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Grab a woman and have her attack a rabbit. Auto-explore.

Buffing/nerfing or moving units around to different phases isn't the only way to incentivize aggression. Another way would be to make players actually think about map control. Currently, a new CC is something that you see very rarely. Reducing their territory influence will force players to think about expanding and give more importance to map control. Of course, reducing the cost of CCs would be needed in effect. With all the ideas for offensive options there need to be more defensive options. Giving Military Colonies to every civ would be a positive too. They work as a defensive and offensive option. Secure a vulnerable or important part of your base, or establish a forward foothold if you're the attacker. In general, I dislike forcing players to just pick between set options.

Thanks. Centurion Yekaterina reporting for duty ; ) I will be efficient, as the Romans were.

Just nuke around 75% of the RMS folder. There are a few well made ones and the rest were made with a quantity over quality approach. Even with new graphics, they would still look pretty bad.

What the game needs is a soldier-citizen concept, then, instead of the current citizen-soldier concept. You need citizens (workers), who just happen to fight, rather than soldiers who just happen to work. Then you could create more champions (your "real" soldiers) for each civ and move their availability to P2, along with some weak siege ("dudes carrying a log") P3 has heroes, advanced siege, mercenaries (and possibly extra champs unlocked).

Another solution: citizen soldiers offer very weak attack, champions offer huge attack. Meanwhile make champions cheaper, so the army would be half champions and half citizen soldiers.

It sort of is a valid tactic already in use quite commonly. I use various hashtags in my videos relating to AOE, C&C and Starcraft - essentially anything in the meta data that can associate what your doing with something else that's in the same wheelhouse - so in my case, some of the most well known RTS games. In this case, however, I don't think anything would be more beneficial than 0AD actually being reinstated on Youtube's game list. It does provide a way of grouping content into more valid search results. While it's good if someone inadvertently discovers 0AD whilst searching for something else, it is absolutely critical that if someone searches for 0AD that for the most part, they are served with 0AD content.

Only half-kidding here, but could this be part of our marketing strategy? Choosing thematically relevant AAA titles in the game browser so that those fans may inadvertently click on and watch a 0 A.D. video?

Currently, defensive map control is EXTREMELY easy with forts having the "root" that civic centers do. It's annoying. In a23 if someone forgot to defend their base and sent all units to the enemy their base was toast if someone attacked it. Currently, all you need to do is place a fort near where your army is. This forces the defender to always have an advantage as their building "root" can be located in multiple places with multiple forts. This forces the attacker from being unable to take over bases defended by women, even more so when walls and undefended forts are present. In a23 only Ptol/Sele had this ability (secondary cc's of smaller cost). A24 really promotes turtling and winning by forcing the other side to "run out of resources" or an enemy newbie making a really small/big mistake (that amplifies) which can be picked up on by an ally who went all cav (e.g., enemy border did no walls, pocket from other side sees this and overwhelms with cav).

Yes, this is still problem and a real bugbear. So far, I've raised it with Youtube directly via the help/feedback form provided on the site - however, I would add this was using my personal account as I wasn't, at that time, officially acting in any capacity for 0AD - purely I was raising the issue as a 0AD related content creator. I got no response and nothing changed so I next raised it on the official Youtube sub/r - who pointed me at the Youtube Twitter. I raised it on the Youtube Twitter, by that time using the official 0AD account, and was pointed right back toward the help/feedback form on Youtube! @Stan` - The one thing we haven't done (to my knowledge) is raise it with Youtube on the feeback form using the Official 0AD Youtube Account. I've not got the keys for that as I'm not currently producing content for the official channel. I'd recommend referencing the 0AD Wikipedia entry, and possibly making a few updates on the page to show recent activity.

She really is. Very positive attitude.

I love this Spirit. it is good to have proactive and enthusiastic people.

african-veteran.zip This one allows all heroes to train units. Hannibal trains champion swordsman Hasdrubal trains mercenaries Maharbal trains champion cav. So OP!

Those people have forgotten that there were releases where rushing was far to strong. Then everyone cried nerf rushing. After plenty assorted changes without touching the CS concept we are now at a point were people complain about the reverse. Also unit pushing which I think is part of A25 will have a major impact on the balance of this, so any discussion based on A24 I consider pointless. Basically if balance is completely outside reason after feature freeze do a hot fix adjusting the parameters that were used in the past to nerf rushing, else just leave it as is for now.

Please teach me, but I must warn you that my school censors a lot of stuff and Phab might be one. I will go home after 1 week or so.

We could make it so heroes can unlock the training of different units as long as they live.

I think it might be cool if we coupled this with making expertise in war a trade of tech,where expertise in war is 300m but gives you original training times. So now you have to chose between either lightning fast reinforcements or advanced rank mercenaries. I think both could have their charm. And once a game you could of course first train the lightning fast and then upgrade those you already have. I think this would be cool. If you have a super rich ally he could help you out at a hefty price, since they aren´t cheap.

