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Or something like this: Day 0: Feature freeze Day 3: String freeze Day 6: Translation freeze Day 6: Commit freeze Day 7: Packaging Day 8: Release Candidate early access to community partners Day 15: Final bug and balance review (based on feedback from partners) Day 20: Final Fixes freeze Day 20-21: Re-Packaging (if necessary) Final Release Candidate released (if necessary) Day 23: Release There you have 15 days between when community partners are informed of the pending release and given early access and final release "to the public." It also has a built-in 12 day window for final "oh @#$%" fixes.

I've been around for 11 years at this point, and I'm not even the 'oldest member' in this thread. I remember a time where the game didn't have walls or technologies or trade. I certainly remember a time where it didn't have an active multiplayer lobby ---- I won't go too much in the Alpha debate, but what I think is: The game certainly wouldn't be releasable as a paying, finished product tomorrow. Mostly because of the lag, also because of the very limited SP. That makes calling it an 'alpha' fairly logical. Conversely, it's also very playable (e.g. in 1v1 MP), and it's largely feature complete - or at least there are enough features. That makes the 'alpha' moniker weird, particularly if you compare with e.g. alpha 10 - now that wasn't playable whatsoever. The 'disconnect' I see is that we have a user base, in MP, that nowadays has expectations about the game - expectations we didn't expect having to meet. The dev team can call this an alpha all it wants, it has a player base that treats it like a released game. This is really the reason why I would drop the 'alpha' from the name. There is also a 'historical' reason, which most of you won't necessarily know. The idea, for a very long time, has been to actually release a "Version 1" of the game at some point - a finished product. This was the idea from the start, including after the open-sourcing in 2009. And for the early years of the 2010's, it was still the idea - there was a fundraiser in 2013 hoping to 'finish the game', and more talk of leaving alpha than I'd care to recall. In that context, we're still in 'alpha' or 'beta' at best. However, I think those were a bit fool's hopes, looking back on it. I think we are (and perhaps always were) in a 'perpetual beta / seasons' release model. The game won't ever be 'finished', because the distinction makes no sense -> we already have players, so in that respect it's already finished. I wouldn't even call it early access, which also implies a 'finished' product. No, we're just releasing incrementally more complete versions of the game, but there won't ever be a point where we can say 'now it's done'. You might be right, but in truth we always would get some of these comments. People have strong opinions about their video games, and there is basically no chance that we'd get 100% approval from our players.

Built a Carthaginian port city in the Bahrain map. The little extension of land from the coast was perfect for building a Cothon.

You're right. I accidentally added my own 2 cents without directly addressing your comment. The feature is awesome, the biomes themselves are not. It's hard to show someone a video to get them jazzed about a game when the terrains and game world looks ugly, is what I was getting at before. Speaking about marketing and PR here. And yeah, for sure, it's also embarrassing to try to showcase the game to a skeptical community on another site when the game starts to lag so horribly and players have to fight to get formations to wheel around a building without getting stuck. Agreed. I annoys the Hell out of me that everyone plays the ugliest maps. lol Time to improve the ugly maps I guess.

(sorry if I ignore some of your points for now) 1. I think "influencers" is an unfortunate term as well, but it is definitely useful in this context as an all-encompassing term for Youtubers, streamers, bloggers, et al. 2. I think there is no easier way to see what is happening with the development of the game than to just bite the bullet, install SVN, and get the SVN development version of the game so one can easily get the latest updates. 3. One question that needs answered is: Do we need to do a bunch of PR blitzing at this stage of the game's development? @wraitii I think has hinted that WFG has neglected PR because the game simply isn't ready yet. We can debate that point for sure, but I don't think it hurts to amend the standard release schedule to include extra access for a list of trusted influencers. Just some rando thoughts for now.

Shall we make posters of 0AD and post them on Instagram and other social media platforms? This should gain us some recognition and attract more players? I can start spamming Instagram with 0AD content and I will tell my friends to do the same as well. I also think it would be a good idea to make a 0AD group chat on Instagram and Discord (or snapchat etc) for players who use them?

