Thorfinn the Shallow Minded

Perhaps this might be a lone dissenting opinion, but having Iphicrates let alone Iphicratean like units seems against the central idea of 0 A.D. The goal is to represent civilisations at their height, which in Athens case would be most likely the timeframe between the Persian War to the Peloponnesian War.

I don't really see the issue myself. Costs can always be adjusted to compensate for that.

I stand corrected. That all said, just because a building existed does not make it a worthwhile part of a building roster. Undoubtedly people in the ancient world had latrines, but for some reason they are not represented. As it seems, the Stoa was removed for even more pertinent factions like Athens, but having a structure that served social functions and was the main meeting place for philosophers serve as a training ground for mercenaries does seem a bit odd. That was an underlying piece of logic behind its removal. Also Spartans can build multiple mess halls, so I don't see where the point about them being able to build from only one building comes from. That all said, I have mentioned before and point out now that Sparta could theoretically be able to build mess halls in the town phase or even the village phase to make champions a more staple part of their unit compositions.

In theory that is possible. The problem is that spears are generally always preferred to swords in most situations due to better reach; the advantage of the sword was its utility as a side-arm, not as a main weapon. The idea of troops using the sword alone is generally a pure fantasy idea (with a few exceptions).

You've argued generally that distance is the bigger variable at play in this conversation. I guess that begs the question; what do you think of the current distances with where animals spawn? I would consider that to be valid to this conversation since the gather rate can consider when the amount of time it takes a unit to gather the resource and drop it off.

The stoa was generally used for commercial activities, something that Spartans were known to disdain. Furthermore, doing a quick search for all examples of stoas on Wikipedia lists no Spartan one (That's not definitive of course, and anyone can list a case of a Spartan Stoa, I would appreciate it..).

So with all of this, I would say that a middle ground is possible. People like turtling; it's a staple of the RTS genre, and if people want to farm in the safety of their protective shell, perhaps they should not be overly penalised for doing so. That said, I would still say there should be ways to encourage people to use other areas due to increased output at the risk of being raided in those areas. In addition, there could be a few benefits to realistic urban planning around the Civic Centre. This all could help encourage better map control and more thought with building placement; all to say, I think that there is a compromise to this whole matter that is not too extreme.

This regardless of any other points is something that should be seriously considered. I could see another alternative be to have chickens be replaced with something like sheep provided that the food count be the same.

The concern I see with this is that Age of Mythology dealt with 15 civilisations, divided into clear variations of roughly the same civilisation. 0 A.D. lacks that advantage, and this feature would complicate the learning curve depending on how it was implemented. How would you see making each choice intuitive? I assume that you've put a bit of thought into how this could work. One way that differentiation could also be done would be to have other mechanics such as a nuanced way that the structure might behave with territory. Alternatively I could also see some civilisations having cavalry have the ability to build a hunting lodge as a resource dropsite.

I agree with the debuffs part. Fields built near the Civic Centre having an arbitrary malus to collection makes little sense. That said, having some ground be more fertile to incentivise players to farm in those areas makes sense and adds another layer to the area control aspect of the game.

That's kind of the baffling thing to me. Why should the beginning of the game feel that way? There's something to be enjoyed about a somewhat more slow-paced beginning that ramps up as the game continues; naturally there is a balance to be struck, but why should a village economy be fast?

Thing is, this kind of feature would reward good macro, assigning workers in such a way to sustain constant production. As ValihrAnt noted, even the corral option has a major liability that this feature would help with players who meticulously have calculated their production and consumption; if you've ever tried sustaining a corral economy while actively attacking an opponent, I can assure you that having to cycle through the corrals is a frustrating distraction.

A setup option seems a bit much for me personally when it is just an automation feature. When Age of Empires II DE came out with multi-queue and infinite reseeding, there was a degree of push-back. Honestly this is a quality-of-life option that should make the game less micro-intensive, one core value that 0 A.D. aspired for.

While that might be the case, 0 A.D. reflects empires generally at their greatest (in which the exact time is admittedly a bit arbitrary). During that time Seleukids, Ptolemies, Carthaginians, and Indians all used elephants in a variety of battles; having them decrease in value doesn't really line up to me at least.

I'm honestly unsure about this feature as well, but it would be interesting to make it so that advanced, elite soldiers, and champion have resistance to this.

