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Ok, we have a community mod release for a27 out now. Here are the main changes: Units no longer get "stuck" attacking low preference units, like buildings. When attacking buildings without player intention, they will check for higher preference units each time they attack. If you told them to attack a building, this does not occur. Walls and palisades can be placed on top of trees, deleting them upon completion. Also, walls and palisades are cheaper, faster building, and weaker. This is to selectively improve their utility early on, while decreasing their effectiveness when spammed all over the map. Stone walls can be destroyed in reasonable time by infantry. Buildings are more difficult to capture while empty. Base building capture point regen: 0.5 -> 5. CC capture point regen: 5 -> 20 Fort capture point regen: 10 -> 30 What this means is you will need a larger capturing advantage over the defender in order to start bringing down capture points. Buildings (except for CCs and Fortresses) are easier to destroy without siege. Hack and Pierce armor are both decreased, so ranged units will now be able to damage buildings, just not as well as melee units. For some buildings, crush armor is decreased from 3 to 2, allowing siege to break through weaker buildings more quickly. Edit: I forgot to mention that cavalry receive a 30% damage debuff vs buildings, which mirrors their existing 30% capture attack debuff. It is my understanding that something along the lines of the last paragraph was intended to come with attacking buildings by default, so we can see what gameplay effects this has. From my own testing, destroying a building is roughly as good as capturing with the same number of units, but buildings don't regen health like they do capture points, so attacking buildings would be better than capturing if there are defending units.

Well hopefully it will be eventually. I did some 1v1s today with it and it turned out that a bug exists. This change is reverted with version 0.27.1 because there was a bug. I'll need to troubleshoot it.

I'm not sure why it is so moody for some people.

What ? Cavalry should be quicker than infantry, making them less distinct from infantry isn't the way to go.

Could be nice indeed. A bit too strong change of balance though, not sure if a middleground can be found. Unable to take garrisonned buildings, maybe (so still able to mount a devastating raid if the enemy makes a mistake).

While 0 AD does have players start with a cavalry, given the importance of hunting as a source of food, it is often relegated to the task of gathering resources, while I have before argued for speed at which they gather food to be slowed down to make early game scouting more relevant, I think that ignores the fact that regardless of how glacial the pace a unit might gather, many would prefer to simply approach the game from a greedy perspective than scout, which I think makes the game weaker; scouting is a key ingredient to most great RTSs. Thus, I think that an argument could be made to have a unit with little to no combat ability and economic value to improve what many have described as a slow and boring early game in the Training Time topic. First, I think that even if these units are only specific to niche skirmish maps, they still should have a place since they could provide good value for future campaigns. If they were to be introduced to regular play, I think that there are some valid questions to ask such as whether they could be trained, how much they would cost in that case, and many more such implications. Athenian and Spartan scouts could be runners, which would obviously benefit any representation of the Persian Wars in campaigns. Persia could have a courier unit, modelling the famous praise Herodotus said regarding the system. Britons could have a smaller dog. Again while I think there is an argument for such units existing in standard play, they certainly would find a great niche for scenarios.

This guy Hanisx insults people in the lobby and in game when he is loosing and he kicks specs when he finds himself in a disadvantageous position. His rating is artificially high because he quits any game that he is loosing. Many people didn't get a chance to report but just looking at the previous few posts of this thread, he is a repeated offender. Can some sanctions be placed? And things got a bit serious:

Thanks, all great and needed changes. Needing siege for every single building, including towers, is just a waste of time. Attack priority change is more of a bug fix, than a change, IMO. Just wanted to ask about it, then I saw this. Thanks. I'll try it, already have community maps mod for a while.

You do know that @Emacz and I are making the historical mod together, right? Historical mod would not be where it is right now without me.

I usually build twin towers and man them, then get the extra arrow pretty early. Murder holes is next, then the extra reach when I can spare the metal. All depending who I am and what my situation is; sometimes, when there's no traffic at my borders (or I'm iber), I never build or upgrade stone towers myself and just do it later when I captured something. I hardly ever get the other two tecs, if I do it's extra arrow per garrison before (if ever) the extra health.

Cara muito obrigado por tudo que você está fazendo pela comunidade, sou daqui do Brasil descendente do povo Tupi ao qual vc colocou está colocando no jogo, quero agradecer pelo carinho e por deixar nosso jogo gigante❤️❤️

It's better to avoid the "this specific unit is good only against that other specific unit" hard counter situations. Spearmen and pikemen should be strong against cavalry in general, not just against melee champion cavalry. It's a historical fact that the best defense against horsemen was a long spear. It's also a fact that cavalry obliterated archers on open fields. Most other (semi)historical RTS games reflect these facts by giving attack bonuses or armor weaknesses. If cavalry are really a problem, a simple solution would be to improve the already existing counters.

Would solve the main problem that champ cavs currently can slam into infantry formations, meat-shield, and even melt them by their own, which is prob what most people think is broken right now. Slowing heavy cav movement speed will mean they no longer counter ranged light cavs? Or at least ranged light cavs can escape them pretty easy? Could make sens for realism but this might have a lot of consequences balance wise.

Ducks are on their job. They're helping us - developers to write code P.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

I don't like the tech either. But I don't think it is a big deal as the % increase is just too small. It really only matters in cav vs cav fights. The problem is that champ cav can beat their supposed counters (spears) in straight up fights. Until that changes, champ cav will always be the best unit and optimal strategy will require players to spam as many champ cav as possible.

A change for this alpha is that champs coming from temples and unique buildings train 25% faster. I could bump that up a bit, maybe 30 or 35%. The issue I have with training from forts is that you had a situation where forts were just an expensive barracks that you needed a lot of space to put down. In other words, they weren't used defensively. Making them come from forts doesn't change the fact that the unit itself is strong, and it would make melee infantry champs extremely unhelpful. I think specific units could be moved to forts on an individual level, but I disagree with the formulaic approach of moving all the barracks/stable champs to the fort. IMO, this tech has to go:

I think you’re all missing the point. The unit itself can be strong, and that wouldn’t be an issue. The real problem is how it’s used. Let’s assume there’s a fight between two decent players (and no, I’m not referring to the endlessly repeated pattern of me vs. Decker). One player is using Champion Cavalry, and the other isn’t. The real issue is that even small groups of Champion Cav — even sent one by one — reach the front line very quickly and draw all the focus to themselves. Because they’re unreasonably resistant to ranged units, they effectively become tanks that shift the entire outcome of the battle. So is the only option to make them weaker? No. What if we had control over target priorities? Why shouldn’t a ranged unit have options like “target only ranged,” “target low HP,” “target strongest,” “target weakest,” etc.? With just a few smart targeting presets, we could greatly improve balance. For example, archers that can’t harm champions could instead wipe out the enemy’s entire ranged force — leaving the champions to fight alone. Simple trick. Big impact.

still mad because of my archer cav ?

Maybe it's better to improve attack-move? Make your units prioritize other enemy units if sufficient number of units is already engaged on the nearest target. This prioritization would only activate while the units are ordered to attack move. Units on offensive and defensive stance will by default behave as they do now. Situation would be as follows: 1) Your army is approaching the enemy army on attack move command. 2) First 4-5 units see the nearest enemy and go after it. 3) Second 4-5 units see that the nearest enemy is already engaged by 5 units, so they choose a different target. 4) Repeat for the rest of your army. The number of units that will go after the nearest unit can be changed in the settings. Siege units won't have this logic, as they are primarily used to target specific buildings. We can also exempt buildings from it, as most of the time you don't want to attack buildings with your units. If the above logic proves to be good, we can change the default targeting, too.

For me, I don't believe that there shouldn't be some "reflex-oriented gameplay" or that there shouldn't be any mechanical skill. But inefficient game features for me are just frustrating. I get that for some it's somehow providing dopamine, but I just dislike when not being able to translate my will into actions. There are amazing features in 0AD, like free draw formations and a couple great hotkeys like call to arm, queue action etc... Some feel/felt broken to me. One example is sniping, where you need to make hundreds of clicks just to avoid an army from targeting a hero (see Box Targeting thread) when a proper feature could make it feel sooo much better with a 5 line of code patch. In vanilla UI, you also have no way of knowing if, or which buildings are idle, I don't find this fun as maintaining production in buildings is pretty basic. Add to this a treacherous feature like auto-queue that is totally unreliable and you'll have me find it hard to enjoy a game. If the game doesn't want to introduce these features because some people find these limitations enjoyable, I'm glad that I can still get them in a mod.

The standard game starts with a scout. If you want to scout, you're free to use it. You can always make another cavalry unit and use it to hunt.

yes indeed. Pretty sure they were called hemerodromos. And very specialized "units"

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.

In DelendaEst there is the additional concept of slaves (with a limited lifetime due to the hard life they are forced to endure). Could that be the additional working unit you are looking for?

I'm gonna comment on this before @Emacz does; We added running scouts to those civs in the "historical patch" mod and I believe it did indeed add to the gameplay!