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Eurasian Steppe

And / or reduce gathering rates. As some people complain EA to be to be to spamy reducing gathering rates is probably better.

The most fitting ones are where you reenact historic military campaigns of the 0ad heros. But if you want to send a centurion with his man on an odyssey to go save the princess from the evil dragon that's fine as well (finally a use for the dragon ). As for difficulty, make it so it's fun for you first and foremost.

Yup. I think it's fine that badly damaged structures can't accommodate units. I really like to capture enemies' infrastructure so I usually don't damage buildings at all; unless there are too many soldiers inside to capture it... Sometimes it can be a close call not to accidentally destroy the building, for example when I have 'Captain Lardbutt' (Hanniba'al Baraq) along, who doesn't have a capture attack but deals tremendous crush damage.

Play testing intensively the development version is definitely something desirable, yes. Where have you heard that? The only thing that was announced that we will stop adding A25 features on the first of June, if there is no delay. It doesn't mean A26 won't get new features.

This is a typical trope in RTS games, very damaged buildings can't get garrisoned as it represents the building is in shambles

now i understand. I think that's unnecessarily complicated. I would take it out, e.g. in A25. a matter of taste, of course. of course i think more from the direction of a newcomer. Conversely, if <10%, all people have to go out. Maybe that is already the case ==> or send message to user: "buildings under 10% health can't be manned" or "this building is actually not strong enough to go in" ( helps learning feedback)

@seeh The buildings are too damaged to be manned; you have to repair them first (I think>10% health).

Suppose we have a sandbox fight in which a number N pikemen supported by N ranged units face of against N infantry swordsmen supported by N ranged units of the same type that supports the pikemen. In this assumption the pikemen march to the swordsmen and fight in the middle while the ranged units do damage from behind. In my view, the fight would be balanced if the swordsmen die as fast as the pikemen do. In a simplistic model we could say that the damage the pikemen receives per second is (5.5/0.75+P)(1-0.65), where P is the DPS(damage per second) of the ranged unit before taking armor into account. The damage the swordsmen receives is given by (5/2+P)(1-0.41). If we demand that each unit dies equally fast, they should receive the same amount of damage since their HP is equal. Solving this for P gives a value of P=4.55. This model does not include misses, but I can say that archers are fairly accurate if the melee units meet in the middle and slingers would in such a sandbox fight miss about 20% to 10% of their shots. You might argue that this is just an oversimplified model, but it goes to show that the value of ranged damage would be far lower than the current ones, if you want these fights to be balanced. This calculation is what I think describes the current situation of pikemen vs swordsmen (+ranged support on both sides) fairly accurate. Once again, I argue that ranged units deal too much damage. Let me discuss another sandbox fight in which a number N pikemen supported by N ranged units face of against 2N infantry swordsmen. Once the N pikemen are killed, the ranged units run away. This time we say that the fight is ballanced if both sides deal equal damage. The damage received by the pikemen is 2*5.5/0.75*35 and the damage received by the swordsmen is (5/2+P)(1-0.41). Solving this for P gives a value of 6.15. This calculation has is limits as the ranged units will be able to get a few kills before the fight starts. On the other hand, if the damage is distributed over the swordsmen, it might mean that less than 10 swordsmen die. Again, the P value should be significantly lower than we see in game. I realize that these calculations have their limitations, but I think it is a decent example where it shows that ranged units have to much DPS.

The idea of dropping off resources is a staple of the RTS genre, but for 0 A.D, it limits key design aspects of the game. As has been noted, changing movement speeds has a direct impact on gather rates since units have to deliver resources to drop-sites. Interestingly enough, the original vision was to not have this kind of feature, and in some of the first alphas, this was nonexistent. The initial plan was to construct structures that had an aura; units could gather within this aura and not outside it. This was clearly a very restrictive choice. What I would rather propose is that drop-sites (including worker elephants) would provide bonuses to collection rates within their auras. Instead of increasing the resource capacity units could hold, technologies could instead increase the effect or range of the building's aura. This could benefit the game in a number of ways: Movement speeds would have less importance for the economy, making it possible to have greater unit diversity. Performance might increase since units would not have to calculate routes as much. There might be chances for diversity as some civilisations might be better at collecting resources outside the range of drop-sites while others might have ones that are much drop-site auras that are smaller but have much more potent effects.

A25 introduced a new campaign mode. At the moment there is only 1 campaign: tutorial. How do I make my own campaign maps / scenarios and add to the list? If the devs can teach me then I can perhaps make some interesting and challenging campaigns.

Well, again, it's a simulation attempting to get something close to what happened in history. Historically, archers weren't necessarily very good against pikes. It's not like phalangites had bigger shields or anything, I've read it may have been the "forest of pikes" phenomenon which scattered the incoming arrows. Very difficult to simulate in 0 A.D. with its very simple combat paradigm.

Actually I have managed to add damage textures but they are ugly. I think my problem is not with the technical bit but artistic taste, which is much harder to acquire than operating blender.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ZY5vw

Yeah i agree. But unbalanced teams can give a skewed perspective on unit balance.

Yeah, sorry about that. It should be _a lot_ easier to mod these kind of actions now.

poor princess... Yekaterina check on the campaign by @SciGuy42, it covers all macedonian wars from philippos to alexandros, in greece, persia, egypt and india.

