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The cope of rushed plebs is insane here.

I'd be heavily against implementing more automation into vanilla. It's part of the rts to juggle all balls, economy, warfare and management. Satisfaction comes from mastering those aspects of the game and beat your opponent fairly, meaning either all have the same mod(s) or no one has a mod. If you feel you need automation to win certain games then you are simply playing against players out of your league. Or if you feel like you are forgetting to keep producing units then you have an area to focus and improve on. No disrespect meant to any player whatsoever. I do think you have to be a little dense if you think automating half the game for you does not give you an advantage and isn't cheating though.

It's from 2023, but here you go. (I'll probably check later if it destroys my upload quota and delete it eventually...) 0ad-0.0.27-rc1-27645-alpha-win32.exe

I think this kind of comments from an unknown user is the reason why a bunch of old timers in the team have the feeling that 0ad players, especially those who have never written a line of code, live a bit disconnected from reality and disregard the major part of their free time (which is scarce in an adult's life) the devs dedicate here. Here Acero says in a aggressive tone and with utmost disrespect for our work that devs MUST deliver a flawless (but still free) product on each and every alpha, fix every bug immediately while also finding time and motivation to play the game in a competitive multiplayer setting. Guess what Acero: that leaves me the choice between giving up OR avoiding interaction with players. And players have been degrading my motivation over the years as the expectations have been getting higher. You should be asking yourself why, instead of disparaging us. Now I hope you understand why your tone is unacceptable Please delete your post which doesn't help, and I'll do the same with my bad taste parody. Instead we would be grateful to have profiling data and numbers instead of vague feelings of performance degradation. I do not question the fact that there is a performance issue, but right now it is unexplainable. As wraitii points out, it is not possible that the hashing is the sole culprit if you maintain that A26 was objectively faster. We need to understand that issue before we can think of fixing it.

From my POV this is the great advantage of the Smart train. @Atrik Do you remember the game we played the other day where Hakunamata constantly attacked my base with cavs? I had my barracks for a long time without producing xD. And even if I had remembered to produce in them, the vanilla production system is quite inefficient and instead of assigning units to free barracks it stacks units in the same barracks in a somewhat random way. I believe that improving the production system should be a priority in the next version of the game, similar to how it’s done in AOE 2. This way, the advantage of a macro that automatically assigns the batch size according to the available resources and instantly would be mitigated greatly. The advantage of being able to freely maneuver your units instead of having to keep watching where the heck the barracks full of stacked units are is really quite obvious. I have used the smart train several times and my production has improved a lot specially in situations like I mentioned before. Unfortunately, you are also a bit dishonest in this regard. I have rarely heard you mention it as an argument, and instead you argue about your great skill as a player and how you can overcome this difficulty. Something that, while true, somewhat avoids the point in question that, at least I and other players have pointed out to you. I don’t believe the solution is to enter a game as a spectator and start berating yourself. However, I understand the feeling of frustration. Taking extreme positions on either side hasn’t proven to be effective. And it would be nice to reach some common ground. Something that also seems unlikely.

I believe at least in RC1 the phase still played a role; e.g. I couldn't hold a tower with three elite units in p2 while in p3 two elite units were enough.

You can probably get away with the same trick I used for the biome buildings https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/7069/files#diff-81474b3184d8557e342374db4f58e99a876da08a Using the biome you can put in the map you could switch the tracks. Actual patch https://code.wildfiregames.com/D2401

Yeah it's possible. I have a patch that was initally made by @Sandarac but I never got around to finishing it.

Marian Reforms unlocks "Onagers", unable to locate this unit. Units are unable to gain experience at the barracks after unlocking "Marian Reforms". Units are able to in the stable. Marian Reforms does not state that skirmishers are upgraded to "Legionary Skirmishers" in the description. Sorry that this is not three posts, I am unable to post more than four times per day.

This exploit works on any buildings that can be captured and are not territory roots. Buildings/units that are not your own do not take up your cap of that building or your unit cap. The issue is that you are able to give your own buildings to Gaia removing them from your territory, which then allows you to build more, which you can capture back. One way you can do this by placing farmsteads at the edge of your territory in a line then placing a tower one far enough away, then putting the building in the tower's territory, then demolishing the farmsteads and waiting for Gaia to take it. If you have a teammate not on your team have them capture your siege unit/Wonder/Imperial Ministry/Winter Palace then capture it back after building another one for infinite trickle/population. You can also place buildings that cannot be placed near each other like towers/fortresses next to ones you do not own then recapture them. This appears to be already patched on the Revered Monument and Edict Pilliar of Ashoka by removing their capture points. Examples of the issue: The Kennel increases the maximum amount of dogs, with this exploit you can have unlimited dogs. The Large Pyramid increases attack damage, this exploit allows you to have absurd attack bonuses. The Theatre is difficult to exploit, but with enough Theatres you can remove the territory of all of your opponents and build anywhere even next to their Civic Center! You can place a lot of stone towers next to each other to make a crazy amount of arrows. You can put a multiple Temple of Vestas to make your structures impossible to capture. Multiple Small Pyramids can make gather speed instant. Ice Houses for infinite food trickle. If you somehow got 21 Grand Temple of Amun then brought a hero into the range you might be able to make their health negative or underflow. The limited building issue can be fixed in a few ways I can think of: Remove capture points from limited buildings. (No fun) Limit limited buildings across every player on the map. (Also no Fun) The minimum space apart can be fixed in a few ways aswell: Minimum distance across all players for them. (You cannot place towers near other people's towers, which kinda sucks.) Don't fix it at all. (I doubt that it would be a good strategy anyways.) These issues are not really a bug and more of a exploit of intended mechanics, which make is difficult to come up with a fix. Thanks for making an amazing game, I just looked through all of the new stuff over the past few hours and found all the issues I have posted today, I most likely will not respond to these posts as the accounts I used to make them are temporary.

Yeah it's gotta be exhausting being obtuse on purpose i guess. It's wasted energy. But now some volunteers have to find a solution to make games fair, which would've happened sooner or later anyway so its not a bad thing persé. Onto that subject, i think a "no mods" toggle for the host would be nice thats on by default. But im not sure 0ad supports loading/unloading mods on the fly yet, seeing how you need to restart the game if you download a mod. On the other hand coding while playing does live update. Haven't looked into that much yet, and if it's on the cpp side of things im not even going to lol. Maybe a mod can be made that detects unsigned mods or shows what files people have altered.

They have returned in A27 as an official feature. Not sure why it was removed or why it returned. It is not a particularly OP item so no whines about it yet. I tested all of the things mentioned above, the decay then capture exploit does exist (except for siege). These are very creative and meticulous observations. However, nobody has ever tried to exploit these in a TG. Building houses to extend territory then delete is quite a large waste of wood and time. Not sure if it is actually advantageous in most standard TGs. The territory influence is actually quite strong for a single tower; you are going to need about 4 houses out to achieve this with certainty - 300 wood spent. Then, the gaia tower will shoot and hurt your units if you go back and re-capture. I lost 4 slingers just to get 3 towers up this way and it's not even that dense.

That sounds like a bug. The limit should be global not per building. Also weren't kennels removed ?

I was playing a27 and did not test that either, just assumed based on past alphas. If this makes it so buildings do not decay to Gaia when not near a territory root then it would. I can not confirm what this does though right now. I assume it prevents you from changing teams which would not fix any exploits. This does not rely on soldiers but the fact that all buildings with no territory root near convert to Gaia. This bypasses the limit on dogs as each kennel gives 10 more to the limit now, I have tested this and made 100 dogs with ten kennels. This should bypass fort limits too but I have not tested that. It is mostly impractical in competitive games, but I believe that dog kennels are exploitable enough to be potentially competitive. Dog kennels are super easy to convert, small, and don't even require a tower as a few farmsteads can allow you to remove them from your border. In longer games with more people this becomes stronger.

I don't think it would make a big difference (Especially given you already replaced most of the textures in your mod). Do you have reason to believe the converse? The reason all meshes need all the maps now (though most of them use a very light 2x2 norm and spec), is because shader switching is expensive, and the game needed to switch many variants of the shame shaders depending on the texture maps. If you look at Godot or Unity (Godot is another FOSS engine) materials for instance, they all have all the maps. Since our engine is a bit different we're just a bit more explicit about it. Another big performance hit is the entity variation. Many different units means many different textures to load and unload on the GPU. In your case, if you force all the entities to use the same textures (not identical ones, the same file) you might see improved performance.

