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Any tool, be it GUI mod or any other mod, that helps one player play the game faster than the other player, is cheating. In RTS games, time is a very important factor. It's in the name. If something helps me play faster than you and it's not an official part of the game, then that something is a "cheat" tool. I think this is obvious.

"Bad" maps can be challenging and the imbalanced design can be viewed as additional fun factor, especially if the map is pretty or "looks cool". Pompeii, for example, is a horrible map. But, it looks cool and the buildable layout provides some challenge to the player. A better criteria would be to either remove or update maps where the AI is broken. No use in keeping a map that's useless for SP.

@LienRag, one option could be to move access to Battering Rams to the Town phase. No Catapults and Bolt shooters, just rams. This would allow more military options, earlier. Reasoning is that in all "Age of" games, players have access to siege weapons in the second-to-last age. Weak reasoning, I know. Here's a better one: no more only "boom and turtle to win" strategies. No need to do it in the next release, though. EDIT: Also off-topic, so regard the above thought as just me thinking out-loud.

Screen Recording 2025-04-05 103826.mp4 here is my more recent "best of both worlds" approach. This improves lag in 2 ways: Corpses accelerate slightly, allowing them to spend less time under the surface and less time overall spent decaying. This means fewer corpses will accumulate. (i could also reduce the time it takes for corpses to start decaying). Corpse position is update at 1/150th of the current rate, implemented with a random chance. This also makes things look less homogenous. This second part is much greater an improvement than one might expect. Even when the same number of units are decaying at the same time (as in the below profile), cutting down on the unnecessarily high update frequency results in a substantial improvement to rendering performance. So with this PR https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/7616, players might not need to turn corpses off as is done in autociv.

They're usually easier to safely evacuate though. While it is true that I (generally) have more women on food than people on wood, it's not by that margin and due to a. a lot of food going in tec upgrades and b. champ cav costing 1.5-2 x the food (that's what I'm mostly producing late game).

Base gather rate for fields is 0.5, Base gather rate for wood is 0.8/0.75 So one woman on a field gives 0.5 food/second, while one woman on wood gives 0.75 wood/second. Also, gathering from fields becomes less effective the more women you put on one field.

Also, women are useless in a fight while soldiers can at least defend your town. Another aspect to consider.

You seem to lack expertise of the game. For example, women are more expensive than half of the prize of a soldier: Food is more expensive than wood, and both units cost 1 population space...

IIRC it starts on the default creen so maybe you could swap the default and this one. Looking at your screenshot it seems you also have display scaling which might cause issues. You might try to launch the game with SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland if fedora uses that.

I'm just talking about what the user base most likely looks like. When you have hundred of thousands of new installs/downloads and virtually no observable user growth then you have a retention problem. That is obvious. With how many downloads/installs we have, I think it is pretty likely that most new players play the game for an extremely short period of time (because it is too difficult--learning curve that a better tutorial could help with) or never play it at all (because there isn't a campaign mode--more on that later). It's often said that the SP community is larger. But there is virtually no evidence to support that. The inverse is largely true too. It's been said many times, but the SP experience needs to improve if we want the user base to grow. Some of those SPs will then convert to MP, which will cause the MP base to grow too. I think a better AI and campaign mode are the obvious ways to improve the SP experience. A dumb AI means that most players will eventually get bored by the game because it is too easy. I don't think I need to explain why a campaign mode is needed. One thing that is almost certain is that the retention problem will not be fixed by new features. New players are much more likely to be initially overwhelmed than wanting for a new spy functionality (or whatever).

We're doing this for the 1500+ players playing the game each day, the 25k Ubuntu snap installs, the 300k download per year and the 150+ installs per day on Flathub.

I'm not going to continue to develop for or play a game that's riven by cheating.

