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Auto-Queue is an ability of a building to loop through production queue indefinitely as long as resources and population limits permit it. So instead of training units repeatedly, you can simply set the queue once and set the building to auto-queue. If you played Age of Mythology you probably have used this features. In Rise of Nations it's called Infinite Queue. I have searched through the forum in case this topic has been discussed before, but I can't find any. So I decided to make a small mod to demonstrate this feature, inspired mostly from RoN's infinite queue. I attached the mod below (also accessible from GitHub). Here is the screenshot of 0 A.D (Alpha 24b release) using Auto-Queue mod. The button is accessible in middle panel at the bottom (command section, beside delete and rally point button). When the button is toggled on, units in queue will be indefinitely looped. It doesn't work with technologies as they are one time only. I know that auto-queue is generally considered as a rather controversial feature in RTS, as it is reducing micro but also can be dangerous if left unattended. I personally think that 0 A.D. vision is to reduce repetitive actions, so this feature is a must. What do you think about adding auto-queuing in 0 A.D? 0AD-Auto-Queue.zip

Cool, I like the extra button. Working well. I know @nani has integrated something like that in its AutoCiv mod. In this video, titled 0AD Mods - AutoCiv Game Enhancer @1min53sec (4/Sep/20), you can see the feature in action.

I haven't created the auras or techs yet, so feel free to give ideas or criticism. The Portraits will eventually need to be replaced. I wish I had the cash to just hire an artist.

please no. Other elephant techs, yes why not.

Their stats would be rebalanced of course.

Elephant Stables Numidian/Nubian Mahouts (Carthage/ Ptolemies): Greater Speed Elephant Roundup: Faster Train Time Forge Tusk Spikes: Greater Attack Elephant Panoply: Greater Armor (can swap actor to armored version) Elephant Howdahs: Gives Howdahs to war elephants

It would be good if this is added to the main game. Then there would be no discussion if it is "cheating" using a mod that includes this feature. An extension could be to automatically adjust the auto training batch size to get even more efficient training times.

Heavily inspired by the morale mod: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/37755-morale-system-for-0-ad And this idea: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/38187-give-elephants-area-damage/ I want to explore a new mechanic for elephants. (Just for fun, so the effects may be unrealistic) Original version, now outdated: Historically elephants were especially effective against cavalry, because if the horses were not used to the presence of elephants, they would get very nervous and flee when they saw something that big walking towards them. This would disrupt the battle formation and cause disturbance in the enemy lines. I am basing this mostly on wikipedia quotes, so if some of the historians want to explain more if this is historically accurate or if these are just some anecdotes, feel free to do so Therefore the Idea would be that elephants have an aura that changes the stance of enemy cavalry to passive and forces them to flee. It should only affect unhabituated / basic rank cavalry, as the horses loose their fear over time. So advanced /elite cavalry is not affected. Current Version (V 3.0.0): Elephants have the aura "Fear" which affects a random percentage of all basic rank enemy Infantry and all of the basic rank enemy cavalry. The affected units get scared and will flee, but they try to attack again. Every time the elephants get hurt (under a certain threshold) there is the probability that they also get scared and fall into rage. So you have no longer control over them and they may attack your own units. scary-elephants.zip battle-test.mp4 So let me hear what you think about it Thanks to @wowgetoffyourcellphone and @azayrahmad for the tips.

I think it's a big overstatement to call this mod realistic. This makes some famous anectods - actually marginal to the history of war elephants - into a very important feature, that can change the balance of the game in a forced way. Just give elephants a bonus against cavalry (and maybe spash damage?), that's more than enough. Elephants were used against heavy infantry most of the time. Hannibal at Zama didn't use elephants to protect his infantry from Scipio's cavalry.

- The difference is that attacking rams can attack the defending rams and outnumber them, but they are helpless against defending elephants - point 3 would increase the turtling aspect of the game too much - even if rams can attack elephants, they are rather helpless against them

Clear "no" to garrisoning elephants ever in fortresses - how to ram down fortresses if elephants are in there? Right, not at all. I'm also against additional buffs for elephants - why buffing them if they are OP? So, only thing I could imagine is: Excluding them from the current armor upgrades and give them their own armor upgrades, for nerfing.

Great adaptation, @maroder! Perhaps create a new class e.g. Habituated. Or add Basic class to the aura so advance /elite units are not affected. As to @faction02's concern, I think it could be mitigated by tweaking the aura range, i.e. should be within elephant's attack range so fleeing enemies can still be killed.

True, but to me it seems like that would only bother a small amount of the top players. If your micro skill are only average (which I guess should be true for most players ) and there are often moments in the game where you forget to produce more units, this feature can add more fun / reduce the unnecessary stress. Especially when trying to use the corrals. Also, efficiently using the batch size to your advantage does still provide a reward for micro-skilled player who like to do it manually.

You'd have to convince everyone it's not cheating in the first place

Great job congratulations! I would love to see this adapted to 0a.d. Alpha 25 It would be a really unique mechanic (even if I don't expect it to become official: D)

As long as it stays a mod: pretty interesting!

I am on the side of wierd jokes. In addition why introduce techs that are to expensive to afford? Also the practice of using war elephants died out(except in India and south east asia), so I don´t disagree with elephants slowly decreasing in value.

I'm honestly unsure about this feature as well, but it would be interesting to make it so that advanced, elite soldiers, and champion have resistance to this.

lncredible...

As I would not like to see the change in the game I'm not thinking about an idea to balance it ; )

as the temporary effect by an ability, would be good. We need abilities.

You can change it in the game settings popcap.mp4

@borg- @wowgetoffyourcellphone what techs does DE have in stock?

This is a nice idea, I am not sure how easy it is to implement this. You could of course use a random subset of the affected units, but the aura gets updated all the time, so you will likely hit every unit with it.

I try to prioritise community patches in my Review Queue. If you have trouble settings things up, feel free to ask! (Easier on IRC: #0ad-dev.)

In order to make the game more balanced and even more credible, the elephant or group of elephants could scare only a percentage of the enemies, something like 20-30%.

Yeah, good point. I tried to simulate a large battle, but its hard to control two player at once. From what I saw it is not that big of a problem, as the elephants chase the cavalry easily out of the range of the ranged infantry. But yes it is very chaotic and the cavalry is more or less useless in this case. You would have to send them raiding, while you use your infantry to counter the eles. Or research the not yet implemented tech. Also I think it is not that problematic with the cav, because they are not such tanks as the heroes. Otherwise you could use the strategy you described also without this mod just set the cav to passive, order them to attack and then send your infantry. At least I haven't seen someone use this until now. But yes, maybe something has to be changed in the chasing mechanic. It might be better to preferably attack non-fleeing/non-passive units and only target them when there are no other targets left or you specifically order to attack them.

I never did it before, but I'm going to try. I think this patch has different purpose than my proposed mod, perhaps I'll try combining it both in another patch.

I will only buy it if it's Linux compatible (it won't be - 99.99% certain unless they make a deal with valve) And if it is Nothing map viable. I mean, it isn't technically illegal to Pirate something which they specifically made it so that i can't use on my system, right? If they want my bucks, they need to Accommodate to ME first!

@Freagarach that would be really nice

@azayrahmad will you create a patch for it? https://code.wildfiregames.com/

I mean it is only cheating if it gives an unfair advantage to one player. If everybody can use it I hope this would not be a problem The benefits of reducing micro and not having to click on the buildings every few seconds is imo way to great.

Nice.

Darn it I knew I must not be the only one trying to implement this feature here. I searched for 'queue' and 'auto queue' in this forum and found nothing relevant. To answer @seeh's question, yes it is the exact same functionally. The only difference beside the name is that autociv uses hotkey and my proposed mod uses button. I think I'm going to add hotkey to my mod.

I think to mitigate this effect it should be fixed.

I love the idea but I (and I think a few other players, chrstgtr in the topic below) dislike the flee mechanics in general. I think the part we dislike about it might be a problem here too. Having units running when they flee and other chasing them instead of fighting is problematic in battles. It is common to have a player setting his hero in passive to trigger the chasing mechanic in the enemy army. It can put you at a strong disadvantage. To abuse this feature, I would send my melee cavalry to attack your elephants and therefore force your ranged infantry to chase my melee cavalry instead of killing my ranged infantry. I would suggest testing some large battle with it, I would expect the result to be chaotic (I tried to make a video while testing it to show you what I mean but I messed up the installation. I might try again when I have more time). While this might looks like a real battle from a gameplay perspective, it might become quite messy. It will be great to try it. Keep up with the great job and the nice ideas !

