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Hey everybody, happy to report a LOT of new 0 A.D. music coming! I'm working on a bunch of tracks, and @Samulis contributed a lot of excellent ones as well! I've noted the request for more battle music, will see what I can come up with! Though to the best of my knowledge there are two combat tracks from Jeff Willet, Elusive Predator and First Sighting - is there only one on the game playlist? Might be worth checking. Thanks, Omri

The map and terrain overhaul will come with some new and updated maps, some ported from Delenda Est. Perhaps 10-12 new or updated skirmish maps will showcase how the completed map overhaul will revolutionize the look of the game. Work continues.

I begin the process of posting this to mod.io if no one else has any bugs or requests.

Most of the work seems to be focused on making things standardized and then adding "special" techs/bonuses to each civ. See athens threads on forum and the associated tickets for an example. I think that these techs/bonuses are great. But I don't think those need to be the only differentiators, and if you peruse the proposals for long enough you will begin to notice that the same ideas keep popping up (e.g., give a slinger tech to slinger civs like how there is an archery tradition, give a spear tech to certain civs like how there is a archery tech, cheaper techs for Athens like how some civs are universities that provide cheaper tech, heros that provide similar bonuses such as an attach buff of x% or healing rate of x, etc.) These aren't bad features, but they are repetitive features. Having some basic differentiating features like Iber starting with walls (which many now want to get rid of), celts getting a pop bonus for each building (which was eliminated this alpha), some civs not having rams (which was eliminated in this alpha), or ptol having free houses (which was eliminated this alpha) are all nice differentiators. There are still some things that are totally unique (e.g., Brennus giving metal for every kill) but these are less common than before. Making all buildings cost the same for every civ will only make the game more and more uniform with less and less differentiation. I question why this is necessary. To answer your question with another question: why do we keep eliminating differentiators and then racking our brains to come up with "new" ideas to differentiate civs in order to "fix" problems that didn't exist before the latest "improvements?" It makes a lot more sense to work within the current structure to balance what already exists and add differentiators as appropriate and as necessary. This is what was done to balance units this alpha, which is one of the most popular changes (and while still not perfect it is much closer than before).

elef vs spear.webm This is a demonstration of 1 spearman vs 1 Mauryan elephant. I had healers to prevent it from dying. The attack rate of the spearman was 1500ms, I can't remember the default attack rate. I would imaging they can attack quite quickly because they have been training to stab people for their whole professional career I suggest maybe 500ms? But to balance that we decrease the damage.

I don't think there is a point to this discussion for the game, that's why this is in the off-topic section.

I agree. We can also introduce other places where stone could be spent, e.g.: Certain techs Champion slinger units? Remove metal cost of civic centres/ military colony and replace it with stone. (500 wood, 1000 stone)

I have already been experimenting with giving the game a much needed update to the terrain textures. I have been exclusively using assets from this website here, licensed as cc0: CC0 Textures - Public Domain PBR Materials We could contact this gentleman and ask for his assistance in creating new assets if his site currently does not have them and WFG could even become a Patron (his highest Patreon level is $5/month). Even if we don't try to partner with him, we can still utilize his excellent CC0 assets and ask him to check out how we're using his stuff. cough I am very keen now on using CC0 or CC-BY-SA materials. eh hem. And so far the results have been better than I'd hoped. EXAMPLES India: Desert (using assets from the India biome) Alpine-Polar (I think these 2 should be combined) Pros for updating the terrains: The game's current terrains are inconsistent in quality and scattershot in style. A new set of terrains can unify the quality and style. Terrains take up a massive amount of screen space, or what the player sees, so improving them gives a large boost in visual quality. The current terrains don't fully take advantage of the graphics engine's capabilities. A new set of terrains can do that. Improving the terrains can bring the look of the game closer to modern expectations. We can reduce the sheer number of terrains by half, which comes with the benefit of visual consistency and ease of use for mappers. Cons for updating the terrains: It will take considerable effort and take attention away from other possible tasks. The new textures will be on average 4x larger than the existing textures and will add normal maps and spec maps where previously there were few. Will increase the graphics memory load and possibly push out those with low-spec computer rigs. ?

