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Atlas really needs the option to choose the biome of the random map the designer is generating. Mainland random map, for instance, has no option to choose a different biome. It always generates an Alpine biome map. There is no drop menu, as in game setup, to choose the biome it ill generate.

I believe that certain units should have their own statistics, which represent more what they were, in their time. like for example, the cataphracts that were heavily armored = less speed + stamina and a little more damage ... also the briton longswords that have the same stats as the other champions that use sword and shield -.- the elephants should have a small area attack not only frontal attack so that little by little it will be more important to choose each civ, for each phase and that the play styles will be more different per civ and player.

Elephants are now the only counter to siege towers, which would be riddicously OP if they were faster. I am against turning 0ad in a tank battles game.

"Solved" is probably impossible, this is true. But a reduction of harm is demonstrably a positive step forward. I was not aware that there were other lobby moderators aside user1, I thank you for the information. One thing that helps a lot was the integration of the lobby-to-discord bot implemented by Hannibal Barca, that is how I have been able to easily see some especially egregious activity in the lobby, through my 0ad Discord server, I subsequently reported the user, and action was taken. I have generally stayed away from these kinds of controversial topics in the forum due to my social anxieties, but I have decided that it is important to spread the load among more people to reduce the negative effects of negativity and toxicity. Having more people responsible for absorbing and rectifying the negative activity will improve the mental health of everyone involved, as they will not have to be exposed to as much of it alone. I'm trying not to be upset about this comment, but I can't help but read things into it that might not even be there. When I read "will likely never be solved" my mind extends that to "so it's useless to try to make it better". That's not what you are implying, right? I thank you for your contribution, and apologise for picking it apart, I just want to more fully understand your perspective. I feel like my response here is an ego-driven defense mechanism, but I decided to post it anyway in order to process my reaction, so that I can learn to more effectively and objectively communicate my perspective, and so that others can learn from it also.

Therein I would say is the biggest problem. It should be viable to escort siege weapons.

I have a revision for this: D3968. I would like to try and merge it before A25 (btw @nani you might have input on this?) However, it will likely rely on trust.

this tower had melee attack. Here the Cataphracts.

I just want to see what additional thing is missing.

And check this.

He gave them incompetent siege. in DE even archers do a better job than the bolt shooters. Their siege towers are a joke in DE. I took out a fortress with a few spearmen but 5 bolt shooters and 3 siege towers cannot make a dent in anything.

Speaking of siege rams, one of the things that bothers me the most is the extreme discrepancy between melee and spears to counter. I mean, I get it they can have some different efficacy, but shouldn't be as extreme. This really is a turn off for immersion. Maybe this is going to be already patched in a25 tho, i'm not in the loop. Besides, I think rams are already tanky enough and I wouldn't favour to buff them even more. Instead, maybe is possible to tweak a little bit the state of elephants so they're not so OP as rn

Any thoughts on returning splash damage to catapults? I liked this mechanic in a23, but it was sometimes frustrating, it could do more damage to a smaller number of units, perhaps limiting cap on the net damage each shot can do? I think we should be careful to limit tech proliferation. A feature is broken? lets just make it an expensive tech! I think this is a solution sometimes, but we can't let it become a lazy way to "balance" something.

No, Exit, Exit to Summary

The game lacks many technologies for specific classes and units.

When I made the title of this tread, I purposely made it bi-ambiguous. It could mean ¨What would happen if pikemen had their attack rate halved?¨ and then the video would be the answer: They would still be excellent target dummies and that is the problem with the meta. It was not meant to be a serious question of ¨What do you think about if pikemen had their attack rate halved?¨. I just wanted to say that their current gameplay role seems ludicrous to me. I think the art team makes the models based on history. As a community I think we could all help out by shaping the balance such that the units serve a historically accurate role. If people want target dummies, they probably need to give that role to a unit with a big shield. Also I feel like the game should be shaped such that being a target dummy is not a thing. The problem does not lie with the art team, it lies with the people that decided pikemen needed to have huge armor stats.

If you want the json formatted for a specific tool I'd say make it a mod, unless there is just one such tool or one which basically defines a standard. Otherwise the json should be what makes most sense for 0ad. That format could also be used as a replacement for the current ini-style hotkey configuration which might be desirable anyway, so you can map a user facing string to the key value pair for instance. Then a script to convert it to different tools could be added.

Siege towers can also be countered by rams, catapults and melee troops, especially cavalry. But of course they must not get a speed bonus.

Also you can look at this

shouldn't C be "quit and view summary" instead?

It's not about the weight of a sword, light infantry is understood to have been more mobile than havy infantry in general. My biggest problem with @BreakfastBurrito_007's idea, however, is about gameplay: slowing down archers would kill their defining tactics, which are hit and run and archer rushes. Those are what make archers so fun to play, and if we slow them down they will be heavily crippled. What BB wants is to reduce their effective range around defensive positions, and that can be achieved in many ways, not only lowering archers speed. I think reducing archers damage at higher distances - either by raising arrows spread (already in SVN I believe), or enforcing a fixed damage dependent on distance - is the best way out of this bog, it would not change archers identity, but would make them just enough less effective in what they do best. It doesn't have any creepy eco implication, and it doesn't push us back in this endless swing where every alpha we reconsider the choices made in the last releases. Light infantry speeds were made equal for good reasons. And no, archers are not faster than slingers or javeliners, they have the same stats.

To be fair, there are other moderators in the lobby. Though not sure how active they are or what timezones they live in so it can happen that even if there will be more moderators, its not guaranteed 24 h moderation so the issue will likely not be solved anyway.

As others have explained, filter lists are not able to take context into account, leading to false positives. The solution is to have more active moderation, which means more volunteers are needed. These volunteers also need to prove that they are capable of performing their moderation duties appropriately without being too heavy-handed. It is a difficult conundrum, because it might be that there is no clear way for volunteers to prove that they will not over-moderate the community. The FOSS community sometimes tends to lean too heavily on "free-speech", without recognising the fact that responsible community moderation can increase the net-total of freedom of expression by limiting the ability of nefarious actors to use their speech to discourage minorities from having a voice. The main solution that other games have implemented is a crowdsourced one, with easy and visible tools for reporting harmful content. As far as I understand it, the only lobby moderator is user1. This person is not able to moderate in their sleep, so having at least one other moderator in the lobby would be a positive thing. This extra moderator should probably be someone who is not also a programmer, time should not be taken away from programming and given to moderation because the amount of programmers is limited. But the amount of people who are capable of responsible community moderation is much greater. The problem now comes back to choosing which people are capable of performing these moderation duties without over-moderating. I would have said that sil-vous-plait was someone who was capable of performing this moderation, until this passive aggressive and somewhat arrogant post. "spell out" reads to me as patronising. I think that maybe this person was just frustrated, and I do not want to discourage them by pointing this out. I've felt the same frustration that they have, so I cannot really give blame to them for acting on this frustration. The best guidelines that I know of in regards to enforcement are included in the Open Source Contributor Covenant https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/0/code_of_conduct/ Anyone who wants to put their name forward as a volunteer moderator should look to this covenant as a guide to how to perform moderation duties. And here is the point where I will put my hand up and say that I am willing to volunteer for this position, I can not say that I will be able to give a large amount of time to this duty, and I would say that at least one more person should also be given this responsibility. I also want to point out that I would not be offended if people decided that I am not suitable for this position. I hope that everyone will have good days.

I can't actually argue against switching elephant attack damage from hack to pierce. I think that's an indictment of how arbitrary EA's damage types are, more than anything else. More importantly though, I argue that this issue is merely symptomatic of the deeper problem that we've been discussing elsewhere: you guessed it... ranged vs melee balance and static defense vs unit balance. Elephants would have a harder time killing rams if those rams were actually escorted by meat shield to their target. However, no one escorts their rams because there is no unit type with sufficient arrow resistance to dive against static defense and ranged fire support.

Yes, I discovered 0AD through Homebrew casks, was and still is the one at the top of the list. There is also this YouTuber with a tier list of RTS games, the first one he starts with is 0AD. Best RTS Games of ALL Time! by BeastyqtSC2 (14/Dec/20)

https://github.com/Yekaterina999/0AD-Aristeia-Egyptians-A25-Mod/tree/main Link to Bronze Age Egyptians mod.

To me, auto-explore is fine so long as it's better to scout yourself.

I think the problem is with the elephants. An Indian elephants can defeat 5 champion swordsmen. This means elephants are incredibly cost effective. I think it would be historically inaccurate to do this.

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1868?

Because part of 0 A.D. is "to reduce repeatitive tasks" and good micro would scout better still than an automated function.

Considering the other changes currently under discussion, I think adjustments to elephants and siege engines are premature. You are going to waste a lot of energy if you start designing solutions to problems that may not even exist any more by the time you implement them. (Or worse, you will create whole new sets of problems for yourself with too many degrees of freedom to know for sure what even caused them.) Better to take things slow and apply your work tactically.

Everybody can win from multiple cultures - also in gaming. The art works you guys do, are really impressive!

