Leaderboard

In this topic I would solely discuss the simple economic effect of starting with a worker elephant. Once we understand this fully we can expand to discussing more complex matters. There was a topic earlier were worker elephants were criticized. I ran a few test to compare Maurya(M) boom with Seleucid(S) boom. To reduce randomness, I imposed a few rules to play by: 1. Don't use extra berries, extra hunt(only chickens) or wicker baskets technology. 2. Start by building a farmstead and a house. 3. Aim to get fertility festival early. 4. Don't build a second worker elephant. 5. Map mainland, biome autumn. 6. Aim to start training infantry at the CC around minute 5, before that make only women. 7. Only collect only food/wood 8: End the game after 11 minutes(In practice this was most often a few seconds later) Note that several of these rules benefit Sele more than Maurya. Here are my results the games played first are on top, civ (trained units) (trained infantry) (food collected) (wood collected) M 147 45 8501 8836 S 158 14 9286 8426 S 139 38 8153 8805 S 154 56 8905 9849 M 145 35 8390 9915 M 169 31 10009 10223 M 168 44 9175 10239 M 155 46 8663 9061 M 163 35 9553 9063 M 152 35 9045 9405 S 151 52 8368 9325 S 138 42 7979 9011 (I blame this result on unfavourable map gen.) S 151 48 9348 9050 I am rated around 1700 and the results show that I was unable to get the first 3 trials right. The fist Maurya boom was an under-performance(getting fertility festival to early) and I have figured out what the issue is. In the fist Sele trial I mode only women, which is not representative. And the second one was an under-performance(getting fertility festival to early) again, since I was unfamiliar with Seleucid. The 12th game seems like an under-performance, but I think it had to do with unfavourable map gen(starting wood far from the CC). I think it is a fair point to say that with a worker elephant maurya are better to at dealing with unfavourable map gens. The conclusions are that Maurya seem to collect a little more. On the other hand these results might seem the cause because I tend to get more cheap units (women) as Maurya and less expensive units(Infantry). This seems natural as Maurya have the small houses and Sele gets the barracks for 200 wood. In most games I would not get the ability to place a 4th barracks foundation before 9 minutes, so running out of stone was not an issue for these results. It should be mentioned that at the end of the trials, Maurya still had their stone, while Sele spend theirs. My initial hypothesis was that Maurya would completely outboom Sele. Considering the results, in most cases, the difference seems to be rather moderate. I don't think the starting elephant is the reason why Maurya is considered OP, rather I think it is one of the contributing factors. There are some tests I would like to : namely see what Maurya would be if you start without an elephant(i.e. deleting it at the start) and then training one or more during the game. I would also like to try to get results on the Maurya boom without the restrictions imposed here.

What is this obsession with giving slingers crush damage?

The biggest advantage of the elephant is being able to reach resources you otherwise couldn't and keep efficiency constantly high. Skip out on a farmstead when hunting, take neutral berries or metal. In these tests you limit yourself from using any of the elephants strengths. The big advantage of the Mauryans is their early boom plays into great early late game. Removing the pop bonus and having it be unique to Persians is a better solution than messing with a unique gameplay quirk of the Mauryas.

Somehow I doubt this to be more accurate than the original. Most meshs are to delicate for rammed earth. They are more based on something like the following A rammed earth fortress would be more like Anyway colums are always red as far as I know. Well green for pleasure houses.

The 300/300/300/300 starting resources used to be quite useful to differentiate gameplay: - It allowed Britons to go for an early slingers rush. It was also enjoyed by beginners since they could get their first 10 soldiers faster for a safe start; - Ptolemies could go for faster boom thanks to stones available for the barrack which needed 200 stones and mercenary costing metal. During the a22 -"No cav" period, that was often used as a substitute for rush, you could send your woodcutters away for a relatively long time without slowing much your economy since Ptolemies could keep growing without much wood; - I heard about a time when going for swordmen attack in early game using the roman bonus of faster soldiers training time, the starting stones for faster barrack and the starting metal to finance part of the swordmen was a strategy; - In a23, the starting stones allowed Persia to get the stable costing 300 stones at game start. With some hunts available it was possible to reach pop 100 with 20 cavalry to harass without being slowing down with respect to a player booming without cavalry; - In a23, with some extra berries, Seleucids could have boom comparable to faster civilization since with 300 woods and their starting 300 stones, they could get 2 barracks; As a player, I like each of these specificities of the different civilization, and I would prefer to see more of them rather than less of them, even if they might be difficult to balance. That being said, I guess there must have been some discussions about starting resources in the past since I remember a mod adjusting starting resources for each civilization. I would guess because many of these strategies were seen as too strong. That makes sense since other civilizations do not have comparable strategies, and depending on how the question is interpreted, one might want to remove these strategies but he could also add some for the other civilizations and try to work on balancing them. I guess a number of people who enjoy 0ad for the uniqueness of each civilization would also enjoy this part to survive.

A number of times light troops such as skirmishers were cited in primary and secondary sources as able to pepper enemy elephants with enough missiles to drive them to rout and run amok, so I think I give javelineers a 1.5x bonus vs. Elephants in DE.

A number of changes in a24 have contributed to alter significantly the status of stone within the game. While in a23 it was an important resources for all civilizations, in a24, some civilizations might simply buy their way out of stone collection. The role of stone is a complex question since it relates to many balance changes. Starting with some extreme example to illustrate the question: Mauryas can go to P3 and get all military upgrades except will-to-fight for only 750 stones. The player might decide then to add some optional 200 for a palace, 300 for a temple or 200 for an elephant stable or skip them all and go for a fast push with rams instead. Gauls might even need less stones since outside of will-to-fight and defensive structures, only slingers might be useful to spend stones. As a reference point, upgrading stones gathering rates costs currently: 200Wood+100metal / 400Wood+200 metal / 600Wood+300metal. Simply using the resources you would have used to upgrade stones gathering rates to buy stones seems therefore like a good strategy, since it could be sufficient to cover stones needs and avoid the time spent on gathering the resource. Changes that have contributed to reduce stone needs between a23 and a24: - The last wood/metal/stone upgrades stone cost was replaced by a metal cost (150 stones for each) - Stone cost has been removed from military upgrades (1000 stones in total for both melee and range infantry upgrades) - Fortress cost went from 1000 stones to 600 stones and most civilization required a fortress to get their hero/sieges in a23 - Barrack stone cost is set to a standard value of 100 for most civilization instead of 150 or 200 for some civilization Tickets that would affect the current issue: - D307: cheaper economic cost of technologies : 200wood+100metal / 300wood+150metal / 400wood+200 metal - D3680: Remove stone cost from will-to-fight I see 3 critical points for the role of stones: - Limited supply of stones: For some civilization, stone is a rare resource with a limited supply (Ptolemies, Athens…) while for other civilization it doesn’t have more value than wood. Removing stones usages benefits to civilizations with citizen-soldiers with stone cost. The problem of missing stones for these civilizations was however eased by switching to a system in which military upgrades applies to both infantry and cavalry. It allowed for an easier transition from slingers to cavalry/camels (even if it still requires stones to build stables); - Reinforce(create?) a negative correlation between the value of stones and the value of metal: With the change in fortress cost, the reduction of stones alternative usages also reduces significantly the cost of turtling. With too much stones available, there is no limiting factors to the production of fortress and towers. As a consequence of the multiplication of defensive buildings, it also increases the need for metal to build sieges leaving less available to play champions or mercenaries. In a24, it is frequent to see players using about twice more sieges; - Excess stone availability gives an advantage to civilization with range advantages: Since not all civilization have long range units (archers, catapults, bolts…), too much turtling makes some civilization really unpleasant to play in late game. Attacking a players with multiples fortresses/towers and archers that can shoot and retreat as needed to kill the enemy is far from being pleasant when a civilization has a range disadvantage. In a23, the value of stones in team games was usually correlated to the value of metal up until relatively late into the game. Stones would be always gathered and either used or sold for metal at a relatively good price. In a24, its value starts falling relatively fast once p3 timing is passed. In a23, the lack of stones had the advantage of being limiting factor to the spam of the best unit in the game. In a24, the overproduction of stones is extremely unpleasant since it raises new questions such as how to balance towers/fortress. Through my description of this problem, I would like to question indirectly some of the arguments that are motivating changes. For example, if you interpret the lack of metal within the game as being the result of expensive upgrades among others, the current values of D307 can make sense. If instead you interpret the excess supply of stones and too many defensive structures as an important factor behind the lack of metal, then D307 might in fact make the problem worst since instead of buying stones through the market or simply skipping stones gathering upgrades, it might makes sense to gather them and build 5/6 fortresses to force the enemy to waste metal on sieges. Comments on my description of the question?

hello friends, I have made a mod to play battles with 0ad. No need to focus on economy, just choose your preferred unit types and start playin battles. characteristics: 1. No unit can gather resources and build any buildings. 2. Female units can only build Civil Center and Palisade walls.(only one Civil Center at a time) 3. All units and blacksmith research are available from Civil Center. 4. Units produce instantly. 5. Technologies research time also Zero. e.g : ai does not works so multiplayer is only option. have fun and make suggestions. Mod Name : BattleMod. Mod File : attached. Installation : just download, unzip and put it in the mods folder. battlemod.zip

