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What about slingers, they seem quite capable of taking down elephants. How does champion infantry perform? Sure that's absolutely true, but just realize that most people don't see the game as some sort of mathematical equation. Casual players tend to be roleplaying, pretending to actually run a small kingdom, build a "city", raise an army, defeat their dreaded enemy in glorious combat, while taking in the views and such. Not looking at stat sheets. The game needs to be intuitive. Some tangential stuff: The other day I played a +2 hour game with some noobs that barely understood how to play. But they seemed to be having a lot of fun, just building their little settlements. There wasn't a single real battle in the entire game. I also just followed que and built a lovely little city, just for fun. There was literally no point to this game whatsoever. Yet it was one of the most relaxing games ever... A lot of people play like that. I've introduced the game to a number of real life friends and even relatives over the years and none of them ever play MP. They just enjoy casual fun, spending hours on a single map, building their perfect little town, enjoying the beauty of the maps and admiring the 3D models from all angles. They just want options and variety, even if they're not very useful, or even not useful at all. On the top of their wishlist are things like roads, different types of, walls statues, temples, monuments, plazas and gardens and other beautifications and unique buildings and stuff like that, and large unit rosters, functional formations and plenty of researchable technologies. Like, a lot. Some of it, more realistic or feasible than than the next. Stuff that would be utterly irrelevant to MP, but could still, to a degree, be accommodated in the game without compromising MP balance. It doesn't need to be all or nothing. It's possible to create a very full game that satisfies most casual desires, while still offering the more streamlined experience for competitive players just by virtue of them knowing which units and tactics are good for winning competitive matches and ignoring the rest. The casuals don't care about a few underpowered units or useless, frivolous buildings, and really expensive techs that no sane person would spend resources on in a competitive match. On the contrary, they love the availability of choice. Not: realizing that they've built, recruited and researched everything they could in 30 minutes or less. Don't get me wrong. The game should absolutely be well balanced. But it should also be intuitive, and facilitate this kind of roleplaying fantasy through immersion. For example, competitive game speed is too fast (almost stressful) for casuals, but not fast enough for competitive players. Unnaturally fast moving units, or superspeed animations are really immersion breaking for casuals. It's a really big no-no, but competitive players always want it even faster. But the game-speed can be manually adjusted, so this shouldn't even be a problem. The default speed should obviously look natural, not unnaturally rushed, because it looks weird and even stressful. Competitive players often have a different idea of fun and intuitive gameplay, and often loose sight of what is fun and intuitive (and immersive) for casuals, and that's something important to keep in mind as well. As for the historical accuracy part, I often see unhistorical (and unintuitive) stuff slip through, while very juicy historical details that could make every tech tree unique are more or less ignored. I think we should just get together and make a list of possible historically inspired techs and then pick and choose from them.

Hopefully this thread can address a few of the complaints I have read there: I won't go into details about the others yet. Personally I'm fine with the gameplay being slower, including unit movement speed. Sometimes in a23 I had the feeling maps for teamgame were quite small, the enemy could be reached very fast (in bigger map size settings was not an option due to lag). Now with the slower movement this looks more like AoE2 in term of 'map size feeling', and I think this alpha puts more emphasis on map control in general, something I felt was missing in a23. Regarding a balance patch mod, there are a few problems with that. - Potentially difficult to get people to use it - Very easy to disagree with the changes there - Most importantly, it will necessarily diverge from the changes of the new a25 version. First of all, a number of the changes that would go to the balance mod would not be changes that can get in the next version of the game, due to consistency and historical accuracy requirements. Secondly those changes would be more like a patch, and not enhancements to gameplay, which is still an objective for the next version of the game (= more divergence). Thirdly, engine changes can affect how the game is played. All in all, those points will make it so that the balance reached with such a patch will have to be thrown away for the next version of the game, so they could end up not being helpful for tuning the a25 balance. To end this post, I would like to point out that the state of the balance of this a24 version has not been figured out yet (see the thread I linked to have explanations and examples). I also think like @Nescio that we should give it one month or two before being too critical with this new version. There are a few things I don't like of course but all in all I think a24 is an improvement.

Sometimes it's so much fun modelling an eyecandy .... Learning about array, mirroring and so on ...