Indeed, to return to the original topic (sorry, that was my fault, I mentioned the Alpha thing!) In trying to boil the issues down to a few points, I can see; _an apparent disconnect between those making the game and everyone else. Obviously there are a few people closer to the dev side than others who hear bits and pieces and pass it on, but that generally leads to rumor, speculation, etc and isn't really that helpful. On the face of it, the offical 'mouthpiece' of 0AD - so the website, the news/announcements section of the forum, the official social media channels, are largely mute for extended periods of time, including in the run up to the release of a new iteration of the game - a time which is an unprecedented time of opportunity to expand the audience, but overall is symptomatic of the wider comms issues. _currently, a tiny number of devs working unpaid to make the game - who by their own admission, are both not having the time to deal with PR themselves and, understandably, not wanting to give up more of their time to take this task on / or - also understandably, personally not having any interest in that element of the project. I think it's fair to say that the 'talent' in a given field quite often does not want to be involved in anything other than the thing they are most passionate about. Again, totally understandable - if you want to get the best out of the individual - grant them the freedom to do what they are best at. _The 'influencers' (still hate that term), content creators - the non-deving evangelists of the game who do want to spread the word further, are left scratching around for anything to talk about coming out of the project in terms of tangible current or future developments. So, I see a lack of PR (actually prefer the term community engagement myself) in general, exacerbated at times when a bit of a push in the promotion stakes are a logical step, like a new release (that I'd consider to be heading into marketing territory, but as the game is free, I guess it's not technically marketing, really.) Because there is no money, profit margins, general business pressure related stuff involved, essentially a very simple strategy could be employed to address all of the above. To achieve it I think it would need; _at least three volunteers to form some kind of committee with the blessing of the devs _an acknowledgement from the devs that as things stand, good old Sun Tzu would probably put you firmly in the 'tactics without strategy' camp as far as 0AD community engagement goes. _the committee to draw up a proper strategy, say from now until whenever A25 is approximated to be released, detailing where things should be by that time, and the steps that would have to be realistically taken to get there (what Sun Tzu refers to as the tactics ) _the aims to be fairly obvious, really, but mostly to engage and further develop the community of 0AD players and enthusiasts as an ongoing process, to help raise the wider profile of the game and the project as a whole through positive communication, to take on the horrible PR jobs that no-one likes, like social media postings, etc, and to ensure that when A25 drops, it is communicated well, in a professionally co-ordinated way and garners as much warm, positive attention as possible. That does actually encompass quite a lot, but all the little jobs would essentially feed into the mains aims in order to achieve the overall objective. _the above happen with a commitment from the devs that while the day to day business of community engagement and promotion is being done well, in order to allow them to focus on their strengths, that there is at least a quarterly Q&A/interaction between them and the committee to establish what is happening with the ongoing developments, what features might be added/changed or removed in the next alpha - basically a chance to put the community's questions forward, to understand if things are or are not running to plan and understand why, but above all - to get a clear, consistent and factually accurate picture of how things are proceeding to be projected back out to the community. I guess this could be a proper video/audio chat, an instant message chat, or even just an exchange of a few emails, but something where there is an open dialogue. _and of course, any screenshots/sneak previews of features or fixes, or anything basically so cool you'd want to announce it, being shared on an ad-hoc basis. _at the end, when A25 is released, an evaluation as to whether the aims were met, whether the approach has benefited the devs, the game and the community. What could be done even better for a potential future strategy, maybe to A26? That is really just a 'back of an envelope' speculative proposal of one route that could be taken. It's a bit big on words, light on detail, but proposals are always like that!

All of that is true, but to have yet another unit type seems overkilled. Could just have a "Siege Engineers" tech that unlocks building field artillery with soldiers.

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This process here could be updated to include the PR things each release needs. https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/ReleaseProcessDraft I think between packaging and release there should be a 2 week span of time that our community partners get "early access" to the release candidate. We then (respectfully) ask for an embargo until release day. 2 weeks gives enough time for playtesting, video creation, written copy to be made, etc.