I have increased the spread of archer projectile to 2.5 and changed the damage per second to 4.34 as opposed to the previous 4.46. The archers fire more frequently but each arrow does less damage. Greater spread means open order formation is more important; if an enemy archer misses your unit they are less likely to injure your unit standing next to their target. Can the balancing advisors discuss whether this is nerfed enough or do we need more nerf? XML file content: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Entity parent="template_unit_infantry_ranged"> <Attack> <Ranged> <AttackName>Bow</AttackName> <Damage> <Hack>0</Hack> <Pierce>4.34</Pierce> <Crush>0</Crush> </Damage> <MaxRange>65</MaxRange> <MinRange>0</MinRange> <PrepareTime>1000</PrepareTime> <RepeatTime>1000</RepeatTime> <Delay>0</Delay> <Projectile> <Speed>100.0</Speed> <Spread>2.5</Spread> <Gravity>9.81</Gravity> <FriendlyFire>false</FriendlyFire> <LaunchPoint y="3"/> </Projectile> <PreferredClasses datatype="tokens">Human</PreferredClasses> </Ranged> </Attack> <Cost> <Resources> <food>50</food> <wood>50</wood> </Resources> </Cost> <Identity> <VisibleClasses datatype="tokens">Archer</VisibleClasses> <GenericName>Archer</GenericName> </Identity> <Loot> <wood>5</wood> </Loot> <Resistance> <Entity> <Damage> <Hack>1</Hack> <Pierce>1</Pierce> <Crush>0</Crush> </Damage> </Entity> </Resistance> <Sound> <SoundGroups> <attack_impact_ranged>attack/impact/arrow_impact.xml</attack_impact_ranged> <attack_ranged>attack/weapon/bow_attack.xml</attack_ranged> </SoundGroups> </Sound> <UnitMotion> <WalkSpeed op="mul">1.2</WalkSpeed> </UnitMotion> </Entity>

For now my plan is to bring generic material that serves multiple purposes to the game. the first one I will bring will be the Civic center or Villager center of a poor province. is poor and generic, so that it can be tested by any 0 A.D player on their maps,

All of this. Also, the worker ele is now worse than previous alphas and almost never trained by the most skilled players. So then how is that when the worker ele was made worse Maurya suddenly became better? It's because the worker ele isn't what makes Maurya good. Maurya is good for other reasons--the main two being that Maurya has archers, which were buffed too much this alpha and hence the reason why Maurya is suddenly very good, and because Maurya's bonus pop cap allows them to have more archers than anyone else. There is already a ticket to nerf archers that will surely nerf Maurya.

I ran some tests to learn something about the effect of the spread statistic. I measured the performance of 6 units. The first one is a camel archer at short range. The second one is a archer at short range. The third one is a archer at short range firing at multiple opponents. The fourth one is a camel archer at long range. The fifth one is a archer at long range. The sixth one is a archer at long range firing at multiple opponents. The camel archer is the control group with static stats. For the archers I tweaked the spread statistic. I made the following table where the numbers in it represent the experience which is correlated to the damage dealt and shots landed. In the brackets, I mentioned the % of damage it dealt compared to the long range variant (so the 38% in the bottom right corner means that archer at long range vs multiple targets did 38% as much damage as the archer at short range vs multiple targets). For the camel this value is always around 0.6 as the spread of camels was left constant. spread 0.1 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 Camel short 126 133 140 155 133 144 archer short 125 108 102 96 67 66 archer short, multiple targets 125 125 125 125 100 100 Camel long 78 80 84 94 80 84 archer long 123(98.4%) 49(45.4%) 42(42.2%) 38(38.6%) 24(35.8%) 20(30.3%) archer long, multiple targets 123(98.4%) 75(60%) 62(49.6%) 57(45.6%) 43(43%) 38(38%) The first observation is that camels(2.0 spread) at short range are fairly close to near 0.1 spread archers. In reality they are archers with 2.0 spread and +5% damage, so the shift in spread of 2.0 to 0.1 is equivalent to about 4% damage for the short range. The second observation is that archers at long range seem to drop of more compared to the short version if the spread increases. The third observation is that if the spread increases, the relative advantage of the archer with multiple targets also increased compared to the archer shooting on only 1. I hope that some players will be able to make some other insightful observations, but I will leave it at that. Now I will explain what I think should be good for the game. I think at long range, ranged units should be mainly a nuisance and bad at targeting individual units. So for the option of 4.5 spread, this means that it drops in 30% in terms of effective DPS on short range. To counter such, the Archer could be given 20% more pierce damage. This would mean that if archers now deal 100*1.2 damage in the same period as the camel (similar to the archer with 0.1 spread ) deals 144. So at short range it is a 15% nerf (provided that the archers are shooting at multiple targets.). On long range it would seem like a nerf of 47% (compared to the long camel shooting at multiple targets, this statistic is not in the table). If we chose a spread of 2.5 and no additional attack increase, we would get a short range nerf of about 5% provided the archer shoots at multiple opponents. For the long range the nerf will be 6.5% (compared to the camel shooting at multiple targets, this statistic is not in the table) To be honest. I messed up my test results by having the short archer firing at multiple opponents was advanced rank and had better accuracy than the others. I will need to update the table, but I will do so tomorrow. 88121138_speadtestforspread4_0.63801cc4ff25c1802139df3e418b4344

hello, please try to whitelist 0ad/pyrogenesis in your antivirus or try to disable antivirus for the time you play 0ad if whitelisting does not help or is not possible.

