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Dang, why is random civ so complicated? perhaps it should just be..... fully random?

A meat shield is efficient Doesn't mean the people in it are not treated like trash. Crossbowmen were peasants given a crossbow. So cheap and expendable. Crossbow taking down buildings sounds terrible...

Fight the tyranny of the Archbishop as the Adrestian Empire or defend the "Holy Church" as the Knights of Seiros! Journey across Fodlan and take part in some of Fire Emblem's most iconic battles, but this time in an RTS format. As rumors of war begin to formulate in the surrounding villages due to the tensions between the Church of Seiros and the Empire, the Archbishop, Lady Rhea, forms an army in secret just in case the rumors become fact, what happens next is something entirely different than what she had expected and it all began with three students being chased in the woods by bandits... Release Date: TBD An Empire in the Making (View Original Post) The Adrestian Empire is located at the south end of Fodlan bosting the famous Black Eagle house to represent them at Garreg Mach Monastery which lies at the center of Fodlan. It is said that the founding of the Adrestian Empire was aided by Lady Seiros when they helped her defeat Nemesis (The King of Liberation). The "Crest of Seiros" runs through their family bloodline as a gift from the goddess for lending their strength to Lady Seiros. The Black Eagle house was named after the traditionally black armor of the Adrestian knights and the twin-headed eagle on the Empire's coat of arms. The Black Eagles' attendants this year are as follows: Edelgard (The only child left of House Hresvelg and the only heir to the throne of the Adrestian Empire), Hubert (House Vestra), Bernadetta (Only daughter of House Varley), Ferdinand (House Aegir, in line to become the next Prime Minister of the Empire), Capar (One of the sons of House Bergliez), Linhardt (House Hevring), Petra (House Macneary and in line for the throne of Brigid), Dorothea (The only commoner in Black Eagle). Help Wanted: If anyone wishes to help in the development of this mod we will be grateful to hear from you on our Discord Server. We are currently in the need of a 3d modeler, music help, and some artists. If you wish to help in any other way then you are always welcome on our team. Thank you. Fire Emblem: Three Wars Reddit Fire Emblem: Three Wars Discord Server Fire Emblem: Three Wars Mod DB Page

lol for me none han. If the Han civ design was intended to be "trash cs, OP economy, OP champions, OP cs cavalry" then the economic advantages and units need to be changed, because that is not a good design. To be honest, the Han don't need an anti-cavalry ranged unit or a mobile crush unit. They already have great siege in late game and extremely powerful options in general from p1 to p3. The main thing to consider is that their citizen soldier units are bad, they should be as good as normal civs units. Citizen solider crossbows are both redundant (between cavalry and infantry) and bad, so it feels like Han are swamped with this terrible unit that people will avoid making. That is a great tragedy. Can you copy the patch link?

Did a few 2v2s and 3v3s, tried han, merc cav, ptols, cav speed in general cav acceleration is fine in my opinion, might be worse during lag Occasional lag spikes after mouse action, it seemed a variety of actions can trigger this lag spike Han CS infantry seem to be pretty bad (I suggest turning the CS infantry xbow into a "Chu Ko Nu" unit like from Aoe2, with slinger range, bad accuracy, and dps of skirmisher with high repeat rate and longer prepare time). Otherwise there are too many redundant types of crossbow for han, excluding the champion crossbow which at first seems very op. Sword cav in p1 are powerful, but it seems skirm cav might be ok vs them Han farms are too fast. I know there has already been a .6 to .5 change of their rate, but I suggest giving them identical farming rate to basic civs (including 5 woman on farm). I think small area farms are a fantastic buff for food eco security by themsleves. I think the merc changes are probably not enough, but I will wait for more testing to be sure. Maybe HP value increases of ranking up cav can be changed to be same as infantry. Replays: In one replay with 2v3, you can see merc cav from kush, iberian cav rush, and han champ crossbow In another replay with 2v2 you can see ptolemies and Han p1 swordcav rush In another replay with 3v3 you can see old civs but plenty of cav and firecav gameplay. metadata.json commands.txt metadata.json commands.txt metadata.json commands.txt

KpitenBobZy quit a rated game. commands.txt metadata.json

As I played the campaign, I truly enjoy 0ad's single-player experience. The use of trigger scripts always makes the missions exciting and a real struggle to complete, but all the more rewarding when you actually win them. Favourite single-player mod to date.

I think this represents the core problem of the balancing team.

This is a change I've been meaning to request for some time. I thought about it several times and as far as I can tell, there's no reason why it couldn't be considered, nor any disadvantage to the method I'm proposing which should be a lot more pleasant to the player. At very least it could be offered as an option so players can configure it to their preference. Currently if you don't have enough resources to produce an unit, its button turns red and you can't schedule units or batches of that type till you do. This used to be less of a problem until auto-queue was implemented. Ever since you're put in the annoying situation where the production settings of a building are automatically cleared whenever you run out of resources to make units: Every time you have to wait until you have resources again, then go through the buttons and schedule unit batches on each building once more. My proposal: Don't deactivate a building's schedule and also allow the player to queue units when they don't have the resources for them. The building instead waits until you have enough resources, the last building that's been waiting will produce an unit of that type the moment resources become available. This exact behavior already exists when you're reached the population cap: Unit production doesn't deactivate but waits until you build more houses, you can also schedule as many units as you want till then as the button isn't disabled only production is paused... couldn't the exact same be done for lack of resources?

Millet Porridge (小米粥） (not people porridge, not to be confused with 'bir millet iki devlet ...' )

It was mentioned earlier that the paddy fields should be handed over to the Indians and Han's main crop is millet.

I think this largely agreed to.

Context This is a fair ask. There are multiple benefits to it and a lots of players feel like this should be there. Recently i promoted coral only game play in tgs and most people are started to like it, although the one of issue with that is one mentioned above. The problem it will solve are follwoing. New players are not used to fast paced game play and they are slow in how to handle pop boom, it will help them imporve fast, hence user retention. This is an good to have feature. This will insure people will use this auto train feature more and more. It will promote coral usages It will impact user experience as whole. Like player are seeing that their batch in training progress. There are 2 solutions to above problem. First is mentioned by the @MirceaKitsune. I have some more inputs on top on how to pause the production Example Scenario: Auto queue for 5 women from civic center , currently only 150 food availble. 1. Simply don't start training the que untill you have the required resources. Here training of 5 will be 0% and wil progress only after 250 food is available. 2. or, Start the que prodution and halt at the percentage of the resource availale. Here training will be continune, as long as available resource > %training time completed * resource required. AOE like mechanism. second solution is: (Taking same example as earlier) Drop the que size to available resource. So, here the queue size will drop to 3 and that will continue, the least number it can drop to is 1. If resource available is not enough to train 1 unit then the queue will pause at 1. Why second? this is useful for continuous training of units given available resource. The player doesn't have to wait to reduce size or get resources to produce his next batch. My pick will be go for first. Extra suggestion: For new installation/new players, keep auto train by default.

I would recommend putting these two on a different control group, for example ctrl 7 The randomness generator first decides the name of a culture, then randomly chooses a civ that belongs to the culture. For example, there is a Hellenic culture, within which there are Spartans, Athenians and Macedonians. The probability of choosing each culture is the same and the probability of choosing each civ after the culture has been determined is the same. Therefore, civs that belong to cultures with few civs inside are more likely to be chose. Some cultures such as Romans have only one civ within it, which makes it a very likely choice. Han belongs to the Chinese culture and there is only one Han civ within it, so the probability is very high. Having Han half of the time is abnormal, but not entirely impossible according to probability theory. The probability of getting Han should be 1/5 or 1/6

It loses to any cavalry even plain javelin cavalry loses handily to spearmen despite costing 35 metal like skiritai spearcav can kill them very easily. So the main concern is its speed yes, I think @real_tabasco_sauce could tone it down a bit so that its easier to catch and trap them, but overall the unit is much more balanced than a p1 gimmick.

Do note that techs and auras are in JSON files and in another folder @Freagarach is trying to get rid of that IIRC Also custom stats on the host are not an option due to the fact that all the players must have them.

