Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

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?

I suppose I should have clarified more. The Oracle of Delphi supposedly stated that a wall of wood would save Athens, which Themistocles interpreted as a proper navy. Granted, Wooden Walls could be misleading, but it definitely is more thematic. Honestly the choice is a matter of taste.

As a minor point in how I would change the name of one of the abilities of Themistocles, I would have Naval Architect be replaced by "Wooden Walls," a reference to the supposed Oracle of Delphi. In the case of the Piraeus Fortifications, it seems a bit odd to increase the hitpoints. Themistocles was famous for stopping Sparta from halting construction of the Athenian walls, a point in which speed was key. If anything, I would increase the speed of construction.

Is this the same for phasing up requirements in the base game do you know?

That's a rather evasive title for an article that is basically just throwing a bunch of flak at EA. Eye-opening all the same.

We aren't?

There is at least one other way to represent women who lived in male-dominated societies (Granted, all were more or less that.), excluding more exceptional cases such as Sparta and the Celtic tribes. Have them as actors in houses, sitting doing some task like weaving.

I already said a good deal of what I thought on the matter in my topic, The Role of Women in 0 A.D. back last year. Here's the link. A few ways in which I saw increased potential representation for women that would be the following: Vestal Virgins could be a trainable healing unit for Rome. Also it seems that women were the priestesses for Athen's cult of Athena, and a handful Athenian women who were citizens apparently were merchants.