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Just want to say, we appreciate you, Stan. Lots of toxicity has been around the last 18 months or so and it’s easy to forget about good people like you.

I would say that before any more major balancing is done, we should develop an updated design document. A25 has a few issues, such as Iberian firecav, but overall it's pretty well balanced, and there aren't any game-breaking flaws in it. Given this, I think that balancing should keep to fixing major issues, not working on civ differentiation or anything else. Before any of that, we need to agree on a design document. Without a cohesive plan for how the game should play, balancing decisions will tend to pull the game in opposing directions, making balancing ineffective or even counterproductive. To create a design document, I think that one or more proposals need to be submitted to the forum on how the game should play in general. For example, it could specify general roles for civilisations and unit classes. After this has been discussed and approved by a vote, then documents for specific civilisations can be created and approved by the same process. Once a complete design document has been created, balancing could resume, with the document as a goal. Until then, it would be limited to fixing major issues, not deciding any gameplay roles. Once balancing resumes, I think that there are two rules which would make it more effective. First, all members of the balancing team should be required to have the SVN version installed. Currently, I think that the current development version has made some major changes, such as acceleration and the Han Chinese, which could cause balancing issues in the next alpha, but which haven't attracted much attention, mostly because very few people play the development version. Second, if anyone wants to make a change to the game, a forum topic should only be opened after a patch has been submitted on phabricator. As it is, there are lots of balancing discussions, but I don't think they've resulted in any changes, mainly because no one creates any patches for them. If the consensus on the forum moved against the changes, the patch could be updated or abandoned, while if the forum approved, the patch could be committed. This could be much more effective than the current model.

Hi everyone, just came to share these pictures with you all about the 0 AD Empires at War, Rise of Rome campaign. I have been working on this Gigantic map for this campaign. The Campaign is made for a solo player, but it can be set for up to 8 players if your PC have the power to push so many units at the same time. My PC can do up to 3 active Al so far, Plus the Gaia player. In this campaign, you play as Rome, and have to defeat all faction and conquer the Whole map. You will have to fight Gauls, Carthaginians, Samnites, Greeks, Spartans, Ptolomeans, Seleucids, Macedonians, Britons, North African mercenaries and Pirates, Capture Catafalques, Cities, Ports and Towns to expand your empire and conquest the Ancient Mediterranean, Southern Europe, Anatolia, Palestine and North Africa. The Map is gigantic, so expect a lot of hours of play, many Epic battles and skirmishes. The enemies you will encounter are not easy to defeat as many may believe at first, so a lot of Strategy for battle hardened players will be a most in order to defeat them. So far, the Tests I have been running are working fine, no error so far. Making all these Factions and units to behave as closely as possible to their own Historical situations 0 AD stile, have been a Challenge for me, so to keep the campaign balanced as well. But is something I did with a lot of Love and passion for this game. I do really admire and love the design and the hard work so many of you, game designers, had put to make this open source Universe possible. My respect and admiration is with you all for such an outstanding job. I will be publishing the campaign soon, here at the Forum, for you all to download and add to your collection of maps, scenarios and campaigns. Here are some pictures I want to share. Thank you all for your time and attention.

The only other thing I really have to say is that a lot of people (too many in my opinion) see problems in the the current game and want to create their own ‘perfect’ game from scratch. But everyone has a different idea of perfect and everyone can’t have their own perfect game that everyone plays. At some point, someone will be unhappy. We have what we have and unless you want to be like Wow and create your own game from new cloth then revisions can’t forget everything and become something brand new. Change will be gradual and frustrating because it isn’t anyone’s perfect game. But it’s also worth noting that there is wide consensus that this slow gradual change is an improvement from where we came. It’s not ‘perfect’ but let’s appreciate that it is ‘better’

To add gameplay changes you have to be able to take scathing criticism. Hell, to change a cursor brings the hounds of Hades. So, you have to be "that guy" who will be willing to ignore a lot of the criticism because you can't please everyone.