Sure my point is that the easy workaround is a mod.io mod that you download through the mod downloader and update when you need to to match other players You can have four balancing mods with different gameplay and ask people to download them.

XML files are precached as XMB, and they need to come in a mod preferably in a zip for bandwith. You cannot add new files while the game is running too, only edit existing ones. Exception being maps when generated in atlas, because we force the reloading. You also need to restart the game to load a mod, and you need a mod.json

Some games allow you to to download maps from the multiplayer screen. If mods could be applied like this, just like a "use map settings", then I think mods could take off a lot better. One problem with this could be the size. This problem could be alleviated, maybe, by including more community art that is not yet in the main game but could be referenced by mods and therefore wouldn't require downloading. Some kind of check for identical files would speed things up. I have tons of other ideas for decreasing things like file sizes and numbers, like even using the new "mixin" feature for templates.

There are casual players in the lobby, and that is acceptable. However, with the split mods, the hardcore TGs will be in grey and they will not be able to join it, and vice versa.

I agree with this concept, I think a single player and multiplayer mode would also provide a healthy competition between the mods which gives people the chance to evaluate the differences. Yes you can just download another mod in the mods screen , but I think that when you start a multiplayer game, having a checked default "multiplayer mode" would be very helpful, because then everyone knows this is a mode designed specifically for competitive play.

For immortals it is difficult to balance the mix of archer / spearmen. They also used other weapons such as axes and swords. I think being able to switch from spear to ax and being able to destroy some buildings can be a lot of fun especially along with cyrus 2.

Or collision circles really need to be increased... and if that requires reducing unit counts so the engine will remain performant then so be it. What is the point of having 800 units on screen if you cannot clearly see a single one of them because they all congeal into a single undifferentiable blob of human neutronium?

Last week I played a game against DocterOrgans and he left the game ealry. Within a minute after I reach p3, he disconnects. At that moment I am ahead as he reaches p3 considerably later. I pause the game and he reconnects. Then we continue the game and after a while he disconnects again when he is at a major disadvantage. He returns shortly after and ask him if I DDOSed him, which I didn't do. He leaves the game again, I wait 10 minutes for him to return. Once I see that he doesn't return, I defeat his units, but that didn't grant points. I have the idea that he noticed he was behind and therefore left the game and tried to blaim it on his connection. I think it should count as a loss for him. It would be undesirable if people can just disconnect once they fall behind and then blame it on connectivity issues. 2022-06-05_0001 DocterOrgans run.zip

If the ancient Mesoamerican factions didn't have a mature model, this was also an opportunity to perfect them. It turns out that we Chinese are more worried about the influence of Great Turkism when dealing with such historical issues, but rarely consider religion, because we treat Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Manichaeism equally.

The mod is open I think other colleagues can help with this, I'm much closer to the Mesoamerican civs than the Asian nomads, one doesn't prevent the other from existing, but I have to keep realistic goals with my available time. The nomadic structures tend to be simpler and more reusable, if you create a thematic texture and some unique structures the rest will be different units and technologies, something interesting for those who have little experience with mods.

European antisemitism. There are people who accuse the Jews of being Khazars.

Mesoamerican techs. They won't let you create this.

There are already Zapotecs factions in the precolonial mod. I think we can focus on some factions that have not been fully constructed. For example, it takes a lot of energy to design Scythia and Xiongnu. If you can borrow this The opportunity to build a mature mode for the nomadic gameplay is also beneficial to the subsequent mods to design other nomadic factions, such as Avars, Khazars, Mazars, Turks, and Mongolia.

Yes. o/

people seem very eager to discuss hypothetical balance changes and debate what to do, but not so eager to discuss the balance of actual changes. i have had 2 balancing advisor feedback on this (quite significant) change for hyrcanian cavalry: I made a mod and a patch, but still very little feedback from balancing people.

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.

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.