Here are some results from tests done one year ago. #Protocol - 50 games 1v1 on mainland with a set of predefined (random) seeds, for each couple of civs, both players positions test - players are AI - tested on a fork of zeroad #Win-Loss results For each couple of civs, we compute the difference between number of wins and number of losses. In that context: - rome, brit, gaul are far ahead - kush, mace, pers are far behind There is perhaps an high civ unbalance or it is related to the way the AI use them. #Trading score There is the potential bias that it's easier to trade when wining the game. Pers, despite losing a lot of game, shows high trade income. That reflects there high trading bonus. #Trained support citizen #Trained infantry cavalry ratio From AI point of view : - Brit, sele, ptol look like cavalry civ - Athen, spart look like infantry civ #Siege and champions Elephants are counted as champions. It's strange that mace that is expected to be a siege civ don't produce a lot of siege. Kush and maur don't have siege units. One can notice that maur gained some by capturing an enemy structure. AI may miss something or the civ is too late at phase 3. Enjoy! PS: That's a quick approach, there was some extreme games messing the means.

All archers have a reload time of 1 s in A24. The proposal to give all heroes the same health ( https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2682 ) was abandoned; instead ( https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3250 ), healer and infantry heroes have 1000 health, cavalry heroes 1200, elephant heroes 1500 in A24. That's possible and that was actually done in the past. If I recall correctly, @Grugnas and @Hannibal_Barca both wrote balance mods for A22 and @borg-, @Feldfeld, and @ValihrAnt each did for A23; there might be a few others too. Mods have advantages (can be quickly changed, easy to use, suitable for playtesting) but also their limitations (unpredictable lifespan; opaque decision-making process; tempting to include unrelated changes); basically they stand or fall with their author and mostly reflect the vision of a single person. What changed during the development of A24 is that people who used to write their own mods decided to become more involved and participated in proposing and reviewing patches on Phabricator. Yes, a lot has changed in A24, and sure, not every single change may have been an improvement. Nevertheless, the fact there is change is in itself already progress. A24 isn't perfect, it's very much a work in progress, and right now people will need time to get used to the new version. However, I sincerely believe A24 as a whole will be considered to be a better product than A23 by the vast majority of players in a month or two.

It's going to sound a lot less dense because the original sounds used lower-fidelity recordings that were centered heavily in mid frequencies. The new sounds were recorded from scratch using professional equipment and so make use of a larger range of human hearing. By definition, it is going to sound less dense. Compromises between authenticity and convenience are important. In the bronze age, sword-on-sword combat was not technically possible due to how poorly bronze holds an edge (it would quickly dull or damage the blade to strike them against metal), so the 'shing' cutting sound is totally unrealistic... however, it does do a very good job making the swords sound different from spears and everyone knows that is the "sword sound", so I added it back into my 2nd draft sounds for a24. Javelins too do not really make such whooshing noises, but it again serves the game. We will probably be increasing the volume of many of these sounds you have commented about for a25. The problem is, the actual sound files themselves are not at a consistent volume level now, so we need to go back and re-process all of the sound files consistently before we start tweaking everything. a24's sound balance was done by ear over the course of a few games I played to get a playable, workable balance, even (and especially) when there are 200 units in a single battle, which can get quite loud. Changes were made to logging/lumbering to ensure it was slightly more consistent and also remained sufficiently different enough from new, much better building sounds. I liked the original lumber sounds too but some of them were very strange sounding; I might go with a hybrid approach, layering the two sets of sounds together, like I did with the sword attack sounds as discussed in the paragraph above. Here are some comparison videos of the lumber and build sounds:

Sound attenuates with distance like real life. The further you zoom out, the quieter things become. Pre-A24 this was not done; 0 A.D. behaved like a 2D game, with all sounds of equal loudness no matter where they were on the screen. This was a basic flaw with 0 A.D. which meant that at far zoom, people mining on the other side of the map would be audible at 100% volume. Not only was this acoustically completely wrong, it caused sound to be extremely cluttered, with a sheer overload of equally loud sounds. You hear mining, but is it the miners right in front of you, or the miners on the other side of the map? Is it the tower in front of you shooting arrows or the enemy TC 1000m away? Now sounds at the top of the screen which are more distant will sound more distant and quieter, which creates a clean and enjoyable separation. The distance attenuation we are using is a fraction of real life, so sounds are audible much further away than they would be in real life, but it is still audible at normal zooms. [[Edit- A quick aside: we could redo the sound attenuation so it attenuates sounds farther from the camera more than closer by the same amount regardless of camera height, meaning the overall sound level would be the same regardless of zoom, but this isn't something we've discussed or explored yet, so I have no idea how good or bad this would be; just a thought.]] Now, I should note we are still working to balance the sounds a bit. There was a major audio bug where certain sounds where playing several duplicate times, which causes them to become greatly amplified (and massively wasted sound channels). This has been fixed, but as a result the balance of audio from before was completely broken. I spent a few hours tweaking sounds to be closer to a good balance, but it will need more work, and that is what a25 and the SoundsMod project is for. My goal with a24 was just to fix the most outdated or flawed sounds and then try to get the balance of sounds at least reasonable, even if not perfect, and I accept that there are sounds that are not quite balanced right yet. One other result is that battles will have a much larger dynamic range. Before the sounds would run out of channels so they would self-limit with more than ~50-60 combatants. Now each unit on each attack should only use one sound so larger battles should be even louder. Here are the old battle sounds, with the same fixed audio engine (i.e. what 0 A.D. would sound like if we kept the sounds the same): Now here are the new battle sounds: Not only are the new sounds to me audibly louder overall, they are also much clearer and less muffled without being irritating. If you want a battle to be immersive, zoom in a bit! Battles cannot be immersive at 500 m... that would be silly. You would not expect a concert to be immersive if you sit in the very back row... you would not expect a TV to be immersive if you're sitting two rooms away. When you play a city builder, you would not expect to hear people chatting on the streets when you zoom out 100's of meters, so I don't get why you expect a battle to be immersive if you zoom out a bunch here... The bow sounds are the same volume as other games, compared to their combat sounds. I compared the sounds to original AoE I-III, the AoE DE's, and a number of my favorite, more obscure historical RTS (Celtic Kings TPW, Empire Earth, Cossacks, etc.) and found that the bow sounds are appropriately less loud than melee weapon sounds. Many games have even quieter bows (like AoE III as Stan said, as well as AoM, which accurately depicts bow impacts as louder than bow shots), while others are about on par with these. In real life, bows are almost silent. They are designed that way intentionally and have been since their invention, because it is a hunting tool first and weapon second. We already are massively exaggerating the sound of bows to make it appeal to the Hollywood idea that bows make some massive whoosh when you fire them, and of course to make it easy to hear them when enemies are attacking which is an essential gameplay mechanic of the sound. I hope this answers some of the questions you have had about the sounds. They are still a work in progress, but the whole point is to improve them. Feedback is definitely welcome but we also have to make sure we are designing the sound without holding onto existing conceptions. It is easy to become stuck in Confirmation Bias, where the more familiar seems better, even when objectively it may not be.

hi guys i gonna list some positive updates in a24 and give few suggestions too 1- outpost is more realistic now but it needs vision update too. suggestion: for "vision update by 100 wood" better to increase height of the outpost (like tower update) to make it more realistic. 2- decreasing number of women on fields. suggestion 1: better to set fields capacity to 3. because its annoying for a player to spread women of a full field to other fields. suggestion 2: why corrals are steal useless? i think better to put a button in corrals that make sheeps automatically (and also a button to pause this ability) it leads players to use it more. 3- elephant stable 4- in a24 its easy to make chams 5- different languages for any civ that makes the game more realistic. suggestion: idk about other languages but some of persian phrases are ridiculous. for example "bale in chie ? بله این چیه؟ " this phrase means "yes! what is it?" that does not make sense. it makes me laugh. or "amade آماده " that means "ready" but this word is a public word. better word is "befarman به فرمان" that means "ready for commands". also the phrase "sarbaze shoma سرباز شما" for women should be removed because it means "your soldier" and all know women are not soldiers. 6- stronger towers, but it has weakness too. because it avoid players to play aggresive. but at least it does not makes towers useless in p3 like a23. 7- no heavy weapons in rome camp 8- no dance 9- vision in p1 10- women can build towers barracks etc.

goats-1.m4v

hello, 0ad is using xmpp client as proxy for requests to connect and answers from host of the match. everytime you host the match in lobby, there are logged all usernames who asked you for ip and port regardless if they got it or not (there was no password, there was wrong or correct, all cases are logged). you can see them in mainlog https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths. look for "XmppClient: Recieved request for connection data from" please also note, once you join host, host can see your ip

@Stan`@Alexandermb@wackyserious@Mr.lie@Sundiata Blender 2.92 is released https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-92/

Stans mod package made it work. And i quite like the metal shine.

