Thorfinn the Shallow Minded
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Posts posted by Thorfinn the Shallow Minded
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One thing I would like to see is the Athenians having a runner on foot as a scout. Spartans should maybe start with a weaker Skiritae unit.
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10 minutes ago, wraitii said:
You must be aware wrong, because they all lost 100 resources
50F50W for archer/Jav and 50F/30W/20S for slingers.
Okay. I was looking at Athens for reference and guess what they have for skirmishers... and archers. I'm glad for the clarification but annoyed by my lack of thoroughness in analysing the costs.
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At the moment slingers cost 100 resources. This is a bit odd when compared to archers and skirmishers, both of which cost 80 as far as I am aware. I'm not meaning to sound hypercritical or anything, but the inconsistency does seem odd. Slingers historically would have been one of the most inexpensive troops to equip in some cases, and if there was to be some way of making them harder to mass, I would find increasing the training time to be the better approach. Would someone be able to explain why this choice was made?
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Along the lines of Nescio's idea, I think that the idea of calling them embassies makes little to no sense. Should we also consider having a mercenary camp for the Persians as well given their extensive use of Greeks during Alexander's campaign?
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13 minutes ago, borg- said:
Perhaps an adjustment in the cost of metal or some other attribute may be enough instead of being able to collect resources?
Those would potentially be a fair choice, but think that it works around the key reasoning of why mercenaries were hired: the employers did not risk the lives of their citizenry. If mercs took up less space, it could represent that fairly well. On the other hand, if mercenaries cost less, it avoids one of the their key disadvantages. Mercenaries were usually expensive. The one other area I could see changing a lot would be giving them a massively reduced training time.
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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.
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39 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
Do "top players" really think a 0.4 second firing rate for Scythian Archers is cool? I hope not.
I take it you are not familiar with the Bowmaster of Helm's Deep?
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On 20/2/2021 at 6:01 PM, facts said:
From a game experience point of view, I don't see how any of it hinders fun for the sake of gameplay in anyway. Have you even played the new alpha? Alpha 24 is officially out too, play it.
Is your perfect scenario of 0ad a game where all units are replaced with one singular unit and all civs are essentially a reskin of one another? Check out AOE 2 for that.
And coming to realism, first of all, realism is indeed a big part of this project, easily the most historically accurate ancient rts out there, but at no point can realism be a bigger priority than gameplay. Gameplay first, while doing the best to keep it realistic. Also, honestly, I don't see what you fail to understand. A swordsman can outperform a spearman in a 1v1 in real life too (owing to the mobility and the versatility). However, in real life sword wielding required much more skill and were more expensiveI 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.
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41 minutes ago, wraitii said:
I do agree with the scouting and gameplay argument. However, the fact that civil centre can train military also kind of defeats the purpose of scouting - to an extent, the game is quite flexible anyways. If we want to change that, we kinda have to change the whole game.
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.
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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.
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On 5/2/2021 at 1:25 PM, DerekO said:
please make a descript description so we know what a club is
Here is a club.
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10 hours ago, Anamuraalententa said:
- I see there are many civilizations that are very similar, like many roman ones, I wonder about this decision.
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:
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12 minutes ago, borg- said:
Generally free values do not work very well for balancing. Having a population of cost 0 is a huge advantage against any player with a civilization that does not have mercenaries, and the situation only gets worse in team games. Another example would be a nomad or deathmatch game, where you can have a clear advantage over your opponent. Putting a number limit on mercenaries that can be trained doesn't seem like a good solution either.
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.
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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.
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Since when did the barracks provide experience when garrisoned?
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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.
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Has there been much consideration for colour blindness with these icons? That's where I could see the current alarm bell be problematic.
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It seems that the Portugese will never find a good strategic niche in the current meta.
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1 hour ago, Nescio said:
On the other hand, I don't know of any occassion where the Ptolemies fielded camel troops, yet they are a starting unit in game
Rome Total War features them, and that game is known as an objectively historically accurate source.
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7 hours ago, Palaxin said:
These kind of choices were cool if they were a much more integral part of the game (cf. Age of Mythology God choices), so not restricted to Spartans, but available to any civ in some way.
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.
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3 hours ago, Palaxin said:
I have also been thinking that it would be nice to have Spartan hoplites right from the start, however, that will make balancing much more difficult (at least if you want them to be these uber champs I have been describing...) On the other hand, one could argue that they are so expensive that you would completely cripple your economy if you trained more than a handful of them before reaching city phase.
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.
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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.
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For once I would like a map that was designed to look like a Bob Ross.
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2 hours ago, alre said:
Let's give spearmen more attack power against rams!
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.
Civ Differentiation: Athens
in Balancing Discussions
Posted
One thing I would add is that Athens was home to some of the greatest philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus. Even just a simple technology or two as a nod to them would be nice.