Is this perhaps the most suitable wonder for the Xiongnu? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noin-Ula_burial_site "one is an exceptionally rich burial of a historically known ruler of the Xiongnu, Wuzhuliu, who died in 13 CE" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-011-9053-2/figures/3

-Mercenary camps system. - Trading post - Advanced diplomacy. -Battalions -Advanced Tech tree. -Advanced trading -Player vs environment features.

It'd be nice if there was some form of team of pr team indeed. But even most people right here on the forum have barely any clue on what is really being changed. For this you would either need to visit trac.wildfiregames.com or visit IRC dev-chat daily. People ingame that dont visit the forums even more so have no clue at all what to expect, and imo as a QoL you shouldnt need to go to a forum to see what is being done. It would be nice if there was an automated process to view the up-to-date changes from trac (is RSS an option?) in a 'message of the day window', along with a 'read more' button on game start up. Also, imo, the programmers/artists need to get some proper creds (meaning more visibly) for their work so that people can thank them and in return boost morale. So i would suggest that the ticket owner name would be visible too. EDIT: I think the term early access is only applicable to pay to play games, but im not really sure.

For building siege engines, more than engineers, it needs officers to coordinate the work. Engineers in the Roman army were also officers if I recall correctly. By looking at Vitruvius wikipedia page, you can get a good grasp of the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius

Definitely not. Quick food production which requires little pop space. However I've added one more option to the poll

From a player POV i would say the alpha tag is still proper though. But it's a very playable alpha. And once the performance enhances and runs smoother than it does now when there are alot of units, i would say thats when you should switch to beta and start hyping things up (first impression matters). Because from a player POV that's what you would probably expect from it- a semi smooth experience. Recently i invited someone to play 0 A.D., after a few games he said he liked 0 A.D. but was put off by the lagg and would come back if this was fixed. This in turn also shows that the community really loves the game if they keep playing it regardless. I also think that alpha and beta increasingly lost their meaning over the past 5 or so years because of big companies. 'Early access' tag is part of the problem and is much more familiar these days. It semi replaced beta and alpha (and is now more of an excuse to sell a game that isnt finished yet).

In alpha 24 seems the simulation code took a heavy downgrade in performance, you can look at it when opening the profiler with F11 midgame and see the erratic msec/frame times that gives midgame and lategame, what's worse is that 99% of that time spend in simulation code is defined as unlogged so that means something went very wrong there. This means is simulation lag not network lag.

I think that is exactly the point. The game has been around for a very long time and as @wraitii said, it doesn't seem like " the final version" will be ready anytime soon, because there is always something to improve. So the options are 1) to lay low, let the few people who work on the development side do their thing, until they don't have the time or fun anymore and let 0ad be a project that is only something for enthusiasts or 2) try to actively get more people involved and grow a bigger community. Because in my opinion 0ad is already a great game and you can have a lot of fun playing it. We don't need to hide that it's an alpha and that there are flaws, we can tell people: yes indeed and if you want to help fix them you are more than welcome. In an age where game develogs on youtube get millions of views, it think there are enough people out there who find game development interesting and may want to help, but they never heard about the project.

Some feedback there: > The biggest problem in this game is the networking. It seems to have the same sort of networking issues Age of Empires did before the HD revamp, except worse. Once you hit a 100+ units for each player, the gameplay slows down dramatically. If the multiplayer desyncs, the game is over and there's no way to continue. The unit pathfinding is pretty janky as well. > I've played it, we liked it, but the multiplayer issues made it a non-starter for us. And while other changes have been made, it doesn't seem like any real networking optimizations have been made in years. The only recent change that might help is them adding a global population max in addition to a per player one, so you can keep the lag from getting too bad but add more units per player as other people get eliminated. But it's not enough.

Another problem is that interesting mp games are played on mainland instead of nice looking maps

None of the issues I pointed out present on the replay are related to the terrains for that matter, in my opinion the bottleneck is somewhere else. Not saying there's anything we can do at the moment to address it immediately with the manpower we have, just pointing things out.

I agree that the game can be quite ugly at times. It's mostly the terrains, IMHO, and I'm (quietly) working on revamping them. But also because streamers need to lower the specs in order to take video at a decent framerate. That is a def a problem.

