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This is an oversimplification of the situation. As ffm correctly points out, the full hashing is a feature that cannot be removed lightly. We are working actively on the issue, as you can see from the linked technical discussions. What we will not do is hurriedly release a new version. We are carefully fixing a few bugs the right way which will take time. Thanks to our new git workflow, we are able to prepare a 0.27.1 release in an orderly way, something that wasn't possible in the past. It will also take some time to get the process right, as it will be our first patch release. The future release 28 is in active development and should be out in Q4 of 2025. I cannot give you an estimate for 27.1, but it will be as fast as humanly possible on our 100% volunteer free time. If A27 is not playable for some people, then it means it was even worse for them in A26. Indeed, full hashes were performed in A26 as well. The numerous performance improvements we released are just making that bottleneck prominent. It is alarmist and totally incorrect to insinuate that A27 would have higher spec requirements than A26.

Adds the ability to recruit Heroes from the start of the game in the Civic Center. Their stats are reduced. HP count: Infantry 250 Cavalry 350 Elephants 1100 Melee and Range: At or below Champion level. Range: Additionally reduced damage. UPDATE 0.2.0: All Heroes have 2 auras added, with small bonuses for units and research. Added 3 Tactics. Switching is done using the unit upgrade icon when selecting a Hero. Neutral => Def => Att => Neutral Neutral - no bonuses Def - units and buildings get bonuses to defense stats. Att - units and buildings get bonuses to attack stats. Heroes can Promotion up to level 3. Tactics bonuses increase as they advance to the next level. hero-rebalance.zip

New design:

Update From now on @Seleucids is the main maintainer of autociv. Thanks for taking over

When we try to produce units from multiple barracks at the same time but don't have enough resources to assign the desired number of units to each barracks, it often happens that units are added to the production queue of already occupied barracks, while free barracks remain idle. This results in long production queues accumulating in fewer barracks than we actually have available, and it also locks up resources that remain reserved for those units. This week, I have been working on a mod to fix this bug in 0 A.D.'s training system. Additionally, I added an option to define the maximum number of units in the production queue. This works the same way as for free barracks: if some of our barracks have reached the maximum queue limit, new units will only be assigned to the free barracks. I'm sharing two videos showing the behavior. When producing in batches, the mod takes into account the number of occupied "slots" in the queue. That is, it does not consider the number of units produced but rather the number of assigned batches in the queue. Also, I added an alternative production system based on the standard system from AoE2, where units are assigned, as we issue the command (via hotkey or click), to the free barracks or the one with the fewest queued units. For now, this system only applies to individual units (not batches). This means we can combine both systems—producing one unit per barracks each time we issue a command or distributing multiple batches among the selected barracks when using batch production. The spirit of this mod is to offer an alternative approach to what I consider to be design flaws in 0 A.D.'s vanilla training system. Distributing it as a mod gives us the opportunity to conduct the necessary tests and receive feedback with a view toward its implementation in the next release. I want to give a special thanks to @Atrik for pointing me to the necessary game files to modify and for sharing a preliminary code to implement this mechanism. To install: unzip the content of the folder into your mod's folder. (I plan to make the .pyromod file and add it to mod.io in the future) CustomTrainer.zip AoE2.mp4 176872599_MaxQueueLimit2.mp4

Considering the latest news about the Autociv mod, it seemed like a good time to do this poll. While it's possible that some community member will start maintaining this mod, perhaps this is a good opportunity to think about what features we think could be incorporated into the vanilla game in the future. I want to take this opportunity to eternally thank @nani for the invaluable contribution he has made to the game with all the time dedicated to the development of Autociv. I'm sure that most of the community shares this feeling. Thank you very much, nani. You're the best. If I have omitted any feature that you think is important, please mention it in your answer.

I support this. Do note however that integrating the code will be non trivial as some things are hacked around the game and we will need to take the time and make them proper. E.g. the corpse thing i tried to port in 5 different ways and none got in.

Hi all, right now all civilizations use a carthagian actor for formations, though especially the romans had their own, very unique standards, e.g. Aquila (eagle), Signum and Vexillum. I put together 4 standards, which I'm adding as a mod here. Alpha for player colour still needs to be added. @wowgetoffyourcellphone @Stan` @real_tabasco_sauce maybe someone could take a look on it and make a PR? we could also put together a standard bearer unit, similar to the gaul trumpeter, as a scenario unit or upgradable legionary in vanilla? They used to be called "Aquilifier" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquilifer) or "Signifier" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signifer). references: wikipedia links: standards.zip

This is not a bug ! Technical explanation: Han civ was pulled straight out from Terra Magna A23 and had its code fixed for a24 and A25, as a single standalone mod civ. On incorporating into A26, for balance, many features of the Han were removed. However, they didn't delete the template files; they just removed the OP units from Han production buildings. Crossbow cav and mobile boltshooter tank were examples of these. But the production buildings of other civs do not have explicit inhibition of these units, especially the Persian CC which can train all cav class units. As a result, the hidden units can be trained by capturing other civs' buildings.

cc @bb_ @Freagarach @implodedok

Here is the popularity of the technologies in my database. All data from A27 A24. The data is gathered from 369 games with 1436 players (not individuals [if a player is in 2 games its counted as 2 players]). From the 1436 players are the top 600 selected with the highest eco_score of spend resources by minute 13 selected and evaluated. So games in which the player booms and is likely left alone. The percentage shows how many of these players who can researched the technology actually researched the technology in that game. So if a tech is only available for han, and all the han players researched it, it would be 100%. This could be used to balance some techs. tech_stats.xlsx

I appreciate your enthusiasm. However, any mod that automates anything beyond the tools already explicitly provided in the game is a cheat mod. Every single game studio in the world would agree with me here. I'm not sure why Wildfire Games alone is expected to be different and allow cheat mods.

Hey guys, how is everyone? Today I'm happy to present you with the final result after some drastic improvements to the River Delta map. All terrains have been updated to the Sahara biome, map layouts updated to resemble a more natural looking marsh-like landscape, updated resource distribution and also added some final touches that I think will make it more fun to play I've scaled down the 4 player map size from giant to very large so it may be possible to create a 6 player map as well in the future. I'd love to take a look at the new performance improvements of the newest version and explore the possibility. I have uploaded the daytime 2 player and 4 player versions in the original post where I have attached the files. Do take a look and I'd love to hear what you think. Edit: Night time versions uploaded.

Hi all, please list your feature requests for autociv below, and I will try to implement them as suitable. Also any suggestions and bug reports are welcomed. For a start, I am thinking about allowing the user to choose which stats they would like to see in the stats panel. For example, you can choose to see your melee count but not the number of siege weapons that you made. You can also disable teammate stats (despite allied view on) as some people found it annoying to see so many fluctuating numbers. This will be configurable via a page in options.

Do it. No one wants these monstrous ships.

I´m using this references for the new design

As most people are aware, A27 has some technical bugs: extreme stuttering and OOS on rejoin. The extreme stutter makes many players drop down to 3fps or even freeze and crash the game completely. We have determined that it is caused by full hash. Wraitii has a fixed version with quick hash that solves this problem. I and @real_tabasco_sauce have tested it out and large battles with 4 players were able to run smoothly. My question is, can we do a quick re-release like we had in A25-b or just call a new version A27.5 / A28, where we at least fix the hashing stutter. If this is too much to ask, all we need to do is compile this: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/wraitii/0ad/src/branch/quick_hash_only/ into .exe or appimages then distribute it to the player base so that people who aren't capable of building the solution can also play. Of course it might not be compatible with the rest of A27 players but if everyone could update easily, then it won't be a problem. The solution can be popularised by advertising on the forum and the lobby heading message. We can do a release candidate every time a bug is fixed, just to get games going. This current version is almost unplayable for many medium spec users and a few players I know have quit because of the stutter issue.

It's not. It's actually within the game licenses that anybody can mod the game. You can make a circular reasoning with the tos stating that cheating isn't allowed in ranked games. Actually the Terms of Use are very clear that everything which grants unfair advantages isn't allowed in multiplayer games, no matter if they are rated or not:

I won't argue on what is the definition of "cheating", but I would like to leave a comment on the "real solution" proposed. Having a system with a single host computing everything and sending out the data would be a great simplification of the code and indeed solve some of the cheating issues. It definitely would make our work as programmers a lot easier (no more cross platform out of sync, no more deserialization bugs etc.). However, there is one particular good reason why we (and every similar game too) go through all the hassle of a lockstep networking model (i.e. simultaneous computation of the simState in all the clients): A single host computation system will not work practically. The problem lies into the fact that the bandwidth of an internet connection is limited. (An old article on the topic is here: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/1500-archers-on-a-28-8-network-programming-in-age-of-empires-and-beyond) In a single host computation system, the host will have to send (a large portion of) the gamestate to every client multiple times per second. The data of the gamestate is required to show the player what (s)he is supposed to see (units in its vision). This needs to be updated with a good frequency so that the player can respond accordingly. Currently we have turns of 200ms, so that means a frequency of 5 per second (in the past in 0 A.D. we used turns of 500ms, which wasn't ideal, but sure one can tweak a bit here). A gamestate can have a size of several MB's. I just tested: a new game on the acropolis map is already 500kB, so having a big map with 8 players in late game will be like 5MB. This means we need to be sending 25MB to every client per second. With 8 players and some observers, this will easily be a few hundred MB per second. Even on 1Gbit/s fiber class connections you won't be able to do this (1Gbit/s usually gives just over 100 MB/s). This issue prevents any MP game from running stably, so it really is not a practical solution. Even if one would have sufficient bandwidth, there is also the issue of latency. A message send over the internet takes time to arrive at the other end. Currently one a player can give a command based directly on the current turn in the simstate. The command then has to travel to the host and then back to all clients for it to be executed. So basically one needs to send stuff twice over the internet. If one has a single host computation system, the player sending a command is actually already lagging behind (since the simstate has been send from the host to him). Then secondly, the player gives a command, which is send to the host, and lastly the host sends a new simstate to the client. So in total 3 times things have been send over the internet. Meaning that the latency of commands is increased by 50% (and probably more since the package sizes have increased too). Also a single host computation system is filling one hole with another: since the host will now have full control of the simstate, and no one is controlling it, (s)he can change it. So such a system makes it possible to cheat the simstate for the host. Creating an (imo) even bigger problem than the information leak problem in a lockstep networking model. Surely one can come up with "solutions" like dedicated (trusted) servers, but then one runs into the question: who will maintain and pay for those servers? In all it boils down to the quote, quoted above too: While technically it certainly is possible to design a system without information leaks, such a system is nonviable to produce a playable game.

Welcome @WiseKind. You formulate your argument(s) very eloquently and rationally, but you seem to repeat the same talking point in a different formulation quite often? Please correct me if I'm wrong, this is how I understood your main argument (for GUI mods, regarding the network issue/system I cannot speak as I do not have the sufficient knowledge): "The GUI is not part of the game, it is only how we interact with the game, thus changing the GUI cannot be considered cheating, as cheating means the game itself was altered" And you support this argument by using the 0ad vision (again, this is how I understood your post, please correct me if I got it wrong): "The vision states that 0ad is not supposed to be won by executing a build order with the fastest click speed, thus reducing the amount of clicks needed is not a relevant change to the gameplay" If I understood you correctly (if not, please ignore the following paragraph), then I'd like to disagree: - The GUI is a crucial part of the game, not some seperate entity. The GUI is what I am interacting with, it is essentially what I am "playing". A game is a thing in which things happen, according to my inputs. Changing what all the inputs do, means changing the game. Changing the game to have an advantage is considered cheating. - You said yourself that every action should have (or has?) strategic importance. But there are only so many core strategies that fit within the confines of a game, and having a larger army will always be an advantage. So if someone spares even a few seconds because one of their clicks equal ten clicks of a "normal" player, they will have an advantage. And since that advantage comes from installing a mod (which the others might not even know about), it is unfair. An unfair advantage can reasonably be called cheating. I want to answer to two things specifically, first: I do happen to know that putting the checks into place for this would be literally impossible, given the nature of free software I think it's not about any "checks", it's about establishing a common ground on what is "cheating" and what isnt. 0ad has no malicious cheaters (that I know of). But there are different opinions on what should be allowed in a "normal" or a "rated" game. And the "cheaters" we do have (Like @Atrik, the evil, evil villian ) are perfectly reasonable people, that deactivate their "cheats" when asked to (as seen in a recent tournament). So if we did find a common ground, the "cheating problem" would instantly cease to exist. As my last point I want to answer to this: Hello, that's me! I'm bored if I can't click meaningfully atleast twice a second. Even if I had ProGUI, I'd manually manage all my barracks, because I like it and because there's not much else going on (and there shouldn't be, as the "buildup" phase with only light skirmishes and major focus on you economic decisions is a great part of any rts).

《Cambyses II》 Cambyses II is marching his army to conquer and rule over the whole Egypt as the first foreign ruler and the first Persian Pharaoh. That would mark the end of Egypt's independence and the beginning of Persian rule over the region. Cambyses II's conquest of Egypt was part of the larger Persian Empire's expansion into various territories. Cambyses II becomes the Pharaoh of Egypt after his successful subsumption of Egypt into the Persian Empire. In doing so, Cambyses II was given the Pharaoh name of Mesuti Ra, beginning the 27th dynasty (the first Egyptian Satrapy), which lasted from 525 to 404 BCE. A Pharaoh name was a significant tradition for Egyptian royalty as it highlighted the perception of the pharaoh as being a vessel for the gods, and therefore, a divine being in their own right. 4 Players: 1. Cambyses II(Persians) 2. Hippias(Athenians) 3. Psamtik III(Egyptians) 4. Cleomenes I(Spartans) Revealed Map Unlimited Sources for all "Requirements" Installation of 0 A.D. alpha 26 + Millennium A.D Mod "File Paths" Mac: User/Application Support/0ad/mods/user/maps/scenarios Linux: Home/.local/share/0ad/mods/user/maps/scenarios Windows: Documents/My Games/0ad/mods/user/maps/scenarios ●Mithra Shakiba● Acheamanid Empire II.pmpAcheamanid Empire II.xml

Hello my friend, I would like to share with you everything I have managed to do so far. I will describe everything I have added and modified in the game. First I changed the population amount to 600000 and increased the map size to 704. Then I changed the construction time and its life, needing 4 to 5 citizens to have a similar time to the conventional one. I strengthened the walls a lot, now the walls protect the cities well and without siege weapons it is very difficult to penetrate the walls. I created new roads to decorate the city, with 3 models, 1 made of dirt, stone and Roman flooring. For now they are only decorative, but I would like to have an effect of increasing the speed of units when passing through them. I created two new units, creating the male Citizen who can collect more wood, stone and metal than the female. He also has new buildings that only he can build. Icreated the Landscaper who can build trees to decorate the city. The female units can now only build the farm and the corral and they collect more food than the males. Plantations are made inside the farms, with 5 options: wheat, vineyard, date palm, orchard, and banana grove.In the market you can create stalls of various types and an area for selling slaves, and there you can buy slaves. I removed the distance of towers and forts and the construction limit so that the player can create their city in the best possible way. I modified the icons of the items(still missing some). I added new songs to the game. I need to clear up some doubts. How can I remove Footprint and Obstruction so that the player doesn't bump into the roads after they've been created? Every time I remove them, I get an error. Next step, I want to add new resources like money, clothes, technology, among others, and modify the appearance of the buildings with the generated technologies. Thank you once again for all the patience and support you've given me so far.

Since cs melee cavs rushs and melee champ cavs are op the obvious thing to do is to increase counter dps of inf polearms. Melees champs cavs are brokens since they lack any counter now, but themselves counter everything (inf, siege, other cavs...) and have the highest mobility. Mobility can be fun, so the nerf should be on their ability to meatshield/destroy armies of spears => restore x3 counter for example.

About ministers, the bonus was intended to be much more, then there was an argument made that this needs to be useless for the sake of balance. Trying the initial intended value is still something I think is worth a shot. Another point is just because top players don't use certain techs doesn't mean low elo players can't see value in it, so the statistics probably paint a skewed picture.

I believe the crew is built-in; additional passengers would make the ship slower, due to increased weight. (Don't implement that!)

You can start by making a mod for this yourself, then try to submit it as patches towards the main game. Alternatively, we can keep it as a mod. To make the mod, start with Seleucids and Persians as template and assets source...

A video demonstration of the disproportionate OPness of champion spear cav: Spearmen are intended to be counter cavalry effectively with its 3x bonus, yet the champion cavalry kills regular infantry spearman with 205 remaining health. This is disproportionately OP. Its also defeated a Persian immortal (a champion unit that has hard counter against cavalry) with 57 Hp left. Even matched against the strongest infantry spear units of 0AD, the Spartan Olympic Hoplite and Macedonian shield bearer, the cavalry unit inflicted severe injury before dying. Combined with the mobility and its affordable cost in late game, this unit is disastrously OP. Solutions: Reduce its damage to a sensible level so that it cannot kill a spearman in 5 hits. Decrease armour value Limit the spam - either only allow them to be produced from special buildings or raise their price to unaffordable levels. Give some counter units to every civ. Leif has implemented features in his Historical mod to limit the abusive spam of this unit, which is great. I think we should have some limitations in base game as well. The training champions from fortress mechanism of A23 was good.

I think this kind of comments from an unknown user is the reason why a bunch of old timers in the team have the feeling that 0ad players, especially those who have never written a line of code, live a bit disconnected from reality and disregard the major part of their free time (which is scarce in an adult's life) the devs dedicate here. Here Acero says in a aggressive tone and with utmost disrespect for our work that devs MUST deliver a flawless (but still free) product on each and every alpha, fix every bug immediately while also finding time and motivation to play the game in a competitive multiplayer setting. Guess what Acero: that leaves me the choice between giving up OR avoiding interaction with players. And players have been degrading my motivation over the years as the expectations have been getting higher. You should be asking yourself why, instead of disparaging us. Now I hope you understand why your tone is unacceptable Please delete your post which doesn't help, and I'll do the same with my bad taste parody. Instead we would be grateful to have profiling data and numbers instead of vague feelings of performance degradation. I do not question the fact that there is a performance issue, but right now it is unexplainable. As wraitii points out, it is not possible that the hashing is the sole culprit if you maintain that A26 was objectively faster. We need to understand that issue before we can think of fixing it.

My intention is to be able to get a more or less accurate idea of the players' preferences by giving them the possibility of choosing multiple options instead of holding a vote in which only one option can be chosen, which would force each user to exclude some of their preferences from their vote. As an example: So far, there is a clear preference for the addition of Building Hotkeys over Players' Stats Overlay, with a difference of approximately 18% percentage points (17 votes/22voters = 77% vs 13 votes/22voters = 59%. ). Of course, here we have to take into account the different preferences between single player users and multiplayer users. We could infer that a single player user does not have much interest in seeing the economic information of his allies as a multiplayer player does. Same for hosts features which has even more difference (23% over hotkeys). And this "could confirm" that right now most voters are single player users. Evidently, this seems to be the case. However, taking into account what I expressed in the previous paragraph, we should consider which of these features are more suitable for the two game modes (single/multiplayer). Taking Active Pause as an example, it doesn't seem right that a player can execute commands while the game is paused in a multiplayer game, and in this regard I would put more emphasis on how to modify the pause system in multiplayer in such a way as to mitigate pause abuse, something we know can be quite irritating. Finally, I would like to add that beyond the "democratic spirit" of any vote, it is difficult to take the results as an absolute and definitive truth. Rather, I believe they serve as valuable feedback for those who, with effort and dedication, develop 0 A.D. and make the decisions they consider most appropriate (and feasible) to continue improving this great game, incorporating Autociv features that have contributed a lot. It could also be a nice tribute. =)

Helllo, If a bot performs tasks on your behalf and this feature isn't available in the vanilla version, it's considered cheating. Other players don't have the option to do the same. I don't want to play against cheaters, whether they're weak or strong; it's the same. I'm convinced that someone who focuses on rushing with their cavalry will manage it better because they won't have to click on these buildings and produce, or even think about it. The player without the mod won't have this advantage. If QuickStart were in the vanilla game, configurable and accessible to everyone, I wouldn't like this feature, but I wouldn't oppose it. I also think that issuing commands during pause is a form of cheating for those with autociv. I find it comfortable with all the pauses in the games. The goal isn't to issue 50 orders but just 1 or 2. Should issuing orders during pause be in the vanilla game? I'll let you debate that. People don't ban it ,because they don't know it exist. If tomorrow a super developer creates a bot that plays entirely in your place, performs excellent military maneuvers, automatically sends resources, and starts transitioning farms on its own, would you still find that acceptable?

Ok i forgot to explain With this PR, (https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/7633) units will only get stuck attacking a building (or capturing) if you have directed them to do this. If you didn't, they will consider units of higher priority. So it means that if you looked away from your army and they start attacking buildings because there are no units nearby, they won't get stuck doing this. Also, it helps with units like bolts to not get stuck attacking a house or something.

Typing banani should ban nani.

I volunteer !

This is very good! It'll be in DE for A27 and in the base game for R28. The hanging banner consistent with the Pirate ship sail is a nice touch.

Hopefully in the next few alphas we can get some of that historical stuff into the game so you all can learn more.

After Han captures a Persian CC, a hidden unit becomes available in that CC: Han Cavalry Crossbowman. This unit is never mentioned in Structure Trees.

I think I figured it out: I need to clone the new 0 A.D. repository after installing git-lfs. I didn't do that since I thought LFS is just some git fork that's supposed to be faster and an optional thing. Cloning again and this time it's taking longer like it normally does when it pulls large data, so this should have solved it. Updated to confirm it works now! Got to the main menu and it's too late to test an actual match, but the menu renders fine and I hear the music so all should be good. Thanks for all the help and glad to to have 0 A.D. running from Git once more!

- allow Carthaginians to train Champions in stables again. What is a stable which can train only skirm cav? - maybe allow them to train infantry Champs in barracks as well.

Updated to Version 0.5.1 Compatible with 0.27.0 Added description to the first post.

It's from 2023, but here you go. (I'll probably check later if it destroys my upload quota and delete it eventually...) 0ad-0.0.27-rc1-27645-alpha-win32.exe

From my POV this is the great advantage of the Smart train. @Atrik Do you remember the game we played the other day where Hakunamata constantly attacked my base with cavs? I had my barracks for a long time without producing xD. And even if I had remembered to produce in them, the vanilla production system is quite inefficient and instead of assigning units to free barracks it stacks units in the same barracks in a somewhat random way. I believe that improving the production system should be a priority in the next version of the game, similar to how it’s done in AOE 2. This way, the advantage of a macro that automatically assigns the batch size according to the available resources and instantly would be mitigated greatly. The advantage of being able to freely maneuver your units instead of having to keep watching where the heck the barracks full of stacked units are is really quite obvious. I have used the smart train several times and my production has improved a lot specially in situations like I mentioned before. Unfortunately, you are also a bit dishonest in this regard. I have rarely heard you mention it as an argument, and instead you argue about your great skill as a player and how you can overcome this difficulty. Something that, while true, somewhat avoids the point in question that, at least I and other players have pointed out to you. I don’t believe the solution is to enter a game as a spectator and start berating yourself. However, I understand the feeling of frustration. Taking extreme positions on either side hasn’t proven to be effective. And it would be nice to reach some common ground. Something that also seems unlikely.

Can you describe your problem in more detail? Do you drop down to 4fps irregularly, like every 4 seconds, or is it just a constant laggy experience? How quickly in a typical game do you get down to 4fps? And what fps would an equivalent game in a26 have? What steps to fix it have you tried, like switching to different graphics settings in options -> graphics (advanced). Have you tried combinations of Vulkan/openGL and with vs without GPU skinning? It could be that you are experiencing a separate issue.

Updates for A27: To enlarge training icons: larger-icons.zip Ranged Overlay without OOS: rangedoverlay.zip Previously, the ranged overlay mod caused OOS with community mod, because the stats of units are different. Now, community mod no longer exists so your templates will not be touched by other mods and hence no OOS issue.

In my opinion, packing effects into the Phase up techs is super uninteresting. It's not like 0 A.D.'s tech tree is massive.

The minimum screen resolution we support (although with some limitations) is 1024x768 pixels. With that resolution there is pretty much no empty space left over there. Parts of the panel are also used when spectating a game for selecting the player to spec. Also mind that the game should appeal to new and casual players as well, which might get overwhelmed when there is too much information shown there.

Wait a minute! Where is the one-boob armor in female form? I feel cheated.

If someone were to make some mods isolating some of the features (and people can enable whichever features they'd like to see via mods), that would be super cool. Doing so might also create a basis for some pull requests down the line.

Capture is no longer the default, you need to press the C hotkey to make units capture in this version.

There is a blog article about it here: https://www.comitatus.net/greekbellybow.html Although it is not really related to the Macedonians but to the Greeks in general, it is a real ancient weapon. Edit: There is a plausible evidence for its use in Macedonia in the 2nd century BC: https://www.academia.edu/31610915/Perimortem_Weapon_Trauma_to_the_Thoracic_Vertebrae_of_a_2nd_Century_BC_Adult_Male_Skeleton_from_Central_Macedonia_Northern_Greece_2004_Death_from_a_catapulted_bolt_head_Journal_of_Paleopathology