Stan`

Hey everyone, I am creating this thread to discuss the balancing from a "meta" perspective in hopes to improve the current situation. Please refrain from discussing "actual" balancing in this thread. As some of you may know, it has been a priority of mine for the past three years to find a way to provide a good experience for players, whether they are on the competitive side or not. For the 24th Alpha I created a Personal Mail (PM) with a few individuals, in order to try to create a team-like cohesion. While the 24th Alpha was a game changer in a lot of ways, and a painful experience, I do believe that it was the most productive in terms of actual patches and changes. People played by the rules by proposing, creating, and accepting patches (I insist on the last part because without formal acceptance there is no liability). I also tried to leverage a documentation team to update the design document. The job was too hard, and it died quickly and in silence. The original design was somewhat different from what the current game is today. There would have been much less civilizations, and instead your empire would have switched from a generic civilization to a more specific one (e.g greek -> macedon -> seleucid). Then another era came, where everything changed. Meanwhile, I was not happy about doing things in the shadows. This whole project is a community effort, and the contributors of today are the ones that might carry the flame when I am gone. So after a few internal discussions we came up with the balancing subforum, where everyone could see what was going on behind the curtains but only a selected few could interract, and anyone could ask me for a seat at the table, with some relevant experience. It came with little titles that hoped would boost morale. However... It did not go as I(we) planned. It created an even bigger split in the community, resulted in a huge variety of threads which is good, but which led nowhere as none of the idea was accepted enough to be implemented. And even the ideas who did get implemented did not make it. While the Personal Mail (PM) did go off track from time to times, it had the advantage of notifying people everytime someone posted (I do not think many people use that forum feature for threads) and I think the discussion was more focused, people pinging each other for patch reviews etc... There was also an attempt to use the chat on Phabricator which also sends emails for each messages, but it quickly vanished after the 24th Alpha. The 25th Alpha got some welcomed changes, at a much slower rate, and I think it fixed a lot of the quirks Alpha 24 introduced. But we're not quite there yet, and I know a few people are hurt about the current state of the game. I'm not a fan of the current balancing forums, and I'd like to merge them again with the rest of the game discussions, or at least to open them, since there seem to be no point in having them closed anymore. So I'm asking everyone, what can we (as in Wildfire Games) do, to get more contributions about balancing, to make A26 a success. We have some very nasty release blockers, and that leaves time for a bit more balancing patches. Best regards, Stan

Some old devs of 0 A.D. worked for age of empires IIRC

It's used by user1 somehow. I think he has a non public script doing some magic. It has not been disclosed to me. I just know that tampering with it brings thunder

It's a PSD somewhere maybe indelenda est @wowgetoffyourcellphone

Don't use letters if possible. Alphas with the same numbers are binary compatible.

I think it is important to mention that those videos are useless to the game. I can show you videos of previous alphas where the problem does not occur. If you have a fix, share it. Or do not. But just sending videos is not useful. Sorry.

@Freagarach

Indeed to get the macedonians campaigns in we need a massive overhaul of the maps in there. I haven't tested the scenario itself though.

When A26 is done.

Minimum supported resolution needs 768 in height. Some people want us to go even higher than that.

Can't it be an interesting differentiation if made more explicit, or if it comes with bonii ?

@user1, @Dunedan

Well it needs code and animations.

We need bb's secondary attack patch for that

@gameboy where is the fix?

Heh, no rush you'll be fine. It's a bit frustrating at first but it gets satisfying in the end. Those things take time, give yourself some.

See http://docs.wildfiregames.com/entity-docs/a25.html#component.Garrisonable

IIRC units target the closest unit that matches their prefered class. Which could be somewhat far away. I think it's just not only a dichotomy

Hey @AGamer Welcome to the forums! Modding errors should be in interestinglog.html :) As for it keeping prompting you to reenable mods do note you should click the save button next to the start game one Happy modding. :)

Could be linked to stances?

Can you try to disable whole map shadows and set shadowscascadecount to 4 in the config file.

I might not be looking at the right thing what's the second one.

Since you can draw mockups are welcome

IIRC @wraitii had a fix but never finished it. @vladislavbelov had a potential hack for it.

Looks like A25 though, no cc icons.