Pedro Falcão

Age of Empires 3 Mobile:

"praesidium/presidium" are the latin words for a defensive building, but i can't take away the thought that in portuguese it is more to Jail than to Barracks... The english word "barracks" itself born from the spanish "barraca" that means "temporary shelter", but more commonly used as "tent".

The more, the better, imho. The essencials for me (at least in RoN), are Conquest, Musical Chairs, Barbarians at the Gates and Sudden Death. These are all of the Rise of Nations game modes: Conquest: the only way to win is to conquer every city of every enemy player. Musical Chairs: Each X minutes, the player with the worst total score is wiped out of the game. Sudden Death: If you lose any city, you lose the game. Economic: The first player whose income of all resources reaches the X value, wins the game. Not able for 0 AD Score: Wins who first reach X total score points. Tech Race: Wins whoever reaches the information age (the last age) first. No combats are allowed and if your unit enters enemy territory it will receive constant damage until it dies or walks back to your territory. Not able for 0 AD Territory: The player whose territory covers X% of the map wins instantly. Time limit: When the time expires, the player with the highest score wins (score is calculated considering wonders, % of the map within control, buildings and units alive and techs researched). Barbarian at the Gates: X defenders against Y attackers. The defenders (usually only one) always are more powerful (start already at later ages and have a greater base/starting stock/starting income). Assassins!: Each player is given a different target. The players receive a high damage if enter an enemy territory if not your target and absolutely no damage (no matter your techs) for entering the territory of your target. The battle goes on until only one player lives. Classic Deathmatch: All players start with high stock of resources. Information Age Deathmatch: All players start with a high stock of resources, at the last age and with almost all technologies researched (except for ultimate techs and nuclear bombs). Not able for 0 AD

The shining water attract the attention of most gamers, so show the quality of our water. Also you forgot to add the game slogan "0 A.D.: history is yours for the taking!".

Forgetting the roads, i thought about Queues of orders and pre-orders. The idea between them is quite simple: about the queues (featured both in Starcraft 2 and Rise of Nations), the player can select a unit and give it a sequence of commands to be done in the exact same order by holding shift button while giving the orders; About the pre-orders, i didn't see it in any game, but i thought it would be nice to program a set of orders to various units to be executed at the same time. For example, a player wants two armies to attack at the same time, but from two different sides, so the player can "shift + (the button of pre-orders) + click" to program the first army to do something and, still holding the pre-orders' button, program the set of orders for the other army (the same way as the first) and then release the pre-orders button to start the sets of orders for both armies. Since the queues are already featured in games and they don't seem to harm the playability, the "pre-orders" (just delaying the set of orders) won't cause much harm to it too, while adding the possibility of more strategies (specially if/when the bonuses of attacking by behind are implemented).

I'm too methodic, i place buildings aligned with each others and a distance of two squares between them to facilitate troop transiting in my cities. My strategy for defending is to fill all the gaps with melee foot soldiers, archers close to the central building, melee horsies scattering the melee enemies and ranged horsies taking them down. To attack, every melee soldier around the central building to occupy the just-trained units, archers standing ground around the catapults and cavalry taking down any distractions.

In real life, the romans preferred to use the roads to travel, the army in a long straight line for everyone to have a spot on the road.

Caravan roads are featured in rise of nations just for aesthetic purposes, save for handing over the caravans' postions. In RoN, only buildings and caravan can create roads, though (and automatically, manual road building is impossible). It would be nice to have roads featured in 0 AD, even cooler to have speed bonus from them.

Think this way: do you really want to spend time hand-picking your elite guards and your raiders? This can be funny once or maybe twice, but as time passes it becomes boring. To solve the attack speed issue, a global cooldown on all abilities, or increasing its effect based on the units' strenght could ease, if not solve the problem. I.E.: The unit X has a "critical strike" ability. while speed increases its chance of proccing per second, the attack of the unit could increase its damage. This way, the player can equally choose between high amount of low damage procs or a low amount of high damage procs. Or, the other way: the ability Y has N% chance of proccing each every 2 seconds. If it procs now, the unit can only do it again two seconds from now, even if the dices say to proc.

I say flat & foundations. Flat for the higher ground (considering from the center of the building) and foundations for the lower ground. The problem is that when the hill is flattened, the discrepance between two tiles reaches ridiculous values. The solution for this is to add a wall (fashioned alike the building) separating the flattened ground and the original hill ground. After all, we feel bad for both seeing those incredible terrain curves and those too high foundations.

Just a note on this: The Helepolis can or not garrison?

