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Hello all, I am Vikrant; currently in Bangalore, India (GMT + 5:30). My nickname is my first name and rest of it abbreviated. I have been playing AoE for past 16 years (almost half of my life) - completed all official campaigns in AoE 1, 2 & 3 including the expansions. Believe it or not - I, my wife and my dad often play each other over LAN. I have created some campaigns myself - particularly one about Mauryan empire. So I was pleasently surprised to find that as one of the civilizations in 0 AD. I studied Sanskrit for 3 years way back in school. But I have kept in touch and will be happy to contribute through it or historical research which is another thing I love to do. I installed 0 AD yesterday and this is my first post here.

perhaps a specific time duration for the pause as well as how many times a player may pause?

Last 10 days, we did 50 commits to the game. Sometimes fixing small bugs, sometimes adding new features. New units can be added if it doesn't complicate the gameplay too much, or if it's really needed for balancing. Which I doubt for now. Well, thanks to capturing, balance is completely lost now. So we probably will switch between a few rush-only, turtle-only or boom-only games in the next versions. Which is why balance comments on A18 are sadly of low value now. That's just because it's laughable. We all want some humour. Stats are simply defined in XML templates. F.e. the stats of generic spearmen are defined here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/simulation/templates/template_unit_infantry_melee_spearman.xml Thanks to inheritance, you don't have to define stats for every unit. You can define generic stats for infantry, a bit more specific for melee infantry, even more specific for spearmen, ... I do advise you to work on SVN, else your work will be outdated by the time you want to publish it.

Make sure that you have a couple of GBs of free space on drive C: even if you installing onto another one. Some people reported issues with this before.

I am against stupidly strong towers because they make for a bad game. 0 A.D. isn't a simulation, it's a game. There's nothing realistic on how units are trained or the way the spawn. There's nothing realistic on the way units are killed or how they fight either. There's nothing realistic on how resources are gathered and then spent. There's nothing realistic about a commander who has the ability to micromanage troops with a bird's eye view. If you want to use the realism argument explain to me how making a tower costs 200 in-game resources whereas most infantry are ~110. A tower is literally tonnes of material, compared to one guy with some equipment that weighs less than 100 kg. You find this anti-towerism senseless because you're not looking at what makes 0 A.D. a fun and interesting RTS. You can't stick to reality if you want a good game. Have you ever played Starcraft 2? Have you ever been cannon or bunker rushed? If not, then you can't quite understand what I'm really afraid of. My general point which I'm trying to get across is that you have a bunch of units which are all very interesting. You have so many different kinds of units and they're all relevant units. I love that there's a distinction between units carrying a spear and those carrying a sword. I love that javelins are distinguished from bows. I absolutely love that even more when you consider that there is a lot of micro potential in the game, even as of right now. There's beauty in the way units will move when they are being micro-managed. Each group of units is being carefully positioned and re-positioned as each player attempts to gain the upper-hand. It's also very fun to be one of the players who is actually doing the micro-managing. In this game, 0 A.D. it's even more amazing because you have a lot of things to consider. Swordsmen will counter Spear-men for example, yet Spear-Cavalry does well against Swordsmen. However, Spear-men actually do well against all Cavalry. You have Archers which do some damage from long range and you have Skirms which do a lot of damage from short range. So there's a lot of depth to units in 0 A.D., it's amazing to see. The units are all very diverse and very unique. Units being promoted adds even more zest to things. It's really, really, really, REALLY well done. I'm also especially excited for things such as unit formation, where a line of spear-men will be a death-trap to cavalry for example, however if flanked you can get some very effective damage in. It's another thing that promotes positional fighting skill. Things such as surface area, hit and run, proper splitting, knowing when to attack-move, etc. It's all going to matter in 0 A.D. For example, a group of archers will fire a volley and will fire, in one volley, enough damage to kill several units. However, that extra damage gets wasted if all the archers fire on one unit, so it's important to select small groups and have them fire a volley if you want maximum damage. That's very good, it adds depth to the game. It's going to be amazing and micro in this game is already pretty fun. I can say from Aoe3 that positional micro for these kinds of units is really the way to go. It's very, very fun. It's not hard to understand. Yet two high level players micro'ing against each other is a treat to see. It's also a treat to actually be the one doing the micro. These two paragraphs are the tip of the iceberg as well. That's why this game is going to be great, it's why the game is already great. But then you have Towers. Any idiot can make a tower and put 5 ranged units in that tower. That's all there is to it. I wouldn't mind this normally, since static defense is important to have, however Towers are completely immune to units, period. If you build 1 tower, somewhere and put 5 archers in it and have a few more archers around the tower, you can can cost-efficiently take on x10 the amount of units you have in that area. No micro, no positioning, no nothing. It's incredibly boring and it's also game-breaking in that 1 tower and 10 archers will deal with 50+ units easily. If it goes to 60-80? Just make another tower, no problem. What point is there having beautiful units in the game if they all suck compared to some stupid 200 resource building? I hope that with this post people understand a bit more where I'm coming from with my dislike for towers. The units in this game, as well as the way they interact with each other, are amazing. Truly amazing. Yet everything is overshadowed by this silly thing called a tower. Now don't get me wrong, the concept of towers fine. However the stats they have are completely ridiculous. It's just a matter of finding more reasonable numbers. I think that Sanderd's work on units being able to die when in towers and such will also help with this. But as of right now towers are much too ridiculous and they don't really add any depth to the game like the units in this game.

I find this anti-towerism to be senseless. Towers would obviously be stronger and fire more arrows than units. To me, there is nothing unrealistic about towers in the game. I got two suggestions: -Storehouses should be built anywhere on the map -Walls could only be attacked by siege, after all, an army wouldn't take a massive stone wall down just by banging swords against it.

I don't agree. If you balance things now then you have a solid base for balance to work on for later. We're not talking hardcore balance you know, we mean fix the obviously broken design issues. Skirmcav need a counter and need to be moved to age 2, towers need a huge nerf and some civs need their civ bonus to be reworked. This isn't quite about unit stats or anything, it's more about design flaws. If you want to attract more players (which is the goal isn't it?) you need to make sure that the game design is sound as early as possible. So many potential players would come if they realized how good the core game design is, but they'd be chased off by the design flaws. These design fixes aren't exactly ground-breaking either, it's just moving some things around in the tech tree and making sure towers aren't the ridiculous thing they are now. I talked to someone online the other day who practiced skirmcav rushing and said how he tried to skirmcav rush against a skirmcav rusher and how the other guy was just a bit better at it so he won. is that really what 0 AD is? I've played against borg lots of times and I've had a few ggs with him. I played one game against another top 5 player in ranked and the nub just tower rushed me. Borg plays the game how it was designed to be played, the rest of the "good" players are just exploiting the big design flaws to get the win instead of the fun game. I had another nub exploit the phalanx bug and explain to me how he was a better player than me for knowing about the bug. http://i.imgur.com/Dj6tpOi.jpg Design fixes need to be implemented asap. Nothing ground-breaking or difficult, but stuff needs to be fixed. I for one am passionately against stronger buildings or units in buildings by the way. This includes walls, towers, CCs, I don't care. Players should use a standing army to do their military work, not buildings. see screen shot.

You do not need to stop creating, just stop adding new things for a period, facilitating work on balance and performance.

The game does not need anything new at the moment, just balance and optimization. After these two problems solved, then add new material.

Suggestion: Make Civic Center available at phase1 (maybe restricted to own territory), so that the annoying roman sword rush (especially in 2v2) gets senseless.