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Why not both? A 4th phase is welcome like in AOE. However, each phase should have a focus. In AOE2, phase 2 was an opportunity to rush before defenses came up, phase 3 was where better offensive units came such as knights but also better defenses like castles so it was difficult to finish off a well defended town, then phase 4 introduced ultimate siege weapons like trebuchets and bombards.

beta?

rather than adding new civ why we are not thinking about a new phase.

+1

I think a good start would be eliminating the champion unlock tech for champions that come out of dedicated buildings like gymnasiums. I also agree with @chrstgtr and @real_tabasco_sauce in general about melee vs cavalry champions.

Options to crib from DE and which are already pretty advanced: Scythians & Xiongnu would add completely new styles of play. In DE, Scyth and Xion cavalry can construct buildings for example. EA's versions don't have to be as radical as DE's, but a focus on innovative playstyles would be important. They are "the nomads" after all. Suebians/Germans would have cheap, weak buildings like the Celts, but also have Ox Cart dropsites. Where the Celts/Brits/Gauls have plenty of armor, the Germans of Part 1 have almost no armor and would rely on speed and attack. Heavily wood-focused. Those above already have custom building models. Those below crib models from civs already in the game: Syracusans are pretty advanced in DE and are what I'm working on currently. Although at first blush they'd seem like they'd be just like any other Greek civ, I think we could do some cool stuff with them: a "Hoplite" civ with "Successor" things such as Quinqueremes, Libraries, Gastraphetes, and come up with some cool special techs for them ("Archimedes' Screw", "Archimedes Claw", "Antikythera Mechanism", "Pythagorean Theorem", etc.). Not to mention nice hero and mercenary options. I wouldn't go too weird with Solar Towers or anything apocryphal. Thebans are 100% ready to go, but might be a bit bland since they are just a typical "Greek city-state Hoplite" civ. I kind of look at them like the "n00b civ" of DE: uncomplicated, but still strong. Epirotes are kind of like a variation of the Macedonians, but with a larger roster of mercenaries and access to War Elephants. The rest of DE's civs are out of time frame for EA's current focus or too far away: Imperial Romans, Gothic Germans, Yamatai Japanese, and Zapotecs. Options from other mods: Lusitanians: Getting there, but still need a lot of work to get them up to EA's art standards. Thracians: Not even close to being close to done. I think people know and like the Thracian aesthetic though. Focused on skirmishing. Garamantes: Would be nice to add another African civ. Still need work. Mayas: Out of scope. The mod is advanced and already has a lot of nice things, but needs work for EA-standard.

Would it be cool to add another civ to the game after this alpha? It's too late for A27, but A28 or A29 is definitely doable. New civs are a nice way to add content and also keep the game fresh. There are many excellent options to choose from. It's also perfectly okay to choose 'No.' Either way, it'd be good to state reasons.

Champions have been dominant units in past alphas, however these units are no longer seen in the game, neither in 1v1 or TG. For me it's a big waste of material, so I'm willing to put together a patch to make them viable again and I count on everyone's opinion/suggestion to be able to put together a patch as suitable as possible. My three primary suggestions are: 1- Reduce costs; 2- Give champion units special abilities, like fire cav / immortals. That way you will have a bigger and more specific proposal to train these units. 3- Both. So what do you think?

Does it make sense to report here anymore? @user1 will you process these reports? Offender: Dreamliner Reason: Left game when he was about to lose CC and lost engagement. commands.txt

Take a look at Github the mods are being updated little by little for the new alpha, there are some points where we can refine the models but @Duileoga has already done a brilliant job, about the Mayans they are also updating take a look there too, there is a proposal on the mod that mostly supplies its peculiarities.

