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I have been considering unit upgrades in 0ad for a while now and I have come across a variety of ways that they are problematic. Issues with percentage based upgrades: boring: percentages are nearly the exclusive method for upgrades to units and there are interesting cases for addition based upgrades imbalance: units that do higher damage per second are benefitted more by the same 1.2x damage upgrade than lower-damage units. Even more concerning is that the gains in damage per upgrade grows with each upgrade, which means the discrepancy between lower damage units and higher damage units increases at an increasing rate. This certainly is one of the contributing factors for champion cavalry skirmishers (firecav/brit chariots) being so OP. Another example is indibil's cost reduction percentage giving a bigger savings for champions and cavalry more than citizens and infantry. I know that eons of balancing efforts have been done with these percentage based upgrades in mind, which is evident in the quite good balance between skirmisher infantry, slinger infantry and archer infantry. Because of this, I think that rather than making a drastic overhaul of the blacksmith, we need to consider addition based upgrades in certain problematic spots or for future creative upgrades. One option for the blacksmith could be to make the final attack upgrades a +1 rather than a percentage change, and then also addition based upgrades could be considered for certain civ bonuses, team bonuses and heros. I think for the development of the game it would make a lot of sense if addition based upgrades could work in sync with percentage upgrades by the use of order of operations from math. Would you be interested in seeing more addition based upgrades in the game? please tell me what you think!

fire cav will need a buff in a27. a25 damage per second (without fire): 36 pierce/1.25 sec = 28.8 dps a26 damage per second (without fire): 25 pierce/1.5 sec = 16.66 dps compare to CS skirm cav: 14.4 dps Its a bit heavy handed to be honest. meanwhile chariots still do 36 pierce/1.25 sec = 28.8 dps without boudica!

@Genava55 The system aoe4 had before is laughable. The new one is an improvement, but ultimately the overall balance scheme is ruined by homing projectiles and overly strict rock-paper-scissors counters. People like to say that the Aoe4 civs have such great differentiation, but the reality is that most of it are gimmicky mechanics that are unique, but not special, because they have no baseline to stand out from. Aoe4 differentiation strategy seems to be inventing whole systems for each civ rather than simply adding extra properties or abilities to existing unit classes or buildings. This aspect of the game design seems to be intended for novelty rather than gameplay quality.

Indeed. I've installed kush-extreme version 0.26.2 via the in-game interface. Thanks for developing this, and thanks to the WFG team for getting it signed. freyyja, TwainRick and I were able to easily beat 5 "Very Hard, Aggressive" vanilla bots that were using the Gauls civ in alpha 26 rc3, so the bots needed an increase in difficulty. A bot with "Hard" difficulty using kush-extreme is much more difficult. I was able to survive, but it took 24 minutes for me to obtain a battering ram. Maybe I'm not exploiting the bot's low intelligence enough by building diversionary structures, because the bot was wiping out most of my army with each attack. This is good, because it increases the skill ceiling of the bots. It kind of reminds me of Jebel Barkal, where the opposition Kushites civ ("Napata") has quite strong units at mid game, depending on difficulty setting. Is that part of the inspiration for the kushites-extreme mod?

we should have river boats. And rafts.

it takes time to add a civ/faction. The current Mayans, for example, are in an alpha version. They have fun mechanics, like hunters with blowguns, flaming proyectiles, no cavalry. Still they should work almost consistently. The same the Xiongnu they lack more mechanics that were not originally designed.