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Dear members of the community, it's been half a year since I took the lead of 0 A.D. (time flies so fast!) and I would like to give you some news of the team and tell you what we've been up to. Programming We faced big issues in the programming area during 2016. The game is more and more complete, and, as a consequence, more and more complex to maintain. With each new feature come new bugs, and we must be very careful as it is easy to create regressions, i.e. bugs that were fixed but reappear due to another change. The number of things to keep in mind when we change parts of the code also increased drastically over time. There are several ways to address this, and we decided on a new programming workflow, in which all our patches are reviewed to avoid oversights. On top of preventing a lot of mistakes, the mood has improved as we have clear and, it seems, efficient, rules. The review process mainly happens on our Phabricator instance. It is integrated with a set of automated tools that help us automatically catch mistakes (with linting) and prevent regressions (with unit tests). Some of those systems have just been set up and we hope we can tweak them over time to continue increasing our efficiency. In the near future, we will look into using our AI to automatically test the game. This new workflow also proved helpful to handle the stream of patches from occasional contributors. Some of the contributions were especially welcome and we are happy to have a working review process again, otherwise we would have lost the great work. We are looking forward to welcoming some of the contributors in the team when they are ready. Speaking of which, we are delighted to highlight the arrival of @s0600204 in the team! s0600204 made a lot of important contributions throughout the years and the team was unanimous in proposing him to join us, which happened a few weeks ago. Art The artistic team didn't rest on their laurels either. As you already know, the new unit meshes, along with brand new animations, are now in the game! The cavalry units are still missing but they are being prepared and you can expect news in the near future. We also started working on new icons for a variety of units, structures and technologies, and you can already see a lot of them in the development version of the game. The new units are a great milestone in the development of the game and we already have plans for the future and possible areas of improvement. We'll keep you updated! Acknowledging our design issues Despite all those great news, a few of you have rightfully expressed their disappointment about our need for a better gameplay design. The original vision of 0 A.D. founders is, naturally, not easy to follow when the project has accumulated more than a decade of various contributions. We received interesting gameplay proposals from dedicated members of the community but none of them met the unanimous enthusiasm of the team, which led to more frustration for both sides... This is the topic on which we will focus our team discussions now. The ultimate goal is having a modern game design document that revives the original goal of the founders while properly allowing people to contribute to it. Nothing is decided yet, but rest assured that we are taking the issue seriously, even if it takes us time to reach a decision. A new release is near! Our next announcement should be the release of a new Alpha version, which is exciting. I'm not going to detail its content, but you are encouraged to test the development version, and help us catch some bugs before we start packaging it. Last minute additions may or may not happen, depending on the nastiness of the bugs that might delay the release, the weather, or the astral conjunction Just stay tuned! Thanks for your support, your enthusiasm, and for being the best community we could dream of.

Well having tried to make the weyang palace I think Mingtang Pyong would be easier ^^

Ah that's clearer. We should think about that, it would be nice to have a list of all the mods existing, that are scattered across the forums. Ideally we could have ratings, etc. In the meantime, what about creating a git repo in 0ADMods which is a curated list of user-generated content? It would be similar to awesome lists that are quite popular. Call it awesome-0ad or something and create a section for overhaul mods, for new civs mods, for map mods, for other tweaks that are not mods etc. Each item can have links to the repo, the subforum or forum topic, the moddb page, etc. You can then take pull requests and make sure the list stays tidy. When the list is displayable enough we can add it to the important places, like the website

I think is this, make more easy navigation looking mods and add-ons

Indeed

I think that only solves the list sections. However, an essential part of Heavengames is the ability to give reviews and rate the content that was produced...

Specific Name: Yü Lin Generic Name: Feathered Forest Guards Weapons: Cavalry Lance and Cavalry Bow, can switch using DE's upgrade system; I'd say they are trained as Lancers. Description/History: ? @Ayakashi: I just read a bunch of Wikiwand articles about the Han, their government, their army. Those were my sources. There is a lot of little hints and tidbits in those articles that can be gleaned to get an idea of things, but a lot of it isn't openly spelled out for us. We have to infer a lot. <political opinion> Sadly, the Cultural Revolution did a lot of damage to primary sources. </political opinion> About the Government Center, I was thinking of doing this: It would train Ministers, limit of 9, who empower better gathering rates and other bonuses via auras. Buildings would research faster in their aura, etc. 9 of them for the 9 ministries of the Han Dynasty. They'd become an integral part to the player's economy. 1 Minister would be the civ's special starting unit. I'd also move all the techs from the Civic Center, except phasing, to the Government Center. Lastly, I was thinking of moving the Chariot from the Fortress to the Government Center to give it a late game military feature. The Fortress would still house the 2 non-Liu Bang heroes*, 2 champions -- 1 cavalry and 1 infantry, and 2 siege engines and Fortress upgrades. I also will add a new tech pair to the Fortress: Northern Army vs. Southern Army. The Northern Army is the professional army of the empire, while the Southern Army is more militia in nature. 9 Ministers https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nine_Ministers https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Government_of_the_Han_dynasty#/Nine_Ministers - more thorough than the "main" article, ironically. Northern Army and Southern Army Distinction https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Government_of_the_Han_dynasty#/Standing_army_and_army_reserves

Final version

Hello, This is some results that I got with the non-visual autostart : The settings used : - All results are on the map 'Acropolis Bay (2)' (no modifications). - Only Petra players. - Only in conquest mode. - Only 4 civilizations used. - 200 games for each result (one row in the table beneath), with an AI seed from 0 to 199. (Some games didn't finished, 400 000 turns and still continuing.) Players win percentages with the specific civilizations : All the plots (made with R language) showing the evolution of the win percentage for the first player (ID=1) : Plots.zip This shows the win percentage for a civilization against another one on the Acropolis Bay : Note that this is only with Petra players, and if I'm not mistaken, Petra doesn't adapt its strategy in function of the civ its playing. This shows the advantage of the starting position for a specific civilization on the Acropolis Bay : I wrote a Java program to run multiple games, save the summaries and analyze them. But it will be better if the the possibility to run multiple games and save the summaries in a file is integrated directly in 0A.D. Possible improvements for the non-visual autostart: Like mimo said, - add an option to run multiple consecutive games with the same settings but different seeds. - add an option to impose the same civilizations on all players. - write the summary in a log file as a JSON object, to be easier to parse later. And when you run multiple games, write all the summaries in the same file, maybe in an array or something like that. I thought of a JSON summary that will look like that : { "aiseed":0, "map":"Acropolis Bay (2)", "victoryconditions":"conquest", "victoryduration":0, "totalTurns":15000, "players":[ { "playerID":1, "ainame":"Petra", "aidiff":5, "state":"won", "team":-1, "statistics":{}, "civ":"brit" }], "extra":[] } The "extra" attribute will be an array of object where we could add additional informations, and if possible from anywhere in the code, especially from the AI. For example, the AI I worked on, uses different strategies over a game, and it's important to know what strategies were used to analyze them later. And maybe, if it's possible and useful, parallelize some games, to speed up the process. This will also help not to block all the games when there's one game taking too much turns, as long as all the games running are not endless.

I am also reworking the Thracian peltast textures.

As for what it adds to the main game, read: https://github.com/JustusAvramenko/delenda_est#delenda-est-an-overhaul-mod-for-0-ad-empires-ascendant How to install: 1. Download it from moddb: http://www.moddb.com/mods/0-ad-delenda-est 2. Copy the .zip file into 0ad/binaries/data/mods and decompress it right in that folder. 3. Open 0AD, go to Tools & Options then to Mod Selection, select Delenda Est and click the Enable button.

Okay, you convinced me. Especially about the Weiyang Palace scenario, which could also make a great skirmish map, or "Capture the Wonder" scenario. Anyone else have any thoughts?

Actually you should call the Government Center Imperial City. I just remembered the proper name for these kind of places: Imperial City! I strongly suggest Mingtang Piyong because no matter how I imagine it, trying to fit it into the game will be a nightmare. If you make the scale on par with everything else it will be too big, if you scale it down it will look like a doll house. Keep in mind that it's a massive sprawling palace complex many square kilometers in size and also that need to stick to historical accuracy where possible, thus I think just modeling the Mingtang Piyong and calling it the Weiyang Palace is a bad idea. I think if you want to incorporate the Weiyang Palace into the game the best way to do it is to make some props/none player buildable buildings such as halls, walls, gates and the likes, and then assemble it in the map editor and make a map out of it (Imagine a capture Weiyang Palace scenario, where players fight to take control of various palace buildings, that'd be quite fun).

The Weiyang Palace is massive, several times bigger than the Ming Forbidden City, making it the wonder will have to scale it down in a way that won't do it justice. I would suggest instead the Mingtang Piyong (明堂辟雍) which is this big altar in Chang'an that I assume serves a similar purpose to the Ming Temple of Heaven. I need to read more into it. There are some decent pictures of them on the internet such as these: I don't think I need to do concept art for the Wonder if you decide to have the Mingtang Piyong. I think the pictures above are pretty good and there are more good quality blueprints online if you copy & paste the Chinese text into Google. Waiting for me to draw a concept art will probably be a waste of time. Though I am currently drawing some new concepts for the livestock pen and market to bring them up to par with the rest of the buildings. No promises on when I'll finish them though. Coming back to the Government Center I don't know why but that name just don't quite sit right with me. I personally prefer Palace Complex simply because ancient Chinese capitals always have one as their bureaucratic hub and it just make more sense to me even with the function you intended, and to have it be a prerequisite for champion units simply again: since they're Palace Guards, it just makes sense. But that's just a personal suggestion and the decisions aren't mine to make.

Indeed, that's just a "meantime" solution. It would already give a lot of directions for newcomers

Mod translation is supported (the game itself is a mod). Someone (preferrably the author of the mod) should generate translation templates for the mod, provide those to translators, and make sure the translated versions are installed on the right folder. All details should be covered at https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Internationalization_and_Localization (if they are not, we should update that documentation).

Another topic on the subject with some ideas in it:

Can someone tell me what Delenda Est does to the game, what factions it adds and how to install

Adding imperial Romans Thebans Ipirotes and Han dynasty is near to be added.

Thanks dude! The damage of the Cultural Revolution to primary sources and historical artifacts is just a commonly known fact, no need to be ashamed to talk about it. As for the Government Center it's certainly a very interesting mechanic you are going for. Obviously I've been gone for a while and is now out of touch with the development. I'd say great job so far and keep doing what you are doing! I'll leave the historical accuracy feedback to Wolflance

Nice work! Care to publish the additional tooling somewhere? Also I do hope you are interested in working on some of those improvements. About games being stuck, it might be interesting to save the game at that point so they can be inspected manually (as the AIs might be in some state where neither can win, but none is defeated). Proper (as in fully deterministic) AI serialization would help with figuring out some of the internal details at that point, maybe we'll get there someday. For the summary that looks quite a lot like what we do for replays already (and part of it would be the first line in commands.txt files). About the extra parameter I'd both appreciate having that per player and then kept in cmpStatisticsTracker and updates to that being done via simulation commands. As for running multiple games in parallel I'd do that via some sort of launcher, so we don't have to worry about possible non-threadsafe code in tons of places. So the only issue we'd be left with would be file system access (and that should be read-only for the most part, except writing the statistics (and that should just use pid+timestamp), but that should be done to one file per game, so there is no huge issue there). Running a few games consecutively could however be done by the game relatively easily.

Thanks guys, I'll try to comment as much games as I can this weekend (girlfriend is out eheh)

A quick message to support you all. I am hurry to play 1000ad on a22.

Why don't we add fence to the Norse houses? Modern reconstructions suggest that Nordic settlements during the Viking age had their homes fenced, most especially in large towns like major ports and trading centers.