Leaderboard

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?

https://play0ad.com/summary-of-attendance-at-the-stunfest-2022/

because units overlap with eachother, so 4 may almost look like one.

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

I suppose you can create your own game mode for that

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.

Two more Han related things. 1. As the Ministers can enter all (?) buildings, I really would like all buildings to be able to set rally points. I always send my units into a specific direction from a building, but with farmsteads and storehouses I can't do that. Would it help if I considered that additional micro which would go against the design document? 2. If I'm not mistaken the civs have different chances to be selected when playing with a random civ; do we have a table somewhere showing those probabilities, and where do the Han range? I think ~half the games I started with random civ in this version was with Han, that would be quite a high percentage.

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.

Yeah, I tire of these discussions. You guys figure it out.

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.

From my understanding there are Jewish people who actually take both sides of the debate so I don't actually see how it is necessarily antisemitic to take any particular position. Apparently the Jewish scholar Arthur Koestler argued for khazars being Jewish because he wanted to actually dismantle antisemitic attitudes which drew a continuity between Biblical Hebrews and the modern Jews.

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.

I think keeping the ice houses like this is the best alternative at the moment. Yes it will be necessary for a good amount of people to test both patches. I'm looking to improve the Persian architecture technology and maybe add one more unique technology, any suggestions guys?

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.

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/

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

An idea: make unit stats adjustable during game setup, and all players use the stats stored on the host's computer. This resolves all of the balancing issues on the forum, no need to trouble the developers and players can decide the stats of units for balance. There will be no more balancing conundrum.

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).

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.

I can't fix that. As they said below, blaming a department for somethings that is other department task isn't the way, this is fine for social media average comment section, Already here in the forum you can already see that not all of us do the same task, so you can see how a game is developed. But if you try to contribute to that change....you can: Invite people, share the game, pressure the team(little) no like this, I have been patiently pressing for years. The only thing is that the ideas stagnate, I keep them. I save for laters, not only my personal ideas. Sometimes I open tickets without abusing. That reminds me to open those tickets. And bring out those ideas and discussions.

A good community manager is something we've been lacking indeed.

Most of those changes are not visible to end users regardless of how badly they were needed. Gamesetup rewrites, renderer refactorings and SM upgrades don't mean much to anyone who don't follow development closely. Only a subset of changes are userfacing and of those only the very best or the very worst get noticed, and you won't bother posting about how good something is compared to when something is bad. From an outsider looking in, it would seem that rarely anything gets changed and half of those changes that do happen are straight up disasters. Not that development is currently going on at breakneck speed. There were efforts to properly communicate actual progress on a monthly basis quite recently as well, but that's a story for another time.

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 ?

that makes totally sense actually. at the present rate though, the game will be finished in half a century, in fact it probably won't unless there is some kind of spur. the game is progressing so slow that it's practically stuck: major mechanics, like capturing and deleting buildings, even though they're considered to be brocken, are not being touched for years. I think you should try to accelerate the development of the game, and that the best way to do that is to have more people contribute to and test the gameplay trough a faster release cycle, in the form of a recommended mod for multiplayer, that gets automatically downloaded in some way. it shouldn't be hard to make up a simple and secure way to make this work. what do you think it would be a good solution?

Hackers are targeting everything. There are some groups specialized in massive attacks against specific targets but most hackers are alone and independant, looking for easy targets to keep them busy, to learn new tricks and to earn a bit of fame. Sadly, security is mandatory everywhere and people thinking otherwise are naive.

@Sevda had a good concrete-suggestion on another thread: Make it easier to play mods by automatically syncing with the host when joining a modded multiplayer game. Their post implies a host-client simulation architecture that I assume would require completely redesigning the net code (so that is unlikely to happen), but could not the same effect be achieved by just having the players' clients automatically download and install the mod files from the host? (Subject to all parties' affirmative consent obviously.) For very large mods like DE this installation method would take a long time, but for small balance changes it ought to be pretty snappy. From a casual user's perspective this would make playing modded multiplayer content more like having custom map rules. It would allow more people to very easily experiment with new gameplay innovations, without effectively forking the project into two separate versions with the attendant doubling of the code-maintenance workload, as discussed previously. Maybe there are some valid cybersecurity arguments why one would not want to support a feature like that, but this might be a case this requires soberly considering a tradeoff. 0AD is niche entertainment software with an active user base of a few thousands maybe, it's not exactly a prime target for black hats to exploit. Maybe at worst someone with a grudge might think use this nefariously against specific objects of their ire. On the other side of the scale, I think the discussion on this and other threads demonstrate a pervasive consensus that this project is stuck in a creative crisis... Badly stuck. There are too many objectors coming out of the woodwork any time someone suggests serious design or organizational reforms that might let 0AD get un-mired from its dubiously balanced, half-finished state. The only other option you have is to start removing barriers to independent creatives to realize their own visions of the game's future, and then hope that a new consensus organically coalesces around one of these offerings so that it can become the new roadmap for 0AD:EA proper. link to the other thread:

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?

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

I think it would be arcade mode vs simulation/realistic mode.(kind LARP).

I propose a solution to this problem: separate multiplayer mode and singleplayer mode. We can allow 2 main mods instead of 1: 0ad-relaxed and 0ad-hardcore. For people who want to enjoy relaxed games, good graphics and new features, they can activate the 0ad-relaxed mod. This should also be the default option as it is friendly to newcomers. Within this, the developers can add whatever cool features they want and no-one will ever complain! The developers should commit all of their new features to this mod. This will prevent lobby players who complain about balancing issues from hindering the development of the game. For hardcore lobby players who want stagnant features for balance, they should activate 0ad-hardcore mod, which focuses much more on balancing at the cost of new features and art. Within this, I would recommend implementing Feldmap, vividcolours and autociv by default (I cannot play without these nowadays). We can even have different pathfinders and AIs within this! Changes should not be made to 0ad-hardcore unless there is a concensus across the competitive playerbase. This would also eliminate the problem of inexperienced players ruining TGs: they are unlikely to know how to activate mods nor would they actively try to, so there is a natural filter for hosts. By the time someone is willing to activate the mod and use it regularly, they are likely qualified for TGs. The two mods should be updated separately each alpha. Furthermore, we can make mods to fix imbalances and convince other players to install our mods. Again, this removes inexperienced players from pro games without hurting their feelings. @Stan` Does my idea sound reasonable? After playing this game for 2 years as both AI player and lobby player, I think splitting the 2 groups is the easiest solution. It is certainly acheivable from a technical point of view.

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