Leaderboard

no-armour-mod.zip Here you go guys, everything except for champions and heroes have no armour. This is an absolute disaster, in my opinion. Any ranged unit is OP.

Ah! Now that's a good theory! Maybe there was thought of having a hero with an armor-debuffing aura. If every unit has at least 1 armor they could have it reduced by 1 and not fall into negative resistances. (I don't think negative resistance would intrinsically cause any issues, math-wise, but I can see how someone would worry about it.) Likewise maybe someone was worried about divide-by-zero problems if there was an armor multiplying/dividing aura. These are plausible explanations. Unless such auras are already in the game and are see a lot of play, I'm not sure I buy that they are worth forgoing the benefits I listed... but it would at least explain things. Also, thanks for your encouraging words, @hyperion. When messing with gameplay and balance I definitely do believe in a conservative approach. I think there was an XKCD to the effect that any time you find some human made thing that looks weird and stupid, it's a sign that a brilliant engineer spent days trying to optimize an impossible set of demands, before throwing up their hands in frustration. It's a bit hubristic to suppose one can simply do better without large portions of effort and luck.

I actually played a game with everything having 0 armour. It was an absolute disaster; my rams got killed by arrows from the civic centre. All of my pikemen died after marching past a few defence towers. Enemy spearmen are taken out in 1 hit, and archers pose a serious threat to any siege. So this is a very very bad idea. Please don't change anything.

It does makes sense. Champs have better gear. So they have more armor.

Hello! By chance, I stumbled over this blog post and tought that developers of 0 A.D. might be interested in it. As it's from 2018, you might know it already, though. https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/0581/

Centurion @Yekaterina it's time to pay loyalty and service to modder duty. could we see what this is about? What happens if we change the armor to 0?

Thanks for trying out 0 A.D. and coming here to report your problem. As the game is still in alpha releases there are still many things we need to do. Many of these we know already, so when you provide feedback we would ask you to focus on some of the other points that could be improved. PLEASE READ THE FAQ BEFORE YOU POST HERE. THANK YOU. There is a neat table of planned features at http://trac.wildfire...ayFeatureStatus so you can tell what we are planning to add. Lag This is a common complaint, and with good reason. The game does not run as fast as we would like. Late in the game you will probably experience some lag, this is caused by a mixture of things, AI and pathfinding are big ones. The problem is worse on island maps and with multiple AI players. One thing that can be helpful is giving us the profiler information. This automatically generated information is useful for working out where the lag is coming from. If you hit Shift-F11 this will be dumped into a file (location given at the top of the screen). Please upload these data to our forums to help us solve the problem. Thanks! Missing Animations Some units glide around or don't drop to the ground when killed. We have an animator who is working away at making pretty animations. More animators are invited to help with this task. Units Can't Attack When Chasing There is a problem in the code where units decide to attack, then the chased enemy gets out of range before the attack hits so it is aborted, so in effect any units chasing each other won't be able to deal damage. Greyed out/disabled menu items Some menu items can't be clicked on, this is because those features aren't yet implemented. Units don't fight in formation Can't run two instances of the game simultaneously on Windows Multiplayer Lobby No one can join my game! Currently, only routers with UPnP support or routers that have been properly port fowarded are able to host. I was disconnected from the lobby... This is usually caused by a moderator kicking you for abusive behavior or inappropriate/vulgar chats. AI Problems AI tries to gather from resources near your base AI Doesn't Know how to Fight using Ships There may be errors loading a saved game with AIs. Rejoining a multiplayer game with AIs is not supported yet. Common Suggestions "You should use multiple threads/cores" 0 A.D. does have multiple threads for e.g. texture conversion, pathfinding, sound/music playback and user data reporting, but the game simulation and renderer currently run in the main thread to simplify development. "You should use Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc." We did try to do an Indiegogo campaign, but while we did raise some money which will go towards improving the game, we did not raise as much as we had hoped. The goal was to raise enough to hire two developers full time for two years, but we did not reach it so we have not been able to hire them. We might consider doing it again in the future but we currently do not have the resources for it.

What i miss most in 0 AD comparing to other strategy games is the interaction or the early interaction between players. Games are really rare, where you really interact with your opponent, in fast its only single playing on side and building up and attacking in the end if its suceeds its gg and if not its also gg, but for the enemy. Maybe we need a better rock paper scissor system? Maybe we need just some principles to accelerate the beginning?

