues. Notice the (correctly) exported alpha channels are different. I finally found a way to export them correctly which means we can now export the old DDS textures to PNG as needed. The Persian texture will be the first, once it is fixed. Also notice the textures without alpha channels are different. To do the export properly open blender, import the DDS texture, save it as a PNG with Alpha, open it in Gimp, Click on the layer -> Add mask -> Alpha Channel Transfer. You can then copy paste that mask layer as needed to keep the good transparency. @LordGood @wowgetoffyourcellphone Can any of you fix the texture ? keeping the best of both worlds ?

Adding more letters to words or refering to other games doesn't make the proposition true. That onagers are dangerous isn't relevant here because none of our units deal friendly damage currently. I could not find the information online: how did they change onagers exactly? Did they change the default stance to passive or did they change the behavior of the stance for onagers? I read that in HD that onagers only attack enemies if they would not deal friendly fire. Sounds unrelated. It seems the discussion is which view to force upon the player, not enabling the player to chose for himself whether he wants to ambush or clean an area of violent animals to establish a safe area for economic units that can't defend themselves. (If we are to throw in exotic examples, consider maps where dangerous animals are reoccuring.) If the only actual argument is that a single click is too much effort in case you want to do ambush and if aggressive stance is a default that is a must have that the user may not change in the options and if a stance hotkey is considered equally complicated to a single click, at least keep the animal cleaning behavior for the violent stance (although I still don't see the issue and that wow still has to click the defensive, standground or passive button when he actually does want to do an ambush without his units walking away or revealing themselves, because the units still walk away when they see anything other than a dangerous animal that is a target).

I playtested it and it is kind of cramped. I really need that map resizing patch. Also, the bamboo models I took from Terra Magna are a real framerate killer for some reason. Way more so than the Cretan Date Palms. @stanislas69 @Alexandermb There is a distinct lack of Chinese fauna in the game for sooooome reason.

Chang Jiang.

So... Can we agree on this? I believe, if not, the ones that don't agree should try to formulate one or two new options for a more "objective" poll, and urge everyone to vote on it. I think the results of the original poll were quite telling though... I actually tried googling that...

Disagreeing just for the kicks. Because I want to put Women in formation, then send them to packs of lions. After that, watch them scatter for their lives.

The game have rare sense with wildlife-Human interaction. nor realistic nor game wise. Why AoE1 or 2 have more sense, because this is a planned feature. There are exceptions.

Yeah I had to make you sound like an evil monstrosity to suit my purposes But I'm not going to vote opposite, not the best solution either. I know I'm not helpful, this place is one of the rare 0ad places where I can be a pest. Both of you got a point but middle ground is needed IMO

People should keep in mind the only thing that has been decided Wednesday is that the proposed articles will go to the European Parliament to be discussed and voted upon, probably in about six months.

Well currently remaining active devs ( I'm counting an average of 2.5 these days) are trying to make the game compliant to European law to at least have the opportunity to be able to fix those. For everything gameplay related ask both @Itms and @Prodigal Son directly (by Pm for example) as they are rewriting the gameplay document to make it a versionned contributable way of discussing gameplay. They'll know more about it than any of us here. Even though : "its a bug that needs to be fixed" If you have suggestions for Delenda Est which for now is basically the most popular gameplay mod there is ( according to download stats) you can go in the relevant modding section. For the matter here patches are better than words. Minor bugfixes are easy heh. Thanks for coming back and contributing in your own way.