Awesome work

Well kushite camps can be built in neutral territory, so I'm fine with them right now. If I am not mistaken for Carthage there is a larger embassy, not currently used in the game. We can replace the 3 embassies with the bigger one, which could train all units, and maybe increase the construction limit.

We didn't in fact it was slightly worse from what I recall. We did include a 15% perf improvement due to incorrect polling though. https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2919 According to wraitii though spidermonkey 91 will have a bigger boost.

Thanks @Samulis for your hard work, even though I feel it's not comfortable the new sounds indeed are way more realistic and show more refinement.

This "metal detecting" shader keeps getting better. Even as I work in the new shader, once in a while I use the current shader (I mean MY current shader, the metal one), as a test bed for ideas, as well as for my gaming pleasure. I just added two very, VERY subtle effects to human skin: An emissive 0.01 red added glow just to account for body heat; and a sort of emissive 0.03 red glow modified by shadows AND by sunColor, but not modified by view angle or light incidence; in other words a very slight and primitive sub-surface scattering effect. Together with Fresnel gloss this keeps making skin more and more natural-looking. In the shot below, it is hopeless to try and notice these things, but when the women go into the shadow of the trees or come out into the sun, you do notice a hint of translucency, barely noticeable, but it makes a world of difference. The perception of translucency is from the fact that the shadow side of the arms glows a tiny bit brighter when the arm is hit by the sun on the other side. Look at the woman in the sun, and at the two women in the shadow of the trees. Do the women in the shadow look a bit "cooler" than the one in the sun? It's very subtle, but it's there. And the Fresnel highlights of skin happen at particular moments, at particular angles, hard to catch in a screenshot, but when they happen they also add a ton of realism. None of the women in the image are catching the sun in a specular way at the moment I got this image capture, but the men mining metal did catch some rays. You people don't know what you are missing. Yes, there are things you can criticize about this metal and skin detection hacks shader, but the benefits far outweigh the costs, and it is a FUN shader that keeps surprising the eye, such as by putting metal particle glints on the "metal" rocks for mining; an unintended but highly beneficial "bug". So far, as far as I know, NOBODY has ever even looked at this shader; nobody has tried it. They just look at the still pictures I post, and they lean back on their armchairs and criticize... Most of the benefits are dynamic; they cannot be appreciated from still images.

Try Maury with then p2 ele stables that count for p3. Instant p3 eles. Also, ele archers are hahahahahah. Want to know what tops Maury off? Build a heal priest hero and "walk through military upgrades." You do not even need a fort to build a priest now. With priest you get 20% discount and 50% speed on upgrades for garrisoned building. If you have 2 blacksmiths and a temple, you can hop between buildings and upgrade pretty fast. With gather elephants you can gather metal pretty much everywhere on map. Add the pop bonus (signficant at 200 pop) and you got yourself the making of an easy win. Maury TL:DR: Archers Elephant Archers Elephant stables count for p3 in p2. Always build 2-3 in p2. Heal Priest Hero can speed upgrades significantly OP population Let's not forget range upgrade for archers. Also, Seleucids with their ele dmg hero paired with cav archers. Evilness.

A very strange opinion for a historical RTS, imo. It's also empirically true that the vast majority of players aren't competitive multiplayers, but casual players who love to build walls for a variety of reasons. Anyway it's clear that the game's balance still needs some work, and that civilizations need to be diversified more, but as I understand, that was always in the works. Alpha 24 was just a first big, and necessary step towards addressing some longstanding gameplay issues, laying a foundation for future work. Also, the lobby isn't exactly an official discussion platform for game dev. I can understand it's a good place to get some quick feedback from competitive players, but if your serious about development, you should use either the forum or https://code.wildfiregames.com, so that whatever is discussed is archived and easily retrievable and reviewable. Lobby discussions are far too perishable, and probably too biased towards competitive play. I mean, I'd hate to wake up one day to a 0AD without walls because I missed some random lobby discussions. Just my two cents.