Hello again everyone! I had an idea today to improve the "archery tradition" tech available to some archer civs. I think it should return to being a tradeoff tech like in alpha 23 but with some changes. 0 resource cost and instant research: a decision kinda like the seleucid champion infantry research add a drawback and a bonus with an overall effect depending on the situation in game (not necessarily a buff or nerf tech) The idea is to make archers with archery tradition beat other archers like in a24 by a significant (not OP) margin, but increase the vulnerability of them such that more units or buildings are needed to protect them from melee cavalry or melee inf. potential combinations of improvements and drawbacks: +10 meters range BUT establish minimum range (5 meters) where the archer would go to attack units further away. +10 meters BUT reduce HP (a little) +10 meters +15% damage BUT reduce HP(a little) reduce pierce and hack armor (a little) I think that if archers were nerfed in a25 to a reasonable level, then this upgrade could give some options to civs that would usually get archers, like mauryans. If a maur player is against a cavalry civ, or a civ with no archers, it is smart for that maur player to choose regular archers. But if the maur player is against regular archers, such as carthage, then it is smart for maur player to get archery tradition. But if a25 makes mercenaries balanced and effective (but still more expensive), then the carthage player could pull a surprise by investing time and res into merc shops and merc uprgades and mercs and showing up with mercenary sword cav. Balance considerations: getting this tech would have no repercussions like less training time from cc or resource cost (like a24) hence it should not be allowed until p3. Archer cavalry maybe should not be affected by the change, depending on the combination of buff and nerf chosen by the developers for the upgrade. I posted this here because there are many good ideas for a25 here and because I could find no other channels related to a25 that were open to public contribution.

@Lion.Kanzen @Stan` I have tripled the attack speed of the spearman but also decreased its damage by two-thirds (1 hack, 1 pierce). The damage per second is the same but he has faster reaction, which is reasonable in battle. ele vs 3 spear.webm

I'm personnally against it. I don't think it's OP just different. I also agree with @Imarok it should be able to help building.

I get the impression that everything interesting is being taken out and replaced with monotonicity. I mean sure, it does work. See AoE2 for a demonstration I guess. But it also makes the individual civs very meh. And unlike AoE2, there are no unique units. Just the day, I saw a differential to get rid of the mauryan elephant from the CC. I last played A22, and back then literally no one bothered to even train them. And yet just as quickly, they are now OP and we need the CC roster to be identical. Whatever floats your boat I suppose. I got no horse in this race.

Yeah in this case it's the modifier key.

I like this idea of reducing each mine's resources. Stone mines were already reduced like this in Aye Pirates, but there is also a buffed trading mechanic for stone (it fetches a higher price) and the stone mines are spawned away from starting CCs. So a few different deltas for stone... and it works ok for me atm so I thought I would share it.

I agree with Dakara that removing the metal cost from Civic Centres and attaching a stone cost instead would be a good choice. That all said, the point shouldn't necessarily be about making stone a necessary resource. When was the last time a war was fought over a quarry?

Let's not just eliminate an entire resource group...One of the biggest complaints is that the game is becoming too standardized. So yes, eliminating literally 25% of the entire economy will have a huge difference because now instead of balancing 4 resources you will only have to balance 3 resources. Again, this was not a problem before this alpha. In a23 (and several alpha before that), stone was the 2nd most scarce resource for all civs. Several changes in a24 have since changed this (e.g., techs no longer cost as much stone, forts no longer cost as much much, catapults and slingers are no longer as good, etc.). The way we fix our new problem shouldn't be to make another change that assumes the current problem must exist when it didn't exist just last alpha. We also shouldn't take the lazy approach and say "this isn't necessary right now, let's eliminate 1/4 of the entire economy." Instead, we should revisit which changes brought us to the current situation, examine whether those changes are actually necessary, and make the appropriate changes. In part, this is already being done (e.g., there is a ticket to buff catapult, which will make stone more valuable). But there are other places where it can be done too (i.e., do we really need to make forts cost 600s/300w instead of 1000s?, do techs have to cost only wood/metal or should techs cost some mixture of more/other res, which includes stone).

I'm just speaking generally about the propensity to eliminate differentiating factors and to make these standardized. I understand why many of these things were done. But I think there are other, better ways to fix balancing issues than making everything the same except for a few bonuses or techs (i.e., if Maurya has difficulty killing buildings in a23 then maybe the solution for a24 should've been to make ele stronger instead of giving them rams). I know I am not alone when I say a24 is a lot less fun because civs are less unique than in previous alphas. With respect to the one specific thing I did reference in the text you quoted, I am referring to the unit balancing done for a24. A24 units are much better balanced than in a23. It's still a work in progress, but things are better now than before.

