Jubalbarca

http://www.exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=3290.0 Frontpage plug on Exilian has happened

The art tends to be the limiting factor in a lot of game modding, in my experience. Finding people with really good 3d artwork skills is rarely easy.

The question (which has been hounding the AI guys since I was doing it!) is what you give up in flexibility to allow better performance. If I recall, the main issues tend to be things like distance calculations and movement stuff (in particular things like resources, where one was continually cycling through all the workers on the map, then for each of those calculating distances to every tree on the map to work out which was closest), but I don't know how integrated those are now anyway, I'm pretty out of the loop. Out of interest, as a general ballpark idea, if one literally hardcoded the entire AI in C++ would all the above times become negligible/near instantaneous? I don't really know how big the JS penalty is and how much it's just that the AI is making too many calculations - because the alternative to pushing more into C++ is to work out a way to do less to start with.

Interested to see how this goes, sounds exciting! What kind of numbers of AIs per generation will you be testing?

http://exilian.co.uk/index.php We (we being Exilian) are giving you some front-page time at the moment, and FB/twitter shouts.

Does anyone play Mount & Blade here? That's got a very neat way of doing it, a start box that pops up with a module selector.

I know, I'm just not sure if "buildable terrain" could work as a thing or whether it'd have to be some specialised type of building...

Beautiful work! Excited by the much faster loading time too.

I think the way Age of Mythology did it, with some paving placed under the buildings (or even having some paving created around each like the gaia creep effect) would work nicely. Longer distance roads I'm almost wondering if one could build (with faster movement when moving on them?)

I think dynasties are probably a level of complexity too far, it'd make the came about three times harder to balance. 0AD has a lot more factions than R2TW, and having to balance three major bonus sets for each would take ages. Also it's a bit ahistorical, in that the different dynasties in question probably didn't usually bring massively different things to the table - certain individuals did, but that's represented by heroes.

That'd be really useful

I just find it's hard to make good-looking spikes. And the gradients aren't actually that unrealistic as Thorfinn points out.

Fantastic, added it to my site's additional maps index if that's OK? http://www.exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2558.0

Unless the garrisoning had an accompanying anim it would look really quite boring that way though; and if they're all in your city, well then it's sort of your job to protect your economy. Gold farms make sense (cash crops) - for trees what I'd like to see would be tree growth naturally occurring in areas of the map where there wasn't significant building, so the wood tends to replenish over time (which is after all how forests generally work, particularly on timescales such as that of going from a tiny village to a city).

I'm not sure exactly what you mean? The scores on this will work so you gain or lose depending on whether you won or lost the game and who you were playing against - it's a sort of percentage expectation of whether you'll win that determines your potential gains/losses.

qs: Even had I done that, I think the metal issue would have triggered as soon as the initial mine had run out; I may make a more AI-friendly version if there's demand, but my scenarios at the moment are really designed to be more fun multiplayer challenges than the standardised RMS scripts so I'm not worrying about that too much. Sb: True, I wanted to give it quite an Indian feel though, I was kind of making things up as I went along as may be obvious

I've had several thoughts with regards to this - particularly what I'd like to see is more specialists working in the towns, possibly tasked on particular buildings. So for example; - For each citizen-soldier I task on a smithy I get a drop in metal cost when training troops or all troops get a small attack bonus - For each one I task on a pot-maker I get boosted food gathering speed - Some could also be resource converters, say an eating place converts food to coin at a trickle - And so on; the thing that's often bugged me traditionally about RTSes is the extent to which the town slowly becomes a gutted no man's land only occupied by troops not an increasingly bustling centre of trade and commerce. That said, I suspect the above is very much something to be kicked into the realms of modding as there are much bigger programming priorities right now.

There've been various discussions of people wanting to do more multiplayer stuff that I've seen; as such the Exilian has decided to start a multiplayer rankings system to give people a chance to have something to discuss and brag about! With the system we've picked you gain/lose score depending on the difference between your rank and your opponent's (it's the same system they use for chess tournaments). Hopefully this will a) give people something to chat about more, encourage more multiplayer and thus a better awareness of what good/bad balances and builds are, and c) be a springboard for doing some proper tournaments at some stage in the future. http://www.exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2557.0 This may also of course turn out to be a damp squib of an idea that nobody wants to use, but we'll see...

Any chance of getting all the DL links in the first post? Might make it easier for people casually map-hunting than having to trawl the whole thread. And yes, please bring in a forest brush now before I get arthritis...

I'll take a go at some point

Just finished this new scenario! Mace VS Mauryans, three big valleys with lush vegetation below and towering snow-capped peaks above. Slightly inspired by the incorrect theory about the village in the Himalayas people once thought was a leftover of Alexander's army. There's a river down one side of the map, and the middle pass is blocked at the foothills end by a forest. This map is NOT suitable for AI use at least if you're playing as Macedon (should be better with the Mauryans) because the nearest metal for the Mauryans is behind the forest so they'll walk up the side valleys and through the Macedonian base to try and get to it. I'm also working on an RMS script to make Himalayan maps. Downloadable here as with all my other scenarios: http://www.exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=1078

My real name's James Baillie, since that doesn't seem to be in at present.

Yeah, admittedly they're not very AI friendly, though some and some starting positions work better than others. And also the AI will hopefully catch up on pathfinding etc at some point... I can announce that the new map is to be entitled "Himalaya", and will hopefully be released soon

I'm from the border between Norfolk and Suffolk, near the main ford between the two which used to be a fairly major trade route; classic Iceni territory really, with valley fens along the rivers and flattish farmland in the surrounding area. There's a villa in my local village but it's never been fully excavated; the river valley has a lot of flints and so on, so it's been a settled area for a very long time. It's mostly just very rural nowadays. At University where I spend the other half of the year I'm in Cambridge, which of course has a heck of a history though its most interesting bits are medieval onwards with the university. My college, Pembroke, is I think the third oldest, founded 1347 (the older ones being Peterhouse and Clare). An interesting fact there is that people from Pembroke College, Cambridge are not referred to as "Pembrokians" generally, and instead the term "Valencians" is used for Aymer de Valence, in whose memory the college was founded.

I tend to turtle very heavily, lots of fortifications where possible; The AI isn't bright but it can out-econ me at times; generally it can be really, really wasteful of resources though, towers are an excellent way of getting tons of kills in without too much reaction coming back. Honestly the main problem I have with the current version is that the game just chokes for speed once it gets beyond about 300 units on the map, so even 1v1 games are usually too slow for me to bother finishing them.