There are Lopess and @m7600

Yes that's essentially my conclusion as well. I was actually struggling with the name quite a bit, skip_mod_compatibility_check seems a good proposition to me, thanks

Nah there are too many things in there already --"

This is much more about team balancing than unit balancing imo. Yes unit balancing plays a part too. But unbalanced teams can ruin any game even when the balance of units is "optimal". That part honestly gets overlooked in every balancing discussion i've seen yet. But it's probably easier to say civs are unbalanced than to accept the fact that you got your ass handed to you and you went out of your league disclaimer: i'm not talking about anyone specific.

and why would that armor be pierce-resistant then, instead of mostly hack-resistant? The latter seems more logical.

Apocalyptic Good ideas for easy implementation.

I agree that removing shuttling can solve some issues. I think it was determined to implement shuttling after the first few alphas to make the game look livelier (busier, more interesting to look at and manage). As noted, the "aura range" approach was restrictive and once shuttling was implemented, no other solutions were attempted. I would rather keep shuttling, but it needs fixed because of the movement rates. Luckily Delenda Est doesn't have this problem. But one way to mitigate it at least somewhat is to double carry capacity, which means units spend more time gathering and less time shuttling. Another way (perhaps in concert with the capacity change), is to implement a shuttling speed component in UnitMotion. A 2nd walking speed if you will, that we can make universal to all infantry, that kicks in when dropping off resources. Yes yes, people could potentially micro this to get around the shuttling speed, but I would say "good luck to you" micro-ing the shuttling of 100+ units while doing everything else. Lol Only going to happen in edge cases and not very important (there are ways to mitigate this at any rate).

Oh! Apparently I'm blind during late hours! :-D Thank you very much for pointing that out. The problem might be, that it's looking for lboost but it's called libboost in OpenSUSE, same for libvorbisfile. It that's the case, I'll do symlinks with required library names.

Auras perform range queries which can be expensive.

Gather rates are high compared to carry capacity, making shuttling more important in 0ad than most other games I'm aware of. If you want to reduce importance of shuttling you have to make units spend more time gathering instead of walking, not the other way around. I think it was AoE III that does away with shuttling altogether.

It's visible for Carthaginians buildings. Well you get messages when placing a building over resources, so could be doable. Maybe @Freagarach knows (How to make a message popup when building cannot carry units because its health is too low)

Hello everyone ! Sorry for the late. Yes, I'm obviously interested in joining the testing team ! What are the procedures please ? Should I simply play test newer A25 and send here my remarks ? In addition, I have heard that this A25 will be the last version with features adding, so I guess it must be the best in terms of completion, right ? I'm listening to you, thanks and all the best !

A minute to check would be nice.

Yes.

Ptolomies and Seleucids.

Population? I thought we talked about how they looked. No, they will work like the Persians. By this time the Jews have already passed through their first diaspora. Yet Judea is a populated place.

No problem. I am editing the template xml files. I will push to git when I am finished. If there are missing models I will use ptol or sele models.

For now, @wowgetoffyourcellphone's basic rank Ptolemaic and Seleucid mercenary cavalry spearmen in Delenda Est should be a viable placeholder instead of the basic rank Thessalian spearman actor. Has anyone made the changes?

You'll have to work that out with @wraitii a bit, since they are also planning some small campaign, IIRC. But the idea for now is teaching the very basics of an RTS, complemented with some 0 A.D. specifics. See:

I don't think I am capable of programming a whole campaign just yet after seeing the code for tutorial. However, I think I can learn this after some time. What types of campaign are you looking for and what difficulty would be appropriate?

Some triggers scripting would be great.

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.

Hello! Would you like to consider adding a possibility to export (default or user-customised) key bindings as a JSON file? Players of 0 A.D. could use this file to create and print out nice keyboard templates, which are maybe useful especially for new players of 0 A.D. The tool where this JSON file is to be imported (currently, pasted into) is available there: https://isometricland.net/keyboard/keyboard.php Example: I posted this already in another thread but felt that it was getting OT there. Hopefully, you agree with this new thread here. If not, I will remove it. A GitHib repository is available, and I use the opportunity to link to a thread there about this topic: https://github.com/mjhorvath/Video-Game-Keyboard-Diagrams/issues/11#issuecomment-840135466 Currently, the tool cannot yet show combinations of 3 keys on the keys themselves. But below (in a footer), one can add such information, incl. also mouse-wheel/-click combinations etc.). I am not affiliated with the author of the tool but find it quite nice and therefore also hope that you do not mind that I kind of advertise it a bit here.

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.

Also you can look at this

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.

One-Click-Trees with the addon "Real Trees" ...

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

If you want this you can already get it with the autociv mod

No problem... We need an army of volunteers. ------- @BoredRusher @badosu You too.

Yes could easily be, but playing against AI it didn't matter much to me. In that case it makes sense that it doesn't feel different. Btw @BoredRusher this is your chance to give some feedback before something gets into the game

@dpikt Brilliant work, dude, very interested to see how you refine this in terms of the whole situation with count accuracy, but it's certainly a great start. Is there not a live running count of population through the game that can be plotted? I mean, the game keeps track of a pop count, and although it seems to reach it by different means, so does the FGOD mod, right? Or am I missing something silly here?