Hey everyone, I am creating this thread to discuss the balancing from a "meta" perspective in hopes to improve the current situation. Please refrain from discussing "actual" balancing in this thread. As some of you may know, it has been a priority of mine for the past three years to find a way to provide a good experience for players, whether they are on the competitive side or not. For the 24th Alpha I created a Personal Mail (PM) with a few individuals, in order to try to create a team-like cohesion. While the 24th Alpha was a game changer in a lot of ways, and a painful experience, I do believe that it was the most productive in terms of actual patches and changes. People played by the rules by proposing, creating, and accepting patches (I insist on the last part because without formal acceptance there is no liability). I also tried to leverage a documentation team to update the design document. The job was too hard, and it died quickly and in silence. The original design was somewhat different from what the current game is today. There would have been much less civilizations, and instead your empire would have switched from a generic civilization to a more specific one (e.g greek -> macedon -> seleucid). Then another era came, where everything changed. Meanwhile, I was not happy about doing things in the shadows. This whole project is a community effort, and the contributors of today are the ones that might carry the flame when I am gone. So after a few internal discussions we came up with the balancing subforum, where everyone could see what was going on behind the curtains but only a selected few could interract, and anyone could ask me for a seat at the table, with some relevant experience. It came with little titles that hoped would boost morale. However... It did not go as I(we) planned. It created an even bigger split in the community, resulted in a huge variety of threads which is good, but which led nowhere as none of the idea was accepted enough to be implemented. And even the ideas who did get implemented did not make it. While the Personal Mail (PM) did go off track from time to times, it had the advantage of notifying people everytime someone posted (I do not think many people use that forum feature for threads) and I think the discussion was more focused, people pinging each other for patch reviews etc... There was also an attempt to use the chat on Phabricator which also sends emails for each messages, but it quickly vanished after the 24th Alpha. The 25th Alpha got some welcomed changes, at a much slower rate, and I think it fixed a lot of the quirks Alpha 24 introduced. But we're not quite there yet, and I know a few people are hurt about the current state of the game. I'm not a fan of the current balancing forums, and I'd like to merge them again with the rest of the game discussions, or at least to open them, since there seem to be no point in having them closed anymore. So I'm asking everyone, what can we (as in Wildfire Games) do, to get more contributions about balancing, to make A26 a success. We have some very nasty release blockers, and that leaves time for a bit more balancing patches. Best regards, Stan

I agree about biremes and triremes being a single unit line because right now triremes are like biremes but better. Quinqueremes have a different role as siege ships and are capable of garrisoning siege. I think quinqueremes should be a unit line of its own. Different ship lines will indeed make sense if/when we have ship ramming and/or ship boarding.

Personally, I like the "balancing discussion" forum. It opens up different perspectives and points of views of how things can be done. Clearly, there's no right way to do things and not many wrong ways to do things. However, as some noted in this thread, there should be a "design document." This document, could basically, serve as the intended direction and to focus discussions. With the balancing, and other forums, the document could change as need be. As much as a "design document" should exist, I think there should be a plethora more of sub forums that go under balancing or there should be a way to tag topics based on major ones (e.g., civ differentiation, team bonuses, mercenaries, champions, spear cav). Maybe specific "design sub-documents" could be created and updated on github that are not a "design document" but implementation ideas that can be added to the "design document" should there be sufficient time to include them. I love that 0ad is basically a living game. In general, I think @Stan` and the whole WFG Team have been doing a spectacular job with 0ad. I think the "balancing discussion" forum serves as an example of that people want 0ad to succeed.

True, and would be devastating against a wooden structure.

Onager or Trebuchat usually project a clay pot filled with oil, which is also relatively safe.

In fact, there is a question, what kind of catapult is installed on the warship, I have the impression that this kind of catapult is smaller and is used more.

If we add a damage type, it should be "siege" as @Lion.Kanzen mentioned earlier. This could allow crush damage to take more interesting balancing roles. Although to be perfectly honest, this is still equally possible without the new damage type.

Can we mitigate this by giving siege units a low base damage and a large bonus damage to buildings? I think mace and axe units being effective against wooden siege units is a good idea actually.

