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I don't think that the gameplay should change that much. The game is already great, so changing the mechanics can be anti-productive - as we've seen in A24. Better improve other aspects of the game, for example performance or the User Interface (for example its not possible to save and load multiplayer matches? that's rather bad) At the other hand, I've gotten some revolutionary ideas to differentiate the civs which really should be implemented: - All civs except the macedonians lose their siege workshops and train their siege weapons from the fortresses - all civs except the mauryans lose their elephant stables and train elephants in the fortresses - all civs except persians lose their stables and train that cavalry in barracks - mercenaries can collect resources just as other citizen soldiers. and their costs change: from wood and metal to exact what citizen soldiers cost, with the exception that 25 food is replaced by metal. That would turn mercenaries from small anti-siege taskforces to units which can actually used as regular army part! Plus, There would be an additional possibility to diversify the civs: Ptolemies could train mercenary skirmishers in phase one and the slingers in phase 2.

In 0 A.D. all civilizations have exactly the same basic structures: a house for population, a farmstead for food, a storehouse for other resources, etc. This is basically inherited from Age of Empires, which had a granary (for fruit and grain) and a storage pit (for fish, meat, wood, gold, and stone). Age of Empires II had three structures, a mill (for all food), lumber camp (for wood), and mining camp (for gold and stone). Age of Mythology broke with this convention of all civilizations having the same buildings: The Greeks have a granary for food and a storehouse for wood and gold. The Egyptions have a granary for food, a lumber camp for wood, and a mining camp for gold. The Norse have a movable ox-cart for all resources. The Atlanteans have citizens that double as builders, gatherers, and dropsites and for economic technologies they have an economic guild. The Chinese have a storage pit for food, wood, and gold. This worked great and gave each civilization a different feeling. In principle 0 A.D. could differentiate civilizations by giving them different structures too. With four resources there are already 15 possible combinations for dropsites: a single structure: food+wood+stone+metal two structures: food, wood+stone+metal food+stone+metal, wood food+wood+metal, stone food+wood+stone, metal food+wood, stone+metal food+stone, wood+metal food+metal, wood+stone three structures: food+wood, stone, metal food+stone, wood, metal food+metal, wood, stone food, wood+stone, metal food, wood+metal, stone food, wood, stone+metal a structure for each resource: food, wood, stone, metal Other combinations are possible too (e.g. food+wood, food+stone, food+metal). And combined with the house, corral, and market one can get many more possibilities. Of course, not every single faction must have completely unique structures, it's perfectly fine for multiple civilizations to share similar structures. However, the point is there is no compelling reason why all civilization should continue to always keep exactly the same basic structures. Currently there is a great desire to see 0 A.D.'s civilizations further differentiated from each other. However, the current proposals can fundamentally be summarized as “the same basics + something unique”, which means they'll remain quite similar to each other (as is the case in Age of Empires). By varying the basics instead one could easily achieve a more different feeling for each civilization. What do you think? (As for implementation, someone should improve the AI to use the (already existing) DropsiteFood, DropsiteWood, DropsiteStone, and DropsiteMetal classes instead of Farmstead and Storehouse.)

I WANT THE GAME TO GO BACK TO ALPHA 7, WHEN MEN WERE MEN AND WOMEN WERE MEN

I find it interesting that on the one hand it is always very much stressed that the game is still an alpha, which means that there will be sudden changes and cool new features will be added, but many player share this mentality that changes should be cosmetic at best.

I wouldn't say that worker elephant is the problem because if we remember a23 - nobody was saying "mauri too op bla bla" even tho back then those worker ele could also build as well as be a dropsite at the same time - the balance issue is not the worker elephant but other things like making archers destroy siege engines, giving rams and siege production buildings to all civs for the sake of balance If Kushite can start with a priest and britons with a dog - why don't add something to others civs to start as well (carthage can make trade ships on p1 for example, and nobody minds that...) - athen/sparta/mace can start with extra sheep for example (like corral sheep controlable animal for scout and food)

I think we need to answer in the spirit of wierd jokes. The point is that if there are constantly rigorous changes, we might never reach a sweet spot. I think we should take just minor steps at a time and just tweak the stats a little bit to move 0ad in the right direction. However I would support the idea of dropping meat in corrals(and making them a little cheaper than farmsteads) so they finally can get a competitive purpose.

Not sure how that is revolutionary, because what you discribed is basically A23.