Hello ! I am posting this for Chesnutter, cause he asked me to I think these are great and probably ambitious ideas for improvement of the game.... (i hope this is the right place for it .. if not please move it) Hey, I’m a Roman history fan so my knowledge and focus is on them more than other ancient civs. I think these would make playing as and against the Romans more authentic, fun and challenging. Bear in mind I have no coding experience but here are my ideas. So, Roman engineer (unit) builds trenches, traps and roads. OR it could be just the basic infantry unit. Historically, Roman soldiers were part fighter and part builder. I think a greater emphasis in 0ad of this would make it more real. Trenches (with spiky stakes or simply a deep empty moat (with/without water): - Doesn’t prevent enemy infantry movement across but slows them down a lot (80% speed reduction) - Doesn’t damage infantry unless spikes/stakes tech upgrade (like a gate in a wooden wall however you could double click to select all trenches in view to upgrade them to have stakes all at the same time - Requires a lot of wood. - Cheap and fast to build compared to walls but in some ways less effective. Available in phase one, degrades over time(?). Built like a wall across an area. Good against early cav rushes. Prevents cav and siege from crossing. 2. Traps/pits « lilies »: - heavily damages and slows down enemy infantry and cav, but doesn’t damage rams. - Expensive to build. - Built along an area (shown as a bunch of small holes with spikes in them) - Barely visible for a realistic element of surprise. Maybe once enemy units have been damaged they become viable to the enemy (like trenches degrades over time). Would this be hard to code? 3. Roads - speed up movement of units (allied AND enemy). - Available in phase one though maybe cost prohibitive unless teammates contribute resources - which I think would be cool, increasing teamwork and community interaction (which is what I like about gaming). - Built out on the terrain and any units moving on it move 20-25-30% faster. - Requires wood and a lot of stone. - Built mostly straight to make it user-friendly (curved or zigzag roads wouldn’t be playable). - Shift right click to make the units go from point A to point B (so they walk along the road). - Or it could work a bit like a hero/monk where when they are near the road they move faster (but less visually appealing IMO). Does this make sense from a user POV? - Roads could be built through forests, bogs, hills, rivers etc... just like the Romans did it. I don't think roads would make the romans OP because the cost would be fronted by the user building it but it could also be used against him. *Roads are one of the things that made it possible for Rome to conquer the known world (and for them to be conquered themselves by « barbarians” in the 200-400s AD), so I specifically like this idea. 4. (Non-Roman) Need to be stronger against Siege. Wooden walls should be cheaper to build and faster. To make possible what Caeser did in his Gallic wars. Ie Alesia. OTHER GENERAL IDEAS to increase historical accuracy and more interesting game play. Range bonus for troops/siege on hills. Attack + defense/health bonus for troops hills. More implementation for defensive formations (like Romans) but that players actually want to use. Slow attrition for armies not in allied/home territory. Attrition for armies/troops in the sun VS healing rate for troops in the shade/forests. Defensive bonus for troops fighting on edge of forest (to imitate guerrilla tactics). 0zon “Cost surface” ideas + some input from me. “With a cost surface function recalculating range or walking speed etc. based on attributes such as slope, altitude or landuse type (forest, meadow etc.) some of the ideas could be maybe technically implemented..…” - 0zon Reduced speed walking up hills. Reduced speed walking through forests/bogs/sandy areas. Increased speed for troops on flat/non hilly ground (specifically for cav). Rams can only move on flat open terrain. Increased fertility/food gains on flat grassy areas (for farms). Increased building costs on non-flat lands. Forests that regrow. Rams get attack bonus when garrisoned. Allied temple’s aura also heals troops. An idea from LeiftheLucky (I think) Ranged units have only a certain amount of ammo and then they have to use melee or/and go back to allied territory/cc/barracks/garrison to replenish stock. Keep up the good work and THANK YOU! Chesnutter on 0ad Edited several times for spelling and formatting

A variant that wasn't discussed so far is to make the time of disappearance configurable. For instance corpses stay for 5 seconds (use slider for slider sake!). This way the the information corpses provide remain reliable while avoiding the visual oddity of the corpse limit approach. The performance gain would also be similar in most cases.

We all know that current citizen-soldiers can work and build buildings, as well as fight. This has been a major turn off for many people who came from Age of Empires and similar games. Instead of regurgitating all that's been said in the past, I'll just post a link to a comment that described it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32993448 So, I'll propose a system that's already present in some mods for the game, with a few caveats. The major changes would include the following. 1) Citizen-soldiers are no longer citizens. They are basic soldiers that can't gather any resource, but can still build some military buildings. Rationale is that this separates the responsibilities between your fighting units and economic units. This is a key trait that has defined RTS genre from the beginning. 2) Women are replaced by a "Citizen" unit that is randomly assigned a gender when created. These citizens are your economic units. They can gather resources, build all buildings, repair, etc. They don't have different gather rates, the difference is cosmetic. They cost only 50 food, so you don't waste wood on building any gatherers in the early game. Obviously, this requires a new model for male citizens. 3) Common soldiers can only be trained at the Barracks, Stables or Archery Ranges. Soldiers will not be able to build Civic Centers, nor should they be trainable from the Civic Centers. Some mercenary units that cost Metal could be made as an exception to this rule. 4) Common soldiers can still gain ranks as normal. No change is required here. Players can choose to train cheaper, more expendable units, or spend more resources for champions. I don't want to sound divisive, but the current model is very off-putting for someone who just wants to sit down and play a fun game. Different gather rates for females and male citizen-soldiers are the core of this issue. Why keep this feature and needlessly complicate the player's decision making in the early game? The player should gain options as he/she advances through the phases, builds up their town, researches upgrades. Not immediately at the start. Not to mention the balance considerations, the needless code that went into implementing a very questionable design decision. Even from the historical standpoint. Thank you for reading all this. If not, here's a TL:DR: Citizen-soldiers are an outdated concept, that has needlessly complicated the gameplay of this very promising RTS game for so long. The player must have a clear decision-tree at the start of each game, and gain options as he/she advances through the phases. The player shouldn't be punished for making gatherers (the wood cost). There should be a clear distinction between economic and military units. A new "Citizen" unit could replace the female worker, with a new male model added for each civilization. Citizen-soldiers could become just basic, expendable troops.