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Not quite close for me, hotkeys are a very important part of any RTS game, the ProGUI features may not be something 0 A.D. goes for in the future. The only thing i have observed is a player that was on par with me without ProGUI beat me quite convincingly with the mod. I didn't play a lot this alpha so I didn't notice anything else, and it's not like i played a lot of games with that player either, but still what I observed was kinda overwhelming.

Hello everyone, This is an update on the progress of the Alpha 27 release. After extensive deliberation, the team has decided to abort the release process for the foreseeable future. As some of you know, we've been in a "feature freeze" for the past 3 months. This period, during which we halt all new code merging except for crucial bug fixes, is typically a final step before a release. Unfortunately, progress on the release has been slower than anticipated, and Alpha 27 is still several weeks away. Some of the outstanding issues include: Acquiring the necessary macOS certificates for signing the packages Completing the trailer for the announcement, and finishing the announcement itself More testing is potentially needed, and some important bug fixes are not yet merged. The balance of A27 has not been extensively tested and refined. The time it takes to actually release (uploading packages, informing maintainers, etc.) is potentially more than any of the team can commit to right now. Our current pace on these matters is unsustainable. Following a vote, we have chosen to abort the release and refocus. This decision wasn't made lightly, but we believe it's in the best interest of 0 A.D.'s long-term health. We will use this time to: Merge improvements that have been developed during the feature freeze, such as optimizations and further fixes. Identify and address the issues that have hindered the current release process, as we cannot hope to release in the future without fixing them. We will likely come back to the community with more information on this last point and potentially requests for help. We realize that this news may be disappointing. We thank you for your patience, understanding, and ongoing support. On behalf of everyone at Wildfire Games, Wraitii

Well, there is little strategic depth to 0ad. The discussion around proGUI shows this clearly once again. Sure you should be allowed to play to pop cap in p1 but shouldn't expect to be competitive with that. That's what I mean by forcing. Anyway I play for the visuals and the great sound tracks, so I don't care enough to debate this to death.

Yeah I agree with @Feldfeld. Hotkeys and Gui rearrangements are fine, but macros such as auto-start economy should be considered cheating in a competitive setting.

I've been following the discussion and want to share some thoughts. Firstly, about the copyright concern. It's a common misunderstanding about how language models work. ChatGPT learns from loads of text data on the internet, yes, but it doesn't memorize or directly copy from specific sources. It picks up patterns and relationships between words, kind of like how we humans learn languages. It doesn't retain specific sentences or paragraphs, so it's not infringing on copyrights any more than you are. As for the quality of AI-generated content, a lot depends on the input given. If you feed ChatGPT a detailed, precise prompt, it's more likely to produce a useful response. A vague or misleading prompt could lead to less accurate outputs. It's not trying to deceive us – it's simply doing its best to predict what comes next based on the input. The more you give it to work from, the better it does. About biases and inaccuracies in AI output, these stem from the training data and reinforcement. It's a problem the tech community is actively addressing. But, like any information source, we should always approach AI outputs with a healthy dose of skepticism. I totally agree that AI can't replace human expertise, especially for complex tasks like coding or creating historical content. But as a productivity tool? It has potential. It could draft initial content for our encyclopedia, or digest player feedback for game balancing. With enough instruction it could probably even do things like preparing unit templates or adding small, modular features to engine's codebase. This frees us to focus on the harder, more creative parts of the project. So while we shouldn't blindly trust AI, understanding its strengths and limitations can help us figure out how to best use it in our work. Or we can reenact the luddites, I'm sure that will solve this project's crippling manpower shortage. /s

I agree with Mentula that ProGUI gives a serious advantage over a player of the same level, if used well. However he didn't say what is in my opinion the biggest reason why this is the case (at my level that is). The biggest advantage is in the case of continuous fights or harrassments, preferably in p1 or p2, where there are 3 or 4 production buildings per player. In that case, the attacking player can focus near all his actions in microing the fights, making threats, forcing his opponent to react accordingly, and he will still have near perfect production at home. Meanwhile, the other player forced to micro his fights as well will not be able to queue units at the right time and will fall behind because of it. The population deficit will grow until the game is definitely over. I think that it is quite a big advantage. For comparison if used correctly by a good player it would be kind of as if a player is with a game speed of 0.7 while his opponent is at 1.0, normal speed. While both players have the same skills and would make a good decision at a good time, having your game slow down allows you to make more actions that are valuable at a critical time of the game. However, if both players are booming, it makes almost no difference as both players will have the time to do all meaningful actions, and the boom will be the same. It may still boost some players' booming ability, so it may also be unfair for that reason, but i don't really know about that personally. I am saying this based on (maybe a bit limited) experience. There's a certain player that has a similar skill level as me. If I recall correctly I have a slightly higher win ratio against him when he is not using ProGUI. However when he used ProGUI I had 0-3, and it was not even close. He simply made what I think is a perfect use of the mod, forcing fights mid-game and getting a pop advantage I could not recover from. I will give a little more intuition on how this can affect competitive games by giving the example on how macros are viewed in Age of Empires 2. Basically, any kind of macro is banned, and you can see in this video how even the simplest macros are problematic: 0 A.D. is not AoE2 of course but still that shows macros can escalate into a huge advantage. So if powerful macros are found with @Mentula's mod then that gives what i think could be an unfair competitive advantage as well. The same can be said with autociv where building hotkeys give a huge advantage (when used properly, of course). The difference for me is that it is a feature that should so obviously be in the game, that it makes it fine. But anything further than that, I am not so sure. AoE2 also had some grey areas with the building range indicator, and some mods like small trees or age of cubes. I hope you see my point. I personally wouldn't mind too much in team games which are less serious and where we try to balance it before game start, however if I expect the game to be competitive when I really want my level to clash with the opponent, that's gonna be a problem for me. Of course I know that neither @Atrik and @Mentula intend to do any wrong and I respect the openness of your programs, but still that can cause a problem when a powerful feature is released. Personally I would like very much for the AI to have an enhanced training algorithm. Personally a long time ago I modified their queuing algorithm to grow population faster, however it is not worth much as I didn't touch the other parts of the AI to go with it. We can see that in the following screenshot where my AI (red) grew population much faster in the early game than Petra (green), where they both had the same gather rate at a medium difficulty each:

I disagree. In my opinion gameplay would be more interesting if advancing to p3 is more of a finishing move, while the game could/should be decided in p2.