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Yet another approach might be to set the bot's behavior to defensive (via the cog in match setup); expect heavy losses when you do engage, but at least they're not messing up your settlement and eco.

@WiseKind At this point, you "arguments" start to sound like trolling to me. I'm not reading all of that because you said and they literally can't be compared. The devs are addressing this and it will most likely be fixed in the next release. Can't read everything, sorry.

I installed this package and replaced llvm and it worked! Thank you so much! For later people who encounter similar problems: install llvm-dev and remove the other llvm packages. The list of build dependencies should include git-lfs curl llvm-dev

Especially considering what AFistfulofDollars (Geriatrix) just said about me in the gamesetup page of Barcodes TG. You saw that. He also claimed that this @WiseKind is my smurf (clearly wrong). @WiseKind maybe you and @Dunedan should address this. Atrik I consider you to be one of the most intelligent players in the lobby, please stay calm and carry on with your valuable work. Let's not be distracted by haters nor fall prey to Geriatrix trolling.

The majority of comments here are coming from SP players afaik giving opinion on what MP should be. It is... puzzling. They also post elsewhere that MP community have too much influence on game development (??!!). So this is definitely a troll topic that cannot be taken even the slightest seriously. As for fun, MP players also play for fun. There will never be 'pros' players on a free game, they are just designated this way when they are regular players.

Unless you can provide some evidence supporting this claim, I don't think this will convince many (I for one highly doubt this statement). In my experience, this is not true. In fact, they seem to be interlinked to an astonishing degree. Whenever I play a 4v4 teamgame and it starts to lag, I stop being able to concentrate on many things at once; I literally start waiting for my units to execute the orders I gave them and my APM drops significantly. While playing 1v1 I have no problem micro-managing 3 different armies and my economy simultaneously, because it doesn't lag. Atleast in my case, being able to click fast is a necessity for me to be able to think fast. Accessibility tools in this context are inherently just accepted advantages to mitigate disadvantages a person has that hes not responsible for. So it is a performance tool, otherwise it can't be an accessibility tool (what good would a tool for a disabled person be if it didnt help him?).

@Seleucids, "llvm" is a binary package in Debian. What you need to check for is llvm-dev https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=llvm-dev "-dev" packages are for building stuff from source.

A good example of how to defend against double rush in a TG: I foiled all of the rusher's sneaky attacks until he rage quitted ! @AInur thanks for the op save and carry! General tips to defend against cav rush: Position woodlines at the front of your base - you can see incoming cav and start damaging them. Start mining early, with just a few infantry on stone and metal. They will protect your farms Always have houses near your women. Make sure there is enough garrison space for all nearby women. Always mix melee inf and ranged inf. Take hunt between you and your enemy - food income while spying. Invest in outposts if the enemy is very aggressive.

I do wish for some of the Autociv hotkeys to be merged in th emain game. It has been long due.

I don't completely agree... GUI makes me faster cause i can diffiernciate between berries and trees better. The colors are more clear. So for older people, people with poor vision etc, I think gui is necessary to play the game well. If the base game wanted to make brighter more vibrant colors then I wouldn't need gui Are we also saying that Autociv is cheating because it allows for more hot keys? hot keys tend to be very important in all RTS game no? But if the base game doesn't have standard hot keys, people are going to make their own.

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.

One of the problems in the above suggestion is in the above. This might work on a LAN, but one should consider the case when the server is on the other side of the globe than the client. In that case the ping becomes much higher (at least 133ms since that is the time that light would need to travel the distance, so it probably will be 250-300ms, try https://www.meter.net/tools/world-ping-test/). This will give noticeable lag on moving the camera, opening any menu, highlighting units etc. Secondly, I doubt many players will have a computer able to compute the rendering for all players and observers. Sure one can come up with neutral servers who are able to compute it for small matches (and yes dedicated/headless servers are definitely something wanted), but having a reliable ecosystem for this is another (financial among other things) issue.

Taking your idea further: some "fair" third guy with an OP computer hosts 2 virtual machine instances each with a 0ad process running inside. Then each VM is made accessible 1 player via parsec or TeamViewer or whatever. Both will then have to play according to the rules that you have set up in your VM. And then the latency and network lags kick in...

While I'm against "wild west" in competitive gaming (in extremes it will become a challenge of automation tools). I completely agree with the incentive to make game fair by-design. 1. In order to make game fair and truly transparent it is essential to play competitive matches without fog of war. I understand it is not THAT fun, but at least it eliminates a possible map reveal hack. 2. I do not agree with the quote above that sharing only relevant state is not possible and here is where I come from: I can easily play 0ad game via Parsec(remote desktop application). So my host computer simulates and renders 0ad, captures frames and sends me only video stream which is limited to 10 mbit/s. Total video stream lag is 20ms (encode 7ms, network(LAN) 13ms, decode 10ms) and game is very much playable. Which is an extreme edge case showing that sending only relevant information is possible. So let's derive a useful solution from that: if two players Alice and Bob want to play a very important competitive match I could host a game for them on my computer. Running two vanilla instances of 0ad, and give them access via remote desktop(be it parsec or whatever else). Thus they won't be able to reveal what's under fog of war in any way and their computers will never access the full simstate. This last example shows that it is ultimately possible to do that. I assume that video stream(knowing nothing about it's content) is way less optimized that the game could be. I also totally understand that my network is low latency and supporting less reliable connections is harder, but again if you look at a video stream it gets jelly and pixelated when network has hiccups, it doesn't make game OOS. @bb_ what do you think about this?

It's not a full campaign mode. It lacks a lot of hallmarks of a classic campaign mode too. It was only a side project for one of the devs. "Competitive" doesn't mean SP. Most MP games aren't "competitive." There just isn't anything to suggest the long-term SP audience is larger than the MP audience. I don't know how long you've been playing. But the AI for 0AD is really dumb. It literally doesn't know how to use all the buildings. It attacks the closest/building and then follows it until it kills it. There are literally videos online where players exploit how dumb AI is to win 1v7 while only making women. That isn't an AI that can retain many long-term SPs because once you get decent at the game it very quickly becomes too easy and boring. You, again, have absolutely zero basis for this. There are literally hundreds of thousands of downloads/installs. Yet the observable user count doesn't go up. That means most users only for an extremely short period of time. So short that most users cannot possibly learn all the features that exist. I do not understand how you can possibly think adding more features will retain more users when the typical user hasn't discovered most of what already exists. To them there are no "old features." Everyone wants a game where it's mechanics work together.

It is an assumption that 0AD being an RTS game has more casual games.because all RTS have higher casual audiences than competitive ones. The only difference is that 0 AD doesn't have any content geared toward that audience. In most RTS the AI are not very smart.The complexity is given by the map and the resources in addition to being an asymmetric challenge. I highly doubt it, gamers always want new things to test. Obviously performance and quality in controlling units and play helps a lot. That's why new installments are expected, with new civs in Age of Empires. People want the same old stuff but with new features...But at the same time people want a classic burger than a new mushroom bacon cheeseburger... You get it? I mean, it's not just the novelty itself, but also how all these mechanics work together. Although here the conversation started talking about cheats online. I don't know why people aren't honest about something that brings you nothing but fun.

The campaigns generate videos on YouTube and in quite a lot of them.

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).

It depends on a lot of things. What I like about 0 AD is that it's unique, and it's not easy to put down. There are people who have been away from this game for years, and there are people who would like to hear about new features. There are people who abandon it because RTS games have learning curves.It is not a popular genre. Casual players are the ones who spread the game the most since they are the majority in all video games.

We have to take advantage of the fact that AoE is not having a good moment. Companies aren't taking the risk of investing, and the video game industry in general is in a bad spot. Therefore, I believe that Microsoft and World Edge are not going to take any more risks and are receiving criticism from many non-conformist players.

I'm one of the non-MP players I don't like serious competition and putting in effort just to win. I prefer something lighthearted and beautiful I could amuse myself with as a relaxing activity, for which 0AD is one of my favorite choices. If I would ever play multiplayer, it would be with someone I'm quite familiar with so I could spend some quality time with them. In my opinion this game has much greater potential and I believe it is possible to develop it in ways that support all kinds of players, not just those who play multiplayer regularly. For example, attention could also be given to campaigns, innovative different game types and ways to experience life and politics of the ancient world, like what @wowgetoffyourcellphone has done with Delenda Est. That's why I believe 0AD has the potential to become something greater than classic RTS games by integrating new and unique concepts into the gameplay. I'm sure the vast majority of players would be very excited to experience something like that, and you could let multiplayers have their cake too (sans cheating, of course)

It isn’t clear how many SPs there are or how long they play for. We do know that there are (at least) like 2K total players a day (split between SP and MP). But it isn’t clear how many of those players downloaded the game that day and are testing it out vs. how many of those players have been playing for multiple months. No matter how you look at it, though, there is a huge retention problem if there are 300K downloads and we only observe a steady 2K players or so (i.e., no real growth in user count). It also means that some portion of that 2K player count is probably a stream new users that come play for a short time before they leave and are replaced by another new user that will only play for a short time. We also see this constant stream of new players in the forums where a new user comes along makes a few posts for a week or two and then disappears (sometimes forever) Personally, I suspect there are about an equal number of long-term SP and MP users, which reflects what we see on the forum.

Do all of them play multiplayer? If that's multiplayer, the potential casual audience is larger. No they do not. IIRC it's about 100 unique MP players per day.

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.

How do you avoid that if it is opensource?

All of this essentially just means "Dont change anything"... ... except maybe add a convenience feature, that lets hosts list what mods they allow. I have no idea how you would add the "automatically honor those policies", as that is literally the same as adding some anti-cheat system, no? If the host declares "no mods" and you somehow force all clients that join to honor this policy, thats an anti-cheat system. Ah, btw, I agree with @WiseKind. I believe that at this point in time, there is no change needed to address "cheating" in any way. Any energy spent on that would be better spent on improving the balance and performance, adding to the content (through maps, scenarios, civs) or just... playing the game.

Because i think the post was well written and the author put in effort.

darn, @WiseKind got time on his hands and a fire in his heart. If you were to become a programmer for 0ad, you could have such a positive impact on this project (not saying you aren't having a positive impact right now). My good fella @WiseKind, I gotta say, we ain't gettin nowhere. This thread's lookin productive to ya? Must be cause' its yer first. The main problem is precisely that we can not agree on what is cheating and what is not. You are truly correct with what you said about us not having to subscribe to any specific notion of what constitutes cheating. Indeed, we can make up what cheating is to 0ad. But to actually create a definition of "cheating in 0ad", atleast the core team would have to agree on that issue (and since they seem to listen to us lowly players, we all would have to agree). That will not happen, because we all like different aspects of the game and we all have different believes of what this game should become and different backgrounds, under which we interact with the game and its community. The one thing we do agree about (even @WiseKind, the total freedom representative) is that cheating should not become widespread. @WiseKind says only "stuff like revealing the map" (I know thats a sloppy phrase, you know what I mean) is a cheat and the best way to suppress that is by programming a different networking system, (with the goal of making "cheating" simply impossible). Other people say that even extensive GUI changes (without any sort of automation) can be cheating, as it makes the game unfair. Obviously, "cheating" like that cannot be stopped entirely and a suppression needs certain measures, whose use @WiseKind disagrees with (saying the measures would inherently stop the game from being open source). I imagine there are also some people that think GUIs are fine, as long as they do not train any units for you/build any buildings for you or smt similar (Im not talking about proGUI here, btw). The measures against this kind of "cheating" would again differ from the other two. But to actually determine which measures should be taken (if any), we need to precisely formulate the issue (and agree that it is indeed an issue). In so far this thread was a little helpful, as we got a pretty precise look into what @WiseKind believes is cheating and what should be done about that. (For @WiseKind this thread was even more valuable, as he got to hear each of our standpoints.) Now, to move on: How would we decide on what "cheating" is in 0ad? In essence, when somebody talks about cheating, they mean any kind of modification that works against the concept of fair, competitive play, or would anybody disagree with that description? If we agree that the competitive challenge of 0ad should truly only be "in your head", meaning that the only relevant part of the game is in your decisions, and not at all in the execution of those decisions, then any GUI mod can never be cheating (up to the point where you let a script make decisions for you). If we agree that the competitive challenge of 0ad should include not only the decisions, but also their execution ("micro"), (as is the case in every other RTS), then any GUI mod that reduces the amount of inputs you have to give for the same result is cheating.