That should be fine as long as folks are self-starters and resolve to do this without WFG developers, who are not influencers or marketers, needing to prod this along. Say, if you and @ValihrAnt and a few others get together to decide what they want to do and what support they need from the devs, then awesome.

We actually do. Diodorus writes on the Siege of Rhodes and specifically mentions specialists for the construction of the siege weapons. Also Xerxes relied on engineers as well when he had a pontoon bridge constructed to transport his army from Asia into Greece.

Battalions make it less painful to micro, and with that system in place there is possibility for active abilities and to highlight importance of units. In RTS like 0 AD and AoE 1 skirmisher feels worthless, especially when the typical pop cap is around 300 (or more). Losing a unit feels painful in Warcraft 3, even more so in Total War. Also, in say a 50 v 50 archers engagement players focus attack killing 1 by 1. That is not historically accurate. I'm not advocating battalions to replace individual units, but getting back to the topic at hand, if the forge mechanics were to be expanded upon, especially referring to the idea of armaments as resources, then something else has to be simplified. You can't have a game where you micromanage everything.

I believe that objectively the Xiongnu need a Wonder (due to the game mechanics that all civilizations have), since we must look for something in their history in which we have to create something good and convincing for them, I do not expect "nomads" to have pyramids from the size of the Egyptians or the Maya, but something that in the way of life and in the culture they were something really significant. I believe that both the royal tombs Noin-Ula and the city Tongwancheng are good candidates, I would only find it sad and indigestible for not giving them due attention until the next launch, and in the end they end up with a random Stonehenge in victory mode for wonder.

Looks like I have to explain why I consider the Blemmye Camp as even worse than the Column: - each Camp reduces the limit for Noba villages by one - you can train only merc jav cav from the camp, better train jav cav from stables and CCs - if you want to have a military building in neutral territory, just build a Noba village instead. It cannot train cav, but you can send your cav easily through the map and garrison it there - the camp will damage you more than the opponent, because it's a waste of metal - at the other hand the colums might be even useful in rare situations

But we have well-documented heroes for the Xiongnu of the period before 1 BC. the question of wonder is something vast, since for a civilization a wooden statue grid or the burial of a great king is something really important.

Objects contain in name "default" should be available for any faction (units are available in the list)

Yeah I was one of the founders of CoM. Stan was the other and the rest are longer here. May be some times Niektb lurks in the forum. I generally had a Spanish version for the page, That later served as a model some ideas for the current page. On the page I gave and promoted chaos mod that I saw that they could go very far, or that they were semi-official.

I'd say it is a solid option. Tongwancheng could be another choice, more visually impressive but harder to render (would require some speculation). If not for wonder, maybe use white city for possible wall or fortress? Not sure exactly how but i think it would be interesting to portray some of the settled aspects of steppe peoples. Quoting a post from another thread with some ideas about that.

Fixed today. Wait until you receive updates after March 24 https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3725

Here are some examples: Desert/Saharan starting area Expansion. You can see this is an area that would be good to build another CC. On this map it's guarded by creeps. Temperate starting area. The stone mines in the rear are enough for roughly 2 "large" individual mines. You see 2 patches of berries, a boar, and a small herd of deer, with more animals just outside the territory.

The content creators are already there, all it needs it that someone shares content of other youtubers for example on Wildfire games distribution channels like social media, website etc. I think there are enough ppl willing to do content. All it takes is to centralise and occasional short posts about news / new alphas. It is less about having programmers to make hour long trailers and videos, but just about utilizing what is already done.

It's hard to gauge exact resource amounts in Atlas, as that info isn't displayed, but I would say you'd want 2 large stone mines and 2 large metal mines within the starting territory of each player, then you'd want about 3 of each for each player scattered around the map, roughly equidistant. Berries, you want probably 2 patches of 4-5 bushes each in the player start territories, and then maybe one more patch for each player somewhere nearby outside their territory. Probably 1 boar and at least 5 deer/gazelles in the starting territories and probably at least 20-ish more animals per player around the map. For trees, for a desert map at least 30+ in the starting territories, and then some patches and stragglers here and there, very sparse. For a jungle or temperate map, the sky's the limit on the number of trees you place. More in a jungle setting, of course, but in both biomes trees should never be an issue. Keep in mind, players need space to build, so don't let there be too many stragglers blocking up too much building area. A good idea would be to design "expansions" for the map, essentially areas where there's an "orgy" of resources around a nice open area good for planting a new Civic Center for... expansion. This is a Starcraft-ish concept. On each end of the spectrum, Desert/Polar maps have more stone and metal, while jungle maps have more wood. Polar/Jungle maps have more berries and animals, while Desert has fewer berries and animals. Temperate is the most balanced of all maps for resources. In Empires Ascendant, there's a weird tendency to put a large stone and large metal mine right up next to the starting CC. If you want to continue that trend, feel free. However, I feel it's more interesting for build orders to put those starting mines a little further away from the CC so that the player must choose to build a storehouse or just eat the shuttling time.

At some point we will have to call them seasons, you know with this Z-gen trendy of generation z. Another important thing is that YouTube now has very short videos. We could have video of the best players teaching them how to use or micromanage a unit. One of my favs in mobile is a pay to win Clash Royale. So check this. https://youtube.com/shorts/iOPnXJs37D4 Or this all uses of a unit. (I have a hard time being certain tricks with that ice unit).

Perfect!

This mod hides territorial borders, by setting the "BorderThickness" to 0.0 Don't forget to turn off GUI (Alt+G), Silhouettes (Alt+Shift+S), FPS (Alt+F), Realtime (Alt+T) and Gametime (F12). redico.pyromod Edit (5/Apr/21) Found a much easier way to hide the borders, should work for all mods and scenarios, if you have multiple mods installed and still see the borders try loading redico after all other mods.

Pretty cool mod that @azayrahmad You can listen for OnOwnershipChanged or onDestroy messages. ---- Modifiers apply to entities, and there is no way to pass an array of entities (for now anyways). However, a modifier applied to a "Player entity" is also applied to all the entities it owns, so that might be where you got confused. ---- Stackability is actually not implemented in the modifiers manager for now (see L11: // - support stacking modifiers (MultiKeyMap handles it but not this manager).) You can work around it by giving unique identifiers to your modifier, e.g.: cmpModifiersManager.AddModifiers( "MoraleAllies_" + ent, { "Morale/RegenRate": [{ "affects": ["Unit"], "add": this.GetMoraleLevel() }], }, ent ); That way each modifier is unique and it stacks in practice.

It sure does not help that the main homepage has sections that have not been updated since presumably 2012 "Unit formations: Arrange your units in historical battle formations from the Phalanx to the Testudo and gain bonuses, such as increased armor. However, beware the costs that may come with them, such as lower speed! (As of August 2012, this feature has not been implemented yet.)" https://play0ad.com/game-info/features/ But yes even something like a weekly re-post of a nice screenshot from the forum to the relevant social media platforms would be good.

"ApplyMoraleEffects" says it receives multiple entities, but according to what calls it, it merely uses one entity, namely "this.entity", whereas "ApplyMoraleInfluence" actually receives an array of entities. I'm pinging @wraitii on the stacking, for I would as well say this is correct.

Have you played either of the Battle for Middle Earth games?

In Seleucus' and Ptolemy's time, thureoi were not yet introduced to Hellenistic warfare; that would be the around the time of Pyrrhus's Italian wars. So if you choose Seleucus, the thureos spearmen should be replaced with hypaspists and skirmishers with akontistai. Maybe the former can have a fourth rank (like the centurion) which wield silver shields. These make sense since you already put Macedonian pikemen if you chose Ptolemy.