We need to be careful about this because citizen soldiers are also workers. If some factions have cheaper workers, this may break things.

Perhaps to achieve this we don't need new damage types, but can just reduce crush armor of units that have high hack and pierce armor like pikemen, and reduce crush armor a little less for units like sword and spear inf and cav. We would need to keep in mind the effect of this on the effectiveness of slingers, catapults, and elephants.

The Marine Corps should be trained as a very basic citizen infantry, because the navy itself is the characteristic of the Athenian civilization.

This was not part of my request though, but we can see the huge difference between the Athenian elite and champion hoplite. It was actually about the proposed champion hoplite/skirmisher hybrid in the sketch (not the colored one which depicts the "Epilektos") in the first page of this thread: With the intention of bringing back the stoa thureophoros (champion skirmisher) from Alpha 23, in a way, when secondary attacks become a thing.

I vote to implement anything from this post , https://code.wildfiregames.com/D368 , https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2382 , https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2440 and https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2401

I think you mean https://code.wildfiregames.com/rP26520?

I mean taking the lead in the sense of trying to organize the update or the rewriting of the documentation, so yeah writing how it works might help. Indeed, and just like I can't give you a release date for A26 I cannot give you that ... However it's not because features are there that we need to use them.

Since the sizing is the biggest problem, it would be an improvement. Our maps are not large enough for accurate scaling of ships.

Good thing we added an option for it finally in A26! Do you mean something like this http://docs.wildfiregames.com/templatesanalyzer/ ? Indeed each team member has its own agenda. It can be disastrous sometimes. The issue lies between the way people expect to be played I guess. I remember @mysticjim and @superflytom commending the turn rate feature while everyone else on the forums seemed to hate it. This could work maybe. As much as I'd like to, I cannot listen to everyone, and since I don't have a big experience on the game I have to rely on trustworthy people to help me make good decisions. Some might say it's weak, but I think it's better to admit when you don't know instead of blindly doing things. I think I need to find a good image for social media. I'd like that. The design document is actually versioned and changes can be made to it. https://docs.wildfiregames.com/design/ But I need people to step up and take the lead. This would be nice. I offered (and still do) to help anyone on IRC or Discord installing it. Because I'm a bit at loss there. I'm good at being honest, not sugar coating things, feel free to suggest an improved version if you have some time. Indeed, although noise is a thing on these forums, people going of track and stuff. I guess actual moderation could fix it though. Maybe the issue is the medium of communication rather than the actual thing being discussed ? Maybe audio chat could help? This is a big thing. Some people are legitimately scared of making changes, and other get very frustrated when they had the courage to make them and have to take them down. Thank you. I do it for the people that like 0 A.D. even though I must admit the rest has taken a huge toll on me. Hopefully being able to go to events where people are actually happy to discover or talk about the game will bring back some energy on my side. This is why I wanted someone to take the role and make decisions. This is too heavy for me on top of everything else. I hoped it would work with @borg- but it seems even his ideas were not to the liking of most people...

Step 1: Write down an updated design document that reflects the current game. There was an attempt 2 or so years ago that failed. Step 2: Make it an open repository that anyone can propose changes to. Step 3: Add weighted voting to determine what gets accepted and what gets rejected. Someone who has been here for 5 years should obviously have more leverage than a new player. Might seem unfair, but knowing the culture and the community built around this is necessary to propose a change that's going to make most of that community happy. Step 4: ??? Step 5: Profit

Having played Warcraft, Starcraft, C&C, AoE series since the first titles, I always dreamed of creating the "perfect" RTS. I can comfortably say 0 ad is perfect and don't let anyone convince you otherwise @Stan` and the WFG team. Those titles do not come close to the level of immersion 0 ad has. Any discussions concerning balancing at the moment is marginal compared to the awesomeness of what we already have. Big thank you! I agree about the necessity of design documents. When we say "unit x needs more armor", it should not be implemented just to adjust current balance as it is without considering to the whole balance concept behind. We should ensure our proposal is adding value towards the balance goals. We should have an anchor. This is so true. Design is about compromise.