That answers a lot, thanks for the insight Samulis. I agree the sounds are more diverse and differentiated now. I think that's particularly good for late game and cattle breeding (which was very irritating). The javelin, bow and stone thrower sound more realistic now. In the game itself, I would find the faster and clearer perception of ranged fighters important. Why? Because I don't notice that a fight is taking place in town and need my attention. I lose more units and that's frustrating. Here the gameplay aspect would be more important to me. Especially for area damage. Furthermore, the sound is new. That takes time to get used to. Simply as current feedback, the atmosphere now feels less direct, less dense. For me, the sound and the atmosphere are very important to be able to experience. At the moment the game feels indirect and distant instead of being in the middle and experiencing it. At the moment I can see the long-range fighting noises on the one hand, and the sound of the logging that was previously denser on the other. And first of all, thank you for your work.

I'm publishing on mod.db the first launch of the mod with the Incas, this mod will be with no gameplay changes, in the future the pre colonial will be launched in which the Incas will be included with the gameplay changes proposed by @Trinketos https://www.moddb.com/mods/incas-0ad

Classical (Attic) Greek won't be of help in this case, since all words starting with an upsilon are actually aspirated (i.e. start with hy-). It's alien to Latin too. Nor do I expect much from Gaulish, since the few words that survived were written in Greek or Latin alphabets. Therefore we should look east: the y is used for transcribing many languages. I'm suggesting Yaunā, the Old Persian word for Ionians, Macedonians, and Greeks, which seems to me a nice follow-up to Xšayāršā (Xerxes). If, however, the Han make it into the next release (), then we can also use Chinese, giving more options to choose from.

Hello! I started playing 0ad in the early 2020 and play it mostly multiplayer when I have time to play. My main issue with the buildings from a23 and still in a24 is that mercenary camps for this 2 civs (carthage and Kushite) are still quite limited and I wonder why is that so? For example - macedonians can train mercenaries from barracks that are not limited per game, and there is no limit for military colonies (sele and ptole) - so why do this, mercenary heavy civs, have this limit? Macedonians can then train merc archers in smaller patches from multiple barracks, when Carthage and Kushites can make only 3 embassies per game. All in all, what I want to point out is that it is quite hard to diversify carthagininan army than any other mercenary oriented civ, and I think that it shouldn't be like that - on the main game description page there is even a statement and I quote: "Because Carthage always relied on mercenaries to make up the bulk of their forces." (I added the itallic for bulk to emphasise) (https://play0ad.com/game-info/factions/) - Kushites do get some more options in their barracks but still there is a bit of a limit on them too. This is also making an issue to an economic perspective since, as it was pointed it this post that new a24 mercenaries cannot gather resources at all: There I replied my view of fixing mercenary resource gathering issue also. I think that mercenaries should gather resources, not necessary as good as regular units, but still, even if they could, the Carthagininas cannot make them as fast as other civs can in theory and in practise.

Hello and welcome to the forums, @Alar1k, and thank you for drawing attention to this! As for the question raised in the thread title, the long and short of it is that nobody has bothered removing it. As for why the embassy limit is there in the first place, I don't know, though I guess it might have been to make them more “unique”. As for whether it should stay, that's open for discussion. Entity limits certainly do make sense for aura entities (heroes, wonders, theatres, monuments, etc.). However, I don't think they're really necessary for structures that merely produce units; barracks and stables don't have entity limits either, nor do the athen gymnasium, spart syssition, or cart super dock. I'm fine with removing the entity limit of embassies and mercenary camps; or perhaps replace it with a minimum distance, like the rome army camp has (and also centres, fortresses, towers). Furthermore, I think the fortress and tower entity limits could be removed too; their minimum distances and costs effectively limit their numbers already. The purpose of population is to limit the number of entities that move around. The more entities there are in a game, the more things have to be drawn, meaning more to render; and the more things that move, the more things that change, hence more draw calls and hence more lag. Cossacks had an engine that could comfortably handle tens of thousands of units and didn't need nor have a population limitation. In A24 mercenaries have 30% less training time than their citizen counterparts. Basically it's 7 mercenaries or 5 citizens or 3 champions. That said, mercenaries could certainly be further differentiated. [EDIT] I'm also in favour of replacing the cart embassies with mercenary camps (cf. kush) and of introducing mercenary camps for the Greeks. In the long run having certain maps using certain mercenary camps would be great. (Didn't @wowgetoffyourcellphone start experimenting with that already?)