If your game is within important folders, like Program Files or Windows folders, try moving it to another place, my windows 7 very often has problems with programs installed within these folders, even when running as administrator (i've lost saved preferences of a game and didn't realize the cause until the third time it happened).

I was checking my usual guitar chors site and i found this duet on the first page: Long Live - Paula Fernandes & Taylor Swift It's the half-portuguese version of Taylor Swift's own music "Long Live": http://youtu.be/3cZRmyR3r0k Paula Fernandes sings "Sertanejo" (some say "Sertanejo Universitário" to differentiate from the traditional one), the closest brazillian music style to USA's pop country style.

Congratulations, guys, for the great work. I can say i am exigent about music for games, but 0 AD's music fits it perfectly. I'm not directly benefitted of Linux stuff, but each and every effort to facilitate the access to a free high-quality product i deeply support and encourage, so thank you, both Omri and Rico (and the rest of members/contributors) for your devotion to this cause!

I came to the idea of a map like this one anexed. It isn't a realistic map, but a good one for players looking for a challenge, be it single-player or multiplayer (even though the current AI isn't scripted for naval battles...). The idea of the map is a fight of two teams: one player defending the main island and the rest of them trying to invade it before the time expires. Well, i miscalculated the size of the buildings for each island, what ended up in a tiny map, but in a larger version of the map, there should be some tiny islands with towers surrounding the center island to help slow the invaders. the spiral way to the center of the island provides a large andvantage for the defender. Notice that the defender has (or will have in a larger map) enough resources for all the duration of the siege and only one possible direction of incoming attacks. Also there is one island right at the south with a high quantity of resources to supply the attackers (They should have only the essential to build a decent base and then build an outpost on the rich island), while providing some extra chance of slowing them (the defender could send some small army there just to buy time). How many attackers or how many time the fight should last is on the hands of the players to decide. In red the passability of the areas (to emphasize that there is only one way to reach the defender's civ centre. screenshot0002.bmp

In Rise of Nations i'd say i do the same, capping territory to make it harder for people to find new resources and building as many wonders as i can. But that is for RoN, in which cities are strong and can kill many soldiers and there is a constant damage for being in enemy territory (called attrition damage), so to with a small army i can repel initial rushes while keeping the major resource production at some specific and fortified cities (in RoN the resources never deplet). When the production is high and constant, i build an ocean of barracks and stables, turn the infinite soldier requeue and just keep managing the battle front. In other games expand slowly, but fortify very well each and every base so to not care about my workers, as it may drive the attention needed to win the game during the main battles.

Tutle, i'm that obsessive too. It just feels wrong when the walls are far from each other, even though i know they do protect my cities all the same. BTW, in Rise of Nations, "builders" are called Boomers and the mythos-likes are called rushers.

I'd like more to add more (different) units/buildings to each civ than to add more civs with less content. Yeah, in both AoE, AoK and AoEIII the factions were almost the same (AoE3 had less units and some were shared, so they could have different models, but it felt pretty much the same civs). Starcraft and AoM had only 3 civs, but they were very different between them, so it rarely was a problem.

I agree that "Imperium" is a common word in most stuff about Rome, but still we have to consider that the word itself has a strong effect, if you get what i mean. Try pronouncing it loudly (with latin accent, of course, as english takes away all its awesomeness) and you'll see what i'm talking about. Powerful words like this are preferrable for titles, imho, even though it is a simple alpha release and it isn't likely to be used for the final version of the game.

It says the video is private...

I bought EE3 some years ago, but my PC back that days wasn't able to support it, even with the lowest graphic res, so i put it aside and never tried it again, it is still somewhere inside my desk...

Agreed i'd even suggest to think about a new feature to groups of control, they are very useful, but i think they could have some automation to prevent the boring and repetitive action of assigning units to a control group. I'd like for a control group to be refilled with that type of unit right when they are trained, for a sample.

True, but you didn't got my point. Not saying there weren't farms neither that they weren't necessary, just saying that the economy back in ancient times wasn't as linked to farms as it was during feudal age. Sorry for my bad expressing.

Yes, that's because AoK featured the feudal age, where farms were the base of the economies, but 0 A.D. takes place in an early time, so wouldn't make sense to emphasize farming instead of hunting.

These building limits should be thought about later, i think, when all buildings, bonus and balancing comes into a solid state. In AoK, for a sample, Castles were overpowered, technically, but in the heat of the game, they were not that OP just because they were expensive and could easily be brought down by one or two trebuchets. (this discussion makes me want to play AoK again...)