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@Sundiata I'm not going to be the moderator of any discussions, I've more or less left the project. I try to help out with the forums, but that's about it. I also doubt that another public discussion would be useful, there's no lack of that as it is. What would be needed would be someone who could both take the lead on design and get support for their ideas. Just having random discussions will just result in more information to go through, but no consensus to act on. Just going on without more defined design is unlikely to provide an enjoyable game, or at least as good a game as would otherwise be possible. But on the other hand, there is no point in having the best idea if you can't convince others (especially the ones who will implement it) to see things the way you do, or at least see that it's worth compromising to get a better end-point. So far there has been no such person, at least not for the last bunch of years. There was quite a lot of design discussion and decisions which were made in the projects early days, but not only have all those people left the project many years ago, a lot of things has happened which has put things in new light (features have been cut due to time constraints or technical limitations, and sometimes been added/added back later, other games have brought new ideas, etc.). So I do see that there might be a need to re-evaluate things. As for wow leaving, leper expressed himself a bit harshly, but at least he's still around and can be talked to. Wow just left and didn't even seem to consider that he might have been wrong/misunderstood things. It might just have been a symptom of him being less than hopeful with the project overall and this just being a catalyst for that. In either case, and while it's certainly worth taking seriously how the team reacts to community contributors, it's hard to take him completely serious as he's done the same thing (though under a different alias) several times before.

My thoughts exactly... It's ever-changing nature is it's greatest strength. I do understand the frustrations shared by a lot of people, and I do actually think that the team isn't putting enough effort in to attracting new content producers and maintaining the current community of active members, or showcasing peoples' work and promotion for the game in general. The same issues also keep popping up incessantly by new players, and not much is done with it outside of the mods: citizen soldier-concept needs a remake: people that work and fight is awesome, but there need to be common labourers, better at economic activities (not only women) destroy needs to be the default over capture counters are impossible to understand for new-comers, and experienced players trip over this as well battalions, formations and armies need to be implemented convincingly overly aggressive AI (there should be two more, equally competent AI's: a reactionary one, and a defensive one) more variety/options in general, like DE Yes, I understand, these things need competent people to work on them. But what is the team doing to attract those people? Don't get me wrong, I know there's a lot of silent heroes coding away: @elexis, @mimo, @fatherbushido, @leper, @Pureon, @bb_, @Imarok, @Itms, @fabio, @implodedok, and many others... Shout out to you all for the amazing work so far. I've really enjoyed watching 0AD evolve and improve over the years. I just think you could use some help seen as the to-do list is still quite considerable, and valuable people like @wowgetoffyourcellphone leaving isn't helping development of new content. I think the true potential of 0AD is often overlooked, and we end up with a game trying to stream-line itself for competitive online game-play, but will feel empty without expanded single player options. Bottom-line, the game can be a lot more than it is now (expanded economy/technologies, modest city-building elements, battalions and armies and improved battle-mechanics, updated and more realistic maps/smoother terrain textures, etc). It's often remarked how much this game looks like AOEII, but the truth is, 0AD has the potential to be much greater than Age of Empires ever was, or ever will be! I'm very confident we can wipe the floor with the upcoming Age of Empires releases! We just need the right people working on the right things... Now really wouldn't be a bad time to set up a "game-plan" for the next release. An expansive, and clear, public discussion on the forums about what absolutely needs to be added/changed in the next release and how to go about it, with more considerations for the recurring issues listed above (and the various "requested features" topics). With active participation from the development team, so that people in the community can feel they're being listened to by the people actually implementing changes. Maybe someone like @feneur could start and moderate this discussion, with the first post keeping track of the agreed upon changes.

Yes, 0 A.D. is quite similar to Age of Empires, as are Command & Conquer, Cossacks, Empire Earth, Rise of Nations, and many other games, which is probably unavoidable. Citizen-soldiers, capturable buildings, and territory are rather minor points. There are just two fundamental differences: 0 A.D. is free and open source (and available for many different operating systems) and can thus be adapted, modified, or serve as a basis for future games. 0 A.D. has been in development for years and is unlikely to be finished in the forseeable future. Those looking for an end product might regret the second point; personally I think it's actually the greatest strength that the game is in constant development and will possibly never be finished. 0 A.D. can always be changed, updated, improved, and expanded, unlike commercial games designed for profit, which have to be released at a certain date and won't be changed afterwards. Yes, 0 A.D. is far from perfect, I'm the first to admit that. However, keep in mind it's still an Alpha. Nevertheless, the game is already playable, enjoyable, and modifiable, which is simply great. We should be grateful for everyone who has contributed in the past and for everyone who's currently helping to improve the game. Yes, 0 A.D.'s “Empires Ascendant” default distribution certainly has to be improved. However, different people have different ideas, and in group projects such as this it's often quite hard to find concensus on how to change the status quo. Far more important than the actual content (art, factions, templates, unit statistics, etc.) are the efficiency and performance of the underlying engine and the need for a capable and flexible AI. Everyone who watches https://code.wildfiregames.com/ can see that every day several people work on improving the game. Undoubtedly many persons have left over the years, but others are still contributing, and new people are always welcome. As long as that remains the case, progress is constantly made, and 0 A.D., which already is a great game, can only get better.

@DarcReaver , did you check out Alpha22 ? Do you look at the trac updates to see the regular changes ? Did you read the project announcements ? A22 brought significant changes. A23 will bring long awaited fixes and novelties. New code or data is contributed every day. More stuff is happening under the hood. Itms said the game design issue was being addressed. The pathfinder, currently priority number 1, is being worked on. Some other devs are working on formation-related design decisions and implementations. Artists are on huge tasks at the moment. The project is moving on. A lot of work has been done and there's still a lot of work to do, and the resources are limited. But it's slowly getting there.

For now I'm not worried, Ms aren't solving user problem in their games and the beta of DE. With problem with this Definitive edition is the money. Ms don't want put game in steam and is exclusive to Win10. Their developers don't care ask. AoE4 will fragments their community. (Competitive vs hardcore old style)+casual public. The developers are the same, that ruined Dow series but who make CoH. And probably don't have any advanced. I'm part of forums of Aoe, but AoE series never satisfies my desires, like 0 a.d or RTW. Well portrait of ancient civs isn't easy. by other side developer can't be react in that way. I people come and quit since 2012. some are really missed.

Really?

@Servo "Caledonia meadows needs more animals" Do you mean more huntables or domestic or fish or different types of animals? I actually thought there where to many huntable animals and berry bushes. I reduced the ammount of fish due to reviewers requests BTW. I agree we should have at least some maps that support teams being much closer to each other and allowing uneven teams. This shouldn't be the default though. If you have the replay of the map you liked you can regenerate the map in Atlas by using the same random map seed.

Scans by ludo

nope, original animations were very energetic

RotE/Terra Magna, along with most of the Council of Modders projects, and 0 A.D. Empires Extended are primarily just adding civilizations, not dramatically changing gameplay. Everything else is either balance mods or almost total conversion mods like Delenda Est. I have actually seriously considered trying to formally contribute to 0 A.D., even using 0 A.D. Empires Extended as a bit of a test bed to see if I could get food trickle for garrisoned Corrals working, but I have decided that suggesting ideas, providing feedback, and limited modding is all I can justify due to my job search going so poorly.

I'll just leave this here https://github.com/dvangennip/amazones-0AD, I'm quite sure that there is some forum topic about that too.

There is as yet no version for SVN

Basically battalions.

I like the new meshes, they look more natural.

unfinished Vox kd

darn I spent many hours playing the kd version and a new one just came in . Really fun to play the Kushite! The skirm cavs are less OP. 20 fully upgraded units can hardly destroy a defense tower. The two types of temple guards have same features? I hope you can increase the lure LOS of the ungatherable wild animals like wolf, lions etc to liken the lure distance of the elephants. I don’t like to kill these beast! I just put them in my little Zoo. Was there a bug on wall construction? Some walls have gaps from turrets. But some short ones don’t have. I’ll check whether if I build the walls not stretching the distance to maximum from turret to turret could solve the issue. Now I have to make a new game for this new version but it’s fine. Thanks Man! Voice of the player! BTW since AI hardly build a corral. Or they might not research the tech for cavalry they might not produce citizen cavs. If champion cavs has no corral tech prerequisite then they might train champ cavs.

I think this should be possible with relative small changes in Foundation and Builder components, for example adding an 'autobuild' flag to relevant building templates (probably with a 'builder rate' specified), adding an automatic 'builder' in Foundation for such buildings and restricting the regular builders to join construction. We need something like this in the space mod too (the idea is to place a beacon/landing pad-looking foundation and then a spaceship will arrive after some time), but I didn't manage to experiment with this feature yet. Another a bit inconvenient but already available alternative should be building foundations (logically) as finished buildings (technically) and then using the upgrade feature to convert to the finished building state. But this will require player to manually upgrade each foundation. This probably may be not so bad if there would be some generic foundations of different sizes and then player would be able to select a number of finished buildings for each of them (like sunken/spore colonies in starcraft).

AAaaaagh- probably

I really like this, but I doubt it can be done. There are too many changes from one release to the next for a mod of a previous alpha to work.

I haven't even got around to porting 0 A.D. Empires Extended, my add-on or expansion mod that ports some Delenda Est civilizations into a RotE/Terra Magna style mod, to Alpha 22 or contributed to 0 A.D. yet, because my job search has gone so poorly, so I can't justify getting into a free project or modding. The constant changes and wide variety of opinions definitely make doing anything for 0 A.D. difficult, but somehow the project keeps progressing and looking pretty good as Alphas progress.

When I look at the staff directory, there's a lot of people who I'm sure have added a lot of value to the game at some point in the past 15 years, but many of them haven't even been on this forum in more than a year. Currently there is a relatively small group of high value content producers, who are all fundamental to the continued development of this game, and they're not even all staff. Wowgetoffyourcellphone is one of these, and needs to be accommodated as one of the most important mod-producers here, offering a quality alternative to the vanilla game, and in turn spurring the development of this game, generating interest and raising it's potential even further. I'm not saying he's right (I don't understand the issue, like literally, I don't understand code), but he shouldn't be treated so dismissively. I've only been active on this forum since December, but I've been following it for many years, and I've noticed a dark and obscure, self-defeating trend in this otherwise lovely community. High quality content producers, like artists, modders and coders barely get any kind of feedback on their work. No reactions, compliments, constructive criticisms... Sometimes nothing at all. And sometimes it can even get snarky, like now (and we've probably all been guilty of that at some point). If someone spends hours on top of hours, even week after week, or even years working on a project, all for 2 likes and an "oh, that's nice", it makes people lose heart, as if their work wasn't even worth all that effort (while it really was). My point is that human resources are by far the most valuable resource of this game, and this shouldn't be treated so lightly. In the past few months, so much amazing stuff has been created not only for the Kushite faction or Delenda Est, but also for a Xiognu (mini?)-faction, the Thracians, the Norse, Anglo-Saxons, Hyrule Conquest and so many other things like experimental balancing mods and map-scripts, the order move indicator and a bunch of crazy code stuff I honestly don't understand, all with barely any reaction from the vast majority of people in this community. Why is everybody so silent? Stimulate development. Encourage artists. Showcase people's work. Help newbies acquire skills in the necessary fields by updating/simplifying the necessary wiki's/pages and improving user friendliness for non code-savy people. Welcome new people, ideas and content. Be patient with each other. Be patient with yourselves, and forgive one another's transgressions. Potatoes