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I agree. Getting into installing SVN, Trac and Phab, can be frustrating, intimidating and time consuming. It's quite a bump you must get over before you can actually try contributing or feeling like you're actually helping (<- of which i'm often not so sure of myself).

I feel like everyone forgets that A24 development was an excruciating 2 years, while A25 was only 4 months. So of course it was bound to have more changes. So many cleanups, so many engine changes, so many new features. If it had come early 2019 it probably would have been much smaller. But the technical difficulties, combined with the team split, and the very special period made it incredibly hard to release. But we managed eventually. And then there was the outcry, a burnout, and we managed to get A25 out of the door. Hopefully A26 will stay on trac and still be interesting to play.

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.

I saw @mysticjim scheduled a 1v1 youtube upload for early christmas on 9:00 GMT. If you can't beat someone in terms of quality, you can always go for quantity. So I uploaded 3 games scheduled for 11:00 GMT. If you happen to be awake before MysticJims video ends, you can wake up your partner and kids and tell them 0AD is a great game which is worth their time.

This is partially because balancing changes usually die on phabricator if it's not already accepted here. However, most balancing changes proposed here or as patches are subjective opinions. If you provide objective values with the changes, the likelihood of it being committed goes up exponentially. Rather than saying slinger attack rate is too high, maybe provide a chart of DPS or something so it's obvious that slingers attack rate is indeed too high. If I was committing stuff, the latter would give me a whole lot more confidence to actually make the change. If something is supposedly overpowered, there would be numbers to quantify that. It's a whole lot more work, but we only need so much advisers, we need more contributors. For the more savvy, run nonvisual Petra tests on the same seed and match up civs maybe. Or hell, integrate such tests on CI too if they offer meaningful insights. As is, forum balance proposals are not doing anyone much good as they don't go anywhere far.

I think there is quite a large consensus that civs should be added. It looks like there is some attrition between balancing advisor and devs, that probably is due to balancing advisors mostly complaining. I feel like the only tool balancing advisors have is complain on this forum ("thats why we made this forum section") and to make mods/patches ("if you want to try it, you can make a mod yourself"). Complaining is the only usable one, because mods/patches don't help much since you can't balance if you don't convince the more players as possible to play and try the new balance. While being theoretically possible, looking back at the last two alphas it never happened (there were few matches, mostly 1v1 or some the last week before release). What's more, you need to make all the svn stuff to make it work. I did it for a25 and it took a long time and around 20 giga of space and lot of network data and I needed to get rid of it to update the OS. Again, it is possible, but it is kinda complex and many people will just give up, and the number of people is important. So by now there are balancing advisors complaining of balance because that's the only thing they can do and devs complaining that they can do nothing without balancing advisors complaining for balance. I'm neither a dev nor a balancing advisor, but this is what I can see from outside. I think that balancing should have some "release process" as well. If each new alpha had the new features in the engine, but set so that it does not to affect gameplay (or it does as less as possible), and changes to gameplay are in an "official" mod, then devs and balancing advisors could just try the new gameplay and include it in the next alpha. If it's just a mod and people are pushed by wildfire games it is possible that it gets popular in the competitive community, helping a constructive balancing process.

Double that Capturing did wreak havoc

It wasn't luck. A24 tried to do a lot of stuff. In hindsight, a lot of people have summed up a24's mistakes by saying something to the effect of "in a23, slingers were too strong and archers were too weak, so a24 just should've lessened the dmg of slingers and increased the dmg of archers." That obviously sounds reasonable. But rather than taking that simple approach, a24 tried to do a lot of complicated changes. Some of these changes, like pathfinding, projectile speeds, and rotation times are massive changes with effects that seep into every aspect of the game and ripple through unexpected areas. When you try to change that much all at once there are a lot of unintended and unexpected changes. It's no surprise that the full effect of all these changes wasn't appreciated during development. In comparison, a25 was not as ambitious. It changed relatively few things and the changes that occured to the bigger things, like rotation speed, were far more modest. In short, the changes were more modest, humble and incremental. As a result, their impact was more ascertainable during development. There is a reason to limit these massive changes that impact everything--because it makes balancing possible. If you try to change everything all at once then you're basically making a new game with each alpha instead of adjusting an old game to keep up with current needs. With that said, basically all of the feature changes that are being discussed here (and elsewhere) aren't of the type that would have rippling impacts.

I personally don't think something needs to be 100% accurate before it's added. None of the current civs were 100% perfect when they were added by any means. But I suppose if there are niggling issues that bother some folks about the civ, it's okay to address them first. Just know that more issues will arise once they are added, and they will make the current release blockers look trivial. That's how every civ release has been.

Hi auxilentmoon owes me some points due to hosting a rated game and closing it when completely lost Please see the attachment Thanks commands.txt metadata.json

@wowgetoffyourcellphone - you beat me to posting this! Was off fighting with (another) PCR test!!!!! Thanks dude