Leaderboard

Hi, I've made a mod that enables you to give yourself a custom rating number and a custom suffix after your name, like this: Your custom rating and suffix can be configured in your options page once the mod is activated: this configuration below will give exactly the effect shown above. The mod is attached as a zip file in the standard 0 A.D mod format. Works out of the box. Have fun! customsuffix.zip

I'm creating a thread to discuss a suggestion I made in another thread. The problem arose following the proposal of different scenarios for a tutorial campaign. Several scenarios were rejected simply because the factions didn't exist in the game as playable. In this case, they were mainly Greek city-states. The case of the various Greek city-states is a perfect illustration of the problem, as these are generally proposals for which many of the buildings would be similar to those existing for the current factions. So I think it's important that we come up with a solution, and to do that I propose having umbrella factions. An 'umbrella faction' in this context is simply a primary faction that encompasses multiple related minor factions, allowing players to start with a broad cultural group and later specialize in distinct sub-factions. For example, in the case of the Greek city-states, the player can start out as a generic Greek faction and can choose to become affiliated to a minor faction during the course of the game, thereby unlocking bonuses, units, buildings and so on. Affiliation can consist of joining the Spartans, the Athenians, the Corinthians etc. There are many reasons for umbrella factions: Creative and Practical Limitations: Designing unique factions for each minor group is challenging, expensive, and risks creating repetitive or uninspired content. The current approach could also exclude interesting cultures due to resource constraints. Umbrella factions could be a more flexible and modular concept. It would even be possible to create minor factions for campaigns. Visual and Artistic Quality: It would help to maintain visual cohesion by avoiding the need for excessive new assets, preserving the game's overall artistic quality. User Interface Concerns: Adding many minor factions from similar cultural backgrounds (e.g., Greek city-states) clutters the user interface, making it more complex and less user-friendly. Gameplay Strategy and Diversity: An umbrella faction approach enables strategic diversity without overwhelming players. For example, a player might begin as a generic Greek faction and later choose to specialize in a specific city-state (e.g., Athens or Sparta) based on desired bonuses or units. Improved Game Balance: Umbrella factions allow for better balance, avoiding factions that are overpowered due to an excess of unit choices or too weak due to a lack of variety. Linking specific units to choices within umbrella factions can enhance strategic depth and create interesting counter-strategies. Encouragement of Adaptive Gameplay: Umbrella factions could introduce adaptive gameplay, where players must make decisions based on their opponents' choices within the faction. This means that as other players specialize within the same umbrella faction, players must adjust their strategy, creating dynamic interactions and keeping gameplay fresh. Reduced Cognitive Load for New Players: For beginners, a simplified umbrella faction model lowers the learning curve. Rather than overwhelming new players with numerous faction options, they can begin with a broad faction and gradually discover the nuances of various sub-factions as they progress. Flexibility for Future Releases: Umbrella factions allow for easy integration of new units, buildings, and technologies without the challenge of designing an entire faction from scratch. For instance, if future expansions explore more diverse regions, new minor factions can be added within established umbrellas, enriching gameplay without overcomplicating the framework. Enhanced historical authenticity: By grouping culturally similar city-states or peoples into unifying factions, players experience historical alliances and rivalries in a more realistic way. This structure makes it possible to add numerous historical references and offer players a glimpse of the diversity of the ancient world. It also reflects how ancient societies often shared cultural traits while having unique distinctions, offering players a more nuanced and immersive historical experience. In the case of a faction such as the Greek cities, the idea is to choose to affiliate with one of the city-states or leagues that were very important: Corinth, famous for its fortress, its architecture and its craftsmen. It was a very powerful city even before the wars with the Persians. Corinth was inscribed with Athens and Sparta on the second coil of the serpent column at Delphi for its part in the defence of Greece against Xerxes. According to Thucydides, the trireme was introduced to Greece by the Corinthians. Sparta, a city that focused on military power and control of a large territory with many agricultural estates. There are many military features that are unique to Sparta. Athens, a powerful thalassocracy with major cultural and economic influence. A very rich and detailed history which enable us to implement a lot of diverse features. Thebes, an important city that made the poor choice of allying itself with the Persians and played a minor role in the Peloponnesian War. However, Thebes came back into the limelight during the following wars and became a major military power. Thebes is famous for its sacred battalion. Syracuse, a Greek city in Sicily, took part in numerous conflicts such as the Peloponnesian War and the Punic Wars. Syracuse was known for its mercenary recruitment, its powerful fleet and its brilliant inventions (see Archimedes). It is generally believed that the first ballistas were invented in Syracuse. The Achaean League, a powerful confederation that held out against the Macedonians and controlled a large part of Greece. They had a powerful army and were the only ones mentioned to use Thorakites apart from the Seleucids. They reformed their army at some point to use the Macedonian pike. And if we implement this system, it would be much easier to create a faction for a campaign. For example, if we decide to create a faction to represent Massalia for a campaign, we reuse the vast majority of existing elements. This would mainly be parameterization rather than design.

