Leaderboard

Hello everyone, It is with great sadness and a little relief that I am announcing my retirement as project leader of both 0 A.D.: Empires Ascendant and Wildfire Games. It has been an awesome 12 years and 8 months, with its ups and downs. Making it to the team will remain one of my greatest achievements ever. After 6 years of 3D art struggles, getting the chance to join the team was unexpected (and, to this day one of my proudest moments), and two years later to be offered the leader job came even more as a surprise. It has been an incredible opportunity to be the leader of such a project. I would not have met half of the awesome people I met if it were not for it, and I would certainly have not have had the opportunities to go to the places I went if it were not for it. I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. Being able to spread the word about the game around the world has been an honor, and I hope the game will continue to shine at events. Recently, I had less and less energy and motivation to give to 0 A.D. The delay followed by the cancelling of A27 was no exception; I simply could not give the same energy I gave for the previous ones. The lobby became a source of permanent mental load and anxiety, first because of it is lack of moderation, then because of it started becoming moderated, and now because mods splat the community even more and the cheating is rampant. And it went downhill from there, as I started the longest break I ever took from 0 A.D. Those of you that know me know I was not really far, but I was simply not there. On the development side, I cannot seem to find any fun anymore. Everything feels more like duty than an actual desire, which can only work for so long until it breaks. The learning curve is just simply not worth the burnouts anymore. There are so many things I wanted to add to 0 A.D to showcase the true potential of the engine, as it is just immense, look at all the mods have done, look at all the thing people learnt about history, programming, art, bugs.. But I don't feel I can carry that vision anymore. I believe it is time for a change. I am therefore, effective immediately, quitting my functions as programmer, artist, video editor, documentation manager, translator, human resources, moderator, social media manager, public relations, system administrator, mod signer and modder, (all my mods can be considered archived until further notice). It is the only way for me to ever move on. I cannot just keep doing one thing for 0 A.D., unless I get a clean break I will continue feeling everything not covered by someone is on my shoulders, and it is a weight too big for a single person. I would like to thank everyone that made some or the whole journey with me, I will miss you all very much. I hope we shall meet again. I would also like to thank all the players that took action in the balancing department it has not been an easy task. I do not have ideas for the person who can or will replace me, nor do I know whether I should be replaced by a single person. I will leave it for the remaining people to decide what kind of leadership model they want to go for from now on. As for what I'll do next I do not know yet, but I've been working on Godot tools to import 0 A.D. assets and it's been fun, so I might continue that. I'm still working with Activ' Design this year as well. tldr; So long and thank you for the fish. May Wildfire Games and 0 A.D: Empires Ascendant live a long and healthy life after I am gone. Best regards, Stan

@Stan` I want to express my sincere gratitude for all the support and encouragement you have given to the project and to each of us here. I'm sure you'll be successful in whatever direction you decide to take from now on. I hope to continue seeing your presence here on the forum.

Alrighty, I think the Assyrian broom bus needs some edits; the action of the ram is a bit odd, and I've been staring at this relief for a few hours and hypothesizing. Does it really move up and down, or does it's swing pivot on a high point, allowing it to hit at an upward angle? It would need to move less material, and more importantly, move it away from the ram itself. If anything it'd give the ram a more involved model and more dynamic animations than it already has. Also, perhaps we could explore tunneling and counter-tunneling in this thread, as the general siege tactic of most civilizations at the time was to clear the walls with archers or slingers, and then proceed to mine the walls.

Healing just isn’t very effective while in a fight. It certainly isn’t effective when your enemy is basically one-shotting your men by using 20 archers to simultaneously volley arrows on one specific unit at a time. Buffing healers would have the effect of buffing sniping because a good sniper will level up his units and then be able to return them to full health more quickly after a fight Spreading out units to avoid “overkill” is like a poor man’s sniping. I agree with @real_tabasco_sauce that changing unit stats would make things unnecessarily more complicated. Along those lines, though, I’ve always thought it would be cool if you could temporarily force units to run until they get tired. It could function kind of like how sprinting works in the EA sports games. That would introduce charging like a lot of players want. But it wouldn’t create the imbalanced mess that happened when charging was accidentally implemented during one of the RCs.

I just realised "cellphones" means @wowgetoffyourcellphone lol.

sniping involves spreading fire among enemy ranged units (damage dealers/glass cannons), so relating damage to health would actually buff sniping, not nerf it.

I thought about something similar today (but for now my priority is patching UnitAI to handle separation of horse/rider entities) my idea was that at 50%+ health the units aren't healable but have some positive health change. at 50%-25% they're healable, have no health change and are weaker (especially movement speed). at 25% or less the template change to dead looking template and have negative health change which makes them need aids or otherwise they die. maybe even make them capturable as captives in that state? edit: if you want a more realistic strategic effects from injuries, you can make the injured and captured soldiers keep consuming population to force players do captives exchanges.

@Stan` really was the ideal project lead. He really knew his stuff and learned on the job very quickly.

I have an idea, so I'll just spit it out: maybe the project leader doesn't need to come out of the developer team. maybe it's better if it's someone who knows a bit of it all, of the programming, of the art, of the modding, of the playing, someone who's stuck with the project for very long, always doing a lot. maybe it should be @wowgetoffyourcellphone.

Snap version had similar problem in the past. You are using Ubuntu, right? If so, latest stable Ubuntu has already 0ad alpha 26 in the native deb package (try that), not snap. If you are using Ubuntu 22.04 you can find updated drivers and 0ad alpha 26 in this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers

Maybe make health and healing more important and also heavily incentivize spread out your attacks to as many enemy soldiers as possible by making attack values have an inverse relationship with health. -10% health = -5% attack; -20% health = -10% attack; and so on. Kind of doesn't make sense for soldiers who are on their last leg (5% health or something) to be able to inflict full attack damage. This "realism" is actually a byproduct of incentivizing the player to form long lines and attack as many of the enemy troops as possible instead of sniping or focus-firing. Just a random thought exercise. I have no concrete proposal here.

Definitely not! If I was able to change the game, I would make rams an absolute pain to build and use. Probably in the way detailed above (i.e. they hardly move, so you have to build them very close to the structure you want to attack). And ships wouldn't be able to carry them at all. I wouldn't have arsenals at all, I would have a very expensive unit ("siege engineer"), who is the only one able to build those weapons (with the help of standard workers, but you need a siege engineer for the building to progress). So the enemy would try to kill your siege engineer, and you would need to protect him, despite him needing to be on the front lines to build those siege weapons close enough to their target. This would make ram rushes impossible, or at least totally impractical.

Axemen are already in the game, both infantry and cavalry. But only two or three units in the entire game. And they are also good in countering rams, because they have very similar stats as swordsmen. Elephants are another good (more intuitive) way of stopping rams, but its true, not every civ has a good way of destroying rams. Last possibility always is to build rams yourself and let your rams fight the attacking rams.

sounds a lot like ChatGPT to be honest

Updated map to Alpha 26. WesternMediterranean_var2.zip