THe music doesn't fit well with the situation.

Correct, there's a few hotkeys that aren't used by default.

TTS would probably be good for visually impaired players, but I don't imagine there are many of those given how visually-driven RTS' are. Not sure why one would prefer it other than that, as most people read text faster than it is spoken (at least for romance languages). Edit: for things like civic centers under attack and so on, there are sound effects intended to help you identify those already without being as intrusive as a TTS voice. While I potentially support the idea of a voice chat in lobby and of course in multiplayer games, I don't quite understand how the game (or any other system) would calculate "player position" as shown in your example. There are no "player" units in the game, it's not an RPG or FPS, it's an angled top-down RTS. Would it be based on city location? If so, players would spend almost all of the time hard-panned left or right which is not comfortable in headphones, and it would offer a massive unfair advantage to players when trying to find an enemy in the first part of the game; the human ear is sensitive to stereo field changes of less than a degree, so it does not take long to locate an exact position even behind unexplored map. I think it would be better for players to simply be mono, or perhaps locked in a fixed place panned slightly based on which side of the map they are on. Honestly probably the simplest solution might just be to have some sort of integration with a 3rd party voice chat solution like Discord or Mumble or something... that way all that would need to be implemented is a way to add an optional field for users to enter their handles or similar callsign, no need for actual audio infrastructure in the game. I'm not even sure what a built-in voice chat could do any better than such pre-existing solutions.

I think you've misread, 'hotkey.camera.down' is S or DownArrow on GitHub too. Maybe you've confused it with 'rotate down'?

Everything is specified here: https://github.com/0ad/0ad/blob/master/binaries/data/config/default.cfg

nani's mod that adds a bunch of hotkeys.

Kill nomad

It's quite straightforward: is the existing difference in building stone cost meaningful differentiation? Does it make the civilisations unique enough that it's worth keeping and re-balancing instead of just discarding and thinking of something else? It seems to me that it fails to clear the bar. It's kind of a boring difference, and it makes balancing un-necessarily harder since it has indeed a large impact on resources available.

That is basically Delenda Est... 300 stone for barracks is too expensive for 300 starting resource. Most players in A24 build more than 2 barracks. I think current cost for barracks is great. Moving champions back to fortress is great, but I would still like siege workshops. It would be a disaster to train both of them from the same building. Will archery range be in A25? Stable cost is nice either way Not sure what you mean by wooden tower. If it can count as a town phase structure, that would be very good news.

I'd make all military and defensive buildings cost an amount of stone. Barracks: 300 stone Archery Range: 100 wood, 200 stone Stables: 100 food, 200 stone Fortress: 800 stone - Move champions back to Fortress Wooden Tower: 200 wood - Upgrade to Stone Tower: 200 stone

I tried to search for the original motivations behind the introduction of this, but it is probably too old to be easily found. I was guessing that it was introduced as a indirect way to force players to gather stones even if it is not realistic to think that you might need these resources to make these upgrades. I did like this feature of a23, although I wouldn't say that it shouldn't be touched. I also liked that a player might not be able to afford all upgrades in the game and he would be forced to choose which one are important depending on the situation. But this might be a personal preference...

This makes sense but then come the question associated with slingers. It makes the question more complicated since Athens or Ptolemies often run out of stones if the game last too long. Maybe going in the direction suggested by chrstgtr, it could be possible to use civilization differentiation and some specific buildings to make some adjustments. D3680 in the list if I copied it correctly this time... I do like the question of the role of the fortress too but I don't have any interesting idea on this specific topic.

It's @Langbart's mod, he's done all the work for it. I've mentioned people are asking about it, but not sure if he'll be up for releasing it officially. Hope he does, cos it's well cool

@Sundiata @Nescio

Hi, I have a suggestion for player statistics to have 2 totals, 1 for ranked games played, 1 for non ranked/multiplayer There seems to be a phenomina where some players play multiplayer only until they get to expert level, and then go seal clubbing 1v1 on new players to raise their rank quickly without risk, if this suggestion were implimented it would give new players an indication the no rank or ~1200-1300 rank may not be accurate for the player with a low game total shown but 200+ multiplayer games under their belt, and make it easier to find a fair match for us noobs. Thanks for all the behind the scenes work on this game everyone, it's epic!

... which with limited vertices have roughly the shape of a sphere. Is the issue the snake line pattern? Or that the stairs are made from stone? Pretty sure they used stone for the base of buildings even back then.