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EDIT. As you all know, one of the biggest problems we are currently encountering in 0a.d is that all civilizations are very similar in gameplay. My goal in this topic is to discuss plans on how to make the Persian civilization more attractive to players and at the same time seek to differentiate from other civilizations. Why start with persia? because it is one of the least used civilizations. It is important to point out that the proposed changes must correspond with the current stage of development (no features not yet implemented), and I also ask that you do not deviate from the objective of the topic which is to focus on Persian civilization. Well for starter, I'm going to list below some ideas of what I think would be interesting. - Persian women have a bow to defend themselves rather than the conventional dagger. - Archers are more accurate than other archers and advance in rank faster - Decreases the attack of citizen spearmen considerably, but increases armor pierce. - All Persian cavalry are available in the CC, except champions. - Can train ax cavalry in phase 1. - Remove conscription and current unique training technology, add a new technology. All units cost an amount of gold but can be trained much faster. - Cavalry health technology moved to phase 1. Verify possibilities: - Immortals switch from spear to bow and arrow - Market can train slaves. Well, these are some of the ideas i have for persians, i would like your opinion.

Apparently everyone seems to agree with the changes: - Persian women have a bow to defend themselves rather than the conventional dagger. - Archers are more accurate than other archers and advance in rank faster - Decreases the attack of citizen spearmen considerably, but increases armor pierce. - All Persian cavalry are available in the CC, except champions. I'm going to remove the gardens because it needs a new model and I think that might be a little off topic. About all cavalry being trained in phase 1, i think we can just leave javelin cavalry and ax cavalry. With the changes proposed by @real_tabasco_sauce it can work very well. As for the recruiting technology, apparently it was well received but it can't be turned off. Anyway, I think that with adequate values it can still be very interesting and effective during the game, as long as the player has enough gold accumulated or possible mines to collect, but if denied the gold the game can be lost. I think it adds interesting decision points. I really like @Dakara idea of market training slaves. I'll look for historical basis for this. I like this idea of @berhudar --> Cavalry health upgrade should be researchable in p1. @alre idea about the immortals is something i did in my mod. Only problem is referring to the status of the units. Both archer and spearmen must have the same health, armor, attack etc.. with the exception of the bonus of spearman against cavalry. So finding good numbers for both is a little difficult.

also it would be nice to have immortals switch spear and shield with bow and arrow.

based on SC lost temple.

Before you claim that such a thing is easy to do, I recommend making a mod a trying it out.

Only ax is moved to p1, the rest remains p2.

Many games have similar units with minor status changes, this doesn't seem confusing, he's still a spearman. Yes it resembles the pike and that can be a little bad, although historically this unit was like a tank that protected the back lines from artillery. They used their big shields for that, but they weren't that good at close combat. Just jave and ax available in phase 1. I don't think it would be a problem to have archer cavalry at phase 2 Ax cavalry is not very effective at destroying buildings. My idea is to just move it to phase 1 to make it much more useful and just a few minor changes needed.

Archery was very common in Persia, it shouldn't be unusual to see women shooting. Your attack ingame should be as low as a dagger. I will take a look to see how this ice house works.

An useless unit is good, because it doesn't break a civ like the fire cavs of Iberians or Carthaginians' mercenaries. If you think the Gaul trumpeter is useless, then don't train it! If someone else spammed it, since it's useless, it can't hurt you too much. But, this useless unit opened up possibilities for new unit types and new strategies involving them. For example, if I was in a situation where I had to spam infantry with the Gauls, I would add in a few trumpeters to boost the performance of my army. But if you don't want to do that, it's your choice.

I would consider this attitude on the impolite side of things. If you can't be bothered to give your opinion on a proposal, you might be in the balancing team, but not in an advisor role. At least you can say that you disagree with the fact and for an advisor it wouldn't be bad to express what you think of a certain feature that is currently in the game, which is in this case axe cavalry. I hope you have an opinion worth sharing on axe cav yourself. Rather than the negatives, we should look for the positives. If there are negatives, we should look for ways to address for the negatives or argue that how the positives can outweigh the negatives. Also in all the posts on the tread, I see some positive things mentioned about the patch. So I don't agree with your view about the skepticism the patch received.

I wouldn't be a fan of moving all good stuff from p2 to p1. I would like it if p2 offered useful and unique advantages instead of being the roadblock on your way to p3 that it currently seems to be.

I see that you removed some of your ideas that you posted. I would have preferred that you didn't delete them those ideas from your post. Not neccesary because they are good, but rather to encourage people to think about all possibilities and inspire creativity. The more ideas we toss in the tread, the more combinations of applicable patches we could make. So I would like to toss in some ideas: 1) The Persians have a truly unique technology and it is named after them. Sadly, this technology does little to define their identity. My suggestion would be to give the Persian architecture tech the additional bonus of providing buildings with +20% territory control. Achaemenid Persia was a big state, so allowing them to gain more territory seems fair. 2) The Achaemenid empire had lots of inhabitants. An population bonus wouldn't be bad, even though they allready have one. An interesting bonus could be that Persians start with +10 population space, which allows some interesting openings for rushes. Since it is a one time bonus, its late game effects would tend to slowly fade away. This would make Persia a good faction for an early rush, but it wouldn't change it (infantry) weaknesses in the late game (for 1v1s). I think this could add to the identity of the faction. Assuming that advancements in phases means advancement through the ages, this bonus suits Achaemenid history: powerful in classical times but overpowered in the Hellenistic age. Also I posted some ideas on Persians a while ago that I wanted to repeat in case anyone is interested: I also discussed created a differential a while back which can be found in this post:

Some of these changes won’t be noticeable to the average player. And if this exercise is done for all civs then the traditional spear/archer/sword/skirm/etc. stats will become meaningless because too many civs will have one off special stat adjustments. I would want something that is easier to understand so each unit type is same across civs. Different unit types will be different even if they are similar (for example, pikes and spears are pretty similar to each other but we all understand how they are different). Making a system where a Persian spear is different from a Athens spear, which is different from a Brit spear, which is different from a Roman spear, will very quickly create a complicated system that can’t be easily understood. This is fine. Perhaps the "Archery Tradition" tech should unlock this (instead of what it currently does, but I forget what it currently does lol Agree. Just make a tech. This would essentially be like the hoplite tradition for Sparta/Athens but with a focus on promotion/performance instead of promotion/train time. I like that slight twist. Sounds good Do it through a tech or make it a different unit type. I would lean towards a tech so that the player has the choice on what to do. Also, what you describe is pretty similar to how pikes will function in the next alpha. The main difference will be that Persian spears will be faster. Not sure that makes sense historically because this will probably mean that Persia gets the best of pikes (armor) and spears (speed) which will give them one of the better inf melee units. That might be good, but it seems misplaced with Persia being the civ to get that I don’t care about the woman change. Do that if you think that’ll be cool. I’m a little concerned about this. This will lead to more “cameling” rushes with the archer cav Can’t axe cav destroy CCs quickly (currently or as proposed)? That could be very difficult to counter in p1 which will lead to a lot of early GGs maybe it best to just keep the same roster from the stables (jav and spear) Yes

This 4-player map with complex terrain looks interesting.

I have to sigh that there are so many necessary designs that have been considered in the past but are not added to the alpha, but only exist in the form of patches and mods.

In the simulation/data/resources JSON, you can specify what actions you can do with the resources. You can't have currency yet. (I have an old patch: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1957.)

on second thought, this shouldn't change the way persian play too much. they already have 220 max pop, so they can have more people farming anyway.

Correct, but: and: ;P (So you can ask it in another thread and I might respond it is on my gigantic ToDo-list already. )

I think this could be a valuable capability to have to be honest. I could see many other buildings or even defensive structures where you could change the "mode" for different purposes.

Such technologies do not exist yet.

Indian

@borg- these are all fantasic ideas imo. I am a bit confused about the garden thing tho. Would that be a new building?

Mauryans?

yoooooo! I am so excited for this, I will be sure to pester people on lobby to get big stress tests/ balance tests going.

It's up to you guys I'm planning to release a RC soonish, I am waiting for one or two bugs to be fixed first. I'll advertise the RCs on the forums

sin mencionar .. germanos, romanos imperiales; hasmoneos,númidas, tracios e ilirios.

-Ya me estoy imaginando una batalla entre Mayas contra Xiongnu o Escitas contra Zapotecas y la cabeza me estalla...o me fascina , y ¿A ustedes? @Lopess @AIEND @Lion.Kanzen

I wish they could work like Einherjars in Age of Mythology.

I am probably the minority in this, but while those were definitely a pain, a decent roman player like myself could play turtle and grind done those blocks with attrition and siege. And it was greatly satisfying True Roman experience was A23, fight Gauls all day every day, and the holy Roman bolter, I still miss the unit sprite for it, was it necessary to change it Also immortal heroes for maximum one man army shenanigans and roll play. Honestly in a way A23 felt more forgiving than the later alphas.

you can micro at the moment, just not very much. Perhaps battles seem longer to me due to lag XD. I bet if the game performed perfectly, they would appear much faster too. Instead of lowering damage values, raise repeat times. If my understanding is correct, this would reduce the number of range queries needed per unit time. I played a23 btw. The main thing that stood out to me were the slinger death balls.

There is precious little to conquer anyway, it is rather fun building elaborate fortifications and watching others break them, but that is irrelevant in A25. Its all boom and go, I like to enjoy my games like I would a good meal, not a ten minute stop at the fast food place and then off I go to do something else. There is more to playing than just winning. It would be nice to have a satisfying experience too. Which we did have in A23 and progressively seems to have evaporated with each alpha. I personally feel quite jaded with the whole thing, if I had the opportunity I would have stayed with A23, at least there was more to personally enjoy.

What about slow-paced fighting? I'm a fan of seeing units fighting.

The issue wit fast-paced fighting is you can't micro the battles once they start. It's often the case that you can kill 100 units in merely 30 seconds; you spend 15 minutes booming and walking only to fight for 1 minute, then it's a siege + turtle time. Not being able to control your army in a fight would be a downside, especially when 0AD is more about conquest than city building. It also removes the importance of good reinforcement: if you outnumber your enemies in the first encounter, you can push them back relentlessly and there is nothing they can do. This problem did not exist in A23 because of the lack of ridiculous techs and all units had lower attack values and accuracy. A23 had a reasonable pace of battle that doesn't include an army of 100 perishing against 150 in 20 seconds. @real_tabasco_sauce I would recommend you to try A23 and compare the differences. You will also see your flood of hundreds of archers be defeated by 100 skirmishers + melee.

Considering that A26 doesn't change the technology, armour and pathfinder compared to A25, having a flood of crossbowmen would still result in you inevitably losing the battle to another civ with melee cavalry or a combination of melee infantry and skirmishers. Your rate of reinforcement will always be slower than your death rate. Units die too quickly in A25 and A26 and there is little opportunity for a long lasting battle. For example, a skirmisher cavalry can kill a ranged infantry unit in just 3 hits (3.75 seconds). In my opionion, this is too fast. Suggestion: either increase the health of all units or decrease the standard attack values.

I have designed an op map imo 1.How can I place units Where can I find the xml file and can i share it here, to play it in lobby with you?