Linux Let me test another game haven't had time yet... I compiled previously incorrectly so i can report if improvement..

thanks for your response. I managed to increase the size of the map, now it is 896, but the players really didn't work out =[

Can you report this either in a gitea ticket or in langbarts ticket i linked in the other thread ? This way we can assign it to a28 and not forget about it in 8 months

ok yeah I can already tell that they still occur in a26 and that they still disrupt the GUI. Its easiest to tell by panning. Indeed, even early on, there is a slight freeze every 4 sec. state_hash_check is unlogged in a26, but I can see 4MS jumps coinciding with the stutter every 4 sec. I'll see how large they get

From what I understand, we are still figuring out why it seems to be worse. The unfortunate thing is that aside from this, the performance really is strikingly better: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7589#issuecomment-111582 (red is a26, green is a27). So this is essentially holding back the benefits of the work that was done, at least for MP. Ok, so here are 3 profiles of combat demo huge in multiplayer, along with one with quick hash only: fullhashCDH.jsonp nofullhashCDH.jsonp a26CDH.jsonp rc1CDH.jsonp I can't tell any significant difference between the magnitude of the full hash across these alphas, they all seem to be 120 to 150MS for me.

I mean alot of games have tasks/routine that come with the genre, but that's not what i said anyway. You still need to adapt to the game and what's happening around you and be faster than the enemy. And thats excactly the unfair advantage it gives opposed to someone who doesn't use it, dont you see that? You're being really obtuse about it tbh. I'm sure there are people that would love to play it. It honestly sounds like total war games are better suited for your RTS itch if all you want to do is slay but w/e.

My guess is what registers for faster PC players as a stutter, a brief hiccup, could be far, far worse for players with a lower spec PC. The 'gaps' you see below represent the former: This is what it looks like for a full TG, you can see the effect of the stutter for sure. This is a 19 minute foothills TG. the blue lines are normal turns that take very little time to compute, and the gaps are the full hashing. We have done these for a long time, but I suspect that in addition to improvements in other areas revealing the stutter, we might also have more to hash overall. So yeah there is full hashing in replays. I'll look at earlier versions and see if the hashing gap remains large like this. if you want to profile stuff, there is a really excellent guide on how to do it here: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/Profiler2

Forts haven’t had root for awhile and only did in a24. This was one of the many things that a24 did that was pretty widely disliked and pretty swiftly undone. Root was removed because it created incredibly long (and boring) games since defeating an enemy effectively required a total decimation of their base. This took a long time and was disfavored. (There were other aspects of a24 that contributed to overly long games and this was just one aspect of it) No. It was a change in a27. @real_tabasco_sauce and I both separately raised concerns about it at the time. I think @real_tabasco_sauce ultimately changed cav capture stats to mitigate some of the concern. I think that was a good change and fixed a lot of what would’ve been a problem. I also think it was needed for other reasons. I don’t like the current mechanic and prefer the old version. https://code.wildfiregames.com/rP27142

cc @Langbart for https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/7510

i guess you don't mean me in this context Because i am definetly against the automation - but what i meant to say is that fairness in terms of equal conditions for everyone is the most important aspect for me. I prefer definetly to juggle all balls.

The description isn't generated, it's written so for some buildings it's inaccurate. Example the Persian palace does provide territory root but it's not noted in desc.

@Atrik I want to add to my posts that i really don't want to discredit your work and effort for the ProGUI in general. As far as i have read about it you introduce some interesting and useful features that might also be considerable for an implementation in the vanilla version, e.g. showing idle barracks or buildings (I mean vanilla already shows idle units). A lot of respect for that. All the improvements of a GUI that are not really automating tasks, are not of my concern. I also don't want to throw the autotrainer and startup-script in the same basket with the cheats, that reveal the map or reveal enemy stats and chat. This is also another level, imo. But still automation makes a difference and does change the required attention and concentration and multitasking. This is what many players judge as unfair. If automating the unit production would be part of vanilla, and hence used by all players there would be even conditions as well. I could also live with that - because it would also reestablish fair competition. I expect of a multiplayer game, that skill decides. You can compare your performance with others, learn from replays, improve your eco-management and hopefully improve your gameplay and lvl. So that rating at the end means a thing. What could i learn from replays of a player using automation or how could i compare my skill level with yours if i wanna stick with the vanilla? Surely, atm this is my problem and i can avoid it if i don't play with people who use the autotrainer (still this is not visible to me before a game)... but basically i would prefer if there would exist a common understanding and gaming culture. I know i am only talking about a feeling here, which might be considered naive. But, just given the fact that there is a rating system (even if it is definetly not perfect), leads me to the assumption that the developers intended to provide it to make a fair comparison of skill levels possible. If we had dedicated servers, the providers could define their own rules of gameplay for their server and ban certain tools. But we don't have that, nor do we obviously have means of simple detection for cheats in general. So imo it would be favourable that for now it is visible for everyone what WFG considers as unfair and/or cheating, which includes answering the question if they tolerate autotrainers and startupscripts or not. I just miss the orientation here and it is obvious that others have the same issue, because the point 8. of the TOS is obviously too vague to give a clear guidance. It could be added, that "when not explicitly mutually agreed on..." But i guess, after this endless discussion, which turns out to change nothing that i have to call my games tg(vanilla), as @TheCJ recommended and trust that people switch the autotrainer and the startup script off when we play together.

