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Another classic clash for Sunday afternoon entertainment!

I feel a bit sorry for this uneducated person:

You can play with the settings there https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/art/materials/player_water.xml We might need a special copy of this file as there are 12 other files using that material.

Hello, nice game you have here - been playing it on and off for a while now. Keep up the good work. Now, the topic is about palisade walls and how the AI is not able to handle the exploit I discovered last night. Perhaps it is already familiar to you? Anyway, you build a palisade wall in neutral territory sealing off a particular approach. The AI keeps expanding and takes over ownership of the palisade some time later. It changes from neutral to AI ownership - and the AI still keeps it intact - leaving my completely undefended approach safe forever. Well, as long as I don't attack the wall myself - when the time is right. - Could the AI handle this a bit better? Perhaps simply building gates in the existing walls once it assumes ownership?

This was a really good one.

Depends on the texture. But transparency isn't good on low end hardware.

Then there has to be some kind of other effect playing into this. maybe scaling? Because the water in the fields definitively moves faster and has way more waves than the water on the map. If it would be exactly the same it would look fine I guess.

If an unstarted constructionside gets destroyed, the player gets all the resources back. The more you build before you lose a constructionside, the more resources you lose. Id prefer it if the AI learns to go to the spot before placing the constructionside, that might be a better solution than making AI constructionsides invisible.

I mean, most of the game looks horrid on low graphics. This item would fit right in.

Charging. Standing Ground (aka Brace). Friendly Fire. Flanking. Open Order (reduces friendly fire and enemy area damage), Locked Shields (aka Phalanx or Shield Wall; greater armor, slower).

The spear/polearm being specifically designed to combat cavalry is a bit of an RTS convention; simply by virtue of much better reach spears were used by and large by all infantry regardless of whether they were facing cavalry or not. Whether a spearman would outperform a horseman one-on-one is a triviality in which matters of other equipment, training, etc,... complicate the matter. Even if the game does not embrace a battalion system, it would be nice for players to benefit from engaging in orderly formations. Even making it possible if only suboptimal would be a nice change of pace. I personally like to see my troops in proper battle lines, but the stand ground stance is annoyingly restrictive while the defensive stance goes too much in the other extreme.

In 0ad right now infantry battles are decided by which side kills the other's melee first. This means that the melee units that tank the most damage are the most useful, like pikemen. The feature like you mentioned in "magnetic pikemen" would be great as long as it did not did not cause perfomance problems (I don't know if it would or not). There are still ways pikes could act as a meat shield rather than a meat magnet: Ranged units could follow close to pikemen so that they can mooch off of the armor of the pikemen since they would most likely be in the same "targeting-box". In this situation, ranged units are in a location more vulnerable to higher dps melee units like swords. The main goals of the changes are to allow more player choice and make the natural behavior of 0ad units less overbearing.

I think that shooting the closest unit is something related to a kind of survival instinct for the human being. A unit shoots the nearest enemy because it is seen as the biggest threat at the moment. When a unit is not forced to do something in 0ad it will stick to the last order you gave him. When this order is gone, it will take his own "initiative". For example, when a unit definitely cuts a tree it will move to the nearest tree near him: you didn't gave him that order, he deliberately decides to cut the closest tree because it is the one that requires less effort in distance terms. What I'm saying is that if you give a specific order to a unit that unit will go against his own nature and do even things that will bring him to death or suicide. If you don't the unit will try to preserve himself (which ultimately is eliminating the biggest threat). A 0ad unit doesn't reasonate for the long term good in a battle, but for the short term one (his own life instant by instant). In addition, I will copy and paste some reflections I already did under the thread "Magnetic pikemen". I think that this feature would lower the original importance of melee units, which is in fact creating a shield for the shots of the enemy ranged units unless they don't actually reach an enemy unit (at that point their main purpose is: kill). Whouldn't letting ranged unit decide what unit shoot by default lead to armies composed by only ranged units? And as I already suggested, I think that a solution to this "problem" could be a simple shortcut: when you press that shortcut while having selected a group of units (archers as shown in the image below) the game allows you to select a zone (the zone should obviously have a maximum size), which is represented by the red area in the image (in which there are the enemy slingers). Then your archers will target first all the enemy units who are in the area (in this case the slingers). Then when the area is cleaned up they will return to focus of the nearest unit available. Obviously the opponent is able to move his slingers out of the zone in order to protect them, so I think that this shortcut could bring to a new nice micro skill.

it depends on how the algorithm works. if it just searches for the closest unit to the last one killed, that would be the same unit for all your shooters, and after that one, still another unique target, and so on. otherwise we could make things more complicate, but with a computational expense (how else?).

today I was just thinking about how a 1v1 could last more than 20 minutes in this alpha, when this replay came out in the you tube thread: I don't know about you, but I was amazed by what Lorenz has managed to pull out in this game. I think that, with the exception of the very first minutes, he played better than @LetswaveaBook for all the match. Of course Letswaveabook was also playing very well, he could afford to slip a couple of times because he was really never in danger. What do you think about it? Do you agree with me here on this particular match? Do you think, more in general, that the next iteration of the game should have late game more decisive?

Just out of interest: a texture would cost more performance than animated water?

Maybe it's good for performance if ranged units just attack the closest enemy. Filtering by unit type or by hitpoints could be bad for the performance.

Ok, for what I saw it doesn't seem there was an issue on the historical accuracy but on the water level of the rice field. Ancient Chineses didn't rely exclusively on rice farming, there was millet notably, but I don't see issues in having rice fields for a faction based on Han dynasty.

Define `this` and how it differs from the main question apparent from the thread title, please.

I understand everyone would prefer a smarter AI and I would do that if I could, just so you know. A temporary feature? Ok, let me know if you'd like me to submit it as a patch (cc @Stan`). Me and @Jammyjamjammanhave only tested it a little, and I wasn't sure yet about what values to use for the construction time. @CeresI'm not sure yet.

@Genava55 Indeed it's hard to keep track of everything. My biggest problems with civ design when it comes to art has always been the lack of cohesion of information. 60 threads of pictures everywhere with random discussion happening in the middle of them. I think @Sundiata managed to get it organised the best for the Kushites probably because there have been little other voices talking about it. Of course there are the civ wiki pages but those only describe units accurately most of the time. I think it could be beneficial to have an organised place to all of this, publicly editable but with reviews so people could make suggestions without it being a complete mess. They have to be removed from the han_china mod on Github before they are even included in the game.

Just pass -mod=mod