Let's neuter Maury (worker elephant) like Romans were neutered (catapults/encampments). Better yet. Delete all civs and copy/paste Britons and rename all units with unique names. This way no civ has a unique advntage over another - in the name of balance. If anything, @wowgetoffyourcellphone has a more reasonable suggestion.

In Alpha 6 the boats could walk on land I remember.

The Egyptians did travel far into the desert and set up mining camps, so to reflect this perhaps we can have a storehouse for food, a storehouse for wood and a separate storehouse for metal and stone. This may apply to the Ptolemies and Kushites but can also be implemented for other civs. I think A24 is not as bad as many people say. I really appreciate being able to train siege from workshops and elephants from stables, as it allows me to spam siege weapons and elephants. However, it would be convenient to train cavalry from barracks. Training hero, siege and champions all from the fortress really bottlenecks the speed of production. Furthermore, women being able to build barracks and forts is very reasonable; they are not stupid.

It's due to merging (I presume you use github mirror). This may result in anything but a linear history. Guess there was a bug in the script or some manual intervention with issues. See $ git rev-list --count A24b..master 2532 There certainly weren't that many commits to svn since then All the more reason to use git-bisect which is branch aware. In case you come across a commit (check with git show) which you think is pointless to test or you can't test (because it doesn't build etc) just use "git bisect skip" to get a new suggestion.

For the record, the worker elephant was actually considered not that great in A23 and made cheaper and trained more quickly in A24, but also easier to kill to compensate; see https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2852

That was the joke,,, I dislike how such a nice proposal gets straight into a "A23b was better" @Player of 0AD You can just go back to that

Adding auras or minimum distances is quite easy to implement. The trouble is the AI: Petra does not understand auras, never builds more than one farmstead, and will try to place fields as close as possible to the civic centre. Forcing fields to be moved away from the civic centre thus leads to a poorer single-player experience (and also reduces player freedom). I wonder whether it's worth it. Also keep in mind the multifunctional civic centre isn't entirely realistic either.

My Sunday offering! Enjoy And @Yekaterina- which particular Chinese language does Robin speak? I'm guessing either Cantonese or Mandarin?

Take a look at this: 0AD pre-Alpha Not sure why I can't train units from cc but quite impressive for something made in 2003!

Instead of trying to cripple the maury ele we could also add equally unique units for each civs so they have more variation. I'm sure the 0ad historians would have some interesting ideas, then the balance team could integrate them to the unit composition of each civ.

This topic is for suggesting the creation of custom in-game menus that better suit each civilization, as well as improved unit/building thumbnails and mini-map. I've created two examples of this:

A general complaint in 0ad is that archers (actually it holds for all ranged infantry) are to strong. I think this is not exactly the case, but it holds some truth. The main type of units that should be able to punish ranged infantry is mellee cavalry, which is for most civs unavailable in p1. When you reach p2, there are allready so many ranged units on the field, that the cavalry nearly seems just to be target dummies. From my experience melee cavalry does not work out as an archer(or more generally ranged infantry) counter. On the other hand, even civs like Rome or Macedon that get melee cav in P1 don´t seem to be able to use them effectively in P1. Hence I have been working on a mod, whose purpose is not to be peak gameplay, but rather a test on how the gameplay would shift after small changes. I expect that there will be a lot of people who will be voicing concerns, but rather I am looking for 1300+ rated players to test with/against me how it affects gamplay and what can be concluded from these results. If you would like to try it out and see what new meta it would create, please leave a comment here. Also the idea is more about getting generic balance right and less about specific civs. The mod is still a little work in progress(I will publish it soon) and I have implemented some features: Carthage, Gaul, Iberians, Persian, Seleucids get access to a second melee(exception sele who get cav archer) cavalry unit in P1 at the stable/Iberian embassy. For Carthage I did some changes to get the Ib. embassy in P1. Melee Spear/Sword Cavalry get +1 pierce armor and +1 pierce attack for spear and +1 hack for sword. Citizen archers get +10% spread(inaccuracy). Infantry swordsmen get +1 pierce armor and +10% speed. Towers take 50 seconds longer to build, but are 25 wood cheaper in compensation. This prevents panic defenses or situations were people build towers right in front of your army, which seems ridiculous to me. Also garrisoned infantry contribute less to the arrow fire of towers. Finally all buildings(Including towers) get less of a loyalty regen bonus per garrisoned infantry after advancing. My main goal is to create a system with melee cav>infantry swordsmen>infantry spearmen triangle, where players are encouraged to do aggressive strategies and build a good mix of melee and ranged units. If A24 units would be perfectly balanced, I would hypothesize a mod like suggested would totally break the game in favour of the cavalry and sentence ranged infantry to death. I hope you would like to give the mod(I´ll upload it soon) a competitive try and we see if the hypothesis of the unit balance holds true.

