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im not sure about i shouid post my drawing in this community, but i am big fan of this game, and curious about ancient history. if my drawing is look ok, i can show more my art to help development of 0.a.d

A DunePainter is something that was missing on Elephantine and Jebel Barkal. To fix the resource problem and increase aesthetics, could have half of the map dunes, the other half something else. Finding a geographic location that the map represents can inspire further content.

Chang Jiang.

While pacing is most of the time associated with movies or books, most games have a similar format, but the structure can vary from one to the next. In many this can be due to artificial barriers. Are these barriers necessarily bad? Not really, but the important thing for most games that take longer than five minutes is to have a distinct feel to what could be called the early, mid, and late-game. The most familiar example to many would be Age of Kings, which had ages serving that purpose. Assuming that all of you are acquainted with some of the strategies of the game, I will simply point out that it offered diverse options from doing a dark age rush, turtling, and then going fast castle often to do a knight rush or just boom; alternatively one could aim for a faster feudal age, and then do a feudal age rush, which most of the time consist of archers or scout cavalry and then going to castle age at a later point, usually hoping that the map control could pay off. There were many variations to these, but the point I want to make is the fact that there were fairly diverse options for every civilisation. Unfortunately, I do not see the current iteration of the game having these options. To clarify, I understand that the game is in alpha and such things cannot be expected to existed in any full-fledged state. Still, I find it disconcerting that no one has been able to better define viable strategies for each civilisation. A pressing issue is the fact that in its current state, 0 A.D, with unique aesthetics, implies that each civilisation will have extremely unique gameplay mechanics on par with games like Starcraft, but when looking on paper, the spearman of one civilisation, although drastically differing in armament and historical context, is practically identical. This ultimately makes 0 A.D. seem like false advertising; its visuals are almost as different from one culture to the next as in Age of Mythology, yet the gameplay does not follow this. I am not going to say what each civilisation should be like right here and now. I don’t know enough about many cultures outside of Persia, Hellas, Italy, and the Hellenistic states. What I do want to argue is that there should be an intentional way allowing civilisations doing things such as rushing, booming, and turtling to some capacity and also in a way that plays to its historical strengths and weaknesses. Obviously there could be exceptions; Sparta seems impossible to viably turtle with. What this can broadly mean though is a better attempt at designing things such as the tech tree and phases to fit to encouraging interesting options for all civilisations and then with a stable foundation like that, refining the ideas behind each one. One other note to be made is that there should be a feeling of reward to advancing a phase. These currently feel like some of the most lack-luster aspects of the game. First, I would advise making them be named things that are more thematic. Village, town, and city seem matter-of-fact. I would recommend basing it around legal reforms such as “Code of Laws” and so on and so forth; there could be other ways of doing this, but the main point is that there should be some theme behind them, not just what seems like a placeholder name. Also, there should be some fanfare or sound when someone advances to a new phase to signify that something great has taken place. If at all possible, there could even be variations in the music tracks give them slightly thicker musical textures when possible in the subsequent phases. Lastly although changing the models each phase might be difficult, there could be as simple of changing the textures to look dirtier and staler in the village phase to more vibrant colours in the later phases.

Laws of Lycurgus In wiki page, I found that spartans have -10% population and their units get promoted directly to elite rank with 1 kill in age III. But it's not mentioned in game. Is it the case that one is outdated? Does spartan units still have that perk? Testudo, Syntagma and Phalanx What do these formations do? What kind of bonuses will they provide for units in the formation? I read in this forums in a comment that with Phalanx formation, the damage is distributed with every other unit in the said formation. Can someone clarify this? I couldn't find any official wiki or in-game explanation. Iphicrates and formation bonus Say I keep some citizen soldiers and Iphicrates in a formation, which will give every unit +3 armour. Now while fighting, they are going to disperse anyways, so does the formation bonus apply after they naturally disperse when an enemy unit approaches?

The thing that you are ignoring is that aside from some basic safety, there is little advantage to be had from killing wildlife since their deaths in no way directly contribute to the victory conditions. If there was some reward such as food, it would become more plausible to have it done that way. As such, having the units automatically attack wildlife is a liability. If there is a low hp unit, they will end up dying due to the player simply marching it too close to a predator. There are cases in which predators do yield food such as crocodiles in Age of Empires. Even with this potential benefit though, there are definite risks to fighting against violent animals in the game. Thus, there is more than only one argument against the current unit behaviour.

(The screenshot showed that the playercolor ban on one side of the persian temple had golden stars on it but the other side didnt.)

Thanks for the report. Please note that your image link has expired for some reason. The issue comes from the remastered version of the Persian Texture made by @Enrique which, while having a significant number of improvements have some new issues. Notice the (correctly) exported alpha channels are different. I finally found a way to export them correctly which means we can now export the old DDS textures to PNG as needed. The Persian texture will be the first, once it is fixed. Also notice the textures without alpha channels are different. To do the export properly open blender, import the DDS texture, save it as a PNG with Alpha, open it in Gimp, Click on the layer -> Add mask -> Alpha Channel Transfer. You can then copy paste that mask layer as needed to keep the good transparency. @LordGood @wowgetoffyourcellphone Can any of you fix the texture ? keeping the best of both worlds ?

Neat! I think from a gameplay perspective, the scale of the dunes is outsized from terrain features in most other maps in the game. I think if the dunes scale was reduced by about 40% you'd have something super cool here. Put a randomly seeded oasis in the middle surrounded by dunes or something and you got a stew goin. I like what you did with the ambient colors to make the dunes that orange color. Perhaps have a few variations between a set of few different realistic colors to make the map look slightly different each time. Also, too bad the game doesn't have SSAO. Would look so much better on a map like this.

I would agree with wow. The objective rarely has to do with actively killing wildlife in 0 A.D, and making soldiers pursue this automatically seems peculiar. The wildlife wound them, potentially weakening the troops for the next engagement. The issue is that there is no actual purpose to killing them other than the point that they might need to be killed later. What reward does the player get? A good analogy is from mangonel behaviour in Age of Kings. Prior to the conquerors expansion, they would actively target enemies regardless of the presence of friendly units. This could prove disastrous. For reference, here is a highly informative video depicting the destructive power of mangonels.

Considering that we can now play with Kushites in Polar Sea and Brittons in Fields of Meroe, I don't see a problem in having Rome Republic vs Empire. It's impossible to have total realism. Also a fourth phase puts the game even closer to AoE2. If Imperial Rome was just the fourth phase we wouldn't see them a lot in the game since most games (at least 1v1) would finish in P3. (Discussion has gone off topic.)

The stats feature is very useful. Thanks Seems like faction02 has 1 real (6.20 old) and 1 fake fgod (0.23)

Sure, right next to the skeletons of the people who left them there. Random treasures are a weak way to balance a map though. You can't expect random treasures to supply the tens of thousands of wood that each player needs in order to compete reasonably.

All part of my evil masterplan to confound you [insert evil emoji]. In seriousness, though, I wanted to avoid an unnecessary amount of text crunched together and still like the aesthetics of indentation in paragraphs; I also am fond of the eclectic French tastes concerning that matter. In regards to sanitation, the point is to make it seem like there is something great occurring with the next phase; it should feel rewarding. While many games seem to naïvely adhere to the Whig Theory of history (things continue to get more sophisticated and better), the important thing is that phases should not just be another technology you press. If this was a city-building game in which sanitation was an in game mechanic, I would by all means stand by that position.

Actually it ought to be the other way around: contrary to popular belief, cities were (and are) a lot dirtier than villages.

Thank you for your post! You managed to amaze me again with your unusual typography. Not only do you type two full spaces between sentences (as you've done earlier), but now you also started to indent your paragraphs (I didn't see you do that earlier) after white lines. Typically people avoid combining the two. And indenting the first paragraph is often considered bad taste in English (but not in French). Of course, everyone is allowed to mark up his messages in any way they like. Unusual typography merely distracts me PS Something I do appreciate is that you use proper “quotation marks” and not programmer's "cat claws".

I don't know about Europe, but the black and white variety was common across Egypt and Kush for thousands of years before 0AD'S timeframe: True that not all are mountain goats, but they can all scale steep cliffs. It's just the "vertical cliff" climbing that's specific to some goats. The ibex, one of the wild goats in-game is one of these vertical climbers. I own some West-African Pygmy Goats, and even they can jump, climb and balance on some incredibly small ledges... One of them can summersault! Some non-mountain goats have even refined the art of climbing trees! Check these out: