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I would make the pillum an automatically used ability that recharges only when a unit has been out of combat for a certain amount of time and that is only used (once) when the enemy is more than 'x' tiles away. It should be a bit more powerful than the melee attack (it could penetrate shields), since it can only be used once per combat this shouldn't make it such a huge advantage.

The sigmoid approach seems ripe for exploitation: 1. Get the game's source code (it's freely available). 2. Hack the game a little to make it optimize resource collection automatically while you do other things. 3. ??? 4. Get a much/vastly better resource collection rate than someone not using this exploit.

I want to stick closer to a AoE type of game, but this might be a fun mod.

I feel its an overkill and restricts gameplay.

It's quite possible to get it in Alpha 14, especially since the release will be delayed until the AI is fixed (which could take around a week). Basically once this design stuff is settled I can commit it (although the bit in the patch that handles delay before regeneration is more ugly than I like - I'll either change that or remove it entirely).

I prefer a combination of approaches (as is currently implemented in #1973). Berries should have constant regeneration, and fish should have sigmoid regeneration. Advantages of sigmoid regeneration: It's more realistic: the more fish there are, the more new fish are produced, but when the population gets large enough it slows down again due to less available food for the fish. It takes some time to get "warmed up" from 0. This means that it isn't immediately useful to gather from for a while after it's depleted. Less "game-y" than constant regeneration, which simply seems overly artificial for a resource like fish. Disadvantages: It is possible to micro your fishing boats heavily to optimize food income, adding pointless micro to the game. Counter-argument: As we don't have many fish on maps spreading fishing boats out is not feasible. Counter-argument: This would get prohibitively difficult with > 5 fishing boats - anyone who can pull that off deserves to be rewarded. Counter-argument: This isn't pointless micro - it requires doing a fair amount of non-trivial math in real-time to balance the number of fishing boats, the number of fish sources, and the current resources of each source. Counter-counter-argument: Someone could do the math for X numbers of fishing boats and Y numbers of food sources once and post a table of it, meaning that people could just memorize that and brainlessly micro their fishing boats around. Simplicity doesn't really mean much here; the player doesn't really need to know how it works. I actually think sigmoid may be the more expected form of regeneration from a player's perspective - people expect more fish to reproduce more fish. The advantages of this are dubious, IMO. It would likely not provide a substantial food benefit and the ridiculous APM required to constantly check your fish sources and remove the fishing boats at the necessary time could be put to far more productive things. Nitpick: You wouldn't be optimizing the gathering rate but rather the regeneration rate. It would gather at the same speed regardless, however you would have more food available more quickly if you pulled the fishing boats off at the point the sigmoid curve starts to turn exponential. Those actions could be put to far more productive things. I think you underestimate the APM it would take to constantly check the resource levels of every supply of fish and move fishing boats around constantly. If you're fishing with one or two boats, sure, it might give some extra food, but when you have 5 or 6 boats? Not so easy. Incidentally, I might count this as a pro for sigmoid regeneration: overfishing is punished in real life, too.

Tim, any updates?

It was good to finally talk on svn yesterday. It sounds like you'd fit in very well with the team, which is always a bonus. Your sound effects are good too When you're happy with them, post those blacksmiths sound effects here for us to review.