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The big problem is that balancing patches go through the same democratic process as other large patches. We have some patches with a small number of changes (status) that are a few months in the queue waiting to be checked. My suggestion is to create a small team balancing 3-5 players who listen to the community's suggestions, and based on the suggestions, talk and agree on the changes (vote if necessary). After the changes are agreed upon, the patch is built. Ideally, we need a moderator with the main role of balancing patches and gameplay that is more available for this type of patch. This moderator would not exercise his opinion on the patch, he would just test it for possible bugs and code breaks. There have been a lot of good suggestions on the forum over the years on how to work with civilizations, but the process of having to break those patches into dozens of little patches and all being discussed individually doesn't work well, because when you have ideas about changing a civilization, you think about global changes, one patch often depends on the other, and in the current form it's almost impossible to work.

This is precisely why I proposed working with a new schema, the kill your darlings concept applied to 0 AD. First, while the current alpha is an excellent template to work off of, it does not have to be followed to a T since the first civilisation that would be reworked could be balanced against itself. Things would complicate themselves with each successive rework, but the important thing is that there would be a coherent idea of how each civilisation would perform beyond just looking back at previous versions. At the same time since there would be the option to play the factions prior to the rework, players could still enjoy the variety of them without a grossly imbalanced game. This would allow for much more radical departures from the current formulae. Instead of champions always being available at the 3rd phase simply because, there could be some, like say the Spartans, who could train Spartans at the very outset. There could be new ways of collecting resources like Athenians collecting metal from olive fields.

If you look at the forum history, the people who were loudest about the a24 being imbalanced were the same people who said a24 was bland and uniform louder than anyone else and they did so from the very start. If anything, it was the casual players who received a24 best, but that also came to pass and I am not here trying to point fingers. And if you look at the ongoing conversations in the balancing community, most concern how we can (re)introduce aspects of the game that lost in a24 or have never been developed. For example, look at the threads @wowgetoffyourcellphone posted where he and I had several productive conversations that hopefully will materialize into new, balanced features that will make everyone happy. Saying "people who care about balance make the game boring" is wrong and unproductive. People who care about balance can also care about it being interesting, fun, and dynamic. People who care about balance simply want new features to be balanced in addition to being new.

Sorry you're right it's not a direct blame. Some team members are a bit afraid of the insults and the backlash we got after A24. So they wait for balancing people to come test those patches and suggest improvements, which is currently hard to put in place. so the features never move forward, or like in the case of acceleration, just go through without much consideration.

You give an extra load on the lobby, because you have to download stuff, and all the clients of the game needs to keep pinging it to know if there are updates. It's possible that it would introduce some security flaw where the person(s) currently having fun ddosing players (and sometimes it seems the server) might inject other fancy stuff. While assuming we have recurrent updates, a mod with team verification on modio with manual download seems much more secure and requires much less infrastructure. Secondary attacks, attack ground, mixed gender citizen soldiers, scouts... probably a lot more. I believe @Freagarach was working on something that could allow directional damage. And because I'm a jolly mood, the hans

Sorry, that feels like a no-true-scotsman fallacy to me. Yes, everyone wants both balance and new features, but the important distinction is which one you prefer when you can't have both. It seems like this community ends up picking balance over features every time. Perhaps a more useful framing of the problem is that the project's consensus view of what constitutes balance is too narrow for its own good. It's not enough that every strategy has a viable counter; that counter must be tuned to an exacting level of minimal surplus efficiency to preserve the soft counter character of the game. Moreover, you have to do this with consideration to every single civilization in the game. If a new feature makes any one of the game's dozen civilizations grossly over or underpowered then it is automatically not fit for purpose. And forget about trying to deliberately change the nature of any particular strategy or counter relationship, or majorly adjust the unit roster available to any civilization. The community has certain expectations about how things are supposed to look in 0 AD. The problem is, when combining all those constraints the only valid solution is gridlock. With counter margins so finely tuned, every single tiny simulation or stat difference triggers a cascade of unacceptable changes that must be fastidiously counteracted every patch, eating up development energy. Meanwhile, anyone trying to contribute new features has to run a gauntlet of predicting and adjusting for every balance implication across every combination of civs. It is simply not possible to innovate successfully in such an environment. To get out of this rut, this community needs to accept that 1. it is worth breaking things to add features, and 2. that a more bold, rough-strokes approach to balance and counter design will cause less balance problems while the game is in heavy development. Otherwise I think 0AD should accept that its game design has fully matured to its natural conclusion, and slap a beta number on the next update.

