Pedro Falcão

Haha! So no chance the Mi’kmaq are featured in 0 A.D., then?!

They need to be buffed, yes, but the most important buff for them will be charging damage. They already have the advantage of being faster, compared to infantry, so they can't be the overall strongest either.

I'm surprised I hadn't posted here before, but here it goes: Pedro Falcão (read Falk-am, Portuguese nasal sounds are a pain to foreigners) is my true name. I'm from Brasil, GMT-3. I am a Computer Scientist, and in my free time help translate 0 A.D. I also like to study languages, I speak English fluently, Spanish reasonably well and basic German and Japanese.

Bah, I play the Iberians, so the map isn't exactly the kindest map for me, but I've been trying workaround strategies to get the upper hand in situations like this, so it's a good thing. Good work on the map, both of you, it's really fun (except when they bring an army of quinqueremes)! Encourage them, then. Of course it would be troublesome if people started speaking in their own languages every time in the forum or created a session only for a language X (who'd supervise that?), but if they have a contribution to make, I am quite sure the team will not complain if they can't speak English. I am totally comfortable doing everything in English, nowadays, but it was not always like that. And most games currently released by major companies like Ubisoft, EA Games and Blizzard Entertainment are including Portuguese translations, but 10 years ago you'd only find games in English. Plus, now there's the Google Translator. I help translate things to Portuguese, now, because I don't want other people to struggle to play a game like I did, not understanding what the objectives of that mission were or what that X ability did, or what the unit Y was good for. So I can say I understand very well their situation, but there will be no progress unless the person makes an effort, like you do, Lion.

I feel like being able to cast these powers from anywhere kinda turns it just into an annoying thing. In Age of Mythology it made sense, since they were god powers (and most of them had only one use), but in 0 A.D. it would amount just to wreaking havoc in the base of the winning player without letting him any chance of defense, which is not fun. On the other hand, I could totally see some specific units having abilities like this, and IIRC some abilities are already planned for the game (like 'Charge' for cavalry), and I don't know if it's planned, but several people suggested warcries that boost morale.

Interesting opinion about the AoE series. I can't say I played Age of Empires before it was launched, but I used to watch my father and my cousin playing together, and started playing myself when I was 7 or 8 years old. I played every single one of the Age of Empires and Age of Mythology series and still play, from time to time. I agree with you that the size of the map in Age of Empires 3 was annoying, it could even be game-breaking for turtlers like me, but I found it a good experience in many ways, too. The shipment system had its problems, but I lost count of how many times my bases were saved because of those extra 6 musketeers from the shipments, or the extra gold, or how oppressive the factories and the forts (acquired only through shipments) could be if you let them be. IMHO they also did an awesome job in balancing the stats of the units (I can only guess how much of a nightmare balancing all those cannons must have been), and holy crap, those were the best campaigns in the whole series! And about the Age of Empires 2... Is that so? I feel like Age of Empires 2 was a huge improvement on the first in many aspects. The barracks' infantry in the first had too small of a line of sight and moved very slowly. Priests, principally so for the babylonians, were totally broken (what about that cross-continental range? And the conversion rate was hella fast, to booth!). With a bit of luck, you'd get a civ that could totally smash another civ, too. Units getting clipped and/or hiding behind things, non-refreshable farms, kinda confusing tech tree... All these were things I noticed myself that were fixed in the second game. Don't get me wrong, the first one was one hell of a good game, no other game so far could capture its atmosphere and the soundtrack and effects surpass AoK's ones, but there were so many improvements in the second game that I (as the zealous fan I am) admit I felt a bit offended when you said it forsook strategy, in fact I felt that you could really focus better on the strategy side of the game than on annoying bugs or on your soldiers being kited by enemy archers. I'm sorry you had to read such long a rant, It's just that I found interesting how different you thought about the series! Now, as for the 0 A.D., I just have to say that it's still Alpha (there is much yet coming before the game is complete), but judging by the passion the team and the community devote to this game, it will be another brilliant strategy game, just you wait!