In most RTS game, ranged units deal less DPS than melee units. In 0ad this is the reverse and by considerable amount, which is not historically accurate. If we watch in-game fights, we often see that the melee units are not in striking position. All of this means that most damage is done by ranged units, which is problematic for balance. This mod aims to reduce the DPS of ranged units such to encourage more use of melee units. In addition this mod aims reduce the effectiveness of turtling and to enhance the unique roles of each melee unit. Since ValihrAnts Train-Rotation-times mod was well received, I decided to incorporate its main changes. -Train and rotations times are as in ValirhAnts mod. Unit balance: -Citizen slingers and citizen javelineers get -15% attack(Javelin Cavalry still kills a women with 2 javelins and receives less damage). -Citizen archers get 3.0 spread and -5% attack. -Citizen spear cavalry gets +1 pierce attack(previously 10 unupgraded swordsmen infantry would defeat 10 unupgraded spear cavalry). -Citizen spearmen and pikemen get -2 hack armor, to make them more vulnerable to melee units(especially swordsmen infantry). After these changes, swordsmen infantry will be hoped to be the most favoured citizen soldier. This is fair since they cost some metal and are often limited to p2. In order to counter citizen swordsmen infantry I made the following changes. -Athenians get the council chamber in p2 and are able to recruit their city guards there as well in p2 in addition to the gym. -Carthaginians get their champion spearmen in p2. -Champion spear cavalry and champion swordsmen infantry get +1 hack armor. Champion elephants give to much value for their costs in A24. Hence: -Champion elephants see their base price increased by 50 food and 50 metal. So once a player reaches p2, they get some extra options and it encourages the use of champion melee infantry and champion spear cavalry later on. The most useful options I will list below: Athens(Champion spearmen) Britons(none) Carthage(Champion spearmen, mercenaries) Gaul(Champion fanatics, buffed sword cavalry) Iberians(swordsmen infantry from p1) Kushites(swordsmen infantry) Macedon(none) Mauryas(swordsmen infantry, elephant archers) Persians(mounted archers) Ptolemy(mounted archers, mercenary swordsmen) Rome(swordsmen infantry from p1) Seleucids(mounted archers, mercenary swordsmen) Sparta(skiritai). For Macedon and Britons I did not decide what my favourite way would be and hence they are left out. In order to make turtling less effective I decide; -Phasing up gives -1 capture regeneration increase per garrisoned soldier. -Fortresses take +150 seconds to build and its construction can now be more easily stopped. -CCs, military colonies, Stone Towers, Fortresses deal less damage per arrow but the base amount of arrows in increased such that their ungarrisoned damage output is left constant. However garrisoning soldiers adds weak arrows to the structure and garrisoned structures thus have less DPS. Misc: - Elephant archer is nerfed as any citizen archer and now costs 2 pop. - I don´t think cavalry archer should be like a super archer with more DPS, fast speed and 2 times the HP, but I currently leave it as it is. AlternativeBalance.zip

Hello Everyone, I am back from my long vacation! Happy New Years to everyone, to set everything into motion we will be having a Summer Tournament League on June 24th - July 24th (estimated 1 - 2 rounds every Friday and Saturday) We'll be expecting at least 16 players to join more details below: Dates: June 24th - July 24th (extensions if need be) How to Register: To register please, say your "in-game-name" and rating (also message me your email address for check-in) Optionally you can register on challonge: https://challonge.com/tournaments/signup/B1V10ZFk8W this is also where the bracket will be hosted How will the Games be Played? The Games will be a Best of 3 Matches Which Maps will be Played? Mainland, Libyan Oasis, and Death Canyon What should be the Map size(s) Games should be played on the Small or Medium Map Size If you want to contact me about something how should I? Respond to this post or email me at: derek@owumi.me Game Settings: Population Limit: 300 Starting Resources: Low Mode: Conquest Spies: Allowed Treasure - Off Explored Map: Off Revealed Map: Off Cheats: Disabled Game Speed: Normal (x1) Ceasefire: None Spectators: Allowed Tournament Rules: Recordings: Send Files to me via Email - derek@owumi.me or Reply to this Post Play-style: Best of 3 1v1 Double Elimination Banning Phase: Both Players can ban 1 Civilizations (Bans affects both player and it can be cancelled off) Player Ethics: Do not be rude Do not pause the game before loosing Do not Pause the game without asking for permission from your enemy and the host If any of these rules are broken you may be kicked or banned from the tournament completely If you're in any way interested feel free to register with any of the ways given. Wish you the best of luck in competing!

sorry bud but it aint gonna happen, booming with citizens and going for 50 women max is the norm. " Booming is turtling " a sentence that fits the game very well as you can develop your eco and not fear being molested by cav since cavs sucks ( weakens your eco because they can only hunt, are made of paper, don´t kill ranged troops effeciently and most maps are just hell for their pathing) and because past age 2 citizens and towers/forts are everywhere so no unprotected women. Better go with AOM if you like the rock papper scissors counter. Also i predict skirms will be in fashion for A25

That is just a sign of a stable mind! I think this is a fair point.

