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Alright, time to bring out the salt. Absurd statement. All of those complaints are possibly contradictory. If anything the fact that there is always one unit that's OP, but it's not the same unit, proves that we do do balance changes. Formations & naval combat aren't a feature of competitor RTS games either, so why pretend it should be here. 'Expected polish'? Did you somehow pay for 0 A.D.? Look, this can be rephrased pretty easily as 'People come to the forums, dunk on the team with their brilliant ideas that are definitely gonna fix everything, then whine months later when their miraculous solution™ hasn't been adopted when in reality they have done 0 effective work for the project'. We don't need you. No one cares about you. You're just some random human complaining on the internet right now. Your contributions to the project are nil. You don't have a phabricator account, you've never posted on Trac, you've never actually contributed anything beyond forum posts, which have obviously not succeeded at doing anything or you wouldn't be complaining right now. You've been here for 4 years. If nothing has changed, perhaps you should look inwards: your current efforts are insufficient to help move forward 0 A.D., and playing a self-aggrandising card to the dev team achieves nothing (though you did get a good rant out of me, I do love these). Your first post in the forums was "What can I do to help?". My answer is simple. Start actually helping, or GTFO. Wish I could enshrine that sentence.

How exactly? What are the choices? Not in vague abstract terms please. Why does someone else have to be the change you want to see? You or anyone else here are on equal footing with people who have commit access to propose changes. https://code.wildfiregames.com/feed/query/all/ read as far back as you can and see how contributors interact with each other. The usual story is that someone posts their opinion with no attempt at justification and expects everyone else to treat their subjective opinion as axiomatic truths. Justification is hard, which is why 90% of people just stop after a forum post. And the vast majority of reaction comes from other gameplay & balance experts. That might have provided a clue as to why borg stepped down. Its up to you to convince people around here the merit of your contributions. If the community wholeheartedly rejected it, and the game is developed for the community, isn't it in the projects best interests to make most of that community happy? You are seeing this with more organizational structure and bureaucracy then there is. FOSS is just flat. "heres a thing, play it if you like it. make changes if you don't. just do whatever you want with it". In fact, our favorite license makes it very clear. * 0 A.D. is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the * GNU General Public License for more details.

Counter (counter) salt! Complaints that a project prioritizes graphics or performance or whatever other area of development over balance are not properly understood as criticisms of the people working on graphics or performance. They are criticisms of project managers for failing to onboard people to work on the problem area. The old fallacy that end users have no right to criticize creators... but let's ignore it and actually dig into that situation. About a year ago Stan chastised me for exactly this, and I thought "Hey they are right! Why complain when I could help fix things?" However as a I dug into what that would actually entail, I quickly realized that the time and effort that would be demanded of me to make a useful contribution were far beyond my current capacity. I'm not in any way a professional developer. (But even I know about GitHub at least.) Like Crynux said, you guys are using this arcane combination of outdated technologies to do your development; and it gatekeeps (irrespective of your intentions). It would have taken me days of very trying consultation with Stan to get up to speed. And then what after that? As has been noted time and again, the 0AD community is profoundly reactionary. What is some no-name noob actually going to accomplish? Spend hundreds or thousands of hours coding and advocating for changes that will be tried once and unceremoniously rejected? No. This is my contribution: to be a cranky wall of text that shines a spotlight on problems and options no one else is discussing, to lend support to minority perspectives and underserved users, and sometimes even to light fires when the forest is desperately in need of a proscribed burn. If I can nudge you or force you to make the hard choices, I will consider that a valuable contribution. So far I do not feel I have succeed, which is why I have no qualms about amping up the pressure of my rhetoric. Well, the truth is 0AD does compete with paid products in the hearts and minds of its community (yours included). We care about whether this project ultimately succeeds--whether it eventually attains a polished and feature complete form--because we are all dreaming of someday playing a good community-made ancient warfare RTS that actually respects history, instead of the dreck Microsoft spits out every year to earn a few more dollars. Is that so impossible? (And lest you forget, we are actually paying for the privilege... crowd funding it if you will, not in money but in time and attention. To many of us these are much dearer commodities than the mere $60 that AoE2:DE and all its DLC sell for on Steam.)

I could actually make my staff reports public. I sent mails every two months or so with a commit summary and some internal team things usually nothing too private. I don't do it usually cause they might contain private information about members. Can't get that if they can't run the game Right because the balancing branch by @scythetwirler after A16 the design document on Phabricator with @Prodigal Son and @Nescio, Balancing between @Itms and @borg- the PM about balancing, and now the balancing forums were nothing? That's the thing, My goal is just to have a playable game with interesting gameplay. The designer spot has been left vacant as I still have to find someone trusworthy, competent and who is willing to step up. As wraitii said I have no power to force anyone to do anything they do not want. I can give incentives sure, but at the end of the day if everyone leaves having the crown and being alone isn't of any help to anyone. Good thing I started learning the guitar again

They place your units in a certain way. For example the box formation puts your melee troops at the edge and your ranged units in the center, even ranged cavalry. The closed formation puts your melee troops at the front and your ranged troops at the back, but maybe it puts ranged cavalry in the very front. The battle line puts your cavalry at the flanks. Etc

Hi! Another possible solution: could you add `preferglsl = "true"` line into your user.cfg file? You can find path to it on our wiki page.