Very, very nice! (I hope that vanilla will someday include something like this as well, since battles of the past were primarily not fought on strength but on morale.) The snippets look way cleaner than what I have implemented a long time ago in my own mod xD (Your link is not alive.) Perhaps a silly question, do you clean on ownership change? Since on init the owner is INVALID_PLAYER, which will have no allies, I guess.

mod that provides backward compatibility for map objects. How it works: In the history of the repository, we find all the renamed files (xml,png,dae,dds) and copy them to a mod directory with the current contents but the old name. Old maps should display objects instead of errors in the js-console. https://github.com/nwtour/0ad_path_backward_capability

jerome, you will notice that the FR speakers are statistically the best players

If you are looking for some mercenaries, I found very cool siberian pictures: https://www.realmofhistory.com/2017/05/30/siberian-warrior-armor-reindeer-antlers/

https://www.docdroid.net/UAhXdak/xiongnu-combined.pdf It seems that the Xiongnu did have some agricultural fields in the south-east border of their Empire where foreigners could settle. It wasn't really their own population but they were a kind of vassals the Xiongnu used to have enough food the winter, to have metals, textiles and others craftsmanship. There is small walls even in pastoral fields and fortified small settlements probably to stock and protect food and goods. The Xiongnu seems to have the same superior bow than the Huns. Edit: to summary a bit what I see for the moment. - The Scythians have a varied roster possible. From the Greek authors, there is mention of mounted javelinists and horse archers with the famous hit-and-retreat and ambush tactics. From archaeology, there is swords and pickaxes, spears, various squale armours and shields. The pickaxe is probably an answer against armours and must be an advantageous. The Sarmatians and the Eastern Scythians developed further heavy lancer cavalry and cataphracts. Normally each Scythians warriors, even armoured ones, have both bows and lances. Something to think about if the switching weapons is implemented one day. Crimean Scythians seem to be often separated from their northern Neighbors, having sometime a different king than the others Scythians. I suggest then for balance and historical reason to put the Crimean in a reform to be chosen with the further Sarmatian's development as an alternative. Since the Sarmatians destroyed the Crimean Scythians, it is logical that the player must chose between two different pathways. - The Xiongnu is more obscur but several patterns seem to emerge and we can make reasonable assumptions. The Xiongnu built their empire on a multiethnic basis with sedentarian populations in their border. They must have the possibility to built defensive fortifications and farms. Since the mod make the difference between civilian and militarian buildings, it should be possible to let sedentarian based units to build such civilian buildings. It would explain why sometimes the Xiongnu have a lot of infantry during the defense of their borders against the Han (although with a very mediocre efficiency). Contrary to others nomads cultures, the Xiongnu have inhabited on their territory for a very long time. The Xiongnu have superior "hunnic-like" bows, long double edged swords, spears and leather and iron squale armour. For their horses, it doesn't seem there is any cataphract, only padded linen and silk protection probably against the arrows can be guessed from archaeology. - The Huns are clearly the more mobiles and have clearly the best horse-archers. Not only because of their superior bows but also thanks to battle tactics. In the archaeology, the Huns seem similar to the Xiongnu but with indications they start using mail armour in Europe. They must be the best raiders. The possibility to hire Germanics units should give them better shock units both in cavalry and in infantry. There is not mention of any cataphract or any armoured horseman. The Avars (closely relatives to them) did have good lance cavalry. Attila was very good in siege warfare during his campaign against both eastern and western Romans. Hierarchical classification, I suggest (to discuss): Horse-archers - Huns > Xiongnu > Scythians Close-combat cavalry - Scythians > Huns > Xiongnu Armoured cavalry - Scythians with nomad reform > Xiongnu > Scythians with Crimean reform > Huns Lancers cavalry - Scythians with nomad reform > Huns > Xiongnu > Scythians with Crimean reform Combat infantry - Huns > Scythians with Crimean reform > Xiongnu > Scythians with nomad reform Archers infantry - Huns > Xiongnu > Scythians Economy (self-production) - Xiongnu > Scythians > Huns Economy (Raiding) - Huns > Xiongnu > Scythians Siege abilities - Huns > Xiongnu > Scythians Defensive structures - Xiongnu > Scythians with Crimean reform >> Scythians with nomad reform = Huns This is clearly a matter of interpretation.

Expanding diplomacy options beyond tribute and alliances would be grate. Add something like free-trade ,non-aggresion pacts and more. Also hopefully in the coming future we will have an options menu. That would be more than usefull.