I am not sure if skirmishers should have a minimum range, because they are supposed to be a high damage closer range unit that works in combination with your own melee units. My hope is to get some judgement on these features (minimum ranges, archery tradition tradeoffs) from the balancing team members, it is not necessary to have the numbers ironed out; the core ideas of gameplay function are what matter. The values can always be tweaked for balance before the game is released. @chrstgtr what do you think?

This looks good! It is kinda like a rout, where the enemy flees disorderly with some still fighting and some running. This is what I would expect to happen if archers were to encounter melee specialized units on the battlefield.

I wanted to say that both archers and slingers had side weapons and could fight close quarter, but if they weren't to, slingers needed more room than archers, not the opposite.

the idea is that , they are like mosquitoes, a pleasant pest to kill.

I think archers are the best civilian ranged infantry. However I think the gap is not as big as you might think. With a 10% decrease in damage output they could be fine, that is what I am thinking. On top of that I would like to see a buff for spear cavalry so they can function as a counter to ranged unit. The main advantage is that archers have long range. If the spread would be increased such that their damage at max range is reduced, I think that would help balance. That would create a situation where you can do damage from a safe distance, but it won´t be much unless the enemy decides to get close.

What is Padawan Designer? OK. Slingers are cheap troops who do a lot of damage to units, but are poorly armoured and very inaccurate. The only exception is Roman Legions who also know how to use a sling. Thanks for the inspiration. I got some ideas: Very cheap cost: 10 wood, 10 stone, 40 food. Low accuracy: spread > 4.0 High damage: 5.5 < pierce < 14 (must be less than skirmishers though) Walks at the same speed as any other ranged units.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone I gave slingers 5.5 pierce and 2.5 crush. 21 of them did not manage to smash an empty Roman CC. It had almost half health left when all 21 were dead. But I see your point, crush is too OP for them. Suggestion: 1 hack, 5.5 pierce, 0.5 crush.

Yes, but now you make slingers, who sling little rocks or lead bullets, into siege weapons (structures are crushphobic as well).

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/25131

noone liked my proposal of having formations uniform soldiers speed, while they would have randomly different speeds? I thought it was a nice idea. For realism, mainly, but with some interesting gameplay implications.

I confirm that's the correct path on Windows 10.

I am beginning to think that we should keep the worker ele. Reducing the total population of Mauryans would be a good nerf and they won't be too OP. If we can also nerf the elephants then that would really balance out. I am experimenting with tweaking the XML files to find an optimum.

I will post a video demonstration very shortly

@Lopess could be used for Mesoamerican mods. It's just changing tones.

Reenaction of Spartacus (gladiators vs legions)

How about adding Death Damage effect to elephant? Surely fallen elephant would hurt nearby infantry. Make it non friendly fire as well.

Well, game designers must, you know, design the experience of the game. It's not a sandbox game after all; there must be restrictions to define the gameplay. There is something to be said for a "standard" start for everybody (with some minor exceptions, which are designed and balanced against of course). Having said that, I'm not against allowing the game host to dictate starting resource amounts, but I can already think of scenarios where a host who likes to play a stone heavy civ giving himself an unfair advantage by weighing starting resources in his favor (else everyone else would have to choose the same stone heavy civ in order to remain competitive). Perhaps rated matches would require a standard resource start, while non-rated matches would unlock the host's ability to determine.

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.

Ok, thank you. I guess for today I call it a day (as the hotkey.session part is a bit difficult for me). Please see what I have managed so far (knowing that there might be mistakes and there is lots of room for discussion, amendments, and additions): EDIT1: Sorry, I had to reupload. EDIT2: When I look at it, I think that hiding the key letters/symbols might be beneficial, as the layout itself explains it already. There is (from my perspective) little reason to show Q, W, E, ..., Bright-, Ins, etc. Hiding these would leave more space for the 0 A.D. game settings and make them also more readable. Futhermore, the layout of the legend for the mouse could be amended (which is not under my control, though). Please let me know what you think - even if you think this is of no use at all. Then I still learnt something from it. keyboard-diagram-0ad.html

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).

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

Balance test mod? It's @ binaries/data/mods/public/simulation/templates/ Champion archer for example: binaries/data/mods/public/simulation/templates/template_unit_champion_infantry_archer.xml spread would be their accuracy.

Go ahead.