Again, you assume a lot. The original designers had plenty of "vision." However, they limited the game design in order for it to be a feasible project. The generic Hellenes faction was eventually split from "Hellenes" to Athenians, Spartans, and Macedonians, since the original Hellenes lumped all "city-states" into one Poleis sub-faction and then the Macedonians as the other sub-faction. Essentially, it functioned much like the old Seleucid reforms techs used to, by simply unlocking a couple of different champions and heroes. This was very limiting and didn't allow the game to show the real differences between these historical civilizations, so the idea to split them up into their own full-fledged factions took root. I'm glad it went that way. Quite frankly, all three of those campaigns would be possible with only some minor adjustments with the current civs we have as-is. This concern alone isn't enough to add additional complexity. Triggers and custom assets for a campaign have always been understood as necessary and would be enough to tailor the civs to anything we need. The game is already supremely diverse and respectful of ancient cultures.

Hello, community mod players This is possible to add this to the community mod, although it comes with a pretty minor performance decrease. On the upside, we get more responsive engagements and unit ranges hold true no matter where the target travels. The benefit to testing this in the com mod is we get an idea of the balances effects as well a more complete idea of the performance impacts. On the balance changes, I expect this to make retreating less punishing, improve spear cavalry chasing, and make ranged units easier to micro around melee units (ie like for ram ships). Are you all ok to try this out? I'll also look into the bolt shooter unitAI.

Sometimes you dont get a rating when joining the lobby freshly. If you then start a new game and later disconnect, you wont be able to rejoin the game as a player if the ratings bot is working well, because the game will be expecting a version of you without rating, but you will be joining with rating.

This issue so dreaded that I have known players with unstable connection to not play any rated 1v1 game just so they dont have a rating associated to their accounts in order not not have problems rejoining games after disconnections.

Exactly. But preferably, you set your rating before even joining the lobby to guarantee stability. This solves 99.9% of the bug. The remaining 0.1% is caused by the very unlikely case that your engine fails to read your config file properly, maybe due to a hard drive error. To solve this, please go straight into your gamesetup_mp.js and edit the line like I did.

@Acero for now/this alpha the mod above do the job. It is safe and it only change 2 lines in gamesetup and absolutely doesn't interact, or interfere with any WFG service, and certainly not even it's rating system, as Dunedan seems to have made the assumption of. I think, in general, making an opinion built on assumptions isn't too op.

We need this rejoining game bug fixed ASAP. Especially because the fix should be ultra simple to implement. It has ruined countless games and it will continue to do so. The devs should simply identify rejoining players by name only ignoring rank. Including rank into the indentification of players in a game makes no sense, as there cannot be two players with the same name in the lobby. In case of TGs, too often it ruins the TG for all 8 players, making them all waste the played time so far. But it gets even worse: as there is a small chance you can fix the rejoining issue by insisting for several minutes, most players try rejoining non-stop until they can join or the game is restarted. So we can easily add an average of 5 to 15 minutes of wasted time for all players every time this bug happens, on top of the time lost on aborted games. The longer the game has been going on, the longer most players are willing to wait for the missing player to try to join back, before closing the game. Devs, plz look into this problem, as it is a serious quality of life bug affecting games, and surely very easily fixed. The effort-reward ratio must be very high on this one.

Hi @AInur, thanks for the mod. It might help players with ratings fix the rejoining game bug. Your mod is also much more compact then the one Kampot made although it's also because you don't have any presets options, but that's neat.

City building.