I don't really see anything in your post that supports the position to not use multithreading? Yes, obviously more efficient computations is better than doing less efficient computations faster, but given the same level of optimisation, a well designed multi-threaded CPU-bound program will almost always be faster (by how much depends on Amdahl's Law). In most architectures the cores have some levels of independent caches, so increasing number of threads also increase the effective memory bandwidth (for things that are in cache, taking into account cache invalidation, etc, etc). Cores also have their own prefetchers. Modern memory systems are quite well optimised for concurrent access. It's definitely not a case of all cores having to go through the same narrow pipe. For another example, if two cores require data from two different memory banks (last level cache miss, on the order of 100 cycles), the memory controller can issue read requests for both, and wait for both at the same time. Most of what you described are basic optimisation concepts that anyone who cares about performance should be familiar with. However, I think there's one big idea that took me much longer to REALLY understand and get onboard with - always profile first. Humans are absolutely terrible at estimating where the performance hotspots are, and if left with our guesses, we will spend all our time optimising things that just don't matter. Now when I program, I never do any non-trivial optimisations ahead of time. Strictly only after profiling. Of course, that doesn't mean I pessimise unnecessarily. I still try to not make unnecessary copies of data, etc. Just nothing that requires spending more time. Just a few notes about the specific things you mentioned: * Manual prefetching helps in theory, but is extremely hard to do it usefully in practice. You have to make sure you prefetch far enough ahead that it makes a difference (if you do it just 10 cycles ahead of when you need it, that's not going to make any difference, and you are paying the instruction decoding cost, etc), but not so far that it gets retired before you need it (in which case you wasted memory bandwidth that maybe could have been used by another thread). Also, in your example of a linked list, if you traverse the list on every frame, the hardware prefetcher is probably already doing it for you, because it would have recognised the data access pattern. I have been working on performance-critical stuff for about 10 years now, and have only seen one instance of manual prefetching that's actually helpful (and only marginally). Many have tried. If I'm trying to optimise a program, this is going to be one of the very last things I look into. Yes, using a vector over a list where possible is a good idea. Mostly because continuous access means each cacheline fetch can pick up more elements, and for a very long vector, DRAM has burst mode that is more efficient. * Virtual functions are fine in reality. The v-table is almost always going to be in L1i cache, so those fetches are essentially free with good instruction scheduling. Also, in many cases, the actual function called can be proven at compile time, and the compiler can de-virtualise it, in which case it's absolutely free. Virtual functions offer a lot of readability and maintainability benefits. I would need very concrete evidence showing that they are a significant bottleneck before taking them out. Again, profiling first is important. I have not encountered a single case where this makes a difference.

Maybe make the unlock champions upgrade really cheap, and eliminate it for dedicated buildings. Having to wait for city phase and then the long train time delay them a lot.

I think civilization design should be allowed generous room to follow a civ through some centuries of development, and having different versions of the same civ for different time periods decreases the flexibility of mechanic design and civ differentiation (republican and imperial rome).

we need at least a 0ad per civ. @Stan` start compiling

After the currently voted Scythians & Xiongnu, in theory another "combo" of two American civs would be nice. It doesn't seem these people did much fighting tho. Zapotecs and maya are good contenders, I don't think we have to only consider civs at their "peak", this is an unnecessary limitation imo. Just because one typically thinks of the maya in later time periods doesn't mean they didn't exist in any significance at 0 A.D. Teotihuacan was apparently founded before 0 a.d. and grew a lot through 250AD, which seems to be a period of urbanization. IDK if this fight is outside the timeframe, but these two cultural centers seem to be as much city-states as greek ones we have in game: https://www.science.org/content/article/astounding-new-finds-suggest-ancient-empire-may-be-hiding-plain-sight However, it is science reporting which tends to be flawed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-century_Athens The golden age of Athens is the 5th century BC. So we should restrict the civ to this period and remove everything that appeared later, like the artillery.

commands.txtmetadata.json I, RangerK (1308), beat a much higher rated opponent, AlaricPularic (1546) in a 1v1 rated game. It seems he quit and the ratings never adjusted. It was a really interesting game too. We destroyed each other's main bases. A few screenshots of the action here: https://imgur.com/a/OrBxA26

i agree.

To all that contributed, please state how you'd like to be credited in the balancing credits. Options are full name, nickname, or both.