Thank you @Stan` for help fixing the problem. THEBANS ARE NOW ON MOD.IO AWAITING APPROVAL https://0ad.mod.io/theban-greeks

My original idea with 'Cultures' is that each 'Culture' came with a set of features or bonuses, and that a civ could be a "member" of more than one culture. So, Seleucids could be of the "Greek" culture (Theatron structure and "Hellenization" aura, plus a set of armor techs in the Forge and spearman bonuses) and the "Persian" or "Eastern" culture (a trading bonus and cavalry bonuses). It would show that cultures can and do meld. Carthage would have a "North African" culture (North African War Elephants) and a "Semitic" culture (Mercenary and Naval bonuses), each culture bestowing a set of techs, auras, buildings, or bonuses. A civ with only one culture would then be allowed 1 or more unique bonuses to that civ.

I'd think then it would be better to load up a list with check boxes so you can check (or uncheck if checked is the default) which biomes you want.

Yeah, this one really annoys me. ^ @Angen @Freagarach What do you guys think? Relatively easy fix?

// /

The lack of units in the fortresses bothers me too. But without a doubt we must add new ones and not go back to the Alpha 23 because it is a setback in a lot of aspects, Although a24 also brought small setbacks to some civilizations. But in the absence of deficiencies we can move things and create new things for strengths. I think that the type of units that can be created in the fortress are for the defense of a city or a position (a perimeter). Then they would be units that serve to defend fortresses and maximize defenses. Basically anti siege units. And trash units ( to bulk faster the army) some auxiliary units.

@Langbart It's great you like my proposal. However, I'm not a fan of working on MODs. From my perspective, most people won't ever use them. On the other hand, If you can get the developers interested in this feature for the official version, I'd be more than pleased to provide the graphics.

Which is exactly why my original proposal was to split the civiv center functionality (see top post). Defensive buildings do the defense, the farmstead is for storing food and the storehouse is for storage other resources. But it seems this is not the preferred option, which is why I included other options in the discussion. To the problems with petra: this is a second problem that needs to be fixed. If its worth it depends if you like a more realistic city layout. There are some people who would like that (again, see top post) but also people who are ok with the current unrealistic layout. I am just wondering why so many areas of the game are closely based on history, but the standard build order involves that the heart of the cities are turned into one giant farming area. And again: the goal is not to make the game hyper-realistic. With the right solution we don't have to sacrifice a fun gameplay. The goal is to find a solution that is fun, but looks better/ and is more realistic than the status quo.

or/and set same civ for all

If you don't want luck to play a minor role don't use random civ or random map. Also winning or loosing is a minor matter as long as the game is fun to play.

You can't have a battalion without a cohort!

As I wrote, it's fine for some factions to share structures. As for cultures, if you mean something along the lines of this forum thread, I don't think that's a good idea: culture is fluid and overlap should be possible, e.g. Iberians having some things in common with Gauls and some with Carthaginians; or Seleucids with Macedonians and with Persians. (I also favour extending the “wooden structures” civilization bonus to the Mauryas, but that's a different discussion.)

That would also give more flexibility to modifications that don't want to blindly follow the public standard and allow e.g. removing stone and metal from the civic centre, dock, and worker elephant.

Maybe, just maybe, we could use the cultures? Have the cultures use different kind of structures. E.g. the Greek cultures use X and Y, the Celts use Z.

@Lion.Kanzen The above are what Robin and I think about 0AD in China. I will ask CAGD_lulofun for his opinions; he is a Taiwanese player rated around 1500. My Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNHlv9N2BnJjITHbW5V-gRQ Robin's Bilibili: https://space.bilibili.com/437974995/video Robin's Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMfNFa4F-ml8KUDKn2sYspQ/videos Although I am not fully fluent at Chinese myself I can understand most basic conversations. I and Robin are willing to offer any lingual / translation assistance where needed, although most Chinese teenagers are able to understand basic English.