Yeah, Yak, it has to be generic. Like "Alien Warrior" or something.

New update: camps can research a tech which increases max arrow count by 5, increases health to 2250 and increases max garrrison. rome-camp.zip

My belief is that making it so that it takes time to switch from gathering to attacking mode for soldiers would help with balancing citizen-soldiers considerably. Because then each 'variant' can be considered sort-of-in-vacuum. I'm not sure 'hardcoding' strategies is the way to go, but maybe, you know. That being said, don't expect this to get in A25. I think the target for A25 will be to fix the most egregious issues with A24, so players are happier with the current state of the game, before running into an experiment that tweaks a core concept like this.

Yes , I very much resonate with Gurken Khan. Healers don't do their job in A24. The SVN version of A25 has not fixed his yet. I am just as frustrated as Gurken Khan if not more.

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1851

Just the component that defines that an entity (e.g. tree) holds some wood that can be gathered. As pointed out somewhere in the forums, this is already fixed in SVN. I feel you in its annoyance. You can right-click on the "none-formation" (as mentioned in the tooltips) to disable the automatic formation thing. Yeah, that might feel strange. Are more people feeling like this?

I'm actually just getting into a24; so I hope y'all ok with me suggesting things for a25 before I switch to testing it. Queuing actions: It sucks in a24, please revert it to how it was in a23. For example, when I order units to build a house and then cut wood, and then I change my mind and want them to build another house instead of cutting wood, I could previously order them again to build the first house and then the second; if I do that now they build the first house and then still go to the woods, not building the second house. Move orders: It majorly sucks in a24, please, please, please revert it to how it was in a23; don't know how many units I lost because it's such a disaster. And I'm doubting the common sense of the people responsible for that and if they ever played the game with those changes. Why is the Box formation the standard for move orders? Why on earth would I ever want that? If for example I wanna get out of range from some hostile towers, instead of just moving their butts my units now do stupid huddling and sorting and then maybe move out. And it always goes back to box formation! Even when I told them I don't want that friggin formation. And when I tell them I don't want that stupid formation after the move order, it cancels the move order! AAAARRRGGHHH...!!! Aggressive healers: Could healers with aggressive stance please not run away just because they caught an arrow? What's their aggressive stance for? Naturally I run 'em in packs, so their running away just makes everything worse. And how about their priorities? Could they prioritize hurt units (<x health)?

Since A24 is out there has been much discussion about the balancing, not only between factions but also between different strategies. But as @ValihrAntexplained it here: Because of the Citizen Solider concept the best strategy is (in most cases) just to boom as fast as you can. As most units fulfill economic as well as defensive/aggressive roles at the same time you cannot separate strategies. This is not in line with the vision of 0 A.D: " Single path to victory - It seems to be a trend that games cater to a specific strategy that is frequently used to attain a victory. That could be rushing, turtling, booming, etc. We recognize these are valid ways to win a game, but we will attempt to not favor one over another. Players should be able to successfully use (and adapt/change) any strategy to achieve a victory. " (citing from here: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/0AD_The_Vision) Another problem is that this "booming is the best" gameplay leads to a huge snowball effect. So If a player is slower at the beginning, it is very likely that he cannot recover and will lose the game. This makes the game less dynamic and interesting. Being able to turn the situation around after some bad losses is much more fun than slowly losing to your opponent just because he has more units, because he was able to click faster in the first five minutes. The question is, how can this be balanced? In Delenda Est this is done by removing the Citizen Solider concept and using a wide technology tree with many pairwise techs, which forces the player to choose a strategy or to find a good balance between them. But this is also my main critique point with DE. While I like mostly all of the stuff in DE: new factions, better graphics, new features ect, the game feels slower to me. With 0 A.D being the only RTS I play it feels very frustrating to me not being able to use units for eco and it just "feels" slower when some units just stand around. The wide technology tree on the other hand is very interesting and let you do complex decisions, but I actually need to pause the game and read what each tech does and then decide what I want to do. This makes the game slower paced and more strategic (which is not necessarily bad, just personal preference), but it takes away from the fast pace and action, which is for me one of the key features of the main game. So how can Empires Ascendant balance this without removing the Citizen Solider concept and while keeping its fast pace? What if the player had with each phase the opportunity to specifically choose one of the three strategies? So a decision to upgrade your CC or research a technology which gives you either an economic, an aggressive or a defensive boost just for this phase. Possible improvements from this mechanic: This would allow that each strategy is a legitimate choice in each phase, so a p1 turtle or a p2 push would be possible with all factions. It creates a a true "balanced" rock-paper-scissor system This would also acknowledge the importance of scouting (in all phases): if you have the information about the strategy of you opponent, you will be able to counter it. It removes the huge snowball effect that is present at the moment and could allow a player to comeback after a bad start It is easy enough to not make the game "slower" but enforces the ability to choose specific strategies. Here is a mod as a proof of concept:empires-extended.zip Note that this is only a very basic implementation of the idea. It only features positive auras which give you faster unit production and better gather rates for the economic strategy, quicker build times and more arrows for defensive buildings for the defensive strategy and more attack, movement speed and loot for the aggressive strategy. But this idea could be coupled with different art for the CCs, different options to produce units or even unlock new buildings ect. Note 2: the mod is a suggestion/concept for the future balance of 0 A.D is therefore for A25 / SVN So what do you all think? Besides the obvious: don't change anything about the gameplay. I have took some inspiration by the following threads and ideas: Scouting should play an important role, gathering information should be rewarded by being able to make better decisions: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/36928-special-unit-scouts/ There should be different strategies a player can use (i.e boom, rush, turtle) which works as the classic counter system with no strategy being preferred: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/39874-rushing-early-game/ & https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/39901-what-do-we-do-with-the-defenses-of-phase-1/ https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/39669-proposal-for-a-new-behavior-of-civic-center-reaction-to-farmfields/?do=findComment&comment=427486