IIRC those stats are in XML files though each civ has a separate file for each unit so it is a tedious process to edit each file in question so a way of dealing with all the files at once is needed not a trivial task basically a macro for a text editor and not many text editors have macro search and replace functions and then they are not available on all the platforms we support. Enjoy the Choice

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

most of them give ideas and not a single effort to prove anything. it's good not to be on that list. this is not a democracy. democracies fail, the masses, lacking vision, end up in demagogy and without direction. we live in times where people are toxic for the simple fact that they spoil generations of spoiled children because they are selfish. (I include myself because I grew up in this era of social networking and social welfare). but hard times are coming...that will create strong men. when it passes away, it will pass away. it happens with companies, with nations and empires. also with great civilizations that came to decadence. sincerely i don't know what to expect, things are not eternal. to frighten with deaths of projects is not relevant or a valid argument. (we still have a good time, like all men who create things and dream). it's just a hobby. very nice by the way, you have to be realistic, it wasn't meant to go that far. projects with budgets don't go that far. I have known this team since 2011, nothing is set in stone but we are just a reflection of the society we live in, I don't expect everyone to be strong if their leaders are a reflection of their society. this project was created in 2002 approximately, the way of thinking from society was more grateful and less consumerist, there was more loyalty to the ideals. now all that rules is to consume, to share and to discard... when it is no longer new...when it is no longer so, it dies and goes out of trend.

not even paying you(the clients) do not get something polished in the industry. all games are broken and full of bugs lately (AAA).

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.

Its a bit disingenuous to claim its ignored when all proposed contributions do get recognized. Everyone is free to propose gameplay elements and if objectively justified would probably get merged too. If you need unimplemented features, write out the requirements so that an actual discussion can arise out of it. Having an arbiter of game design will not solve the problem of having voluntary moving parts that can just straight up stop spinning just cause they want to do so. There is no WFG entity making the game. There are people just like you working under said banner. Its not ignored because WFG decided to allocate all its manpower into engine development. Its ignored because no one stepped up. Everyone here are just as qualified to dedicate the time and effort and propose gameplay patches as those with commit access. However, no one is under contract to do so, so we cannot really ask @vladislavbelovto drop his rendering work to instead define counters or implement battalions or something. (even if we could ask it and he did sign a contract of servitude to 0ad, it would be a really stupid thing to do because his efforts are most needed in core engine code) Not directed at anyone here per se, but generally speaking, FOSS is a breeding ground for entitlement of volunteer time. A gridlock yes, but not a meaningful gridlock in my opinion, because usually, neither side involved actually goes beyond suggesting ideas. Ideas by themselves are kinda meh if no one evaluates them, justifies them, implements them and make the effort to convince others its objectively an improvement. Statistics for those who care, there are 326 differentials tagged [gameplay] on phabricator, 257 of them are already closed. Thats 78%. Gameplay contributions are not ignored, they don't come.

