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ok there has been a lot of comments and a lot of heat, so it took some time to let my thoughts cool down enough for sharing. first of all, I must say I'm sorry for having caused flame, I'm unhappy with how things are going (not a secret) and my criticisms have probably been quite too sour. I shouldn't have said that the state of development of the game is bad, that was completely pointless on my side and it wasn't my place to complain about it. I should have focused solely on the constructive part of my criticism. I'm sorry for spoiling the discussion. now recapping, I think we can agree that the efforts for balancing the game are inefficient, misplaced, and I see three possible solutions to this, all of them being discussed above: - have all balancing staff on svn and phab. changes must be made, discussed, tested, emended on a continuous cycle. - same as above, but on github/gitlab instead. - have a faster release cycle where an official balancing mod can be updated using a different system from the main game (like github) I don't think it's ever been an issue about openness of discussion. balancing simply cannot work if all the testing is made on a game that only gets major releases.

Realistically, I think those would help with pure balance efforts, but: We aren't giving commit access to balancers on SVN, and it's unlikely that the switch to git would help much on its own (not even mentioning that git is rather complex to use). Giving access to just the balance data requires splitting the 0 A.D. mod from the public mod, & then actually using svn or git for it. All of this is work. Stan has plans for a gitlab migration, but progress is slow for lack of time. Splitting the 0 A.D. and public mod is also work and will lead to interesting problems of synchronisation and things like that. It's entirely possible that it will actually make development slower overall. --- The only real option I see now is to make an official copy of the relevant parts of the public mod after A26, and then let players modify that mod while distributing it. But only assume A26 compatibility. Then nearing the end of the A26 cycle, look where that mod is, and bring back the relevant changes. This of course assumes that the engine hasn't changed substantially in-between, which may or may not be a fair bet.

Hello everyone! I hereby present a 0 A.D. mod aimed at evaluating the rating of players. Official mod page on GitLab here. Introduction Before diving into the description, let me introduce the problem this mod aims to solve. In 0 A.D., the ELO system is used to rank players in the lobby. This is good; but is it representative of the players' skills? As you know, the rating system in 0 A.D. only takes into account 1v1 rated games. Team games do not contribute to the ELO score of a player, as well as 1v1 unrated games. Also, the scoring system only takes into account the outcome of a game (victory/defeat) and not the "performance" during the game. Can we do better? This mod uses statistics. It extracts data from all the replays of games you (the mod user) have played. So, if you have played 20 games (1v1s, team games, other..) with a player in the lobby whose name is (for example) strangeJokes, the mod will assign a rating to strangeJokes based on the 20 games you've played with them. The rating system The functioning of the rating system is described in detail here, but in short what it does is: it considers the average performance of the player during the entire game (and not only at game's end). the rating assigned to a player is a percentage: for example, a player with a rating of 5.00 performs a 5% better than other players on average, while a player with a rating of -5.00 performs a 5% worse than other players on average. you can customize the rating system by giving more importance to military, economy, exploration or other factors to the aim of calculating ratings. Keep in mind that this mod is based on statistics; data are taken from your (the mod user) replays. Statistics might not be fully representative of reality; therefore, a player's rating could be inaccurate, especially if you have played few games with that player. The more you play with a player, the more accurate the rating of that player is. Installation ‣Recommended: LocalRatings can be downloaded from the game menu: Settings > Mod Selection > Download Mods. ‣Alternatively: Click here to download the latest release. Install following the official 0 A.D. guide: How to install mods? Alternative downloads: Latest Release (.pyromod) | Latest Release (.zip) | Older Releases Latest version announcement Explanatory pictures Contribute The public repository is at this page. Everybody is very welcome to contribute, suggest, fork or simply give feedback. Have fun!

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

@SolarEagle Yep the ,map development is still active, i have just come back to it! Have you manage to play it in A25?

I doubt it. Local rating is not only skill-dependent, but also win-rate-dependent and rushers tend to have lower ratings while boomers have higher.

I suggest a more explainatory name for your metric (any two values make a ratio) like "military/economy ratio". conceptually, it's similar to the killed/trained ratio (not shown in the game).

The center is quite dense, except for the temple area. I have already tested it 5 times.

K/D ratio would be problematic, but fortunately value ratio is divided by res spent, so the denominator will always be greater than the numerator, except for scenarios where you start with units. I see what you mean about weights tho. I see. I thought you meant 0 as default. IMO, exploration is a skill that gives you (in theory) the upper hand in a fight, so there should be no need to score exploration in addition to units value killed, etc. When I set it to 0 I find a much more accurate list.

I think this would just lead to frustration since you can't always decide whether units go into forests. It also does not have the level of control that the wall improvements I outlined could offer. It is also worth noting that forests are already slower for units to travel through and this means that cavalry caught in them will take more losses as they try to escape defenders or approach a target.

@Stan`We will need it eventually: the World of 0AD MMO is gonna be Webscaletm!

Hotspot? Transfer your patch to your phone via other means? We can't wait two months for your patch. Please!

Dancing with pikeman to save your ranged units.

I think this is also the same player who quit without resigning in one of Tom0ad's recent vids. Seems like a pleasant fellow.

Ok I thought some more about this metric and now I am convinced the best measure for effectiveness could be this: average (or integral) over gametime (0, end gametime] of value ratio (where value ratio = military score/ resources spent). ^the main advantage is that this would still account for players with high value ratios early in the game (ie early rushes) It would be similar to how average K/D ratio gives a better idea than end-of-game K/D ratio see red below: