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Gameplay reasons Main cause of champs breaking the game is players being able to spam it too easily. If we move these units back to the fort, they cannot be spammed en mass. We would get a trickle of maybe 3 to 4 champions as an enhancement of our army but the strategy of letting your ally die just to build yourself a full champ army will not be possible. Forts are useless / mostly idle for some civs: Gauls, Mauryas, Persians ... Now we have an use for fortresses. We can keep the OP stats of champs or make them even more OP, because the rate of production of these units is much lower - controls their impact on the game. Han and Carthage seem to have the correct use of champions at the moment. Other civs are just spamming till you run out of resources. Players who want to spam champs have to build extra special buildings which are costly and cannot be used for citizen units - less motivation to spam. Historical / Logical reasons: Hell broke loose when champs were moved to barracks and stables: In A25, they spammed fire cav from stables, in A26 they spammed champ sword cav, in A27 is now spear cav. But in A24 and A23, this problem didn't exist because champs could not be spammed enough to break the game. A23 had too few champs because fort was used for siege. Now we have a siege workshop so fort can be used as champion-special Champions (elite units) are being trained from the same place as pleb citizen soldiers. Not sure if that is accurate. Some civs train from special buildings while others train from barracks - inequality We want to emphasise the elite quality of the units, not just let them be CS Pro plus Proposed changes: Cancel the "unlock champion" upgrade - You can get your champs as soon as you have a fort. Every civ which currently produce champs from barracks and stables get their champs moved to a fort. In detail: Persians: barracks can produce immortals (but after researching an expensive unlock tech 1000 Food). Fortress produce champion cavs Kushites: champ cav back to fort, temple guards can stay in temples Gauls: Fanatics stay as they are or go to taverns; Trumpeter stay at their place; Champ cav and champ sword go to Fort. Mauryas: Yoddha go to forts. Maidens stay where they are. No change to Athenians, Spartans, Han, Carthage I am currently working on a pull request for these changes. Please comment below if you have any objections. Thank you, balancing advisors. @chrstgtr @real_tabasco_sauce @Atrik @borg- @Stockfish

Forts should be effective for defense, not an expensive barracks. If they are “useless” right now, work should be done to make their use for defense more effective. Forts should be for defense primarily, with some able to train heroes, unique units (champs), and unique, special technologies. I remember alphas where people would make more than 6 forts just to spam champs, and it became frustrating trying to find space to place them because of the build distance requirement. also let me stress this really important point: there are no complaints about infantry champions, save for immortals being a bit OP in the ranged form. all the complaints are about champcav, so how about we calm down a bit and focus of the specific units that are problematic instead of “moving fast and breaking things” so to speak. why are champcav OP? - high damage, high hp? Sure, but it is not much more than infantry champions, and they cost a lot more. But really the comparison with champion infantry is flawed, champcav will almost never need to fight champion spearmen. - mobility? I think this is the underlying cause as much as others want to deny it. We are talking about units that are double the speed of their supposed counter, units that may not be surrounded, trapped, or outplayed except by a larger or faster cav army. Because you can choose your fights endlessly, champcav players can bank up resources while raiding and retrain fast enough to justify taking bad fights. Additionally, since they move faster, they take less damage from buildings. if you are really adamant to try this, why not set up a PR in the com mod to organize some play testing. I think I’ve seen enough of the current com mod changes to get an idea of what might work in the future regarding capture balance, so we can move forward with a new version if you like.

Thanks for the report, but the dump difference shows that you have a behavior difference in GUIInterface enabling range visualizations (for attacks, auras, and healers). This is definitely caused by one of your mods (I suppose it's Ricci's "rangedoverlay" mod, but if you're the one OOS, it can be one of your mods). You folks should stop abusing the compatibility checks system, or at the very least test RCs without mods.

I would prefer forts not to have a too a central role in 0ad. I actually like having the choice of not building any to go aggressive vs building it if I plan to defend. Putting units trainable in the forts reinforce the need to just build it whatever, and therefor you play a bit more every game with the same build. Regarding balance, I think a framework for balancing should be worked on. It would be interesting to make relation graphs to have clear views on what are each unit role. Below some example with some existing relationship between units in 0AD (A27 stats, they rounded but they are actually real). Power is dps * hp (after converting armor to hp equivalent, so it does take into account armor, thoughts if hack and pierce armor value are different, a decent mitigation is to use the average of the two), so for jav above, it doesn't account for the accuracy gains.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I think all cavalry should get a slight speed nerf — or alternatively, pikes and spearmen should move a bit faster — so that cavalry players can't always choose when and where to engage. Additionally, the damage multiplier of spears and pikes against cavalry should be increased to make them more effective counters. I think cavalry should be a more tactical or support role unit, rather than being the main army core — unless a specific civilization or historical context justifies otherwise.

The speed in combination with the similar strength is in deed the point. They can ignore their counter. Also selecting wounded and pulling them out works good because of their speed. I also thought of having them slowly change the direction and having a fast end speed after a acceleration time or so. Also on the topic of "dancing": I think running back in (small) zigzag is no abuse. Units don't have to run in a line back like Rickon Stark did under arrow fire. But of course this works great on fast units with sudden change of directions. Dancing in itself can be abuse though. But in this case it just makes sense

I agree with this, but sadly there is no balance when it comes to champions right now. Some civs just have better champions that counter other civ's champions. If you try to balance all of the champions, people will scream "historically inaccurate" or "boring"

Melee will end you. I would argue that you are not forced into building the fort. If you want to attack early, you push before their fort is up or while they are building the fort. You would have an advantage, because they are investing building labour and huge quantities resources into the fort. Their units would also be in a bad formation and you can melt the builders if they don't react early enough. Since champion spam no longer exists, it's possible to win fights with a CS army + good micro. The champions will just be an icing on the cake for those who had a chance to build it. It would be more attractive to play aggressively, compared to the current meta of waiting for the champion unlock tech then spam broken units. Another idea is we give every civ a special building for them to produce champions from. But that is a lot more work than just moving back to fort.

good thinking, but icons cant be too complex either, since then they are hard to understand at a short glance

I think I have owed you all an update on this project for a long time now. Me and @ShadowOfHassen have neither forgotten about the encyclopedia nor given up on it. I'm as convinced by and passionate about the idea as ever. It's just that I don't consider the project as high priority as other ones (like making campaigns or a tutorial). However, I can promise I will get back to the encyclopedia eventually: My plan is to overhaul the UI completely (in terms of appearance). The current one looks alright, but it just lacks that artistic touch. And, good news, I am actually in touch with @whiteebony82, he's creating sprites for it, and what I've seen so far looks amazing. Something to look forward to. About the articles, I'd love to resume the writing process, I'm hoping I'd able to still write some texts every now and then, but because I'm now more involved in the technical side of things, it'll never be as much as it once was. I haven't talked with @ShadowOfHassen about it yet, but before picking it up again I think we have to find some more people interested in helping, if we ever want to see it finished. One thing I want to do for sure, though, is to go over all of my old art and improve them (as ShadowOfHassen did with his in the past) before adding any new ones. Looking back, I could have done a lot better and often missed the point. Regarding the code, there is still the PR I opened last summer: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/6997. It contains only the core parts of the page, but also the most recent version of the code. It is marked as"WIP" right now, which means review progress on it has stopped because there are changes planned it -- the UI changes I talked about above. When I've achieved a UI that I'm happy with I will remove the label again, get it moving and hopefully merged soon. Then there is also the github repo I made a while ago: https://github.com/indoptogopt/GUI-page-for-0ads-encyclopedia The code in it is neither up-to-date with the PR, nor compatible with A27. However, the repo stores all of the articles in the latest state. I'm still unsure what to do with it; in regards to the code, it doesn't provide much value to me, maybe it would be better to make a new repo dedicated to just the articles. TL;DR I won't resume now, but I'll do when the time is ready. As a first step, I ported the encyclopedia demo mod to the A27 release version and as recommended created it with pyrogenesis' archive builder this time. To install it, left-click on the downloaded file -> 'Open With' -> '0 A.D.' encyclopedia.pyromod @Genava55 (This mod's purpose is really just to demonstrate functionality, my goal is to add the that to the game eventually, which is why I will not be putting it on mod.io)

I managed to survive to DoctorOrgans challenge many times. Other times... sadly was impossible. An advice for the ones who want to try the challenge, i recommend you to DELETE DE STOREHOUSE and to NOT LET HIM 2V1 becouse he AAAAALWAAAYS loses becouse of that. But it is funnier to spec the Stockfish Challenge for JC. I really enjoy it!! .

Maybe the game should ask about your dietary preference at the start. If you are a meat eater, a piece of meat will be used for the icon. If you are vegetarian, it will show an omelette as the icon and hunting will be disabled for you. If you are vegan, it will broadcast a message telling everyone about that for your convenience.

becasue the walk speed comparrison of cav to infantry is not very realistic But then again how run is used in game is not exactly realistic either, but that is where cav have a much better advantage over infantry.

Why nerf the speed of cavs? The whole point of cavs is being fast. If cavs are slow then just use infantry instead. We do need strong units but at reasonable quuantities.

too bad ur afraid to explore historical, they have slight speed nerf there

Don't you worry, there is so much lag in networked games (especially more than 2 players) that dancing is non-existent. Sadly they do need this speed to counter fire cav and archer. All in all, I think champions occupying 3 population each is probably agreeable. If you want to make 30 champion cavs then you bascially have no pop space for anything else. If there is objection to moving them to fort, maybe we can consider other special buildings. I picked fort because that was the champion building in the past and was expensive enough to counter rich players spamming it.

Other games do this effectively by increasing the population cost of more powerful units. To be honest, I'm not sure why 0 A.D. doesn't do this. For example, making Seleucid Cataphracts take up 3 population slots is a sensible solution to what's the most broken unit of the game at the moment. Just see my match against Rome, where I didn't lose a single one out of 41 (!) Cataphracts. Also, making other champion units take up at least 2 slots is a better option than re-purposing Forts.

I’m not saying they should be the same speed as everything else, just that they don’t need to be so much faster. A gap of 50% faster would be perfectly fine, currently mace champ cave are 240% the speed of spears. we need to do some more broad speed balancing tbh.

So they should have wooden bosses. K, I’ll add them in the future.

There is a limit when it comes to balancing units civ to civ. It is entirely fine that some civs champions counter another’s. What matters is the overall power of the civ. There will always be bad matchups bad maps for a given civ and that is a mark of good civ differentiation.

Very nice! Thank you @Vantha! Works with both A27 and also with SVN (future B28).

In general something should be done against the champ masses. Either this, or make a limit on them, or make them require more pop. The nisean war horse upgrade especially puts every other champs in the shadows. On the other side I don't agree with a lot players claiming everything would be OP, elephants, siege etc.. As the game goes on one should be incentivized not to rely on citizen soldiers only. Although sadly one could rely on mass slingers atm..

Thats not an argument. Even if everyone was a vegetarian, the icon for "food" could still be meat, just like the icon for "saving" on your pc resembles a floppy disk, even though nobody uses those anymore. The purpose of the icon is to convey the meaning "food" in a way thats easily understood and requires little space on the screen. A meat icon fulfills both those qualities regardless of whether a player eats meat or not. Or was it confusing for you, because you didnt automatically make the connection "food - meat icon"? A wheat icon would work just as well, so theres no technical reason to change it. Your personal preference is indeed a valid argument, albeit not a very strong one. I find the argument that the icon should resemble the most common food source in the game a lot more convincing.

I don't have strong preferences over specific icon, rather I would just prefer not to have a red "steak" icon all over the place as I am long time vegetarian (please don't laugh). Single icon that combines wheat, berries, meat and fish is probably the best one to satisfy everyone. I have been asked for an example icon... So it could be a pack of wheat, like this one from civ4. If such change (or some other alternative) wouldn't make it to the master branch as a default icon I would be still very happy if there would be an in-game option to use less "meaty" icon.

just because others do it, doesnt mean we have to Even if the player changed the ingame language? or would that be a translated expression? Then we would also have to change the other resources for consistency. I like the idea of swapping the meat icon for wheat, since wheat is the most used food source in the game.

An advice: don't be fooled by the ELO rating numbers. These numbers mean nothing; some players have unrealistically high or low numbers that will confuse balancing attempts. Since DoctorOrgans has an even chance against me in 1v1 (on Mainland standard settings), you should pretend that he is me when you are balancing teams. That will lead to better quality games and greater probability of completing the challenge. DoctorOrgans ≈ Ricci-Curvature (1610) Furthermore, placing him with his 'mascottes' will give him a performance boost (nababu). Something needs to be changed about the rating system, because right now it's totally uncorrelated with skill level. There are 1500s who can roll 1800+ rated players, then there are 1600 players who constantly fail against 1300 rated players. Some 1400 players are very strong teammates whereas others are Petra level.