Hmm, interesting points from everyone who's chimed in I think. I think the real question now is, where do we go from here? Personally, given the feedback and notes from everyone in this topic/thread, I'm thinking the following: We need an easy way to communicate things that have been completed, and/or progress on the project; since not all of it is apparent. Balance, somehow, needs to be more accessible to the communty; and changes to balance need to be added to the primary 0ad repo, not a fork. Some level of direction is needed; I'm probably out of the loop, and way off base with this, but it seems that the project is kind-of just "going" ... but not necessarily towards a specific destination. We REALLY somehow need to improve morale in the community ... honestly these posts seem to be quite a downer. We have to get over this rut and move forward with a positive outlook. The community, and internal view of the project very much dictates external impressions; at least in my opinion it does to some degree. If anyone has any adjustments/additions to that list ... please make mention and number them accordingly. Of course, if one of my numbered items there, seems invalid, we can just delete it and consider it not a priority. So now ... I have a proposal! The proposal is ... If you post a problem, post a solution. If you don't have a solution, state how you imagine things would be if the problem was solved; as that would at least give us a destination, but not how to get there. So to practice what I preach ... here's some possible solutions to the points above: Further breakdown project milestones/versions (for example A27) into subprojects. There are a couple options here ... we could have an overarching goal for the milestone (for example, "Refactor rendering to remove nvtt and make way for vulkan support"; completely guessing here lol). Then during A27, the majority of work would be on that. Another option could be to have subprojects for the milestone; for example, Art could have a goal, Balance could have a goal, etc, etc. Then once they're all complete, A{n} is complete. Another possibly better option could be to have alternating milestone focus. So for example, in the case of A27. Maybe A27.0 could be focused on getting balance stuff in (maybe it's only a 1 or 2 week sprint). Then after that A27.1 would focus on non-balance related things. This would give time for the devs to do what they want, while also dedicating some time to balance issues. With solution 1 there ... there are some things that could help this. Alternativelty, if balance is just mostly xml configurations ... there could be some functionality added (idk if it's already there), to allow people to merge balance configurations. So for example, have a balance menu in-game where they could select the xml to load settings from. Then optionally, have an in-game balance vote (for example after a SP or MP game), on what the players thought of the balance. This would give some real feedback on each balance configuration, and differences/implications could be drawn when comparing concrete versions of the settings. It would give balance people and programmers a better technical understanding of what setting influences balance the most, or at least is the most controversial. Direction can come with the solution in point 1. Honestly ... my thought is that having a stream if tickets isn't the best solution for projects goal-wise. It doesn't give a clear outlook of progress (in my opinion). Having smaller goals would give a better sense of completion. Seeing those goals accumulate will give a better sense of success. One idea here would be to adopt something with some kind of project-based progress bars. The visual feedback of it is amazing in my mind. For example, there's this https://github.com/opf/openproject With it you can do progress bars like these: Of course, this is just an example, there's probably other software out there that does the same. Maybe gitlab does this? (just checked, it does, here's a screenshot) Ultimately, if we can have something like this on the homepage, that could be cool too! It could be a point-of-interest for anyone looking at the project ... if they're interested in helping, having current workings, or areas of real need posted publicly would be a benefit; and I think would draw in more people. Part of increasing morale is not to focus on the problems, or negatives, but solutions. That's part of the proposal above, and what I'm trying to do in posting these ideas. I REALLY want to see this project succeed and grow. Part of making that happen is being the change I want to see. So ... that was a bit of a brain dump lol. Thoughts? @Stan`I know (or at least it seems) much of the management side of things is on your shoulders. I'd be happy to help with project management where needed. I'd even go through the trouble of building a project management solution for the team if it's needed (I've honestly wanted to for a while lol ... but never had a specific target in mind); but that might be extreme. On a side note ... personally, I've worked for a few companies in the past years (not boasting or anything, don't take it that way ... I'm just using it as my reference of experience) ... all of which had some critical issues with project management. Unfortunately in my position(s) at the time ... I wasn't able to do much to change the management practices for the better. Here ... I'm starting with throwing out some ideas; if people like it, good, if not ... then we can adjust/delete/create/adapt as needed. To some degree, yes. Too much openness is bad, especially when no-one is declared the final decision maker. This is true in many cases. One that comes to mind (I've been watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay lately lol), is in businesses like hotels, restaurants. With a group of "owners", if there's no-one who has a final say, decisions rot. Part of what Ramsay does is instill a position of power in a single person ... that changes the entire organization, and how it runs as a whole. Maybe having a elected "official" would help the project. Alternatively ... we could also adopt a voting system of sorts, where solutions are presented, and voted on with a deadline within the community. Of course, there's a ton of ways about this. We could also make the project configurable by default. So like ... at any point if there's something that's a core concern, or clear divide in the community ... make a checkbox for it ... then we get BOTH those sides remaining interested, while also satisfying their personal needs/opinions. As always ... everyone please post ideas/feedback, thanks for reading my rambles!

Moving to GitHub does nothing to bring in more patches imo. See openage and related projects. STK isn't faring much better either. Active Devs here might just exceed them to be honest. You can't make contributions unless you already know the project. In which case, are we relying on the GitHub home page featuring the repo? Discovery through GitHub is pretty bad unless you're actively looking for something. The only real benefit is that the web interface is easier to work with. A self hosted gitlab would be significantly better than GitHub for that. GitHub for the sake of more visibility would be a disappointing endeavour. You are supposed to direct people to a GitHub, not the other way around. Definitely do need git though. Most people here already use the mirror. There was also a time when it was just Philip, so all things considered, not the worst time to be visiting these parts.