I made a quick test of your mod, thanks for taking time to think about the issue. A few remarks: - there is still the upgrade to increase the default number of arrows, so abusing tower concentration could be an issue. - I tried to think about early placement of fields, I have to admit that they would be tricky to defend effectively. I placed them around the initial farmstead that I used for berries in order to save early wood. I might have set them between my first woodline (ideally on the side of the map border so there is one less side to watch out for enemy) and the civic center since it has the advantage of providing a nice vision. Mines are still right next to the civic center, so I might also be tempted to have farms around mines. Soldiers would be very close to the fields and remain productive this way, an alternative approach might be to start farming with soldiers. - I noticed that the restrictions on the distance between fortress was still there but that there was no restriction on distance with respect to the civic center. I would guess that removing the defensive property of the civic center would increase the incentive to add military structure very close. With the aura that you have added, the civic center might be even easier to protect since it would also work in late game. I have tried to illustrate what my city might look like after 15-20 minutes as an illustration of what the changes might imply (though I probably built too many forts to be a very good example). About the issue with respect to defensive structure, I have tried to illustrate what I meant with my defensive city example above. Sieging a city is costly: if an attacker has to destroy all buildings preventing him from moving forward with sieges, there is an opportunity cost in terms of economy he cannot produce with the citizen soldiers protecting the sieges. If sieges are not protected they would be sniped for free. I added a "palisades net" here, since it is cheaper than a regular palisades wall but quite effective at slowing down sieges. I could also add a few palisades pillar and more layers there to increase the density of cheap stuffs to be destroyed before the enemy can reach my valuable buildings. I let you imagine how annoying it is to destroy something like this and how much worse it can become if the city is protected with archers/slingers, and you don't have any with your civilization. About the choices you made for your mod: - Removing the distance limit between towers: You could concentrate too many towers in one spot, with a wall in front and the upgrade for an additional arrow they would probably be abused. You could build squares of 9 turrets with a wall around to act as a mini-fort which doesn't need to garrison soldiers inside. There is also some maps with narrow passages where stacking towers on top of one another would be too strong probably. The current solution is not perfect but probably better the suggested alternative of completely removing the distance limit. - Removing the storehouse capacity of the civic center: What if your storehouse get captured by the enemy and you have no wood available to build a new one? There would be an incentive to fight to the death to protect a storehouse, probably outside of the aura of the civic center. The potential usage of the civic center as a storehouse and the struggler trees prevent from having this undesirable effect. For food, it might make sense but in general, I think I would prefer an incentive system. A system of fertile land like the one from Delenta Est could makes sense. We could also imagine alternative system that might not require to modify all maps like for example a small malus for farming if the farm is too close to a building which is not a farmstead (because it creates the shadow or poor land quality... ). You could then choose a safe build with farms next to the civic center or choose the one providing a better economy with farms in the most productive area. - Ungarrisoned arrow count is reduced to 0: I don't see an obvious issue to apply this for tower but I don't know what was the original motivation to introduce it in the first place. - The civic center ability to shoot arrows has been removed and replaced by an aura, that increases the attack and armor of soldiers close to it: I think this might be problematic since it could create an incentive in late game to fight right next to a civic center (the initial cc or a forward one). The second potential issue I can think off relates to differences in range from different units. As you mentioned, the civic center defensive capacity is very important in early game and if you have weaker units you might not be able to survive the first few minutes of game. I would put a red flag toward removing it completely since it could change dramatically the early game balance. Some civilization can use their starting stones to get very early slingers, maurya elephants worker make early hunting highly effective and offer plenty of potential for deadly rushes. Other civilization won't be able to compete with this type of advantages (especially in team games for which the distance between players is quite small). Finally, just a bit of food for thoughts since a forum is the right place to farm ideas. I really like Changeset 24971 – Wildfire Games, which introduces smoke at the armory when it is researching upgrades. The changes is great since it has a strategic interest for competitive player, and it is probably a tiny step in the direction your are aiming at. I usually put my forges in front line to protect more valuable buildings (they slow down the enemy, have no value once upgrades are done....). The animation change might give me the incentive to hide it from the enemy sight since if he sees smoke during an assault, the building could be targeted. Teleportation through buildings probably doesn't give any incentive to leave space for movement between buildings (if I remember correctly, in previous alpha units would always exit on the same side, so teleportation could go only in one direction). If that wasn't possible, I would probaly leave much more space between buildings which could help having city which have a more realistic look. I don't know if something like this would be desirable but at least I know it is feasible and might help to reach your aim. As mentioned in the other post, working through incentives would be better but in some cases it might be difficult to do... For example, it would be nice to prevent palisades spam somehow, something close to a minimum distance rules could make sense there too (though I imagine it would create issues when it is not in a straight line). I don't think that stacking palisades is desirable in any way so maybe there, why not working with some hard limit.

A not very serious and quick attempt, I used the British texture, so I understood the sides of the kurgans that could be made of terracotta (??) and the entrance to stone walls, or without entrance. Which would be the best? I believe it must contain enough props to not be too "poor" in detail. I accept criticism and beautiful reference images.

The Scythians need a more colorful texture to differentiate themselves from the Xiongnu (I believe that the current Xiongnu can continue as it is).

I think that a TG cooldown is the solution to laggy TGs and 4v3 scenarios. I agree that having somewhat decent teammates and no lag in my games would double my gameplay happiness. I agree that it'd be nice to have both solo rank and TG rank for better TG balance. However, I think Marcus, Sequani, and Causative are making rankings overly complicated. Using certain stats just favors a TG playstyle and might not mean actually winning the game. If a person wins a TG by feeding resources to another player for an early p3 then why should he be rated lower than someone with a good KD or building capture rate. If people are serious about TG, all that matters is whether you win or not. If the only reason to do the ranking this way is because it would better identify who's "carrying" then we wont get the best players we'll just get the most selfish. If people say that straight wins/losses adjusted for enemy team elo might cause people to use boring strategies, it's the duty of the balance team to encourage players to get kills and have fun (not some over-complicated abusable ranking system).

1) and 3) are big improvements 2) imho could have a little less reflective specular light and a leather like feel, like it did in the old one

Had some fun the phase icons using my new letters. phase_sources.7z