It's just a zip file, they like to complicate things. One thing you could do is provide a pyromod file Then anyone with 0ad installed can double click to install it for their game basically it's a zip file renamed to .pyromod. It's exactly the same folder structure you use in the public mod. here is an example. dan-shaders.pyromod file structure DAN-SHADERS | mod.json | \---shaders \---glsl model_common.fs model_common.vs terrain_common.fs water_high.fs

Those would potentially be a fair choice, but think that it works around the key reasoning of why mercenaries were hired: the employers did not risk the lives of their citizenry. If mercs took up less space, it could represent that fairly well. On the other hand, if mercenaries cost less, it avoids one of the their key disadvantages. Mercenaries were usually expensive. The one other area I could see changing a lot would be giving them a massively reduced training time.

Maybe civilizations with great mercenary potential like carthage, can train level 2 mercenaries instead of 1 like other civilizations, it's just an idea.

I did some profiling and I found it inconclusive. Jumping from SM45->78 meant we paid the price of the Spectre fault which means that equivalent speed is good IMO. The improvement in SM91 is theoretical at this point, but in principle Warp should make things faster. At this point in JS I have identified a bunch of slow code: - Gathering can take a lot of time (mostly because ai AIProxy messages) - Finding new targets is slow / combat in general - Researching something is generally slow (modification messages are sent) - Changing ownership / Renaming / Diplomacy updates are all quite slow.

As someone who cannot play multiplayer, due to bad internet connection, i can confirm that. Normally i play vs one or two AIs and i am very happy with a24. The graphics looks much better, there is building snapping and the balance feels more balanced (I can now win with the Kushites). And i don't experience much lag, since there are only three player. Good to hear. But i think it should be kind of an "official" mod to get many people to try it / find out about it.

You are using SVN, he is trying with the release, which is packaged (and precached NVTT remember?) in a single zip for faster file access on Windows HDDs so he has to uncompress the whole game @maroder note that if you uncompress it correctly you won't have to recompress it since the game will just pick up the files. I would have suggested OBS but your call

Feels like A24 = borg expansion pack + balanced civs + refined graphics + nerfed siege pathfinding When will A25 be released?

I agree with Sundiata also I don't see why it should make an opinion more important how good you are in playing or what rank you have

Nice.

Yeah, As Reza, I think that a24 is terrible compared to a23. In few points, I agree great improvements have been done. Those points are : 1. Dancing prevention by sleep time on turning

Remember also that most are probably not taking use of loom (that is now only a 100 food) and the fact that on phase 2 you can take melee resistance upgrade for low cost. People need to be less alarmist of balance 'issues' until the meta has stabilized, especially on a small low competitive community.

You're welcome. I think the extra 10 hp of the dogs should be removed. It should be enough to start.

HP bonuses don't have to impact champs. We should be able to exclude those. Or just adjust their HP lower so it doesn't have as large of an impact. For example, most (all now?) champs are only available in p3. So a HP bonus from p1-->p2-->p3 shouldn't impact a p3 unit's HP. Regardless, this was only one suggestion. I also like the idea of changing defensive constructions to be less op. I still like giving phasing HP bonus, but it isn't super necessary. Overall, I like the balance changes. Based on what I currently know, I wouldn't change much in terms of unit stats. Yes. Ptol bonus is still nice, now. Just less significant of a difference than before. And free houses with ptol is just one example of how I think civs should be modified to be more different. Other possible reversions would be something like giving celt their building pop bonuses giving siege factories only to mace keeping worker else for mauraya (and maybe giving it building abilities back) I like walls/towers for iber I like cav health bonus for persia/sele (so I would take this away from other civs) I like kush pyramid bonuses I like rome camps and would give it siege again to make the difference more pronounced I liked skirati exp. bonuses for sparta and I think this was nerfed too much Carth and athens could use better differentiators imo carth champs from temples might be a fine strat with champs being a more viable strategy. I haven't tested this athens basically is no longer unique in any way?

