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Yeah, it kills me how good ideas for this game constantly get put on the back burner because 1 person has some minor quibble. Were male villagers in Age of Empires ever confused with soldiers? No.

@Angen@Freagarach@Stan`@wraitii& everyone else @WFG: Is there a revised schedule plan for a25? I believe the release of a25 was scheduled for the end of June, but then those 'nasty bugs', as Stan put it, became apparent. I'm quite happy with a25 RC2, so this is not a matter of anger or trying to put pressure on people. I have no idea about the progress on those nasty bugs, but I actually expect a RC3. Since the originally planned release date is dead anyway, I have a radical proposition: How about lifting the feature and string freeze, maybe until the end of July, so the actual a25 will be as shiny and flawless as possible?

Just between us two:

I think you pretty much discribed what my mod does? Only difference is i use energy so a unit cannot endlessly charge after an escaping enemy and functions as a reset after a succesful charge attack. This pretty much means they can charge once per combat. Only thing i would need to do for ramming ships is simply add a melee attack and set energy in the template. Ram speed and damage will be automatically increased with more garrisoned soldiers.

They were a lot of plans for the tutorials. @Angen had one @Freagarach had one and likely some other people on the forums but it never came to fruition. Having custom templates or using the tehcnology manager can be done IIRC. If it makes sense. The game still lacks some basic tutorial features though like area highlighting or object highliting.

I'm aware of it, they are amazing. Hopefully today's generation interested enough to download 0 AD would be more encouraged to play after testing the tutorials. Although yes, with all due respect to the devs especially everyone involved in creating the tutorial, there are some ways to improve it. The most accessible Tutorial (accessed from Learn to Play > Tutorial) is the Starting Economy Walkthrough instead of the more beginner-friendly Introductory Tutorial. As discussed here, the language used in the tutorials can be improved a bit: I suggest the tutorial to use in-universe conversation for tutorials instead of the currently more technical language, similar to Age of Empires tutorial. I.e. lets pretend that the player is the king of civilization and the tutorial is coming from a kingdom advisor, like this: In addition to above, I think it's best to refer to units as their in-game unit names, so instead of female citizens we can refer to them as Spartan women to avoid confusion. Also in my opinion, at least for introductory tutorial, perhaps we can use special templates for tutorial entities that can only construct what is required in the tutorial, to avoid clutter in structure panel that could intimidate new players. I'm open for discussion about this. I really think that the tutorial is the gateway for new players before deciding whether or not this game (or even RTS game in general) is worth their time, which is important since we're in a time where thousands of games are easily accessible while RTS games are decreasing in popularity.

Due to 0 AD vision of less unnecessary micro, I think switching attacks manually or cooldown mechanic is not preferable for Empire Ascendant (it's really nice for a mod though). Here are what I think might work for ships with current engine, only involving simple template modifications: Concept: Works like siege tower, but at sea. Attack type is arrow but modify damage to be normal damage like one archer. Add BuildingAI component to the template, so increased arrows on garrison. Concept: Big ships with corvus like Quinquereme & Juggernaut can capture smaller warships. Hopefully capture animation can be added later (just lowering the corvus). I'm not sure what would happen if two opposing juggernaut capture each other, so we could set only smaller ships are capturable. Ramming would be a little more complex as it needs component modifications, but here's what I think: Concept: Ramming works as melee attack but multiplied with speed before impact. Speed increase should be automatic, but ships need to be more than certain range for it to work. Modification: Attack and UnitAI needs to be modified like this to allow automatic charge (sorry for rather technical description): Attack type must include CanCharge and ChargeRange properties. If a unit can charge set CanCharge to True and set ChargeRange to a range, e.g. 10m UnitAI will check if the range between a ship and targeted enemy ship. If it is exactly the same, it will charge i.e ship use running speed Otherwise (ship too close or too far) it will just approach the enemy with normal speed. On impact, record the current speed and multiplied this to attack damage before stopping and melee attack. To ram again then the ship must retreat outside ChargeRange, otherwise the speed won't increase. What do you guys think?

Think about it this way. Every feature we add to the combat takes more APM. So, if we want ramming and ranged attack switching, you're looking at reducing the number of ships you're going to want to micro. At least with ramming, it could be semi-automatic (once the ability recharges, the ship's unitAI could wait X number of seconds before self-initiating a ram, a rather simple thing to do; the player can always override and initiate the ram manually or manually task the ship to something else). With ships weapon switching, can there be any semi-automation there? I take it, each attack type should have its own unique benefits and drawbacks, but can the unitAI self-determine which attack to use based on the benefits and drawbacks? Do you need additional manual input from the player?

Hm. I guess they might be a unit's finger's width closer to the building in the 2nd pic. I still think it's fundamentally wrong that it is possible to not see a building you're working on.

I do my best to keep my soldiers away from warships because of that. On the other hand I think it takes really long to sink an enemy's warship, even when I attack with several warships; I wouldn't want it to take even longer...

Were different textures and models not enough? Archers and spearmen are men, but they are not confused with each other.

Crea is right. The language in the tutorial could be worded less sexist. I'm a 49 year old man & even I noticed that. This isn't about historical context, it's about wording modern game text in a way that doesn't make women sound worthless to people playing it. The description above singles out Females & then dismisses them as worthless in every area. Since this is part of the Tutorial, it's one of the first things you read opening the game. Personally I'd like to see both men & women in this untrained role, but at minimum the wording should be updated.

I support this. Regardless of the implementation, I still think D2175 should be committed. It doesn't have to be implemented to all units. Combined with ProductionQueue it could make for some interesting results. For example, Sacred Band soldiers could be produced in a battalion of two, as they are historically.

This thread was started because of this: @Stan`

I've wanted a "hotload" button for a long time. No, the button would not take the same amount of time as restarting the program as hotloading would only be reloading the game's assets, not rebooting the entire program and loading the game's assets. Also, you would keep your current progress with a button.

1. New civs: Very ready civs: Han, Thebans, Epirotes, Xiongnu (All artwork and templates complete, no bugs, may need some final balancing) Almost ready civs: Judeans, Thracians, Zapotec (No bugs left, some artworks need polishing and balancing is debatable, need intensive testing) Not ready but started: Illyrians, Dacians, Ponies. (Still a lot of bugs to be fixed) Planned: Aksum, Balkans as a whole, Greek subfactions.

About the 2 gender citizen mod, since we only need to replace the actors, we can use nani's trick to make it compatible for lobby games. Those who need it can use it but please do not implement that by default, as it is easier to distinguish citizen-workers from infantry if we keep all citizen-workers with a female phenotype and all infantry with male phenotype.

Just like the game requires a game restart when adding mods I think it would require one for that too. @wraitii