Agreed, and with 0 being the first alphanumeric of the title, the game is almost always at the top of any list.

nani you should be able to feel that camps are training slower. If you want it to be slowed down even further I can make it so, but at that point the camp would be a bit rubbish. You should also see the decrement in their health bar. Only affecting one camp is a little bit difficult, but I think I can figure it out given some time.

I am just tired of marching my 80 archer/ 50 spear army along parallel defenses in a 4v4 for 20 minutes at a time, only for people to go afk because the turtling is so boring. Everyone has a bunch of archers and are constantly trying to get an enemy to fight under a fort and tower, but no one will because their archers get eaten by towers. You can't attack weak spots because archers will get to the fight before any other unit besides cav, and then even weak spots take too long to break, causing you to be 2v1ed. One problem is stone availability, another problem is that everyone has too much time on their hands. In a23 everything was a race against time, in a24 there is little excitement, little risk, little reward, and little offensive mobility. This late game turtliness and gameplay stabilization is probably the worst problem of a24 and needs to be addressed more, because it covers up all of the good features a24 did bring. You talked about defensive map control, this is the opposite of what Rauls used to do with his ptol colony-->fort--> catapults. The way I interpreted @ValihrAnt's talk of map control, I think he was trying to foster offensive map control.

rome-camp.zip Extract this into your mods folder, activate the mod in the mod selector and restart the game a few times. Take a look at the structure tree for Romans. You should see the camp being able to train rams and onagers.

Yes that's why I uploaded the mod to show people the difference. At the moment it seems like most people would prefer the farmland option, although I am not sure if what I made would be the option they had imagined. Also the second most voted option is to change nothing, so I am not sure what to do with this topic. @Stan`and the rest of the team, is it worth making a ticket/patch for this? Even if it will be probably only a reference for future discussion?

I've started a "TOC". Well, it's not really a TOC but at least a start. I'm not sure yet, where this will lead to, but foremost, I shall spend more time on the review (and maybe some missing translation if there are such). But the idea to have some basic rules for translation is certainly nice - a style guide, so to speak.

Working on it right now.

this is very well done and gives me the option to do my old A23 tactic with ibero now, if they put it in the A25 it could be a lot of fun hahahahahahaha

It was this one:

I think copyright

I did.

Do you ask a plumber to fix your electricity? Well assuming people that will fix the MP lobby are the same that work on art and sound is the same thing. There is a huge variety of jobs in the game industry. Also this game is open source and you're also free to host your own lobby where you can rule as you see fit. from Discord, it's not complete but it gave @mysticjim an idea

The problem in RTS is that a better economy is always useful. So you can use the better economy for all of these strategies. That does not make it impossible to get good game design, but it needs to be considered. I wouldn´t like it if the choice you made in p2 would put you at an irrecoverable disadvantage. It could work this way to prevent so: In p2 you get the choice between 3 techs, one for rushing(more loot, more cav speed, better capturing rate), one for turtling(cheaper/free tower upgrades) and one for booming(eco upgrades cost 50% less metal). Once you reach p3 you get all of them. I don´t think the tech tree is wide compared to age of empires 2. I think the main difference between the games is on one hand the civilizations are more a like (most get all generic available units in castle age), while each civilization diversifies in imperial age(mostly from lacking techs)

Yes true. It is also critique on a very high level as I said, I like most of the other things as the more diverse maps, mercenary camps, farmlands ect. I think it just comes down to preference regarding the CS concept. And if this concept should stay, it is just hard to balance with different strategies. The difference between DE and EA feels to me like a little bit like the difference between chess and bullet chess. One is more strategic and the other one has this felling of urgency that you need to make decision more quickly.