It's the resolution of the heightmap. The size of the map generated is based on those dimensions.

There are multiple aspects that need to be addressed wrt ships. First is certainly size. While they are somewhat reasonable size compared to units they may be 3 times as big as the dock which produced them. There must be some compressed space in there So if we have established that down-scaling ships is an option, what do we hope to gain from it. Certainly room for actual navigation and fighting needs to be mentioned. My gut feeling tells me biremes are still to large. Next comes what type of ship are need to make naval maps/warfare interesting. A non exhaustive list of options follows. fishing ships trade ships transport ships war ships (probably multiple types, like frigates, fortress type ships etc) siege ships special purpose ships like the fire ships They are fully abstract and one should be careful to not associate them with a certain model. Let's use wow's new favorite term mixins, they are just that. If you want good game-play primarily think about game-play and then bend reality as little as possible to follow what you envisioned as mechanics. But sacrifices need be made surely. Once we have an outline of the types and their roles and what combinations are usable by civs, we assign civs and models to them. If there are leftover models using them to visualize tech upgrades is certainly an option even though this is not common practice in 0ad so far. Might be worth investing into though, was asked more than once why phasing up doesn't visually upgrade structures, seems counter intuitive for many. But I digress, knife model number 15 for females which no one ever sees is apparently more interesting.

Either that or work on engine bugs and underlying code without actually focusing on gameplay. In other words, what developers usually do. You can count with your fingers the number of actual noticeable gameplay changes that have been committed in recent memory. No one wants to be that guy.

this. It is incredibly demanding and time consuming task to argue with people why your view of how the game should be is the good and should be implemented. So people who have the skills to actually do some changes are unfortunately better off time and motivation wise by just creating a mod, especially when they don't play multiplayer. So the incentive of making, discussing or accepting gameplay patches is just not that big, the exception being glaring issues (e.g. fire cav).

For me this comes back to the problem that it's hard to define what 'balancing' is and that there is no definite feature/ gameplay-design plan. Everyone comes in with different ideas of how they would want the game to look and play like and no consensus in any form is ever reached. So is this a discussion about e.g. skirmishers need -1 hack or about hard vs soft counter or about how different civs should play and how the grand gameplay works? Without a having a defined goal of what the balancing discussion should lead to, it's hard to discuss it.

Hello everyone, We're happy to release the first M1 Mac Testing version of 0 A.D. Alpha 25b We provide this in the hope of finding and squashing bugs efficiently. It may however contain bugs. If you choose to test, please keep that in mind. EDIT: Since the bundle is not signed on certain macOS version you might need to unlock the app. You can do so by running the following command. xattr -cr /Applications/0\ A.D..app Download Link Things you may want to test (non-exhaustive) Launch a random game Launch a skirmish. Connect to the lobby Play on the lobby with someone Launch Atlas and try things out there Open Unit tests demo (To see if there any breakage in displaying entity's) (It's in scenarios) Enable feedback and see if it works (Main menu) Video Connect to and use mod.io Test replaying new games Test Screenshots (F2) Test Big Screenshots (Maj+F2) Test hotkeys Test ranked games Test Saving and loading a game. Test Quickload/Quicksave (Optional) Upload the feedback files (See see wiki:GameDataPaths) What to do if I see a weird red line ? Make sure to enable GLSL in the game options. What to do if I have an Out Of Sync? You should go in your logs folder (see wiki:GameDataPaths), find the replay (commands.txt at least), the mainlog/interestinglog and find the OOS dump folder. Zip all these files and upload them here. Ideally, you should coordinate with the OOS players so that they upload their own OOS dump, so we can compare them. What to do if I have an error or notice something weird? Post your commands.txt (replay) and the interestinglog.html file from your folder. You can also reply to this thread. What to do if the game crashes Update your crashlog.dmp and crashlog.txt see wiki:GameDataPaths

Muy buenas, tengo una duda. ¿Cómo puedo crear una cuenta? Cada vez que intento crear una cuenta para poder jugar el multiplayer, me sale el mensaje "No se pudo verificar el certificado del servidor o no se completo la conexión del todo". Lo que me impide crear una cuenta para poder jugar con mis amigos. Agradecería que alguien me pudiera ayudar con dicho problema. Quedo atento a sus comentarios.