Now I see what you are up to. However this is a marginal improvement as you still need all those values to compare the units and the "hint" might actually be misleading. I don't mind negative armour (room example above), but then I don't mind an elephant building houses either. The real issue with changing HP is screwing over the current healing rates. Tripple HP meant it takes trice as long to get HP back to full. Same for building and repairing. Imagine needing 30 minutes to repair a ram due to current 50 pierce converted to HP. As for what is shown, well that can be changed

found this night and this morning. screenshot:

It actually does not. Compare: 200 HP, armour of 10 everywhere > you can take 200 / 0.9^10 => 573 HP of damage before dying 573 HP, armour of 0 => 573 HP of damage before dying. It's much easier to compare units if they all have a base armour of '0' and HP variations than if they have both.

IIRC 0 A.D. doesn't play nice with network drive. One way would be to move the whole my documents folder to that network drive but that sounds risky. There is also no way to make the game download what's missing so you'll have to copy the file manually. You could create a script that syncs both folder with the network drive using synctoy or similar.

I tried to change the armour value to 0, and suddenly all of the template files were reported to be invalid. I guess the problem lies in the maths behind it. However, I can attempt to change the value to 0.0001, which would be close enough to 0

Yep. It allows you to go up to a bit less than 4 GB. (Still a 32 bit app)

It's most probably a spambot.

I have 8 GB ram and it's pretty tight if you are using windows. But 8 is more than enough for Linux.

large-address-aware is used by default in releases and in the auto build, but not when compiling on your own. It's a flag to enable using more RAM than the default 32-bit limit on Windows, which iIrc is 2GB ?

I fear the reason is a lot more human than you think: there was no "0 armour" anywhere, and so when standardising (mostly @Nescio's work) we still didn't use 0. I actually commented that somewhere on some diff, and I think it's agreed that we should probably use 0 armour. It's basically a series of unfortunate mistakes. Armour is an 'HP modifier', and to make things simple we should have a base HP and then sometimes positive/negative armour on top, but that's not really the system we have (e.g. champions have more armour than Citizen soldier, but that doesn't make sense, they should have more HP instead). --- edit: I'll point out that 0 A.D.'s used of 'exponential armour' is unique as far as I know. It is indeed very convenient: there is really no 'start' point, so you can have -10 or 30 armour and it works the same: 1 point difference is worth about 10% more/less HP. This property _is_ what makes it possible to use HP efficiently, but we still didn't

yep that is known most of it was already fixed by @vladislavbelov in 0.24B and 0.25 https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/24905, https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/24903 https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/2023 https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/5288

IMHO, a disconnect should be made to count as a loss. Have a bad connection or your router randomly resets, then oh well sorry aboutcha. You lose. It's just the way it is.

It's rare around here that someone actually wants to understand what he is about to change and whether it's a good thing before committing to it. Asking if in doubt is never wrong, though you might not get a decent answer. Finding the commit might be difficult, renames for aesthetics, commit messages like "fix" or "update", etc. Even if you find the commit you might end up with a link to the discussion returning "sorry, insufficient permission"... Why not 0? There are possibly technical reasons, like division by 0 or simply 0 having a special meaning like invulnerable. Should be easy to figure out though. Then there are design reasons. If you set resistance to 0 at the start you will only be able to adjust it into one direction unless you want to utterly confuse people by allowing negative resistance. Then if you want to change it now without affecting the "balance", you have to either change hit points or damage values. Hit points are mostly neat values so you might not want to change them. Alternatively you can reduce all resistance values by 1 and adjust damage across all units which might be not that great either. If just setting them to 0 you have to think about if the change affects the gameplay in a desirable or at least acceptable way.

ctrl-c ctrl-v Edit: In case I was too cryptic, I'm insinuating that you say the same thing to every proposed change.

I am a subscriber to the logic of Chesterton's fence. As much as I don't like this design choice, I must assume it served some purpose at some point in time. Thus it is imprudent for me to invest resources into developing a new solution until I can account for that original purpose. Possibly. However there are some concrete reasons to make a change. It would make it easier to understand the number of hits it takes to kill a unit, which is arguably the most important statistic for understanding unit balance. It would make the GUI slightly simpler and more informative for new players. It would make it easier to test and observe observe in-game how modification that affect damage are working. And it would shorten and simplify some of the template xml files. Is there an easy way to do this? It seems like it is probably not the result of a single patch, and who knows when it was introduced. Querying the development log for "armor" turns up a mountain of irrelevant tickets.

That's because some traders asked unfair prices. An unfair scale is actually one of the things God hates. And a temple is no place for doing bussiness, fair or unfair. He also fulfilled a prophecy doing that. Texts for reference: Jer 7:11, Mt 21:13, Ps 69:9, Pr 11:1

Can you update boost ?

Hi Everyone, I am working on a map project with the Atlas editor for 8 players or against the AL. I named the Scenario 0 AD Empires at War, and this scenario cover the period of 300 BC to 250 AC, In the Mediterranean and Central Europe during those times.... The concept for this scenario is to put all players close to the Geo political situation of each of the main 9 civilizations of the Mediterranean and Central Europe during that period. For example... The Athenians start in Greece and have all the buildings including a wonder, so the Egyptians as well....but can they keep it??? Because they are surrounded by other civilizations that have some new advantages to take on both... Or you can play as the Gauls...in their case, they are surrounded by other hostiles tribes, and will have to defeat them all in order to expand, same for the Romans, who start with a strong army, but a little city in the center of the Italian Peninsula, and will have to deal with other Italian states in their borders before taking on everyone else... Those are just examples of the Geo political situation of those civilizations in the scenario. Each player will need to conquer a couple of Buffer states close to their National borders in order to expand and fight other players. I am looking for players with experience, so they can help me with suggestions and map testing... I am new at 0 AD...got the new 24 version of the game a few months ago, I already played a few games with the AL to learn the ropes... But it is the scenario editor what really got me hook , because of all the beautiful scenarios and art that can be created with it... I am a lover of Military History, and specially the classical age... And 0 Ad as game have become a dream come true for me... I love the game..... Here is a preview of the whole map for the scenario, I have been working on it for 3 weeks and is not ready yet... I am adding a lot of stuff, from relics and secret passages to fauna according to the different regions of the map ... The Map is a gigantic one by the way pack with small fauna details. Here is a panoramic picture of how is looking so far, all comments and suggestions are welcome... Thank you all for your time and attention.

I will keep everyone updated...See you all and a few days with more updates, thanks for your time and attention everyone.

Hey, how cool...Hi soloooy0, to tell you the truth, I don't know yet...but Im doing a lot of historical research about it, to project the historical situation as real as it was according to history, for example, Spain was very rich in Iron, in metals, and gold, silver....and the weather was great...so everyone was going there to get those metals, either by trade or war...Same happened to the Macedonians, those guys hit the jack pock back in those days and did great as using diplomacy and war and making good use of all the gold they found above the city of Byzantium, by the way, that port is also in the game...you, know, Im trying to make it as close as possible to What most classical agree on, in to the game, while making it always a fun experience for everyone, no matter what faction, you want to play.

quite spectacular, you can feel the hours, it will be very interesting. I only have the question of resources and which zones will be the most important to dominate to gain resources or control the sea.

One could also just tax traders with coin and let the player use that coin to buy resources at the market?

That is why I say that he should take advantage of rendering.

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

GENERAL LOWPOLY TIPS These are general tips when working with lowpoly assets, they're no software-specific. -Use unconnected geometry! This is the first and one of the most important tips. I’ve seen in a lot of models that people try to make the asset (smaller or big) all made from one mesh. This approach generates unnecessary geometry and makes the mesh more difficult to handle if you want to make changes. Here’s an example: Here we can see how many faces we’ve saved, and makes the mesh much more simple, which is good for make changes easier if required. -Split faces for hard-edge creases. Sometimes we want to create assets that contains both smooth curves and hard creases. Some 3D software lets you choose specifically which faces you want to set smooth shading and which ones set flat shading. However, in every single 3D software, you can “detach” the faces that you want to create the hard crease, this procedure will make the unconnected faces as hard creases. Left side are totally flat and totally smooth connected faces. Right side is the same smooth object, but with the faces where we want hard creases unconnected (the faces are split) -Double sided faces. 0AD’s engine does not render double-sided faces, if you want them to be shown in the game, you have to duplicate the face, and invert the normal. It is also good to move it a tiny bit, so they do not overlap for easier selection/modification or when baking AO. -Try to avoid Ngons use quads as much as possible. This one is not as important as other tips, but using always quads have more advantages than using Ngons and triangles. The main reason is that Ngons have sometimes unpredictable behaviors when triangulated (needed to export into any game engine) and not all 3D editing software supports them. Ngons, like triangles, doesn’t let you create clean loopcuts between loopfaces, which makes the mesh topology harder to modify/manipulate. -Animation loopcuts. When you are modelling meshes that are going to be animated, you must have in mind where the mesh is going to bend. To be able to maintain volume in the mesh on the points when is going to be deformed, you need to have some minimal geometry. This gif explains it visually: http://wiki.polycount.com/LimbTopology?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=BenMathis_limb_deformations.gif -Fake details with decals/textures Try to avoid geometry using textures to add detail. This can be further enhanced by the use of normalmaps. You can also use single faces, or simple geometry mapped to another part of the texture to use it as “fake” detail: several windows in 0AD’s buildings use a simple quad as a “decal” which removes the need of subdividing the geometry in the wall to make a “connected face” to map it to the window texture. (You can also make windows “insets” in the wall for more detailed windows, if the polycount permits) -Use as much texture space as possible, reuse as much texture space as possible too. This is a common mistake, and it’s one of the most important concepts of lowpoly texturing (wasting texture space). The best example to understand “reuse texture” expression is found in symmetric objects. Using only half of the mesh texture lets you make that texture portion bigger, which means more detail, at the expenses of having the exact same texture in both sides of the mesh. This is used in several things like helmets and… mainly symmetric objects. This is especially important when you are restricted to use fairly small resolution textures (like 0AD). Here are some examples of how to save texture space, increasing texture detail. Using a mirror modifier in your 3D software will make this process easier and automatic. In this example you can see the same asset mapped to different textures but both of them are 256x256. In the top example, there's heavy use of "reusing texture space" since the object is symmetrical in the Y and X axis. The bottom example is the same asset to another texture of 256x256, but each UV island has its unique space in the texture. You can clearly see the loss of detail, but in this case, you can make every face of the asset different/unique. You have to choose which assets/part of the asset are important enough to have its own texture space for unique details. -Add margin to your textures – texture bleeding Try to avoid seams showing up by texture bleeding (surrounding pixels close to the edge of the UV island gets “inside” of the UV and are displayed). You can avoid seams by texture bleeding simply giving some margin colour to your textures, and using a background of similar colour as your textures, which will minimize the seams effect. Here’s an example of texture bleeding making seams noticeable: http://www.ftc-creative.de/uploads/projects/FROG_Shading_01.jpg -Playercolor in textures. Playercolor is the term used to determine the unique colors of each player in a 0AD match. These colours help to differentiate the owner of the units/buildings even if there is other player in the match playing with the same civilization. Playercolor is shown in the parts of the texture that has not full opacity in them. Here’s a good explanation by team member quantumstate of how playercolor works in 0AD. (it’s an extract from this post: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18035) GIMP will work fine for textures as long as you understand what is happening. The issue is that the game does the player colour in an unusual way. What I think you are expecting to happen is to have a background of the player colour with the texture over the top so the player colour shows through in the alpha sections. It works slightly differently though. First with images you need to understand that each pixel in the image has 4 channels. 3 colours (red, green, blue) and the alpha or transparency channel. When you make part of the image transparent you only change the alpha channel, the colour components stay exactly the same. To see this in gimp you can use the layer mask as Enrique mentioned to show the alpha channel as a black and white image. You can disable the layer mask (from the right click menu of the layer) to see what the image looks like without the alpha channel. Now what 0 A.D. does with the player colour to create the final texture: 1. Multiply the texture by the player colour and discard the alpha channel. So if the player colour is white then the image will be left as it was (multiplying by 1 leaves things unchanged). If the player colour is black the whole image will become black, if it is blue then the image will become blueish. You can test the multiply in gimp using layer modes, just create a layer with the player colour and set the mode to multiply. 2. Take the original texture with the alpha channel and place it on top of the new multiplied image. Then the multiplied image will show through in the transparent regions giving the final texture. You can replicate this in gimp to preview what your texture will look like. 1. Open the texture, there should be a single layer. 2. Duplicate the layer. 3. Remove the alpha channel from the bottom layer. (Now you can see the colours "underneath" the transparent sections). 4. Create a new layer and put it in between the two existing layers. 5. Fill the new layer with the player colour (e.g. #0000FF for blue players). 6. Set the mode of the new layer to multiply. Now you should see an image which will look like the final texture in game. So it is important that you are aware of what the image is like "underneath" the transparent areas because it will affect what the texture looks like. This is why layer masks are useful so you can easily disable the transparency and see the colours in the transparent areas. (create the layer mask using the "Transfer layers alpha channel" option).