You can even order her to attack a deer in Dizaka's case. I think you can select a cav, hold down shift and right click the path you want to explore on the minimap.

Not sure I really understand this point. In my view, you can still have close range damage to a reasonable value, so that it is not too overpowered. Maybe you can elaborate a bit more on this? What I like with @Yekaterina proposal is that it still feels like "unique" approach to projectile in RTS, while solving dancing/turn rate issues. Constant damage independently of distance, I am afraid this is again a recipe for hard balancing between ranged units . Also, having decreased damage when distance increase will also counter balance the fact that archer are too good at turtling, without having to touch their mobility. WDYT?

Maybe the upgraded model for the camp could look super sick too!

Roman camps needs siege to be built from them. Otherwise, they are just decorations on enemy territory.

Maybe it would help if the berries looked more like the harvest. Sketch:

Here comes the review: Bad UV Bad uv, and make it a bit deeper You never know where those pesky players and mappers will try to place it Some parrallax bug Bad smoothing (I think) (Should use shade flat) Grass is floating which might look weird Some broken actor parts ERROR: CCacheLoader failed to find archived or source file for: "art/actors/props/special/common/garrison_flag_macedonians.xml" ERROR: CObjectManager::FindActorDef(): Cannot find actor 'props/special/common/garrison_flag_macedonians.xml' ERROR: Actor props/structures/macedonians/wonder_gardens_turf.xml255: required texture sampler normTex not found (material art/materials/player_trans_ao_parallax_spec.xml) ERROR: Actor props/structures/macedonians/wonder_gardens_turf.xml255: required texture sampler specTex not found (material art/materials/player_trans_ao_parallax_spec.xml) ERROR: Actor props/structures/macedonians/wonder_trees.xml255: required texture sampler normTex not found (material art/materials/player_trans_ao_parallax_spec.xml) ERROR: Actor props/structures/macedonians/wonder_trees.xml255: required texture sampler specTex not found (material art/materials/player_trans_ao_parallax_spec.xml) Not sure we need the veranda to be honest, it's already quite big gp

Made them bigger and added a decal.

At the moment most people generally seem to describe the meta to be some aggression in the Village Phase, practically none in the Town Phase, and more in the City Phase. Ideally speaking there should be good opportunities for fighting during all of these times in the game. With that in mind, there are a few reasons I can think of that have led to this situation. The Village Phase has a wide variety of options with unit compositions. The Town Phase does little to help this and in fact introduces a number of defensive upgrades that discourage aggression. With the City Phase, access to champions and siege make pushes far more possible. Given these points, there are a few ways I could see the phases being more distinct and flavourful through a few measures: In the Village Phase, players should only have access to one melee infantry unit (typically a spearman), a ranged unit (either a slinger or a skirmisher), and one melee cavalry unit. This would help to first of all reinforce the general rock-paper-scissors formula that I believe 0 AD is aiming to represent. Also, it probably would not be overly restrictive at least in my mind. The Town Phase would introduce more unit types and perhaps some key upgrades to allow melee infantry to at least somewhat efficiently counter defences by either boosting attack or capture. At the same time I could see rams being introduced. One important thing to stress is that this would not be an iron rule. If one civilisation has an appropriate reason to have more than just the three, that should not be a problem. Likewise, factions famous for swordsmen like Rome could have that as their early unit while Carthage could maybe start off using Numidian cavalry. The point is that where differences are valid, exceptions can be made. I'll admit that these would introduce some difficulties for balancing, but I think that there is still merit to these ideas regardless of that.

My opinion: Mercenaries should not need any training. They are hired, not trained, fully ready for campaign. Effect: Mercenaries train instantly or very fast (5 seconds or less). Part of a Mercenary's compensation is plunder, that sweet sweet loot they can send back to their families in Bumfuq Arcadia. Effect: The <Looter> component is disabled. Mercenaries are usually already experienced at war (or garrison duty at least). Effect: Most mercenaries train at Advanced rank. Some (Balearic Slinger, for example) train at Elite rank, with additional cost. Mercenaries are paid a wage and buy their own provisions. Effect: All mercs cost Metal and only Metal ("Coin" in Delenda Est was designed for this purpose). Cavalry mercs cost more. Hiring Mercenaries is expensive, and kings had to heavily tax their subjects in order to afford large numbers of mercenaries. Effect: A new tech at the Market, "War Taxes", gives the player a trickle of Metal from every Citizen and Trader, but reduces their gather rates.

Temperate Terrains on a new map I call Gallic Highlands The Belgian Bog map using new Temperate terrains A reimagined Lorraine Plain map using new Temperate terrains How a jungle map (here using the India set) can look

Still working on this. Will eventually make a separate Git repo after A24 is launched. Recently worked a bunch on the Nubia terrains. Compare: