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3.1.3 version is out now, updated original download links (zip | pyromod). Added mod info buttons in the main menu and the in-game menu, explaining the changes that the mod brings. Mainly useful for people that use the in-game mod downloader because they will never see a read me otherwise. fixed. Mod credits have been integrated into the main menu credits.

The forum is great for discussion, but not great for action. Action is creating a mod for others to try and/or a patch to put on Phabricator for others to try and improve and eventually be accepted and committed. Lately, I have been attempting the latter, with good results: [Gameplay] - Garrison Domestic Animals into the Corral to get a <ResourceTrickle> of Food https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4380 [Gameplay, CivBonus] Rework Kushite Pyramids to be Phase Requirements https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4381 The discussions there are far more fruitful, due to there being actual stats and real gameplay to chew over. The forum is really only good for hypothetical discussion.

I will be picky here. It does not mean that many of 0 AD's design choices are near sighted and balanced =/= good design, it only resulted in that many of 0 AD's design choices are near sighted and balanced =/= good design. This wasn't doomed to happen, but it did. I don't think the size of the team is the problem. The main problem is that balance advisors rarely make a differential, or concretely suggest one. Hmmm.... Do you have evidence for that? What is probably closer to the truth is that Balancing team=more imbalances. In my view most inballances that are in A25 are either introduced by the balance changes or they were present in A24 and nobody cared about them. It would have been easy to make a mod that gives players 2 metal mines o mainland, but the balancing team did not push such a mod forward. If such a mod were there, then a number of inbalances would have been solved before we went to A25, but here we are. If you took a look at the scenario editor in A24, you would have seen that skirmishers are good for something, but nobody in A24 could imagine that they were useful. What this community needs is a mentality of complain about it & fix it. It is better to continuously have balance mods being tested rather than having only changes every alpha. If people complain about Roman/Iberian champion cavalry, they are childish. Because if they were smart and really bothered they would make a mod with better balance, nothing is stopping them to mod 0AD. Blaming anyone but the balancing team for imbalances is hypocrite. I like the coral-idea though and I think new features should be not judged on balance. When new things are inbalanced, the balancing team should solve that while keeping the feature intact.

There is an option that allows garrisoning the heroes. Yekaterina, maybe you should wonder if your habit to train only women at the start is always the best approach. Some early soldiers can make a difference in the hero fights.

May I say that, while there certainly is a conservative faction within the multiplayer community, it doesn't represent all of it. Liking to play against peers doesn't involve disliking the game to change. Balance is important for MP, buy one may disagree on how to pursue it.

Regicide has never been a popular gamemode, because it is broken: the hero is given completely randomly, so one player could end up with Scipio Africanus and the other player ends up with Cleopatra. As soon as the game starts, Scipio Africanus can run to Cleopatra's base and murder her. There would be 0 chance the Cleopatra player can defend, because the sword cav is just much stronger than the infantry archer in close combat. Since you cannot garrison heroes, there is nothing that Cleopatra could to to save herself, and therefore the game ends there. Furthermore, some heroes give bonuses that are just too OP for booming, making it a very imbalanced game. So we need to make changes to make this mode actually playable.

First I would like to offer the disclaimer that an emphasis on balance is not a bad thing. It helps to maintain a thriving community, and the community is integral to an open source topic. That said, many design decisions that have changed the game on an integral level were done so with balance in mind, not an end vision. Again, this is not bad either, but ultimately it means that many of 0 AD's design choices are near sighted and balanced =/= good design. Ultimately a problem I see with the game from this standpoint is that the factions are fairly bland. Yes, there are restrictions to what units are available, but at the end of the day a Persian spearman has the same statline most other factions. Many great proposals have been done to flesh them out better. I would particularly mention wowgetoffyourcellphone's and my own, but I'm sure that there are plenty of others. Despite often a great amount of thought being put into them and at least some of the community having positive opinions on the alterations, to my knowledge little if anything gets done. This is ultimately motivated by the fact that these would throw the balance in flux. While this is exasperating to people who would like change, the points behind these conservatives are valid. The multiplayer community might suffer. That said, I think that there is a reasonable compromise that 0 AD can and should take to help diversify factions and gameplay for the longterm without ruining the competitive scene. One by one factions could experience overhauls with key things in mind: How would their economy function differently from other ones? Are there any ways to reward strategic building placement? Are there any glaring inaccuracies in the design? What are current strategies used in the competitive scene, and how could these be expanded upon? These new iterations of the factions would initially be an option until all factions have experienced an overhaul, allowing for players to freely choose between the current, more balanced faction designs and the more experimental ones. Then, the team could in theory even turn around and continue the cycle of overhauls.