I think if you want to enrich the gameplay, you should focus on refining spear cavalry and pike cavalry, or melee cavalry and shock cavalry, general cavalry and cataphract.

Is there any real-world evidence of such a coating? Also if it's just firing a javelin that burns at the front, the ballista probably won't be any more effective than a bolt shooter, can it fire a can of oil or a fireball made of hay?

Because setting the enemy's ship on fire was the most efficient means of attack, the Greek fire was also a very dangerous weapon for the operator, but the Romans loved it.

A good point, though I belive this type was still quite accurate, the Trebuchat which also uses the sling arm was noted for being quite accurate as well. In rough seas though pretty much anything will be inaccurate, it must also be noted that in that age most battles would have been fought in calm weather and near the coast, so accuracy would not really be an issue.

I don't think it's about balance, it's just people wanting to add interesting settings based on their historical imagination. But what I'm trying to say is that it's more fun to design based on reality rather than imagination, for example I suggested adding arson earlier.

what about the fact that a catapult can sink a ship, while arrows can be of little effect on a ship covered by a canopy? siege weapons weren't very common on warships for what I know, so you can bet they weren't that important, but there is still a conception among historians, that catapults were a relevant tactical element in mediterranean ancient warfare.

With all respect there are only really three ways to inflict damage, pierce, hack/slash and bludgeon/crush, if you want to add permutations of those you would need to add resistances for them which means things get complicated quickly. Your best option is to use damage modifiers. Its simple and allows for alterations using the existing foundations without bloating things.

Command & Conquer™ Remastered Collection Insurgency: Sandstorm Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition Sudden Strike 4 Total War: Rome II

I'm wondering why you're so resistant to adding more damage types, I think it's groundwork that should be done to perfect the game, and it doesn't take too much time.

-Translation- "I think a more open discussion is always better for balance, people pay attention to some topics because they want to participate in them, if they don't have a say, players will think it's something that doesn't concern them and ignore it". -DeepL translation by the way.

Can the larger ships (especially triremes, quinquiremes, and the tesserakonteres) able to go across the Strait of Gibraltar? At least it should fit two trading ships...

Sorry for double posting, but @Freagarach, the present Iphicratean reforms tech in the next alpha is inconsistent with the name itself and historically. Better if a new tech was made (see previous post above) for the unlocking of marines and Cretan archers in ports/triremes called "Delian (whatever)" or something else, and the actual "Iphicratean Reforms" is for unlocking the epilektos (and possibly the future replacement of the stoa thureophoros from Alpha 23). Suggest that said Cretan archer and marine (city phase) do not need the tech for training in barracks and gymnasium, respectively. Anyone have other thoughts?

Ramming and other fancy stuff is not (yet) available so it's out of scope. I haven't even seen a description of that feature which allows an implementation, given someone actually wants to work on one. About ship movement, turn-rates and the recent addition of acceleration by @bb_ , even if for a bogus reason (dancing) are important cornerstones to improve on movement. I wouldn't call it fully mature yet but it's already worth playing with. I believe to remember @alre and maybe @maroder also did some work in that direction.

It's working for me.

I liked the ideas borg came up with for the Britons, giving them more options than other civs in p2, but having a lower potential than other civs once in p3. As for the phase up time bonus, I've come up with something similar to that for the Athenians, whom I have added to my original post.

the problem was the distance between the balancing discussions and the game development. big changes are introduced to the game without previous notice, apparently being part of personal plans by each dev, not disclosed to the larger community. on the other hand, there is not enough effort on the balancing part for testing game changes, which in turn depends on technical difficulties, small user base, low engagement with the game development and its management. these are my two cents, from the perspective of a "balancing advisor".

I just watched this video about why aoe2 is more popular than aoe3 and one reason discussed is the worse unit motion in aoe3 particular through a snare effect. Not sure if it is the same as you had in mind but something to consider. @5:40

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