Hm. I don't think that would work nice. Taking from my previous experience with Age of Empires 1 (and I'm sure many here will agree), I was extremely annoyed by the fact that I could only see the population by checking in a house. It's the kind of thing you can't hide from the users because it's very important for their strategies. Besides, when I noticed one market was going to be destroyed, I could just spend all those coins in whatever I could, to not let the enemy have it, and it brings us back to problem #1: how to represent in an easy-to-understand way the advantages we can have by trading with multiple markets? Indeed, some civs could benefit more from trading in a resource than gathering it manually, and it is historically accurate (Greece used to import grain from Egypt and export weapons, for example). I know pretty well that we can't stick 100% to real life, but I don't think you'd trade something you had for something you don't really want, would you? And if you already have very efficient workers gathering that resource optimally, why would you set traders (which are less efficient and more expensive) on that too? As I see it, that would be a reason not to bother trading. yeah, why not just make the market workers occasionally drop boxes in the civic center (as if gathering resources too)? Although short, it would open a window for raids.

Intel i5 2310, 2.9 GHz 8 GB DDR3 With a monitor of 21" I sometimes think I should get a nice gfx card, but didn't bother to buy one yet. Can't play anything fancy (like Witcher 3, Fallout 4 or Anno 2205), but I don't have a high budget anyways and hardware in my country is pretty expensive. Still can manage to play Skyrim in 1600x900, though, and some older games, like League of Legends, Farcry 3 and Anno 2070 are playable in 1920x1080. By "playable" I mean 20+ fps in the heaviest parts (I agree it's not smooth at all, but it's still playable, it's what matters). This cutey is ancient, but it's been my friend for 5 years now...

If you want to reduce the "straight line" effect, wouldn't it be better to just make it circular? I mean, instead of setting a trader from one point to another, make it go around many markets, with bonuses for number of markets and extra for number of foreign markets, or something like that. And instead of a market every X squares, why not a single market per nearby Civic Center (like in Rise of Nations)? The idea of workers in the market is cool, could be used as yet another bonus. And maybe for each of these bonuses you had to research a tech (having in mind that trading is an investment for late game, here)?

Nice idea. I had thought of something that would somewhat improve it's lore-friendliness... Maybe: The market receiving a percentage of every worker turn in nearby (let's say 1%), and a bit less for houses nearby. This way, the player would be encouraged to have a market as soon as possible, and to build it next to houses and dropsites. Then, those resources could be either traded with another market for profit based on distance or used in emergencies (though would trigger a cooldown and would be very costly for not getting profit over these slow-generating resources). ...Then I realized just how complicated it is, and how it would benefit the player who has more resources at his disposal (the winning player would have another bonus just for being in the lead). Well, leaving it here anyways, maybe someone may get some useful idea out of this.

That could be solved by using the "ability" system and adding a variable for number of possible uses. For infinite uses you set the number to -1, and other units could have the ability to add X more uses to the ability Y of the specific unit Z. I think the problem lies not with how it should be implemented, but in who is going to get their hands dirty. Once it's done, one could easily test it to see which way would fit best.

You can access the IRC channel directly from the web: http://webchat.quakenet.org/

I think it's just like it was at the time of the post. At least it seemed, last time i tried rating someone. I really don't see why it is called "reputation", I'd call it popularity or reliability. Also i don't get why it is shown in the user page, it feels silly to show how many "I strongly agree" one gets and it doesn't necessarily mean the person is reliable, anyways.

You may want to see for yourself: http://trac.wildfire...rtedProgrammers I'd say that if you don't have some Oriented Object programming experience, it'll be a bit hard to dive in such a large project. Also Python is an easy and beautiful language, so you may feel distressed when you have a look at the code as a whole (C++ isn't as aesthetically pleasing as is Python), but don't despair! The code is easier to understand than it looks. You can also talk directly to the developers here: http://webchat.quakenet.org/ Channel: #0ad-dev

Yes, that would be the advantage of having a formation. In fact this reminds me of the line formation penalty... Wouldn't it be better if units received more damage when "relaxed" instead of when in a determined formation? This way both the units without formation and those in line could receive the penalty or not, depending on how much time you spent out of combat (ambushes would benefit greatly, here). It just feels silly for lined troops to receive more damage than those scattered all around.