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After a quick test, I think it wouldn't be hard to create a CHEAT (Controllable Hover Entities Area Targeting) selection box targeting feature. The goal here would be to be able to use box selection while holding a hotkey to order selection to target specified enemy units. This would look like this: Select your army Hold down targeting hotkey Box select hover enemy units Then your selected units would be assigned to target all units found in the box selection. This would nicely mitigate aggressive pathing where for example : Half of your army get baited into splitting instead of attacking enemy army because a single unit happens to be behind your army Your entire army projectiles are thrown to a single enemy (overkill or hero dancing) Allow to assign ranged units to fire at back-line units, easier then with ALT hotkey Overall making micro-management funnier then having to make 300 click to avoid hero dance, yet making hero dancing still very good, but just easier to counter micro it. Micromanagement will obviously still be intensive, just you remove the part of spam clicking ALT, and replace it with a better fitted feature for targeting and spreading fire. I'd like to give one more illustration of how micro-management would look like with this. When playing xbows units, if you are retreating, but at some point, turn back to fire a volley, all units will shoot at the single most closest enemy. You CANNOT be fast enough with ALT clicks to spread shots, resulting in massive overkill. With this box targeting, you could make the volley spread on more enemies units following your units. In my opinion that this would be far greater approach to have a user-controllable feature then having solutions like : randomized targeting by @real_tabasco_sauce Or autonomous re-targeting by @real_tabasco_sauce.

cc @bb_ @Freagarach @implodedok

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.

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.

For one reason or another, 2025 has started off as the year where I get back into that most nostalgic of genres - good o' real-time strategy. First came the replaying of classics like Age of Empires, then trying out some new promising indie titles (Eyes of War being my most interesting find - just classic skirmish with a gimmick that lets you play in 3rd person and fight with your army, very cool during sieges), and then it just continued... Age of Darkness was another find, but the latest is 0 AD. Since most of my game consumption is a direct funnel from Steam (or GOG for all my DRM-free purchases), I guess gems like this are even harder to discover unless you hear from it by word of mouth - same as we did back in the day. That's what makes it even more endearing and kind of bitter-sweet because of how nostalgic this whole gaming period feels for me. Where do I start and end with 0 AD? It's absolutely astounding that someone released a free game of this scale and caliber. It's perhaps the closest to being a spiritual successor to the original Age of Empires while also having its own personality. And this was being developed all the way back from 2010? Needless to say, I've dipped just a bit into it and already have to shout praise in its direction. Just so glad whenever I see love being shown (and in such quantities too!) to this overshadowed genre. Consider this my love letter if nothing else <3

New design:

Biggus Di..us, in honour of Monty Python

Another similar idea that could give the game more flexibility on certain factions would be to include certain references to specific tribes. I'm thinking in particular of the Gauls: we could take advantage of the assembly building to include technologies linked to various tribes emblematic of their history, and other tribes with interesting characteristics. The Arverni, Aedui and Belgians, for example, are emblematic peoples, with interesting historical figures and different characteristics. But there are also lesser-known tribes who were mentioned by the Romans and Greeks and took part in historic events. It would be conceivable to form coalitions in the assembly building, in order to gain certain attributes specific to certain tribes. Acquire new bonuses or new units. For example, the Treveri were known as the best horsemen in Gaul, or the Veneti had the best fleet of all Gallic tribes. We could move the assembly building (Remogantion) to the second phase. Then make certain units dependent on the choices the player makes in creating his coalition. Adding a tribe to your coalition should have a certain starting cost, but with a doubling of the cost for each additional tribe you add to the coalition. For example, 100F/100W/100M for the first tribe, 200F/200W/200M for the second, 400F/400W/400M for the third, and so on. - Aquitanians would unlock the recruitment of Soliduroi (champion swordsmen) and give a bonus of hit points to heroes (to represent bodyguards). - The Treveri would give several cavalry bonuses to represent their reputation as the best cavalry in Gaul. - The Lemovices would give bonuses in metal extraction to represent the numerous gold mines they exploited. - The Veneti would give bonuses to all ships, including fishing boats and merchant ships. - The Boii would give bonuses to infantry to represent the warriors who fought in Italy and used pilum similar to the Romans. - Alpine peoples would unlock the recruitment of axe-wielding warriors and naked fanatics. etc. This is just a series of examples that I can extend and explain in detail the historical and archaeological points.

We're doing this for the 1500+ players playing the game each day, the 25k Ubuntu snap installs, the 300k download per year and the 150+ installs per day on Flathub.

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.

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.

@user1I have attached the replay here, when doctororgans started losing he left the game, there was no error of "losing connection to server", then he joined again and said i ddos him, which i didn't, then he said there is OOS error which was again a lie, as i didn't see any oos error. After wasting my time with his baseless excuses for 5-10 mins he said unpause when i unpaused he started playing like nothing happened, then again when i started winning, he said he won't let me get points and started making the same excuses all over again. Such a bad experience. metadata.json commands.txt

1. Just call it Beta. It's the first beta release. 2. Balance (balance has been improving significantly and we should keep this trend) 3. Biggus (some Roman sounding name but suggests that this release will be a big change) 4. Beotians. Add this civ to justify

How about borg (2025 a.c)? - Usually destroys its enemies with ease.

Been having some fun asking chatgpt to remake 0 A.D. screenshots into more realistic images. Obviously far from perfect but it's fun. The island in particular came out great IMO.

The density of substantive content per paragraph is exceptionally low here. It is therefore unsurprising that such threads invariably conclude in the same manner.

I played a 2v2 and it was a fun game

Ah, I don't even think we disagree. I, too, believe that 0ad should not be a clicker game. I tried to make a point through exaggeration. But I do believe there should be some mechanical challenge, as that is also the nature of a real-time strategy game. If one wants to play a game without any mechanical challenge, one should maybe rather look at turn-based games.

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.

FYI: Issue #6918 (New setting for world population distributed by teams) has been closed last week by the merge of pull request #7161 (Add a 'team population' gamesetting) into the main branch. Therefore it'll probably be part of Release 28.

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).

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

《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

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.

Another TG featuring @Danielb32:

It is currently: top 1 - Borg- / Valih top 2 - Vinme top 3 - Stockfish top 4 - FeldFeld top 5 - SaidRdz For me the surprise is SaidRdz, is really playing at a good level, the others are usually always the same within the top 5. There have been no new players at the last years, to enter the top 5, not even close.

I'm excited to share with you my progress on one of these features. Hotkeys for buildings could finally become a reality in vanila a28! BuildingHotkey.mp4

It isn’t clear how many SPs there are or how long they play for. We do know that there are (at least) like 2K total players a day (split between SP and MP). But it isn’t clear how many of those players downloaded the game that day and are testing it out vs. how many of those players have been playing for multiple months. No matter how you look at it, though, there is a huge retention problem if there are 300K downloads and we only observe a steady 2K players or so (i.e., no real growth in user count). It also means that some portion of that 2K player count is probably a stream new users that come play for a short time before they leave and are replaced by another new user that will only play for a short time. We also see this constant stream of new players in the forums where a new user comes along makes a few posts for a week or two and then disappears (sometimes forever) Personally, I suspect there are about an equal number of long-term SP and MP users, which reflects what we see on the forum.

A musical representation of my emotional state while getting rushed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wokx576v5Y0

Review it thorougly in all its aspects, art(actors and meshes), gameplay, historical accuracy etc Civ are notoriously error full

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.

A GUI mod should not change the way the game works underneath, only the way you graphically interface with it. Yes, but you are forgetting that the spirit of competition drives one player to be better than another and that as a direct result, players with high APM do better than players that cannot keep up. This is inescapable. Automation generally is not the solution because it just decreases the number of actions a player can do, which flattens the learning curve. Instead, the ways in which an action can be better than another action, strategic options, should be increased. This allows one players fewer, smarter actions to have more of an impact. I'm trying to help with this last part

Amélie Kuhrt's book is very useful but if you want something focusing on the society, I would suggest "The World of Achaemenid Persia", "A History of Zoroastrianism (Zoroastrianism under the Achaemenians)" and "Women in Ancient Persia, 559-331 BC". Check the table of contents of "The World of Achaemenid Persia" and see if it could interest you.

Drawing of a Germanic warrior that i made.

Great post. I could see the Sasanids going into either base game Part 2 or M_A.D.

Not sure if it's just me, but capturing feels too easy with a27. The two other points I struggle with are ships being too weak and siege weapons packaging and movement being too fast. In a game I had serious problems countering siege weapons even with champion horsemen, because of how fast they've been able to get back behind enemy lines again.

Ok, I have heard questions about this, so I'll answer here. We will do a community mod for a27, however there will be changes to how it works. In a26, we had issues where the mod would split the multiplayer community into mod players and non-mod players. Also, because the mod fixed a couple of bugs, development on the mod was a constrained by the requirement that each change be a clear improvement. This hampered experimentation. So the main change will be that each community mod version will be a clean slate, no changes from the last version will remain. What this means is that the mod serve the purpose of a "Community Test Environment", or CTE. Essentially, its a way for gameplay-oriented changes to be run by the community before being committed to the development version of 0ad. My hope is that we can make release turnaround fairly quick, and test a lot of ideas. Players can certainly continue to submit PRs, but I'd like to invite developers to submit their gameplay-oriented PRs too. Some stuff I hope to experiment with: capture vs destroy balance walls delete trees 3x cavalry counter added economic unit to address boom = turtle ship balance Improve Han gameplay

I'm glad to announce some new features for Autociv - New panel counters: Ranged units Melee units Total units lost KD ratio rounded to 2 decimal points The population counter in the autociv panel has been adjusted to showing the effective population instead of the top panel's housing demand. housing demand = total units on the map + units in production (optimistic value that helps you with housing plans) effective population = infantry + cavalry + support (realistic value to assess your boom and consider before engaging in fights) In this example, the effective population is 9 because there are only 9 units on the map. But 0AD counter shows 10 because it included the woman that is being trained. To those of you who still don't know how to install autociv, check out this video: https://youtu.be/NSDfiqfqJHI?si=jqnvxXRc8X1KX3_6

Update for ModernGUI (1.27.12) Key new features: Custom Colors mod from @Mentula with new options Fixed colors by player slot (option, on by default), with a color preset. Only distinct colors, very good for minimap. Hot vs Cold colors for team games. (To remove the fixed color option, check "Allow all Colors" option) You can pick a color for yourself that will always be assigned to you on game loading. You can change colors, revert to vanilla colors in options. Easy queuing from @guerringuerrin Holding down "Alt" now also works to 'Order One Unit' for production buildings! When selecting multiple buildings, you can queue 1 unit (or 1 batch in combination with "Shift") to the least busy building! When selecting multiple buildings, if some buildings are idle and some not, production will only go to idle buildings, this mitigate highly the "bug" where one building get a big production queue will others are idles when using control groups to queue units. Options (almost-modular mod ) All the options can now be changed in-game without requiring restarting to apply.

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.