The game is a mod yes. However it extends far beyond just the 13 civs and is called “public” All fauna and flora assets are part of it. In my mind the civs should be split from the rest as they could be replaced by something else. Yeah it's possible. If it was split I believe it could be a bit smaller. It would be a fun experiment to see how much space the civs really take. Do note however you could just have an extra mod that just changes the stats that would be much smaller. You could just have three xml files in that mod Without branches and backporting non C++ changes it's not trivial no. Not with the current resources at my disposal at least.

Hi i'm Vrayer on the loby, Pr0siak quit without resigning.... @user1 Cheers commands.txt

tomorrow i will test the fix. thank you very much!!

The tip about msconfig worked great.

Regicide is for quick games and it's fun and players can play a lot of games in the time taken for one conquest alone. and new players have a chance to win a game with a bit of luck. unlucky if you get Cleopatra of course, I am worried about players who get acharya Chanakya.

Thanks @Stan`. I think i understand a few points of your reply, but not all of it. If possible, could you clarify a few things: 1 - It seems that the moddable part of 0AD is treated (in some ways) as a mod itself (called empires_ascendant) <-- is this correct? 2 - If 1 is true, then it means that, much like mods, this one could be changed more frequently, and updated on mod.io 3 - Empires_ascendant is a rather large mod (a few gigabytes in fact) and the only way to change parts of it would be to download and replace the entire thing (can't just change a few files) 4 - " We can't maintain the current version and the next one at the same time. " <--> If i'm understanding this corrently, it means that current versions of 0AD in phabricator (A26) have new features (like acceleration) that changes the game and most of it's .xml files. This way, patches for A25 couldn't be easily tested in Phab without messing with A26 stuff. Therefore it would be necessary to have two projects in Phab, one for A26 and one for A25, and that is just not feasible. If that is the case, then can't we test tentative patches as a simple mod and when eveything is set, officialy transmit them to the Empires_Ascendant "mod". It sounds a little vague because i don't have enough knowledge to know what is possible and what isn't, but if we can use a program, like the installer, to officialy replace files in Empires_Ascedant, it would make things simpler. This way, the workflow would be something like this: Tentative patch A25.01 --> as a simple mod (or .pyromod) file, like any other mods. Balance team downloads the mod, tests it and have discussions. - If the changes are insufficient, a new mod (A25.02) is created and the process is repeated) -If the changes are accepted then it can be implemented. After a final version is approved, an official patch (or something) can be downloaded to replace the original files in the Empires_Ascendant mod for the new ones, but only those that were changed (like a copy and replace). ======================================================= I don't know if i got everything right or if this is even realistic, but if possible, it might be close to a good solution to this problem.

Can't garrison all heroes. The elephant can only be garrisoned in an elephant stable ;P. Option makes that hero player SOL, lol.

That is true, but imbalances are a natural part of the process, so it is unavoidable in some ways. The biggest issue, in my opinion, isn't that the game can become imbalanced, but that once it does, patches and fixes will only roll out 6-8months later. I'm somewhat aware of the hurdles of changing compiled code, but still can't understand why smaller changes (like numerical tweaks in the template .xml files) can't be updated more regularly, especially since theses changes can be easily modded. This way we wouldn't be so afraid of imbalances, since they could be fixed after a few weeks of discussion.