Is it possible to make a map of the civilizations already inserted in the game? I know that the game's time frame doesn't help, but... South America seems to me to be totally unrepresented. Is there any civilization on this sub-continent (South America) with enough data to create a civilization in a game with a time frame like 0 ad?

Yeah, my larger point is that beyond a rough inspiration, the game does a lot of historical cherry picking and inconsistently introduces arbitrary restrictions. With the above said, Mayans??? Or, for me, anyone but another Hellenistic civ

But why? Caesar’s contemporaries exist. There is Vercin. There is Cleopatra. Other civs include a wider date range—Ptol includes their first ruler and their last ruler, which begins earlier and ends later than Rome’s Punic Wars depiction. Why restrict Rome only to the Punic Wars period? To me, 0AD civs should depict the greatest period of those civilizations. For a civ like Rome, that extends up through Caesar. Without Caesar, without Augustus, without Marcus Aurelius Rome just feels incomplete. Yeah, maybe some of that should be built out in a separate Roman Empire civ, but even if that happens, where does Caesar exist? Would Rome’s depiction really need to be that different if it included Caesar?

I personally like the time restriction to keep the feel of the time. It's already strange enough that if you play Romans vs Gaul or Britons you do not get to pick Julius Caesar. If at the start of the game you chose between 2 or 3 eras, and then could only choose civs of that era, that would be cool. However, I'm sure that would be a lot of work, especially as alpha updates go on.

Keep in mind if we ever have some kind of moving buildings for nomadic civs, then we don't have to do it as badly as AoE4 did. I don't know if you ever saw clips of Mongol-douche, but it was extremely cheesy. Suebians sound cool, and I think including Mayans at some point should be an obvious yes.

champ cav are quite common (and I would say too strong). For infantry, I completely agree. I would add a fourth choice and make them more accessible via shorter train times and/or eliminating the research required to unlock them

it’s also somewhat date range As I’ve said before, though, I don’t care much for that restriction. But it would be way after anything we currently have

as someone living in the western hemisphere, this is insulting.

I wonder if some special, more flexible territory requirements can be used for these as well. Not sure if territory should be a universal constant or not.

With the addition of the Han, the Xiongnu and the Scythians are a must have.

Yeah, even if a civ like Syracuse gets added eventually, it'd be nice to get some more "Barbarian" civs into the game first. I would love to expand EA to being 500 BC to 500 AD. Add: Imperial Romans Already quite advanced in DE. Goths Dacians Sasanian Persians Huns Palmyrenes Yamatai Japanese And then this would be the "Sequel"^. The Millennium AD mod being the basis for "Part 2."

For me, the first Scythians & Xiongnu and Suebians/Germans sound interesting. I’m a little tired of all the greek civs (not to mention the Alex the Great successors). Others may disagree. EDIT: I know it wasn’t mentioned, but I think it would be cool to get some post 1AD civs in the game. The game is currently lacking a lot (completely?) in that area despite being intended as a game that captures 500 BC to 500 AD. Roman Empire seems like an obvious candidate. Barbarian civs like the Vandals also seem obvious. A little outside that range, but I think some early Islamic conquests would be cool too. Showing content like the Islamic empire (or early mesoamerican) stuff might also help expand the player the base.

I would like some totally fresh content. We should be able to round Han out in the next alpha or two. Are any of the new options already built out? (Haven’t looked at DE in forever) Your thought on the options?

While it may not be worthwhile to, say, have 2 Macedonian civs (Argead and Antigonid) or 2 Spartan civs (Classical and Hellenistic), I think Rome would be the one exception to this. The Republican era was very different from the Principate era, which itself was different from the Dominate era. Rome as a polity lasted so long it could be worthwhile to put the effort into depicting these 3 eras separately. Perhaps a special feature of the Roman civ could be this ability to choose "eras." At the start of the match playing as the Romans, the player is given the choice of which era they wish to play (Republican, Triumvirate, Principate, Dominate) which then alters unit roster, techs, buildings, etc. to suit this choice. Or... just have 3 separate civs and have a random "Romans" group in game setup.