It's obviously an overstatement. I laid out a lot of the changes I would like to see implemented. Below is a incomplete list I would like changed back. Shorten unit production time Increase unit speed change stone upgrade costs to include food instead of wood reintroduce phasing HP bonus (not in original post but this would help units not die under buildings so fast) reintroduce civ differences don't give every civ siege factory give celts building pop bonuses give ptol free houses and probably many other change that I haven't realized yet give outposts more vision Some of it is also probably units being default in formations. So old units that used to be fasted like skirms are now beings slowed by being grouped spears. Undoing this manually is very micro-intensive. Can we not make 180 rotations slower than small turns? Can we not make minimum unit movements (even if this is done just for heros, which is where dancing is 95% of the problem) to make dancing in place less effective? As for unit production, some training times have been tweaked, yes, but not everything is slower; e.g. citizen cavalry went from 15 s to 16 s, but champion cavalry from 30 s to 27 s, reducing the gap between citizens and champions a bit, to make champions a more viable option. The most common units (which were also the units most quickly produced) all had their unit times greatly increased. For example, women went from 8-->9, citizen solider inf went from 10-->12, citizen cav went from 15-->16. Those are large differences. I agree champs needed to get produced way quicker. This is a good change and has made champs a more viable strategy in a24. Again, I suspect a lot of the slow down is actually attributable to formations being the default. I've played a few games. Quick team games (ones where one team dominated and won on the first push without any retreat) went from gg at about min 18/19 to gg at about min 25-28. Some other games that were never really close but people turtled lasted much longer than 25 mins. That's a massive increase. I suspect this is more likely the result of slower unit production times. Also techs are harder to get now, which slows down the game a lot. And because turtling is a much strong strategy now, which makes a ton of siege required in basically every tg.

I am overall not a fan of A24. I like a lot of the balancing changes, but the game overall isn't as enjoyable. Things I don't like The game moves much, much slower. Part of this is because unit production is way slower. Part of this is because units actually move slower. I do not see the need for either of these and both make gameplay considerably longer. Because of slower unit movements, defensive buildings are much, much stronger. This makes fighting under any defensive buildings unsustainable for more than a few seconds. As a result, turtling is encouraged and fighting is discouraged. This is inherently less fun and more simcity. Because turtling is encouraged, it seems like every tg ends in massive siege spam. Sitting back and passively spamming siege to destroy buildings isn't much fun. Civs are too similar now. They all seem interchangeable with the only differences being that some civs are more limited. What is the difference between ptol and rome/gauls/brits besides ptol having many more types of units and buildings? What can mace do that rome can't? It was more fun when there were things like celt building pop bonuses, free ptol houses, and easy spam siege for mace. There are other smaller changes that I don't like. For example, eliminating outposts vision is very frustrating in TGs where it is easy to sneak attack someone. This is made especially frustrating by the fact that capture rates were buffed. Also, I don't like how stone upgrades now cost wood. Before you would do eco tradeoffs between when balancing food/wood. Now, all eco upgrades rely on wood and metal. Things I like Overall, soldiers are much better balanced. For example, I like that archer civs are no longer useless. And, I like that champs are integrated more. Both of these were overdue and I welcome the changes. We eliminated dancing. This has introduced some weird animations but overall it is a huge upgrade. There are some other smaller changes that I like. For example, I like how military upgrades now work.

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Not agree with stronger cavalry. I think they r weaker. And in a23 they were strong enough. Ranged unit weaker !? And how archers r so strong now !? They crush every thing Hero can't be trained after dying was not good choice I think.

Did u ask yourself why many players didn't like a24 and got back to a23 Also I think a game should be developed in a line, unfortunately devs broke the line and made something new, even strong players r learning the game again... Also they mostly didn't like it. About archers they r too strong. They even kill spears and pikes easily. Really hard to counter them. Now archer civs r crazy strong Just image many units try to destroy seigs like rams that r supported by many archers. That poor units r easy target for archers then they die easily. I even feel devs removed the random for archers attack or at least decreased it!

I wouldn't say that XD. When I've sended ~100 units they were walking in a very very long line then when they reached their goal they started to rotate like clock hands. It was pathethic to watch. Lastly most important thing 4vs4 is now unplayable. Yesterday we were playing (nani, juarca, etc) and it was impossible to play. For sure lag is bigger than at prev alpha. Also one more thing. Chop chop chop wood for the win lol.