Regicide is unpredictable and that is fun. I once had my CC taken down by an elephant Hero (Hannibal ?) at the start of the game which made me lose in just 2 min. Was that unfair? yes, but would that have happened if it were perfectly balanced? probably never. I think, this is what makes the mode (the current regicide) worth a try and also play it.

That is interesting, however, building placements are already very important in high level multiplayer games: wrong place could lead to inefficient gameplay or the building being captured. Also, houses / barracks are now used as walls to defend against cavalry rush. If barracks train faster when close to blacksmiths, this will temp the player into making economically beneficial but tactically nub decisions. This is good bonus. Before we talk about reworking civs, the navy is completely broken from a balancing perspective, but also from how ships worked.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone wackyserious/0adtextures (github.com)

Unique features = new imbalances

I feel like you missed something when reading the first post. How would that fix the point that the factions are just kind of bland and lack unique features?

First you have to click on the "Move/Rotate Object" Button in the top-toolbar, then, for actors, you have do select them with the "Alt-Key" and mouse, then you can delete them with the "Delete-Key"... You can select actors with "Alt" and Click" or "Alt" and Doubleclick to select all of the same actors or "Alt" and draw a box with the mouse around all actors you want to select. Maybe this helps ...

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1907

lol I thought noone would implement that anymore, I was actually considering to propose on this forum a completely new alternative for how to make corrals work.

Lol that's not true. There are so many things that are not getting in the game for the fear that people will find it "unbalanced" and start yelling. Every decision that touches the gameplay is looked on from the angle of "what do the multiplayer think". The problem is that most devs play the game not super competitively, but just casually, so no one I know of claims to be an expert for balancing. Which is why there is an extra balancing forum now.

Artistic interpretations, might borrow some useful elements from their concept with accuracy in mind

wrong. 0AD design choices are all near sighted because there is no long term project, not because of general focus on balance. actually devs give fairly little attention to balancing.

Have you tried a combination with the "del" key, under macOS it works with "fn"? fscaleOUTPUT.mp4

Tbh, there is much that can be said about this subject, and will probably lead into another endless discussion with a lot of different opinions. Here's mine though (lol). I'm heavily in favor of rock paper scissors balancing. This way you can really diversify civs from each other and have interesting matches. But for this to work i feel like there would need to be some additional changes like being able to pick your civ yourself in mp matches, and hide your choice from others if you want. Otherwise people can pick obvious counters. But the current way of balancing seems to be more about making civs the same. I also feel like the bigger the balancing team gets, the harder it will be to actually conclude and agree on something. Get a small team to do it, the feedback of the people will be the actual guidance on what needs to change. I feel like this is very true and to add to it, the offline playerbase is likely much bigger than the online one, and the competitive scene is actually really small. But behind the (forum) screens, there is much need for more contributors on trac and phab. From big tasks like optimizing pathfinding in C++ (<- devs really need someone), to simpler tasks like cleaning up loading tips. Anyone can join the IRC chat for more extensive help on how to get set up if interested.

Very nice addition to the Scythian skeletal texture repertoire! I wish we could find a modeler to make more props (lots of "Phrygian cap" variants, helmets, body armor props, shields, swords, horse props).

And just about got a Sunday game out this week. Newbie Rush, and indeed, Christmas, were threatened by a very near miss Covid 19 scare in work, but for now at least, I seem to be in the clear! Enjoy.

I finalize the new Bixie statue low poly with 1053 tris and albedo texture. Last one had 1909 tris https://3dminfographie.com/images/graphisme-3d/0ad/0ad_han_bixie-02.png

You can try temporary forcibly limit the number of processors to 32 in Microsoft msconfig utility (and reboot) It seems safe And you

That's exactly what I would like you to think, so that you can't recognise my smurf accounts hehehe That's good.