Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

I think that having them be trained at rank 2 would be a good option, but it still does circumvent the fact that it is difficult to mass mercenaries for Carthage. One option that I think would be interesting would be to have it so that Carthaginian heroes could train mercenaries. A while ago I mentioned the idea of mercenaries taking up 0 population but having a cap on how many could be trained or making them scale up in cost with the number already fielded. Maybe a compromise can be struck regarding the 0 population idea such as making them cost 0.5 population. That way mercenaries would still have a potential niche to fill that would differentiate them from their counterparts. Still, I think the more relevant point that Alar1k makes is that at the moment, mercenaries are inconsistent across civilisations, something that should be at least considered.

I take it you are not familiar with the Bowmaster of Helm's Deep?

I think it would be fair to first of all point out that there is a good deal more variety in Age of Empires 2 compared to 0 AD at the moment when it comes to civilisations; they might have extremely similar fundamental mechanics, but the variation in tech trees and depth of strategy is significantly better developed there. Then again that is a full-fledged game while 0 AD is in alpha. As to your second point, it holds little water. Spear served as the weapon of choice on the battlefield for a good reason. Its reach is massive compared to most arming swords; the advantage of a sword is that it is a reliable side-arm, something that can be drawn after the primary weapon has been discarded or rendered inoperable. Even legionnaires, who are perhaps some of the most famous dedicated swordsmen in history, used them as the followup to their javelin volleys. The primary point that you have failed to dismantle is the fact that spearmen being worse at dismantling rams makes little to no sense. Also, I would respectfully ask you to consider being more polite with your tone. Needlessly belittling people does nothing to advance arguments and makes one sound immature. My apologies if that came off as insulting.

I would personally like to move away from that approach of the Civic Centre training everything. A simple infantryman would be okay, but having an approach such as making Civic Centre military units be worse or take longer to train would both be good ways to change the structure into less of a military production centre. That all said, there are other intuitive ways of making the game have better build orders for the said scouting point. Cavalry units could only be trained after a corral has been placed; ranged units could be trained only after a bowyer has been built; mercenaries could be trained only after a market has been constructed.

I think the best argument for why archery ranges and stables should exist, regardless of accuracy, would be due to tells if we will. At the moment, when I watch high level 0 AD players, I see little scouting before aggression. While there are undoubtedly other reasons behind that such as map generation, this shows the fact that it is usually difficult to predict the build order based on structures in place. Age of Empires 2 and Starcraft 2 are both games where the idea of working against specific unit compositions is critical to success, and 0 AD theoretically is the same. Having specialised structures do that means that players that look for that intel are rewarded. Whether the stable-barracks-archery range system is historical or not is a bit inconsequential for our purposes. 0 AD is meant to represent the old rock-paper-scissors formula.

Here is a club.

One of the reasons behind there being so many Greek factions can be found by looking at how the game was initially designed. There was first one single faction called the 'Hellenes.' This faction had the choice to go with the city-state or Macedonian route, unlocking unique champions and heroes as a result. The city-state option was a blend between Sparta and Athens oddly enough. The then lead designer Mythos Ruler decided to design four city-state factions: Sparta, Athens, Syracuse, and Thebes. Obviously only the first to were incorporated into the game. The Macedonian option was changed to the successor states we know of: Macedonia, Seleucids, and Ptolemies. The work is hardly done however:

Age of Mythology worked with that concept on a limited scale by having dryads cost 0 population with a hard cap of 5 units; to me it seemed to work out pretty well. Obviously that approach would be wrong for 0 A.D, but I am sure that something could be balanced provided that players are willing to put up with a degree of trial and error. Difficult, yes, but not impossible. The question that would have to be considered is if that approach would be worthwhile enough. Stan's recommendation does seem like a good direction.

I wonder if having mercenaries take up 0 population but either having a hard cap on the number fielded or having a cost that scales up based on the number already trained would be a possibility.

Since when did the barracks provide experience when garrisoned?

Darius the III seems a bit questionable to me as a hero. He was the Persian equivalent of Sir Robin. I would second Nescio's recommendation of Cambyses II. His conquests were no joke considering his short reign.

Has there been much consideration for colour blindness with these icons? That's where I could see the current alarm bell be problematic.

It seems that the Portugese will never find a good strategic niche in the current meta.

Rome Total War features them, and that game is known as an objectively historically accurate source.

If we look at the way that the game was originally designed, most techs were meant to be paired, having the player choose between the two with different benefits. Earlier alphas incorporated that, but the results were a bit mixed, leaving the current gamestate without that mechanic. My take is that there should be choices provided that they are meaningful ones and play to different possibilities during the timeframe in which they were represented. With Rome it might be a matter of trying to consider the demands of the plebeians over the senatorial elite. Carthage might be a matter of relying on foreign mercenaries or locals for its military.

I think that there could be a middle ground. Units can improve through technologies and the like, and what might have served as a powerful village phase unit could be fairly average by comparison in the city phase. The one thing that I'd say should be key to design of this sort is to remember that 'the rule of cool'>'balance.' There should be an aim to always make things feel overpowered compared to vice-versa. My vision would be more that Spartans would be maybe having at most 5 by the end of the village phase and maybe 10 in the town phase at most. The point would be to consider what kind of role they would serve based on how the player chooses. To me there should be a choice as to whether it would be a super-soldier like officer or a powerful mainline infantry unit.

A while ago I wrote a similar thing to that but with a lot more detail; it didn't get much buzz probably because it was long, a fair critique, but here it is: A few things I think would be good takeaways: Sparta should have access to Spartan hoplites at the beginning of the game, with a Spartan hoplite being a starting unit. Another thing was that cavalry would not be available until the town phase. Scouting instead could be done by building a barracks and training a Skiritae unit. For the Spartan hoplite in general, my focus was more around the fact that they could have auras that could buff friendly units and debuff enemies at the cost of an almost crippling training time that could be shortened through a variety of technologies.

For once I would like a map that was designed to look like a Bob Ross.

You do not go far enough! The tyranny of the sword must be overthrown by the objectively more popular and effective weapon. We shall not rest until the reverse is done! Spears remove half of a ram's health in a single strike while a sword does a paltry one damage.

Maybe for some of the less workable maps, they could still be accessible in the game by choosing the map 'Megarandom,' which has some of the wackiest possible options in it.

Well, as I and others more or less unanimously agreed in a topic I started, trying to differentiate between sword and spear units to begin with is a kind of problematic approach.

They do do that, but the reason that WFG chose to give spearmen pierce attack to begin with was because well... most of the time spears pierce. It's a case of making a thing intuitive on paper that is much less so in relation to the game. The reason I prefer melee, ranged, and siege is that there is little doubt about how these work, which I consider grounds enough to make it an objectively better improvement. Granted, hack, pierce, and crush are fine and perhaps good enough to not warrant bothering with a change, but it's because of these terms that the problem existed to begin with for vanilla 0 A.D.

Agreed. In a topic I wrote entitled 'The Problem with Sword/Spear Units' I basically outlined the fact that differentiating between these two types of soldiers merely based on their weapons has little basis in history and hardly even functions well from a gameplay standpoint since spear units are by and large ineffective cavalry counters. Essentially the underlying logic of why spear units are bad versus rams and buildings is because they use a pierce attack, which rams have a good deal of armour versus. This of course is meant to be an intuitive choice but leads to this strange outcome. If I were to rectify this, I think that all attacks should be reclassified as melee, ranged, and siege to better help players understand their purposes.

We need 8-bit sound effects too then and only use 256 colours...

Is permanent deforestation after a grove has been depleted possible with this mechanic?