Anyone is free to give their time to set this up. It's just writing. No one in the currently active dev team or forum members at large seems to be up for it, unfortunately. I think the problem is actually that balance should be more accessible to the developers. We don't really know what we need to do at any given time because few of us actually have the time (or indeed the motivation) to play the game. I don't think a direction is 'needed', nor do I think this project is likely to die soon. There are several active & semi-active developers, and we have renewed somewhat regular releases compared to years past. People care, and so long as one person cares, the project isn't dead. Now to discuss some finer points There is one thing that must be understood: there is no 'deciding' what people do in 0 A.D. You literally cannot force them to do something else. Even if there was a 'decider', their decision power with regards to the 'majority of work' is zero. The 'balance' problem isn't that we don't have a decider, it's that we have no-one actually working on it. Stan is currently working a potential GitHub migration. I think he doesn't have enough time for it though. Help there would likely be much appreciated. But you should expect to be doing most of the effort in reaching out & getting told what to do. I think it would be a great way to help the project if you're up for it, but it's not going to be easy. - 0 A.D. used to have a 'decision maker' to a large extent on gameplay decisions. They day he left was one of those 'almost killed the project' days. Yet it endured. No solutions are risk-free, and no solutions are perfect. But a hard reality, that I cannot stress enough, is that someone taking their time and effort to get anything actually committed is worth more than any endless discussion on the forums.

As opposed to receiving an endless stream of complaints about chronic imbalance and irhistoricity? Curious that graphical interoperability is viewed as a critical priority by the developer community, but game design is sanctimoniously ignored for going on half a decade. Let's not pretend that this is a minor crisis just because it has been playing out for slow motion over years and decades. It seems like there have been almost a dozen balance test or rework mods shared in the last two year, but only small, incremental improvements have made their way into EA. All the key complaints are unchanged: there is always one unit type after every patch that is markedly overpowered compared to the rest, the economy and tech buildup beats of a typical match are unrefined compared to other representatives of the genre, the game is missing expected polish and key features like naval combat and formation tactics, and optimal combat tactics have scant resemblance to the historical militaries they are supposed to be depicting. The situation is a breeding ground for toxicity. New contributors and pundits are routinely popping up, excited to share their creative visions, only to slink away dejected a few months later once they realize how intransigent this project and community really is. (Granted, this is actually a healthy state of affairs for a vibrant project with a clear vision of what it wants to be, in order to maintain quality and focus development & organizational resources where they will be most appreciated by the community at large. But I don't think 0AD can be so-described.) And clearly this negativity is taking its toll on senior project managers too. Stan is obviously having some doubts about the sustainability of this state of affairs. If you look at that list of contributors, it's pretty clear the most experienced are actively trying to avoid any work that would touch on the gameplay part of the titular game. That is not good, and if it keeps up long enough, eventually your time and luck will run out and this project will die. Once again I put it to everyone that too much openness and communitarian idealism is the problem here. The whole point of "openness" is to prevent conflict by giving everyone a stake and voice in the process. However in this case we see too many stakes and voices causing gridlock, which is directly creating the biggest ongoing conflict afflicting this project. We have talked at length about technological, organizational, and philosophical remedies to this quandary. It is time for the guiding hands behind 0AD to make some decisions about what they are going to do... and then maybe practice some of that openness (transparency) you guys preach by not asking but telling us what you are planning and doing, so that we can have some confidence that this ship is headed in the right direction, or else make our own informed decisions about whether we want to jump off.

The issue with hard caps in general is that it's basically stating "we know it's broken, but we avoid fixing the mechanic by limiting players instead." It's a much better idea to limit trading mechanics by adjusting the trade concept itself rather than applying hard caps. like said before a mechanic that trading as a "resource" can be depleted if overused it better. Also it's logical. A small market can only support a couple of traders at once and then it's full. If you want to trade more you have to improve market size. I'd go with the "markets produce resources over time and deplete with each caravan" concept, since it's more logical and applies a similar effect as hard caps without limiting the player. But overall applying a map control concept for markets make the whole trading mechanic more unique and dynamic instead of being a simple copy paste from Age of Empires (especially considering that trading in AoE II is something I'd consider such a great mechanic that it absolutely should be copied in the first place).

Only on Windows.