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

Hi everyone, I am happy to present a 5-part campaign titled "Macedonia: Rise to Power"! The campaign covers the times of Philip II and ends shortly before Alexander the Great gains control of the kingdom. Some screen shots are included later in this post. The scenario files for A23 can be found here:; https://github.com/SciGuy42/Macedonia_0ad For A25, conversion is still underway. The first 5 missions have been converted and can be found on the a25 branch of the github: https://github.com/SciGuy42/Macedonia_0ad/tree/a25 To install, you must download all files from the maps/scenarios/ folder in the repository and place them in the /maps/scenarios folder where your custom scenarios built with atlas are saved at by default. On Linux, this should be at /home/<user>/.local/share/0ad/mods/user/maps/scenarios. Note that for A25, you also have to put the Trigger.js file from the repository into your custom mod folder. Most of the scenarios rely heavily on scripts so make sure to also download the .js files which also go in the maps/scenarios folder containing your scenarios. The scenarios feature more or less typical build and conquer mission, as well as sieges and battles without much building involved. Make sure to read the text in the description of each mission before you play it. Often, there are intelligence reports that can be quite useful. In many cases, there are multiple ways to approach the mission strategically. The AI should be set to Petra, I recommend Medium or Hard difficulty with Balanced option. It's totally fine to play it on easier difficulties as well, especially on the first try. Hope you enjoy! I am definitely looking for feedback -- there may certainly be some bugs or inconsistencies or issues -- please make note and post! I am looking to do a round of updates in about 2 weeks but need to take a break now. If my wife hears the opening music of the game one more time, I'm in trouble UPDATE Nov 2021: - The campaign is now complete with 45 missions, starting with Phillip's rise to power and ending with Alexander's death. Conversion to a25 from a23 is currently underway. UPDATE Oct 2 2020: - Added Missions 16 and 17, covering Alexander's conquest of Tyre. Also made small changes to some scenarios based on feedback from the users. UPDATE July 27 2020: - Added Missions 11-15 covering Alexander's conquest of Asia Minor UPDATE June 19 2020: - fixed some of the winning conditions bugs that were reported - added support for difficulty levels -- switching the AI between Medium, Hard, and Very Hard will now often result in effects beyond gather rate (e.g., more troops garrisoned in enemy towers, better starting teach for enemy, etc.) - Enemy units that spawn and attack now usually march in formation - Added wall towers to fortified cities and settlements I will shortly be posting the next set of five missions. Thanks for all the comments and private messages. And here are some screen shots: UPDATE June 25 2020: Added the next set of 5 missions, comprising Alexander's Balkan Campaign. Features a naval map, new scripts and triggers, and another siege. Enjoy! Some screenshots (minor spoilers): Some screen shots from missions 11-15: Shots from 16 and 17, the conquest of Tyre:

A defense tower or a siege tower? You have said this before, and I decided to do some tests in Atlas and a "small group" of archers does not take down a defense tower in 15 seconds.

This the right long term idea, we absolutely need civ differentiation and interesting civ based mechanics, but balancing archers and wide-area turtling are big problems that need to be addressed soon @alre@LetswaveaBook did you guys get to play a23? I see that you joined the forum fairly recently. My hope is that you at least know what I am talking about... how much mobility there was in a24, and how turtling was only good for small areas.

This offers a new perspective as to our usage of keys.

Nice you want to pick this up! First of all, I encourage you to take a look at the already implemented tutorial campaign. Albeit short, it shows some stuff already. It is basically a JSON file in the "campaigns"-folder.

Ah, sorry. Sure more moderators are welcome. I just wanted point out that one should not expect the issue to go away unless there will be active moderator for every part of the day.

Anything above 1 would make the units take "2 pathfinding tiles", and would likely make the pathfinding feel completely broken, unfortunately. In A25 I can try to increase the pushing range (since atm that makes the problem worse).

I think we need to increase the tree obstruction size so that we can truly make them impassable, or else just get rid of tree obstructions altogether. Right now, you got the worst of all worlds: Not only do units have to bump around trees affecting pathfinding, they also block building construction an make base building annoying. Also, currently it is nearly impossible to make an impassable forest without using a too many trees (stumps side by side to make a all). Example: The new Hercynian Forest map I'm making for A25. You can see that I am using tons and tons of trees, yet here soldiers can walk right through with no problem. Using any more trees to make it impassable would severely impact performance even on my god-tier laptop. Now, in Delenda Est this is expected behavior, because I've removed all obstruction from trees (you can even build over them), and furthermore I've created "Forest Grove" objects that make units who walk through move 50% slower (and fight 50% worse). That's fine for Delenda Est, but I think Empires Ascendant wants the trees to act like in Age of Empires. Right now, they don't. Even if I increase the obstruction size from w=1.6 and d=1.6 to w=6 and d=6, units still find paths through the forest. This obstruction size also affects the gathering distance of workers. So, I am currently at an impasse.

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

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

Because unless javelinists are good for something, no one will ever make 40 skirmishers, and thus whether 30 spear cav can beat them or not will be irrelevant.

The menu shows up correctly when I set to 1.4, which will work just fine for me. I set it to 1.5 before I had cataract surgery last October, so I can see things a lot better anyway.

This dude is still going at it? Seems like he does this non-stop for while then. I dont think he even plays games, just comments trash/hate in the lobby. @MarcusAureliu#s Check this comment (and it's date). He's definitely there just to trigger people in a bad way. Needs a proper ban imo.

good for the official page and social media .

Note it was made faster by wraitii to prevent dancing.

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.

If you don't see the issue you are likely a part of it.

I always say that profanity-phobics make profanity necessary. As long as there are people offended by it, there will be a need for people to provide the required offenses. But yes, consistency, or the lack of it, is a whole other story.