I mainly wanted to spark discussion to have a feel for what people genuinely think. Most seem to like it the way it is or do not have terribly strong feelings about it. Your questions really open a can of worms that might be worth a different topic, but for the moment, not considering the economy, let's go through those. The primary answer to ranged units for Sparta should be the Skiritae unit, but possibly all melee infantry could benefit from a technology that increases their pierce armour called "Fight in the Shade." Honestly the idea of cavalry being an answer to a camel unit is a bit unintuitive. As for late game cavalry, that's kind of when things for Sparta started taking off. King Agesilaus II even formed a fairly decent Spartan cavalry force while they often were able to rely on horsemen from cities such as Olynthus. That all said, them not being able to build a stable during the Village Phase is better than nothing. The guide you shared did provide some interesting nuance to the early game that I was unaware of, but a cavalry rush with Sparta honestly seems weird. All that said, most people do seem to prefer things the way they are, making much of this discussion needless. I went into this with one primary reason; cavalry to my understanding are at the moment vital to early game economy, which seems weird for most village and does mean that all civilisations, regardless of historicity, must start with cavalry to be able to function in the current meta. That all said, it seems that I am more or less just a vocal minority about that position, and I do appreciate the fact that people have been willing to share their thoughts on this aspect of the game.

Distance is relevant, and the reason I said that the space between chickens and the Civic Centre is small is because on nine out of ten random map generations it is that case; the chickens are practically hugging the building. If we set the arbitrary distance number to two for soldiers at a gather rate of two, using roughly same equation logic, a single cavalry unit is roughly 2.58 times more efficient than a soldier, and is 1.86 if the gather rate is set to 3. The point is not for cavalry to beat infantry or women in this case. Cavalry are more expensive than the other counterparts and lack flexibility, and in these short distances it would perhaps be a conceivable to put soldiers or women to work on chickens rather than cavalry. That said, your point is otherwise quite valid in that hunting would be practically meaningless outside of this context for non-cavalry units.

This is more an attempt to bring variety to the immediate early game, in which walking distance is not much of an issue due to the animals spawning close to the Civic Centre. It would do little to make hunting better in other cases.

One thing Nescio earlier on proposed that I particularly liked was giving a bonus to building structures like markets and temples within a certain radius of the Civic Centre. This would be a nice "soft" encourager for the player to migrate their farming economy to a different area.

Fair objection. There could however be a marginal increase, bringing the value from 1 to 2 or even just 1.5 that would make the option of putting a few women or men to hunting viable but not optimal.

So given the fact that some people like the current gather rates of cavalry, instead perhaps the other gather rates of citizen-soldiers and women could be adjusted to be almost or just as fast. In that way there would not be a massive opportunity cost in using the initial cavalry unit to scout.

The reason I did so was to compare a task that cavalry tend to do with one that women do as well in the immediate early game. Fair points though.

They definitely have that kind of feel, especially when it comes to the impact with units; that said, there are two things I appreciate about that design: they are easy to make out and they lack the weird trails seen in most Total War games.

The thing is that cavalry were not hunting specialists; I can live with them hunting faster than other units, but to me the current approach makes the unit completely one dimensional outside of combat in the early game. Do you ever scout with your cavalry unit at the beginning of the game? Most people don't and tend to only scout once they are attacking. Personally I would like to see there be a roughly 50% divide of preference of scouting versus hunting depending on build orders. Scouting could reward the player with knowing the locations of key resources and potentially allow them to grab treasures like in some maps while hunting would be a greedier yet riskier option since there would be a complete lack of intel regarding a potential rush. The other issue that primarily sparked this analysis was the fact that in a different thread I proposed that Sparta should lack cavalry at the beginning of the game and be only able to train them in the Town Phase to represent their poor cavalry. This suggestion was shot down by borg for the good reason of cavalry being critical to the early economy. I'm okay with cavalry complementing the economy, but if the problem is that by nerfing their hunting skill they become much worse, maybe there could be another way of buffing them such as having the ability to build outposts, tying into a more reconnaissance approach.

Cavalry gather rates are fast, and to quantify that, I ran a number of tests with Cavalry spawning on the two player Acropolis Bay Map. First I tested the cavalry unit collecting chickens. The result was that the cavalry unit gathered 200 food in roughly 1 minute and 19 seconds (I set it to gather the most efficient group.). In comparison, I set one woman to gather from the nearest berry group (without constructing a dropsite nearby) and was able to collect 50 food in that same amount of time. Her collecting less, however, makes sense since a female unit costs one third the number of resources and has more economic flexibility than its cavalry counterpart at the cost of having next to useless stats for combat purposes. Three women, the equivalent resource cost, only gathered 140 food in that same timeframe mostly due to the pathfinding causing them to bump into each other. As some general comments, even if the women worked at peak efficiency, they still would take up three population which makes them at the immediate early game rather poor gatherers in comparison. Granted, hunting does grow much more inefficient after the few animals within each player's border dies, and building more dropsites is generally difficult. This does not change the fact that early on, there is an absolute no brainer to having the cavalry unit hunt instead of scouting the map. Personally I would like to see there be a validity of either approach if we discount the possibility of cavalry being unable to perform any economic role.