I get the feeling that you didn't even read or consider my full argument. Yes, you were focusing on in-game tools. I understood that much. I was making the point that these tools should not be regulated, and I tied this to two statements that I have already made more than once throughout this thread: The effect of these tools can be somewhat compared to the effect of life factors such as fatigue or stress, something we already generally don't try to regulate just for an online match. There are two different aspects of the gameplay experience: the mental challenge of keeping track of everything, and the mechanical challenge of implementing the strategy that one has chosen. I claim that mods mostly only help with the latter, which is already not relevant to skill because the game does a good job at keeping the required keystrokes to a manageable level, at least in my opinion. Nor should it be relevant to skill, because a game where skill is capped by a player's typing speed doesn't sound like fun at all. I'd like you to tackle these statements individually in order to claim that these mods can be described as a cheat (which, in this context, can be understood as a way to replace the needed skills to play the game competitively). And they say I'm the one making all the assumptions... I was just repeating something that @Atrik said in the old thread that got deleted. Perhaps I should have been more clear that this isn't my original idea, so I apologize for that. Maybe ask Atrik what made them say that, but in the meantime, here's the rest of my case. Illustrating my point with an example Let's bring into focus the imaginary scenario that everyone has probably already thought about, but don't want to put it into words for some reason or another. Suppose a player is VERY new to the game, either on about my skill level (Hard Petra Bot is my limit), or even weaker. I can go back to my old replays, and I almost always am able to describe the mistakes I made in strategic terms (spending too much time finding a food source in the early game, or focusing too much on early-game research and not enough on training units, etc.). Now suppose that player installs ProGUI, and uses the feature that everyone has been describing, which allows the player to set-and-forget their unit training routine, and if I remember correctly, resource gathering as well. A new player sets their rally point on the starting resources and hits "go", and they can passively watch the same early-game progression that other (good) players are used to manually performing. Problem #1: I have developed the belief that what makes a player "good" or "bad" can almost always be described in strategic terms. If you need more evidence for this claim, maybe I can pull out some of my old replays, compare them with more recent replays, and add commentary on what I really think was going wrong there. In this hypothetical example, what is making the player bad is that they don't know how to implement this strategy manually. The mod knows more about how to play the game than they do, which isn't true for even probably me. When spoken like this, it may seem like ProGUI or other tools can be used effectively as a teaching tool for VERY new players, helping them to grasp the concepts that seasoned players take for granted. Features like this may even be considered for the vanilla tutorial; something like a trigger that automatically controls the player's units to show them what semi-decent gameplay might look like. Combined with the tutorial panel, this could be a way to illustrate how a good player thinks. However, this wouldn't go very far, because... Problem #2: This game is (should be) sufficiently diverse and sophisticated that, in this hypothetical example, the VERY new player who is using ProGUI to watch their economy passively grow in ways that don't work in vanilla, would still lack the sufficient strategic understanding of the game to, you know, actually play good. The game starts, and the first thing I do is set my civic center rally point on the starting resources. As a VERY new player, I genuinely see nothing wrong with this! Oh, my population limit was reached? Time to select all of my units and order them to build houses in a row. Every single unit is no longer building resources, and is now walking across my base to build a bunch of houses, which takes a while. Now I can get back to gathering. My berries run out, so I do what the tutorial suggested and build farms next to my civic center. My wood runs out, so I build a storehouse beside the next closest source of wood. I don't build a barracks early-on, or defense towers, or anything else, because I'm a new player and I don't understand any of that. Other players have stated in the past that ProGUI doesn't automate decisions about building construction, which is what I'm going with for this example. But even if it did, it would still be a similar story. It may be true that a new player would benefit greatly from the mod in terms of raw scores, but it doesn't serve as a replacement for knowing how to play. Someone who does know how to play still has to pay attention to everything in order to get the best possible use of the mod. In conclusion: So, I just made this example knowing that there is a whole lot of room for me to have to fill in details that I wouldn't know definitively, so it's worth stating again that I still haven't tried ProGUI, and I know that there's a high chance that a lot of what I just said is inconsistent with the actual mod. I would like to say that this is besides my point. It's just an example, and you can comment on every little thing that I misunderstood, and say that I'm a bigot (I will probably do just that, once I have actually tried it), but these are all minor nitpicks, and my point still stands. My point is that even if a GUI mod is capable of making