Leaderboard

Just a typo

Replay data can definitely be useful, especially for answering specific questions--like whether a certain civ matchup is unfair. It can be a little more changing to draw wholistic balance assessments just from analyzing multiplayer stats. There are a lot of confounding variables: like differences in player skill, effects of prior RTS experience, and the influence of the continuously evolving metagame. Basically unless you a tremendous volume of data to work from (and a lot of life experience with multivar statistical analysis), you are going to have to filter everything through some prior conception of how the balance situation works, which is just inviting confirmation bias (ending with reinforcing the status quo and never noticing the out-of-context issues). The other problem for a FOSS project like this is that someone has to volunteer their time to do all that analysis, and then get argued with and accused of bias and/or incompetence because some people don't like their conclusions. Normally you need to pay people large sums of money to put up with that **** for more than a few weeks. Also, I should have qualified on my previous comment by adding that AI driven or scripted scenario testing can be very useful for quantifying the effects of specific balance changes, and just diagnosing what is actually going on with the game's balance situation. I don't want to poo poo automated testing entirely; just point out that such tests usually need to be very cunningly conceived and tightly constrained in order to produce useful information. And lastly I want to point out that game balance is about more than who wins and who loses. It is really about whether the game supports entertaining interactions. A game with exactly one optimal strategy that always results in a draw is "perfectly balanced" but also has a huge balance problem. 0 A.D. is actually seems quite successful in terms of providing a fair contest, but it does so by paring away unit and faction diversity to their bare bone. Consequently there is no slack left in the fabric to iron out the last remaining wrinkles.

I think you have unreasonable expectations of how this would go. We did open a dialogue, we in fact opened a ton of it in the various PMs and forum threads. We asked people to send us changes, and we tried to merge as many of those as we could (this meant understanding the change, the justification for the change, the validity of the change, and then actually merging it). If what you mean buy "give responsibility" you mean commit access, this is something we haven't done because: it's an on/off switch right now and seemed potentially a little dangerous, but that may be too cautious an opinion. who we gave access to would become the de-facto balance dictator over all others. I fully expect that to go extremely well and cause no controversy whatsoever. As for the faster release cycle, I think it would be a worthwhile option to decouple the 0 A.D. mod, that we can provide via other means & update separately, from the 0 A.D. game, but we haven't gotten around to that just yet. Maybe an easy first option is to have an official 'patch' mod that we update rather more frequently than 0 A.D. itself, but it does introduce complexity if some features get changed and compatibility breaks. Ah, yes, but that's the catch: this is one of the things that we can do, since it doesn't affect gameplay. The fact that it hasn't been done must be put to a lack of interest on the part of people writing code for 0 A.D. (for my part, I have to say I'm more interested in other bits of the game. Here is the time for the usual FLOSS disclaimer: we are takers of good patches that introduce worthwhile functionality.

I think the theory of having different mods with different game play options sounds nice in theory, but the problems of diverging opinions about how the game should play will not stop. The question is still: who decides what the goal is and what gets implemented? I fear that it will just split up the discussion even more. Also, it would split the (multi) player base, making it harder to find games with people who have a similar rating as you and as already mentioned, it increases the development effort.

Both Vali and I (and possibly some others) have created some mods to change the flow of the game, But it is difficult to convince players to try these modification. Even if you get players to play the mod, then it did not have a lasting effect: It still takes considerable effort to find players to join a game with modded settings. 95% of the players in the lobby are unlikely to try any mods. Vali and I have tried to pushed to try some lobby games with mods, but both of us had trouble to find enough people that wanted to try something different. As long as that mentality doesn´t change offering lobby players the option to download a mod won´t result in anything. I uploaded a mod on mod.io that allows you to research tier 2 forge upgrades in phase 2. Since it is on mod.io, it is super easy to install and can be done when you go to setting>mod selection>download mods in the game menu. As easy as that. No need to go to the forum, download the correct file and unpack it in the right folder. However I failed to get more than a few responses on the mod. In the end I think it is a bad thing: we don´t know if something is an improvement or not and we don´t get any experiences about what changes would improve the dynamic of the game. If you want the lobby to try changes to the game as @wraitii suggested, then I would say that you would need to create a ¨(semi) progressive mod¨ for A26 that features changes and make it the standard. Then players that do nothing use and test the new changes. Then also give players the option to use a conservative mod that allows people to play A26 in a way that is closer to A25. I think even some minor changes to technologies and templates could improve the flow of the game significantly.

I feel like that is the point of that discussion... I mean I listed there all I tried... Maybe I'm missing the point ? How about having custom techs that get applied on match start ? That doesn't really scale on cross platform. Some Debian and Ubuntu still have Alpha23 0ad packaging badges - Repology Plus as you pointed out nobody wants to use mods, so even if we had an experimental empires ascendant mod on mod.io decoupled from the game nobody would use it. Not to mention some changes like C++ ones cannot be decoupled. I don't see a perfect solution. The autoupdated thing is usually frowned upon in the linux world too, with the exception of some distros. @vv221 @Locynaeh

What version of the game do you use? This is the condition that fires: if (data.Identity.Civ != this.DefaultCiv && civCode != this.DefaultCiv && data.Identity.Civ != civCode) What I see in your civ.json is that you use spaces in your codes, while in the templates you use underscores for the civ codes. That may be the problem?

The game engine doesn not affect the stats, and even if it does affect the gameplay at all, everyone is affected by the change, therefore it causes no balancing issues and hence shouldn't be a problem for multiplayers. I am suggesting dividing up the public mod into 2 to solve all arguments between devs and balancing advisors. Quoting @MarcusAureliu#s:

system-info.zip Seems I suffer from the same issue 4GB detected 8GB installed. Seems to be a bug with our detection code. Will be fixed by https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4651

Use DE as the main game and I can assure you that people will yell. Just see what happened with a simple cursor, custom colors or player names for maps... etc There is no balancing manager really. I would be really happy to have a balancing team with a decision process but I'm not exactly sure how it can work when every single little change is argued until everyone gives up on the project, and when there is no right answer as to what the game should be. My only goal is to make the game fun to play and to keep the project alive.

Can you take a picture of the device manager, please ? Maybe you forgot to install the NVIDIA drivers.

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.