@Crynux you know there is a mod downloader using the mod.io platform directly integrated into the game, right? The public folder is a mod in itself, and you can dowload a few more through the game interface, install them by drag and drop or file association using the .pyromod extension. I believe that's the point here, why let them host it when we can host it ourselves (I'd rather not cause it's extra work for me, but I understand where they are coming from) I might be wrong but I don't think Beyond All Reason, Supertux, Supertux Kart, Wyrmsum and Warzone 2100 got a huge boost from it. Moving to git can't hurt if done properly though. I'd like to put emphasis on the amount of work vs the velocity of what remains of the team. balancing is like 5% of the work of the project. You have sysadmin work done by me @implodedok @user1 @Dunedan you have art that's done by me and @wackyserious you've got sound done by @Samulis and @OmriLahav you've got the simulation work done by @wraitii @bb_ and @Freagarach you've got random map work done by @maroder and @smiley you have other maps to maintain, writing the announcement, doing the trailers, answering the community, being at events, you've got the AI which is done by now retired @Silier and by hopefully @JCWasmx86 in the future. You've got the reinforcement learning interface done by @irishninja You also get all the graphic features improvements, fixes and cleanups, and maybe sometime soon Vulkan support done by @vladislavbelov then you have to update maintain fix, patch all the libraries on BSD, macOS, Windows and all the crazy amount of Linux flavour, when they get deprecated or lost to make sure you can still run the game which goes will all the work on the lowlevel part of the engine. You've got the tests to ensure we're breaking everything, you've got mod technical support which I try to do with @Lopess @The Undying Nephalim @wowgetoffyourcellphone etc. Probably forgot to mention Networking with getting the game to work on most configurations all the Devops scripts to automate building, all the python script for various tasks such as updating mods checking for dependencies getting Translations, all the work done in all those languages and the code behind it. And making sure they don't crash the game when they are wrong. When I say there are many full time jobs, I'm not kidding. And some of us only have one hour per week Which can be spent catching up, writing long posts or actually working on the game. So sure for certain people it's just a fun toy. But for others it's much more than this. It's an opportunity, to learn to do better, to give back, to provide fun. Some linuxes are still stuck with A23, we do not and cannot control the release cycles there. Adding more people simply doesn't cut it. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law We've got 28 balancing advisors, do you feel balancing has made much progress compared to A25 and A24 and A23 ?

An option with respect to that is letting people download mods from mod.io, not the host, but fetch the list of mods from the host. It's essentially the same thing but you don't need to trust the host so much. That feature I think we only miss for lack of trying. --- Now with that being said: I think one thing that gets forgotten in this discussion a little is that the project is still given as an alpha. The snail pace is sort of OK. It's actually less idle now than 3 years ago, for example. Should it 'die' in number of players, well it can just be rebooted later with a different visions since the objectors will have moved on. This is a different ballpark entirely to commercial endeavours, which must succeed. We can fail time and time again and it doesn't really matter.

In general I would agree, but the DDOSers have lived to tell a different story. You also wouldn't know what you download. e.g. a modified small balancing mod could contain nasty JS code that does things it shouldn't. This is actually why we have mod signatures on mod.io. It's not fool proof, but we check all the mods submitted there. I believe it's the reason other than "Nobody coded it" why we don't have automatic download.

I was referring to balance update, not engine updates. If balancing is meant to be a thing that helps to define more dynamic gameplay, then we need to dare to make more changes. If the game is supposed to have a better engine in 2025, then leave engine development to the developers. The balancing team should create a balance such that there is enough strategical diversity, regardless of the engine. In my view it is important to see both how they are related, but also to acknowledge that they are very much their own thing (e.g. multiplying food gathering rate by 1.5 and wood gathering rate by 0.67 would do way more for balance that any reasonable engine upgrade could do).

Like https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4250?

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.

Thanks for the games, @vinme! BTW, I organized and zipped your replays, so that anyone can just unpack it into the replay folder and go. 2022-05-04-vinme.zip