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At the moment, aside from upgrades that exist for some civilisations, tests that I have made with champion units has revealed that they are for the most part completely identical. This means that in a one on one fight, an un-upgraded spartan fighting an immortal will always result in a tie. I am not criticising this vein of logic; it makes balancing easier by having identical stats for different classes, yet at the same time it seems like a lost opportunity. Champions should have defining features to them that flesh out the culture they came from. As such, I thought up a few potential changes to how some (not all) champions could be altered to better reflect this. Immortal: capable of swapping to archer mode at the cost of lower armour. Spartan Hoplite: free but extremely long training time and two population, can be trained in the Village Phase through a the Mess Hall, which has a building cap of one in the Village phase, 2 in the Town Phase, and 3 in the City Phase. They cannot be batch trained. Consular Bodyguard: buffed when by a hero. Sacred Band: buffs citizen soldiers within a small aura at the cost of taking up two population. British Chariot: incorporate transport aspect (see Geneva’s thread.). Naked Fanatic: ignores armour. Scythian Archer: buffed when fighting in friendly territory. Is trained at the Civic Centre. Marine: small movement buff to ships it is garrisoned within. Cataphract: Higher armour but slower speed. Hetairoi: Faster movement and bonus against infantry at the cost of a smaller bonus against cavalry. Skiritae: faster movement speed and starts trained at advanced rank instead of elite. These are just a few things I thought up that may not be practical to implement at the moment, but I think that a line of thinking like this would greatly help in characterising defining part of each civilisation.

Will not be able to watch it live but here are my questions (not sure if their interesting for everyone/ answerable at the moment tho ) @Stan`: It's hard to stay informed about the development without hanging out in IRC/ reading trac and following the latest diffs all the time, so do you have an overview about what the team members want to work on for a26? Or ist it too early in the dev cycle for that? I know the roadmap and the tickets on there, but only because there is a ticket doesn't mean it will be done. Also some things have no tickets and get implemented either way (terrain update iirc). Not that I want a definite "that will get implemented", more a "these are the things we would like to work on". To clarify what features I mean: a25 got unit pushing, pathfinder multithreading, terrain update, turrets.. So what could be big things for a26: han? Further lag improvements, building hotkeys, campaigns ect? _________ Also how did you/ the team experience the development of a25 in terms of including more people into balancing and community interaction overall? Was it all positive/ helpful or is there room for improvement how the interested individuals/ the community can help? _________ Looking forward to watch it later

Thanks for the questions, will try to answer them during the stream.

However one thing that is an issue, is that champions aren't used regularly. There is few reasons to train champions in 1v1s. So I think first we should make champions more viable. What I would like to see is moving buildings like Gallic assembly of princes, Athenian council hall, and Spartan mess hall to p2 and allow them to train champions in p2. Since the number of these buildings could be limited, it also allows for some but limited champion training. Also I would like 1 type of champion per faction being selected as the favoured champions, which can be trained in the fortress and does not require any technologies to unlock them.

Make sure you don't miss Tom0ad's next livestream about 0 A.D. Like the previous one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NjTHd26l40), you'll be able to discover the new Alpha 25 release, and hear from Stan about how the process of creating the new Alpha went. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhIOUv0vVw0 Hope to see you all there!

Looks like a nice to have, will look at it

It will probably involve simulation code changes (UnitAI) and has some pretty hard edge cases so I say it would be better to be done as an official 0ad feature

Hi everyone, I am in a great addiction to the game recently (start playing from A23) and started to read the forum until I found this topic. I read through all the post and I found this game is not only working on each civilization balance but also on the historical accuracy (which surprised me and like to pay great respect to the development team). I have great interest on the Chinese history especially on the Zhou dynasty (which splits to the "spring and autumn" and “Warring state” period) then united by "Qin" and overthrown by "Han". For the militaries unit maybe could get some reference from the "Trrracotta Army" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_Army which may be more accuracy to the history, since they were built on that time and preserved till date. A whole standard unify army was made include infantry(spear, sword, halberd, gagger-axe"ge", bow and crossbow), calvary, armored warrior, chariot, militaries officer etc. Compared to Han army, will not be that unified as most of their war are against the Xiong Nu which have differ from the mainland army and other regions (which could be seen during the "three kingdom" period).

So you want units that have a critical attack that can be used once every Y successful hits? Much like the greek heroes in AOM.

Sounds a bit like https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1364?

It's actually one of the bugs we're fixing in A25b

I'd make a default stance, probably aggressive, and then make it changeable per building. Maybe like this: Or like this?

Can we make it visible for other factions as well please? Actually I think I can make a mod for this. But @Stan` or any other artist can you make some models for damaged buildings please?

I think that in this alpha there are still some units who need to be buffed or nerfed, such as: Archers (except champions) who seem to not be anymore affective against any kind of pike shield and melee cavarly (especially sword one), which makes them practically unuseful in late game (especially in games with a 300 pop cap); Consular bodyguard: in my opinion this unit is not counterable by any kind of other unit in the game when attacking a player base. You just need to have 15/20 of them to completely destroy the enemy eco (no point for the enemy to have soldiers near to the cc to protect the fields or even walls or palizades, which can be easily destroyed by them); Heroes: I expressed my thoughts in the topic here: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/51406-dancing-lowering-heroes-health-adding-headshot-damage/ I think that one way to “easily” balance this is to implement a headshot/vital-areas-shot damage. It is 1) Realistic, because in real life an arrow can hit a leg, an armour or a vital area 2) Useful in game, because it can be a counter against all the op units mentioned before. This damage would not be applied only to ranged units but also to buildings (maybe not all, I think this kind of damage is needed especially for the civic centres). -> I think the damage should not be a instant kill but a hit that cuts down something like a 60/70% of the enemy unit health points. Here are some idea how it could work: By percentage. An example could be: Archers: 20% chance Slingers: 15% chance Skirms: 10% chance Buildings: 30% chance A rechargeable damage. I don't like the idea of having a bar that recharges after a definite amount of time (just because if you have an army of many ranged units with all this damage recharged would be op). I would like this to be rechargeable in proportion to the effective hits the unit succesfully gets. An example could be: Archers: rechargeable every 10 hits Slingers: rechargeable every 13 hits Skirms: rechargeable every 16 hits Buildings: rechargeable every 8 hits