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Some of you might remember my previous posts about the North and Central America, South America and World maps. I've now bundled all three of my continental maps into a single mod and submitted it to mod.io (currently pending approval) The mod includes: North and Central America: four biomes (polar, temperate, desertic, tropical), with special landmarks like buildable zones in Yucatan and Cuba. South America: the main South American rivers (including the Amazon), four biomes, and access to the Pacific through Chile. A full world map using a sinusoidal projection to preserve continent areas, with biomes as faithful to reality as the engine allows. Designed for epic, resource-rich battles. All maps are also available on GitHub if you want to take a look at the files or contribute: https://github.com/Baelish03/0ad-maps I'll update this thread once the mod is live on mod.io. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome — hope you enjoy them! P.s. For further details the thread for each project can be found on this forum. On those threads there were some suggestion, I will implement it! I want to remake better all these maps and to expand to all continents, so I will appreciate your help earth_maps.zip

I don't have much to add to what @Stan` and @ShadowOfHassen said. I do try to keep up with hot topics people are talking about here, but I can't always read everything. @seregadushka Since this is an open source project, the best/fastest way to get an idea into the game is by implementing it yourself. When people suggested for you to do it in a mod, it wasn't meant maliciously. It is not uncommon around here for people to test their ideas in a mod first and then to get them into the base game eventually. If you don't want take that path, however, that is completely fine; contributing directly from the start is also possible. See: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/GettingStartedProgrammers https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/SubmittingPatches Keep in mind, though, that in any case, consensus has to be reached for a patch to be accepted and merged.

@seregadushka Hi. "Fighting UI" is pretty popular discussion in RTS world. My opinion is that 1) RTS should not be played like (turn-based) strategy games (like Chess, Go, Civilization, HOMM, etc.). You still need "real-time" element. Some people prefer more clicking and some people more thinking. I'd say RTS genere is balance between the 2. Between chess and Counter strike or similar games for example. 2) For easier discussion, people mentioned BW and AOE2 (I'd add Warcraft 3) as very success ~30y old games with old mechanics that still works and a lot players play it. I'd add to discussion: there's different type of successful RTS games that automated a lot of things: Supreme Commander FAF and it's ascends Beyond All Reason and Zero-K. Even if those games are automated, they are also popular (well BAR is). But you still have clicking there, more or less. So what's catch? I think it's about switching focus of clicks. In BW/AOE most of clicking is focused on production and micro. In SupCom-type games it's switched to general macro. In PvP (player vs player) clicking in RTS is inevitable. 3) I would also add BattleAces as failed game. There's no macro and everything is automated and it failed hard. TBF, I don't say it's same as what you suggest. You will get point why I added it to discussion. 4) Regarding this automation discussions, there will always be different vision between competitive players and casuals. B/c of this, you will always have unsatisfied group of people however you balance it. So it's about authors to decide how they balance it. 5) I will add 1 more example: NBA basketball 3 pointer range. This is short history: - 1979 (Oct 12): NBA officially adopts the 3-point line, initially viewed as a "gimmick," with a 23’9” radius and 22’ in the corners. - 1994-1995 Season: The NBA shortened the distance to a uniform 22 feet around the entire basket to boost declining scoring, a change that lasted three seasons. - 1997-1998 Season: Due to higher percentages and increased usage, the NBA reverted the line back to the original 23’9” distance (22’ in corners). You can blame NBA for what they did in 1997 as artificial made obstacle. We can say "hey decrease range and make basket 2x bigger". And some people will like it I am sure, but NBA would lose a lot if doing that. My personal opinion is that 0AD is already a bit too much automated, but it's still fine. Adding more could ruin game.

Hello @seregadushka and thank you for sharing your opinions about this feature. As mentioned earlier in this thread, we value feedback, but we're never in capacity to address it all due to lack of sheer developer resources. That's why we usually encourage those who can to go the developer route or to find someone that can, because that makes changes much more likely to happen. I understand this is frustrating, but that's just how it works. Everyone here is doing things for free on their free time so no one can really be forced to do anything. As you saw in this thread what seems to be the biggest pain point you have in the game is inconsequential for some (but surely not all) other players. Everything here is about balance and compromise. Now to address your concern itself it was discussed at length in the past, and the developers made the choice to go one way and autociv (the mod) went the other way. Relevant links with documentation under the form of discussions https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/38261-auto-queue-for-0-ad/ https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/6669 https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/6743 https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3865 https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4144

Just sliding in for a quick qualification. I am not in an official member of the Wildfiregames team. But I've made contributions before, and try to help out where I can, helping with issues, writing tiny PRs, copy editing, history research, helping with the flatpak (when I'm not to stupid to figure out 0 A.D.'s build process and have to have Stan help me) stuff like that. I haven't written a single line of code for 0 A.D. Eventually when I have time I'd love to though! It really is pretty easy to get involved with 0 A.D. The devs are very patient and friendly, and the GitTea repo is pretty easy to figure out how to open an issue or PR and get that feature you want in the game. 0 A.D. is open source after all. All the devs are volunteers with lives, commitments, and jobs. Yes, they made this amazing game just for fun, and consequently they work on the features that make the game (and their dev work) the most fun for them. If someone else has new idea that would make the game fun for them, they are more than welcome pitch in and try to get it added. In fact, if they have any questions on the process I'll do my best to help!

I think the best balance is to have rudimentary automation features. Leaving those automated features un-optimized allows a player to manually outperform it if they decide to allocate their apm and attention to the task. A good example is auto-scout from aoe2. It has known behavior, like trending toward the bottom right corner of the map. One could think of many ways to optimize the path taken by autoscout like using map script knowledge to scout likely other high value locations, automatically avoiding danger ect. Some modders of 0ad would call these changes “quality of life” improvements, but the result is the destruction of gameplay.

forum these past few days: 20% other things, 80% auto train argument

The result is tolerance of macro mistakes. If this feature gets in, all I have to do in the first 10 minutes of the game is set my CC and Barracks to produce certain batches of units, set Auto-train to ON and never touch those buildings again until I get to the City phase to unlock champions. I don't know about you, but this simply awards laziness and kills the fun of actually managing your production.

P.S. my experience about related topic: OpenRA Red Alert (open source CnC games project) as you know has infinite queues and it never runs out. As result, we have players that queue 1000 units in queue and never check it again. I ran experimental tournament with idea to reduce this queue sizes to 5 or something and there was intense discussions. Some people said that it's retarded change and some were for that. At the end people wanted balanced solution of 50 or 100 units. Most of competitive players were FOR the change and smaller queue sizes. Unlike casuals.

I am making a campaign which contains scenario-like levels to teach players advanced micro skills in battles to improve their fighting performance. This is the first version: battlecampaign.zip I will be adding more levels and tactics to it once Atlas Editor fixes itself from crashing all the time Feel free to give suggestions ! Link to the github (actively developing): https://github.com/Yekaterina999/battlecampaign.git

Please do. My honour!

@seregadushkai talked to you with respect until u started to trashtalk me. if you know how to code you probably know (or can learn easy) how to make a pull request. repository is here: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad

Indeed we consistently see that "old" games which feature skill expression become e-sports because you can get infinitely better at the game without being perfect. The satisfaction with learning and improving and outplaying are also what makes games fun aside from just being competitive. Many modern games try to remove these "difficult" mechanics and the result is boring gameplay where the only distinguishing factors are simply choosing the stronger option whether thats a gun in a fps game or a civilization in an rts game. That is why aoe2 performs better than aoe3 aoe4 and AoM retold. Games 20 years ago were designed to be fun in order to succeed in sales. Now they are designed to have a marketing induced mass appeal for a short time, and sell skins in-game. For this its important that a player can feel like they are "good" at the game within a week or so of buying it (skill-based matchmaking also contributes to this). So removing any sort of mechanic with skill expression boosts sales. It seems like some people just want a modern slop game that they can play while yawning and watching movies on other monitors.

I think car analogies don’t work very well for discussing RTS design. But even if we were to accept it as a valid comparison rather than a false analogy, I’ll explain why I still think it doesn’t hold: The Model T today is mostly a collector’s item and is no longer part of the modern car's market. By contrast, StarCraft: Brood War still has active professional tournaments, specially in South Korea. And the same unit-training mechanics are still present in modern competitive RTS titles like StarCraft II and the Age of Empires series, which continue to run esports tournaments with significant prize pools. So this isn’t just a case of defending an obsolete design. These mechanics are still part of the competitive RTS ecosystem today. However, I’m still not entirely sure what we are actually discussing here: whether the goal is simply to add an option so that the vanilla auto-queue pauses until enough resources are available, or whether the intention is to introduce a highly automated system like the smart training from the ModernGUI mod. In that system, production not only resumes automatically when resources become available, but the game also determines the batch sizes based on the available resources and distributes the training across all eligible buildings through the training panel provided by the mod. Because those are two very different things.

Fun fact. StarCraft: Brood War is one of the most successful RTS games in history. That game defined the word E-sport. I've been playing that game for 20 years now, and I'm nowhere near being good at it. My average APM is ~105, when I'm being serious, which puts me at high D to low C rank. Good players have ~250 APM, while pros can go up to 400 when microing their units. The best part is, Brood War has no auto-queue. You can't even hotkey more than one building at a time. Still, I'm still playing that game, after all this time.

Seconded. Otherwise, why even play the game if you want everything to be automated for you?

Here is a video demonstration of the playthrough @Stan`if you think it's a good idea, maybe I can make a PR and add these campaigns into public? I get that my maps are very empty, so any artistic recommendations would be welcome as well We really are missing campaigns and it would be cool to merge in some other people's campaigns as well so that the singleplayers have something fun to do :O

It would be good if this is added to the main game. Then there would be no discussion if it is "cheating" using a mod that includes this feature. An extension could be to automatically adjust the auto training batch size to get even more efficient training times.