I was playing around with the high water shader. I wanted to try two things: Using LOD bias in reading the bottom texture in proportion to the depth, to increase blurring. This is NOT because water blurs light passing through it; it is a surface effect, namely that waves are fractals, even at small and smaller range there's waviness, and this produces angular scatter, which then becomes a larger and larger absolute area scatter the longer it travels down from the surface. In the shader, if I'm understanding the code, there's blurring of the bottom done manually by doing a bunch of reads with displacements, and averaging the values. I wasn't going to mess with that, but was simply going to add a computed LOD bias, so that each of the reads would itself already have some blurring. I found, to my surprise, that our terrain textures don't seem to have LOD's. This is strange, because a texture with LOD's typically scales more smoothly as you zoom out than one without, which is quite desirable even if you are not manually trying to use bias. So that effort failed. The other thing I wanted to try was using a real Fresnel formula for specularity. As soon as I did, sky reflections nearly disappeared, and the waves became hardly noticeable; so I boosted the brightness of the sky-box, and multiplied the xy of the water normals by 5. This is real Fresnel ... almost; the algorithm is called Schlick's Approximation, but it is an approximation used in science; far more accurate than typical graphics approximations. The reason waves became more subtle is because the waviness was, in fact, rather subtle, as the Fresnel approximation that was used dramatically increased their visibility. It looks different, and I like it, and I'm going to keep my high water shader mod for my own playing; but it may not be for everyone. The waves look more realistic in my eyes, but also a little rougher. This, again, tells me this shader could use a uniform to control wave strenght for island hopping in rainy, stormy days. There may also be a need for the map to control wave strength. The strength I got I think is pretty good for seas, but lakes could use far less strength. Notice how distorted the reflections are in the second shot below. Some lakes could use an almost complete absence of waves. (Then again, rivers could use increased murkiness.) EDIT: Never mind; there ARE uniforms for waviness and murkiness. ((Actually, I may have stepped into some trap in the code... something affecting how reflections alpha-blend. The reflections of the dock got too faint I think.)) Here's a comparison screenshot: The original waves first: The modified shader second: There's a ... #define USE_FRESNEL_APPROXIMATION 1 ... that I threw in there, that causes the original code to compile. Commenting it out causes my mod to compile. Cheers! water_high.fs

Certainly any feedback is very useful (mainly what is wrong), but it is fair to bring some improvements too, like: 1 - stronger cavalry 2 - ranged units weaker 3 - champs back to the game 4 - spear cavalry attacks correctly now 5 - cant dance 6 - hero cannot be trained after dying 7 - melee units chasse easer 8 - formation works better etc.., etc... It seems to me that there are more positive changes than negative ones, so I think we are on the right track. What I can recommend to you is to keep playing and maybe have a different view.

Saying that you don’t feel playing 0a.d doesn’t make sense because 0a.d isn’t a ready game, it’s constantly changing, but I understand that, it’s been a few years playing the same version, it’s normal to feel different, but you can get used to it with the changes. Anyway, we can bring some necessary changes back in a25.

True. I feel like the unique gameplay mechanics that every civilization had in alpha 23 has been exchanged for a more generic version that is a fit-for-all that imho makes it less interesting.

I've seen TG ranking working well (enough) for autobalance (not in 0ad). The small community issues are still present but with a bigger amount of tgs in 0ad i'd expect it to work better. Granted it uses trueskill but I wonder if ELO has something similar. Anyways, since the lobby implementation is separate from the main game it should be straightforward to implement without having to wait for a new release. It would improve Quality-of-Life considerably imo.

I was featured in Robin's video here: Had to admit some of my moves were cosmic.

I like the idea, but consider issues like crash/internet problems of a player could affect all other teammembers, you can play op but still lose rating. If you evaluate personal play on the other hand you encourage ego strats. So tg could be ranked, but all would have to agree. Also team making when rated could take forever to get all to agree. However also an issue is, that if you only evaluate win/loss and games are well balanced, you can be the player carrying the team all the time but your win rate is 50% so u have still nub rating. Combining rating personal performance and team win would also be somewhat complex to implement, especially in a way so it will really reflect impact, for example op rush but dealy of eco and so on.