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But do we know how long those players have been playing? We know that there are a lot of downloads. How do we know that these aren’t new players that are continually coming in but not being retained? It feels weird to me that the influx of players would be 1) constant 2) consistent in terms of version representation and especially that new players would enable feedback while it's apparently a hidden feature. I mean sure people can be convinced to work on specific stuff but most of the time you just end up draining their energy faster. I'll agree that my experience here might be different than elsewhere. I don't think the document does that per se. For me that specific line is not from the document itself, which I cannot say I know by heart. It's mostly how devs feel or are made to feel about the game. If we followed the design doc the game would be much more different than it is now. @Wijitmaker told me it's completely off with regards to what they had in mind at the time.

Almost sounds like every civ is different and has different strengths and weaknesses If no civ had any weaknesses, how boring would that be... No but for real, in Age of Empires 2 Turks dont have pikemen (the only cheap cav counter), Spanish dont have Crossbowman (essentially making their Archers useles), Teutons dont have any fast raiding cavalry. Still, AoE2 is one of the most popular rts games. The mere fact that not every civ can do everything is not a flaw. Han are still one of the strongest civs in vanilla 0ad, if their crossbowmen were mobile, they would be op (also, atleast one of the three farm upgrades work ). Civs like Ptol or Sparta, that have low mobility, make up for it with very strong citizen soldiers. Archers quickly become equal or even stronger than the other ranged units if used correctly... I personally only have a problem with Brits, as they just feel a bit like the weaker little brother of the Gauls; you can basically do the same things as Gauls, just worse. Ah, and maybe Carth, although they are great on certain maps, just not mainland...

the amount of tasks you are responsible for is not in any way at the expense of strategy. It just means you have to decide where you will spend your effort. yes, and? If its a hunt map, maybe a cav rush is good. Low wood? get slingers and mercs maybe. Though I would like to make scouting more impactful. Ideas on increasing strategies: Hide territory line updates in FOW, hide resource collection development of unique units unit specific technologies. New economic unit: Laborer try to embellish unit roles and counters (heavilty limited by citizen soldier framework) maybe champs can be more involved with this?

So I think the sparta p1 champs are still not really viable in the com mod. We don't have time for a community mod release, but I was thinking to let the building itself grant a pop space of 10, like a house would. This provides a selective benefit to their use early in the game, and since it is a "mess hall" it reasonably could support population space.

It's hard for me not to bite to this thread and ask: Why so much people pretend that the priority is to keep a very steep learning curve of mechanical skills (arguably the less interesting part of Real Time STRATEGY)? Every time I post about increasing playability of micro like sniping, training.. someone comes up with an argumentation that makes it look like it's something great to have minimal features to make it the hardest as possible to achieve any basic thing... My opinion is that, more focus on mechanical skills means less emphasis on strategy, teamwork etc.

Artemision Bronze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemision_Bronze https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/zeus-or-poseidon-from-the-artemision-d4876aa609304682945145debedfc77e https://open.smk.dk/en/artwork/iiif/KAS2100?q=Poseidon eller Zeus fra Artemision&page=0&filters=has_3d_file%3Atrue That statue showed either zeus or poseidon depending on the weapon in the hand, so I just made both. It was kind of difficult to find a representation for how the ancient greek imagined a thunderbolt, but I certainly didn't want some harry-potter-kind zigzag thunderbolt. I made two separate meshes, but we could also add the weapon as a prop if that's better. Both models can use the cover prop. I'm not sure about the colours though. I added eyeballs, so when we have the final colours I'd like to add this (with gimp?): @wowgetoffyourcellphone maybe you could have a look and tweak it a little? Also I just used a brightened diffuse as spec map for now, but I could bake something if needed. poseidon_cover.dae statue_poseidon.dae

@Stan` has replied to the same report over there.

We have to admit that the girl is not stupid.

the brit chariots are one of the top 5 strongest units in the game. In both vanilla and the community mod. with non-random building ai (in the com mod) sentry towers provide some relief from camels. if you try to "fill in the holes" of each civ, you get civs that do the same things but just in slightly different ways, which is bad. Civs should have strengths and weaknesses.

I don't want to always repeat myself but again, i think that when looking at developing asymmetric unit rosters one must always look to age of mythology. Especially at the rosters of Egyptians and greeks.

And don't forget that some casual SP enjoy building up a Civ on a beautiful map and have only occasional conflicts until the final showdown. It is certainly not competitive but another way to have fun.

It would only be less boring, because then a game won't have to end at min 18:00 because one dude spammed some uncounterable unit for another team. Another example is Ptol vs Ptol camel rush. Ptols have 0 way to defend against camels in P1 apart from spamming more. So whoever spams the most camels win. Given the current champ spam meta of A26, Brits do seem weaker than Gauls. That's primarily due to chariots instead of spear cav and missing the naked fanatic, which can counter champ cav. If Brits can have more diverse units then that would be better.

In case I've already posted this...sorry. It's from 6 years ago and I'm reading the comments: Then I found good answers in the comments section. I identify with answers like: "I play to conquer the entire map." A cooperative mode should also be implemented, it is very popular. There is a very interesting comment, which says that when you don't have time to practice, because you are aging and becoming an adult (That happens to me) You stop being that good and competitive player, because you "sucks" playing...So it becomes frustrating. Another comment that I liked is that the ways to play in multiplayer are always the same to win.(I imagine that situations change but there are always pre-defined situations). [That's why some people always complain about new mechanics.] While the single player gives them an excuse to play without measuring himself against anyone.

We need gold rush type maps. No one would complain about Carthage. Brits- If we were to go back to slingers rush they would be useful. Slingers rushes were fun, but they need to be done more wisely. The other problem is how boring the war chariots are in this game. And druids should fight too. People should add things instead of taking things away. The Britons would be happy with a pyromaniac unit.

The reason why AoE 4 is quite Starcraft is because of its pro community. And turning an RTS into an E-sport is a mistake. Casuals are what make up the audience for these games.

I'm going to post some non-RTS game development videos that are useful for this cause. I've noticed that games before were made to entertain even if they weren't balanced.

I addressed this in DE with mercenary camps. Don't have Archers in your standard roster? Capture a mercenary camp and hire them.

Well, in general, i think the community mod has been good for a26, especially since it fixed a couple of issues with the base game such as the han farm techs not working. However, because of the division it created, I'd like to suggest a bit of a different approach for the next alpha: Each version should be a clean slate. This way each version is an opportunity to test some new ideas or balance, and the successes of one version do not become pressure on the subsequent versions to be perfectly balanced. I expect this will result in less regular use of the community mod, which means players will mainly play together on the base game, resulting in less division. This approach is also more friendly to more experimental ideas, which are currently somewhat avoided in order to avoid "ruining" the com mod. Some of my experimental ideas are an infantry balance where melee units are generally faster than ranged units, with exceptions, and the introduction of a laborer economic unit to tackle the booming = turtle topic.

I have noticed something with the game. Not so much of an imbalance but favoritism of center units. In online play there is basically no cavalry use. When playing agents computers, cavalry units need to be baby sat. I think they would be more useful in game play if they had a setting that when they took 60% damage they would automatically withdraw out of range as the others continue to fight. Not sure if this would be overly complicated from a programming perspective. I think this would make them more useful.