Is it in this file? + recompilation? # grep -R "turn % 20 == 0" simulation2/system/TurnManager.cpp: if (turn % 20 == 0) I will try it, if it gives me normal responses I'm ok temporary using it this way, so others will just ignore OOS.

@real_tabasco_sauce Could you take this version for a spin see how it feels ?

the onager is a catapult (army camp/arsenal)

I've just discovered that you add ignored user on forum, that's great. I can add @BreakfastBurrito_007 so I don't feel the need to explain/debunk every bs claim he repeat in circles, after I already debunked them multiple times.

Lost tomb of Thutmose II discovered near Luxor It's the first discovery of a royal tomb belonging to an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh since the discovery of King Tutankhamun in 1922 and the last royal grave from the 18th dynasty.

I think this kind of comments from a leading developer is the reason why a bunch of old school players have the feeling that 0ad devs, which are almost never seen in the lobby, live a bit disconnected from reality and disregard players opinions. Here Itms says in a dismissive tone and with categorial certainty that a27 MUST be more preformant than a26 given all the performance improvements released on the latest alpha. Guess what Itms: For a lot of players a27 performs WAY worse than a26. And devs have been degrading 0ad perceived performance over the years even as computers have been getting more powerful. You should be asking yourself why, instead of denying reality. While a handful of players reported an increase in performance, and some did not notice a change, i would say half or more feel the performance of 27 is worse in 4v4 games. Even veteran players and hosts like Said have expressed they lost a lot of motivation to play 4v4s anymore due to the extreme lag we experience in a27. Chrsgtr went out to say that he thinks this alpha is the one that will kill 0ad due to the lag. Related question: Is there any way i can install alpha23 on linux without recompiling? Any appimage or other source is available. I would love to do some tests, because i am pretty confident I will make some very interesting discoveries of how performance has evolved over the last 5 alphas. Alpha 23 was the last alpha that had 2 turns per second among other things, and the last alpha i remember ran decently well on rather older CPUs. I would appreciate if someone could point me to official executables for linux for alpha 23. I will prob not download a compilation from a random player tho probably, for security reasons. If the official executables are not available, i would also appreciate some instructions on how to compile myself. Thanks.

This video below shows you how to re-compile A27 and edit the engine code so that hash is removed. This is exactly what I did this afternoon: By the way welcome to my new channel ! This one is for Linux users. I will look into Windows tomorrow.

I played a lot of games where @BreakfastBurrito_007 was spec and had it off. That's also why he is obviously blatantly lying to fit his narration. My game-play is exactly the same, early 2 cav scouts, often followed by cav or inf rush, high female count in late game etc, often successfully. He will just recall the fails I have even it's a minority of games and that I fail big time all the time with autotrainer at a similar rate ~35%. Basically I know that I need only very short adaptation time to get my brain to make the very interesting part of training units manually then the difference with or without is imperceptible. The limiting factor of economic development is resource balancing and build order. Units can be autoqueued (vanilla) and the efficiency of batching doesn't matter that much (There was even some posts that argued that smaller batch are more efficient, theses posts are simplifying calculation too much but that's another topic). So in any cases, the important parts of what make you successful in a game will be tactics/micro (and build order) and strategy. The small tasks of having to scroll to optimal batch size and re-click production buildings every once in a while are just unimportant frustrations of a limiting UI. It's just my opinion ofc and I respect others as long as you're not dishonest like @BreakfastBurrito_007.

As long as it doesn't affect balance and game mechanics, it's fine. Atrik always uses ProGUI so his level is consistent and we can balance him accordingly. We don't know his level if we take ProGUI away from him, but we can easily balance him as of now. Similarly, if you take my cube trees away from me, you will see a 1350 player struggling to put down storehouses.