Just adding the official 0AD Newbie Rush edition of @Yekaterina's guide here; Download link below Massive thanks to @Yekaterina for allowing me to produce the official tie-in version, I've no doubt it's going to be popular and look forward to reading future, updated editions (not least because I'm so bad at the game myself and need all the help I can get!) From_nub_to_OP_Dec2021.pdf

Huge double episode today!

Implement DE's hero choice feature. Done.

IMHO this does not qualify as “Feature”. It's an embellishment at best. Features would be a new civilization, bataillons, acceleration, multiple attacks, building sockets (think settlements like Age of Mythology), Knockback, hero selection screen, attack ground, etc. Players who want A23B can still download it and or use nani's mod Disabling defeat sounds is just a a xml file to change. Because it's important there are a bit more sides. - Engine Side Pyrogenesis: Hardware Support, Performance, - Modding and Engine : Features (Both gameplay and hardware such as msaa, 4k support, 64 bits etc) 0 A.D: Empires Ascendant - MP Side: Playability, Balancing, Fun - SP Side: Depth, Diversity etc

This is a defeatist point of view that clearly relies on false assumptions. There are many examples of where new features had been proposed and adopted, so I don’t understand how you can say it’s not possible. I’ve even given you an example of how it can work out so someone doesn’t have to “run the gauntlet” alone. With the possible exception of turn rates, which have been tried several times and are still being tried, I am at a loss to think of any features that have actually be shouted down by anyone truly involved. Sure there are some people on the “balancing” side who think nothing should be introduced because it will wreck balance. They are wrong. Also wrong are the people in the “feature” side who forget that 0AD is a game. Like with most things, the right answer is usually somewhere in the middle

https://www.gimp.org/news/2021/12/21/gimp-2-10-30-released/@Stan`@Alexandermb@wackyserious@Mr.lie@Sundiata new version of gimp is released

Yes, this is the kind of mindset that would be great for every balancer to have, would even go as far as calling it a must-have.

I don't know what goes through my head sometimes

What if, randomly, everyone gets the same hero? Or only heroes of the same class.

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.

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.

Personally the house walling concept is something I dislike; they take away the idea of using other structures for defence like... walls. I think that a soft way of punishing that sort of tactic would be to allow a town phase technology that allows infantry to set buildings on fire. If they are too close together, the fire would spread, but I digress. Walling with buildings is nothing new to RTS games. What we want to think about is ways of providing more nuance. Another thing blacksmith adjacency could do is award experience to units trained from nearby barracks. Honestly there are so many cool, thematic synergies that have remained unexplored that could add some much needed spice to the economic/base building side of the game.

Lol. This is why we can't have nice things.

I played the first round against Berhudar and congratulations to Berhudar who will play against the winner of game between @Player of 0AD and @ValihrAnt Berhudar vs. LetswaveaBook.zip

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.

What if it's so OP all the others civs are unplayable?

Always welcome from me

Just worth noting that at least one of those (attack ground) was actually proposed by @BreakfastBurrito_007, who falls on the balancing side of things, and he and I squawk about it just about every chance we get. The balance vs. feature divide isn’t as binary as some people suggest. I get that there is some paralysis resulting from bad memories of a24’s release. I would submit that the process for a24 just failed. The people who drove a24 are largely uninvolved at this point and the proper concerns were raised at the time, but we’re just largely ignored or voted down by a minority that controlled the process. I really don’t think the entire MP community should be blamed for something like that, especially when many complaints of the MP community are the same ones being voiced here.

Not true. I have come across at least 3 other real women that aren't berhudar or me. Most of them don't tell you until you chat with them for a really long time. Also they don't have very obviously girl names.

@LetswaveaBook I'm happy to hear that you are open to new ideas, but there are some forum members who (from what I know and experienced) have a very what I would call "conservative" view of what changes should be made and what not. There have been things said like "if you want to change something put it in a mod, but please leave the main game alone" or the very liberal use of the confused smiley on every new idea and proposal. Which are very legitimate opinions, so no hard feelings, but that's doesn't create the feeling that changes are welcome.

I think it is wrong to blame the balance team for these functions not being implemented. Can someone point out where the balance team is obstructing these changes? The reason these things aren't being implemented is not because there a people that obstruct, but because nobody took serious effort to create them. Also you could be a little more creative than just say champions in p1. What about a male helot cap depending on how many spartans you have. Also Spartan women were considered strong defenders, so the spartan female warriors could be another champion. A suggestion would be that they are not as strong as other male champions, but gains a bonus when fighting close to the CC or under the command of Archidamia.

I believe that for mod.io you need to accept the terms every single time. Not sure whether they are changing but we are legally obliged to do so. Hosting stuff on the lobby is a slippery slope. I believe people can tell others to update their mod version from mod.io? Doesn't it work like that for Autociv?

more difficult yes, impossible not, in any case it will be some added work to make the merge, but it will be worth it for the accelerated balancing and testing. It wouldn't be the host, it would be mod.io or maybe the lobby server itself, we are not talking big files anyway, a single web page is heavier.

Sure. As long as you have the same file tree. So either you use github.com/0AD/0AD, gitlab.com/0AD/0AD/, or svn.wildfiregames.com Of course dumping files works well enough as a diff. However it will be impossible to track the changes. As in you will have one potentially huge commit. Do not that A25 templates need changes to work with A26 templates. That's a bit dangerous which is one of the reasons why I believe you can't download mods from your host. He could send you anything he wants. And to download from mod.io you need to have accepted the term and conditions.

but diffs can also be created using git right? I don't really know svn but if it's supposed to be better than git for binary files, here we are talking about xml essentially. this is how I envisioned the process: - A26 comes out, then the main dev team goes on with svn. - gameplay rebalances get worked on on a different git project, from a different team (it needs not, of course, to be separeted from the original team, but it needs neither to be the same) - every time the game access the lobby, it checks for updates - if the balance update is out, a message pops up asking if the player wants to update the game, and if the answer is yes, ideally, the update gets downloaded and installed automatically as a mod on top of A26, I don't see it being more than a few kb heavy - some time before A27 comes out, the balance update is copy-pasted into a git branch created before moving on from A26, than the branch is merged into the latest development version and the diff is created (if I remember well there is such a git repo updated together with svn)

Lobby: Eternal Blizzard Offender: delege88 Player exit after losing. Thank you user1. commands.txt

Just watched these three games - all very good, competitive games!

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.

@Micfild you're probably just better off downloading SVN (<- for windows, for other os im sure someone can help) and test it there. Otherwise with every patch now one also has to make a mod file, which likely wouldnt work anyway because the patch is based on a different build (with patches already commited to it). Unless i misunderstood what you meant. The balance team can however already make a mod, and experiment with balancing in the current released build.

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.

I agree on this plan for reworking civs one by one, this is my vision as well. I think all these good intentions could get into the game easier if there was a shorter term balancing calendar of the game, independent on the engine upgrades and the main releases.

This is precisely why I would propose a systematic approach to updating civilisations one by one. There would be time to forge a clear identity to how they would work, yet at the same time since it would just be that civilisation, players would be able to see how matchups with it and other factions would function. Choices would be deliberate, not either dogmatically following the whims of the meta or taking in every shiny idea.. That said, I see the balancing advisors to be have a valid place here, noting where things are broken and noting where fixes could be made. At the moment the economies for civilisations run fairly similar to each other, which I find unfortunate, especially since a large amount of a players concentration has to be dedicated to it. It also can be fun to build aesthetically nice cities in game, but there are no rewards to consider with building placement. What if there was one faction that had reduced training time to barracks placed next to blacksmiths? The Romans could also have their Temple of Vesta offer increased gathering speed to nearby women. Maybe so, but the point is still valid. There is no clear documentation of where the team wishes to take the civilisations from a design perspective (There are documents on each civilisations design, but those seem to have been left by the wayside.), and this would perhaps fix that apparent issue.

This is the worst kind of mindset for a balancer to have imo. And i'd still say that A23 balance was superior and the civs were more unique.

@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?

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

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.

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.

ValihrAnt vs WeirdJokes ValihrAnt vs WeirdJokes.zip

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.

Here's a wip @wowgetoffyourcellphone for the headgear, the I think the Persian crown prop can be modified, then add some Italian feather crest props on top of it?