strategic decisions on the player's behalf, this cannot be considered cheating, because such mechanisms still depend on the player's ability to concentrate and understand what is happening, which will always be necessary. If I am understanding this correctly, your claim is that the lag in the game affects your ability to keep track of everything. I feel like I must put a pin in this and discuss it later, because I obviously don't know what the lag is like, since I've never tried multiplayer. I have tested the multiplayer by running multiple clients on the same computer, and the result is that every command I send has a noticeable delay, but this doesn't make it harder for me to concentrate on what I am doing (not that I was ever trying to, since those tests were mostly an attempt to explore for myself how multiplayer works in 0 A.D.). In the meantime, maybe be more specific about what you mean? Again, I have yet to experience 0 A.D. at a high level, so I can't really make a claim here, but I think it would be helpful for you to be more specific about how this works, if that is possible. The scenario that this makes me think of is one where you input your commands on the keyboard (and don't struggle to do so), but must wait for those commands to be enacted before you can begin thinking ahead. I don't see where a GUI mod fits into the picture here. A GUI mod might reduce the number of required keystrokes, but it wouldn't make the lag go away. If this is your experience, then I don't see how a mod like ProGUI would make it better. And if it is the case that you are struggling to input the key commands fast enough, then I would say that this is the Confusing UI problem like I mentioned above. Being limited by my typing speed doesn't sound like fun at all, and if that happens frequently in a typical rated match, then I would say that 0 A.D. is falling for the Confusing UI snare that they mentioned in the Vision. I think this comment is unfair. I wouldn't say that this is a troll topic that doesn't deserve sincerity. I, for one, have had a lot of fun in this one discussion, and a lot of productive and mature argumentation has already been observed, which I enjoyed a lot. I am feeling the frustration that some forum users don't seem to see my argument eye-to-eye, and make comments that seem to ignore things that I have already said. But neither @Atrik nor @TheCJ are guilty of this, to my knowledge. And it doesn't ruin the whole thread for me. Also keep in mind that this thread is actually several threads in one. There are the following arguments occuring simultaneously here: Are mods like ProGUI and AutoCiv unfair to players who aren't using them? How should we address the flaw in multiplayer that allows any player to reveal the map unfairly? (a completely different question than the one above it) How much of the community is SP-only, and therefore much harder to measure? Emphasis on singleplayer in future Beta versions? About the notorious lag in multiplayer due to poorly-optimized code As you can see, these are completely different topics that have all been brought up at least once in this singular thread. To confuse these disparate questions into one would be a mistake. I would also like to say that every opinion I have stated about "what MP should be" has been on the basis of 0 A.D. being a free software project, and I feel I do have a stake in how certain networking and social structures are implemented, because I don't want to see this great project get ruined because people don't understand my vision of what free software is supposed to be about. But I understand now that I am not going to change the opinion of other people, and I would be better off seeking out a portion of the community who is more welcoming to mod users, letting everyone else do their thing. Hearing this makes me want to try the multiplayer lobby sooner. I did register on the lobby, mostly as a defensive reservation of my username, and when I looked at the list of active games, I saw two people playing a 2v2 versus the Very Easy Petra Bot. If that is what people are using the lobby for, then I might just give it a try, maybe even today. I do plan to try that and ProGUI, mostly because it has been brought up so much, and because understanding what these tools actually are, and how they work, will allow my to better illustrate the opinion I have. But, as I have also already said, my base claim does not depend on specific facts about these specific tools. In this very post, I may have gotten a ton of stuff wrong about ProGUI, and this will probably make me cringe and want to go back and edit my mistakes later, but please understand that my base claim is that there can be no such thing as a GUI cheat mod. Therefore, no fact about these specific tools will ever change my mind. Hopefully you can understand this. I understand the frustration of seeing people make foolish assumptions about your own work, without putting any effort to understand the very thing they are arguing about. But please understand that I am not arguing about ProGUI at all; it's just a useful example that I use to illustrate my base claim that actually has nothing to do with ProGUI, and I am only working with the information that I have gathered from other forum users. If I have misunderstood one of these things that other people have described (and I have misunderstood at least one thing, I'm sure of it), then feel free to correct me, but please don't call me a bigot and say that this entire thread is just a big joke, because it's not. As I have said before, please look past the misunderstandings and see the broader argument being had.

Es libre para cualquiera que quiera descargar y ver el estado actual del mod. Definitivamente no está terminado, de hecho, ni siquiera 0ad está terminado, ¿Entonces no pudiste probar el juego principal? No veo la lógica.