Lion Kanzen about Han Chinese: People in Mainland China definitely have access to 0AD if they want it; it is not banned . In fact my friend Robin posts 0AD videos on Bilibili (Chinese equivalent of Youtube) here: https://search.bilibili.com/all?keyword=0AD&from_source=webtop_search&spm_id_from=333.909 . I am glad to say that he is not the only Chinese 0AD player, if you scroll down this page you find other Chinese people who uploads 0AD videos. However, 0AD is still not very well known in China yet, not because of censorship but because it comes in English by default so many players cannot understand it. The Linux users in China are not really gamers and gamers are too immersed in Tencent games... There is a Chinese 0AD discord group and CAGD_lulofun is the 'leader' of that discord: https://discord.gg/VJ97mUv4 I did spot a few Chinese players in the lobby today (clearly identifiable by their names). There are more Chinese players who fight the AI all the time because they have long pings in lobby games due to long geographical distance. However, in most cases the ping can be under 280ms. Sometimes they are deterred by language barrier. The Chinese government would not ban a such a fun open source game just because an opium war broke out more than a century ago... the types of game they ban are ones that contain adult content or promote extremist views. 0AD is quite healthy for any standards.

0AD A22 Lobby still exists! There are people still visiting it!

The errors above suggest he reverted to A23 and are boost warnings because our version was so old then it didn't know about vs2017

Lets try to make things more realistic and more complicated, but much more interesting. I'm not a programmer and I don't know all the cost of processing this, but, let´s suggest it anyway. In the game, all human beings could have a "scare marker". Nonhuman animals, in turn, would have a marker of potential "frighten humans marker". To give realism and maintain balance, the interaction between these two markers would work like this: a human could only be scared by an animal only once, once he received a "check mark" that tells that he/she has already been scared by that animal/species, he/she would be immune to encounters with the same animal or animals of the same species. The scare would also have a time limiter, I think something between 10-20 seconds. After that, the "check mark" would be granted and he/she would no longer be afraid of that animal/species. So far, it doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to implement, but ... Another interesting thing, but certainly more difficult to be implemented, is the percentage of humans affected in an encounter with multiple entities. A wolf, for example, could frighten 5-10% of humans, an elephant 20-30% and a tiger, in turn, 70-80% of human entities. The problem is that "encounters" are somewhat gradual, varying from one second to the next, in the approximation of an animal to a group of humans. How to apply this percentage if the number of humans affected varies from second to second? Regards, Sturm PS: The "scare marker" would be also useful for "red dragons" e dinosaurs"

@vladislavbelov suggest you do a binary search and git-bisect is the perfect helper for this task. You can fully automate the process but consider this advanced usage of git-bisect which is probably out of reach for now. Just use git-bisect for book keeping and picking a commit in between last broken and first fixed and do building and testing as you did already. Getting to know git-bisect is worth some initial mind gymnastic.

Perhaps train them at the Storehouse, so the player is forced to build a Storehouse first. EDIT: Also, 1. Maybe reduce Worker Elephant health, so they can be sniped earlier 2. Maybe increase train time, so that they take longer to replace 3. Maybe take away 1 or more of the carry capacity techs. 4. Or maybe increase pop cost of Worker Elephants.

The polygon is no longer visible outside the minimap, this was fixed by @vladislavbelov with rP25241, so mods for the current dev version and for A25 can have a nice round minimap. @Sebastián Gómez are you still around, can you provide some graphical content?

You might have to use web.archive.org until trac is working correctly again. PS: If you want to create your own map, there is an excellent tutorial by Tom 0ad: How to easily turn ANY Country into a 0AD Map! - 0AD Map Making (28/Mar/21)

@Stan`

It would make using the corrals to raise animals to butcher for food considerably easier.

I think adding the Han would kind of bring 0 A.D. to a larger audience. I think they'd be a big hit.

hyperrealism in an RTS is absurd. The RTS are full of abstractions to eliminate impractical and unnecessary things. Things like those are the ones that have removed the function for example to the outpost, The outpost is almost useless.

Well, improvements of this sort are all well and good, but I think that the real thing we need to learn about is when Byzantium will be featured since you can't have forks without that.

Yes, I'm aware I'm repeating myself, though it's still true. There is nothing wrong with being private per se. And no, there is nothing wrong with forking either, it's one of the beauties of open source development. You can do whatever you like, it's completely up to you. For the rest of the world, though, the only thing that matters is what's published.

The most important difference is that your fork isn't public.