As someone who uses ProGUI Trainer from time to time, but not in 1v1s and also not when im asked to, i can definitely tell it gives me an advantage, it makes me a better player. It makes my boom 30s faster on average, but really helps me in micro-intensive situations where normally i would just forget to queue units. My number 1 issue about playing 0ad is the sole impact of the "boom" on the gameplay. If you are a 20% faster boomer, probably every strategy you choose will work (at somehow equal microing skills). For me an RTS should have less focus on queueing the right amount of troops but managing your economy and strategic warfare. Then again i am unsure about my own use of ProGUI, sometimes it feels like I'm not really playing the game, and i agree with @BreakfastBurrito_007: "They're not playing the same game"... I got used to using it so much that when i play without the trainer i always forget to click troops, so I feel almost forced to use it to fulfil my own expectations. Yesterday i decided to not use it anymore (cuz i got beaten by @chrstgtr). Yet i consider the GUI (now called ModernGUI) to be the best one available right now, with helpers like idle barrack display.

If everybody in a match explicitly agrees to the usage of cheats, I wouldn't consider using them an unfair advantage. From my perspective that'd be fine and similar to a game where the "cheats" setting is enabled. However, I believe that's a pretty rare scenario and not what this thread is about.

Please be civil guys. Also, never attribute to malice what can be explained with ignorance. On that note; as much as I enjoy playing with you @Atrik, I think you are mistaken in this case. I could be wrong, but judging from my experience and the messages in this and other threads, there are certainly players that do not know about who uses ProGUI and who doesnt. I myself played atleast 10-20 teamgames with you before I ever went to the forums and got to know about proGUI. Now granted, since then I know you use it and I still love playing with you, but there was a time I didnt know. And others (especially newer players) will be the same. Now, I got a question to the "other side" ( @BreakfastBurrito_007, @strat0spheric, @Dunedan): Would I not be "allowed" (technically), to host a "hack vs hack" game, where everybody is encouraged to use as many cheats as possible? Even if it is absolutely clear that it's a "hack vs hack"? I mean, its definitely not "intended gameplay" and it would also not be "same conditions for everyone" since they would use different cheats. But I am certain there are people who would have fun playing this. Its like playing a very "silly" mod of the game. AoE2 also has "AI tournaments", where scripters pit their Bots against one another. Thing is, I believe everyone in this thread agrees that visibility is key. Atrik said himself he would like everyone to know that hes using proGUI (or atleast he said he think they already do). And it would also be better for the host. But until there is a implementation of that in the game, I would like to ask; 1. The host of a game to specify allowed mods in the title ("tg progui welcome" or "tg vanilla") 2. The users of "questionable" mods to declare which mods they are using before the start (if the title of the tg does not specifically allow said mods) Both does not take much time and might alleviate the issue at hand. Edit: Then we could also more undoubtedly take disciplinary action against people that are noticed to use such mods without declaring them, as it becomes clear it was done in a deceiving manner.

This is an oversimplification of the situation. As ffm correctly points out, the full hashing is a feature that cannot be removed lightly. We are working actively on the issue, as you can see from the linked technical discussions. What we will not do is hurriedly release a new version. We are carefully fixing a few bugs the right way which will take time. Thanks to our new git workflow, we are able to prepare a 0.27.1 release in an orderly way, something that wasn't possible in the past. It will also take some time to get the process right, as it will be our first patch release. The future release 28 is in active development and should be out in Q4 of 2025. I cannot give you an estimate for 27.1, but it will be as fast as humanly possible on our 100% volunteer free time. If A27 is not playable for some people, then it means it was even worse for them in A26. Indeed, full hashes were performed in A26 as well. The numerous performance improvements we released are just making that bottleneck prominent. It is alarmist and totally incorrect to insinuate that A27 would have higher spec requirements than A26.

How is anyone to know that no one is hiding it? lol If you are so ethical, why don't you support features that allow everyone to know what mods you are using? lol

One can only agree. Is there a screnario or build that you think the autotrainer feature doesn't allow you to adapt your production too? In my experience you have much better control, and feeling of control of your production and army composition with the suggested autotrainer overlay. You probably make very informed judgement, and you seems to have stake in mp. What's your lobby account name if I might ask? Anyway you might also be one that will start replying with quick claims and insults, I might be guilty of doing it too but better I stop replying to this thread.

What attracted me in the first place to games of this genre is strategy, macro, teamwork... @Grapjas if you get satisfaction out of making repetitive tasks that's ok. The mechanical skill of clicky stuff for me just gets in the way of game enjoyment, I prefer having time to think when playing rather then just only learning to queue up brain tasks. I don't know exactly what proportion of players would actually prefer game with less clicky UI, but it's surely not 0%. Also once again with remarks on skill and leagues and whatnot, I'm considered the same when balancing a game with me disallowed to use "automation", I let you conclude what you want of that, eventually stooping to make stupid remarks on this being related to """"""""skill"""""""".