Prodigal Son

Let's start by saying that I will not go in detail with the well deserved praise to the team and all contributors for the game's development so far, but rather focus on fixes and proposals, instead of mentioning what I like. After testing Alpha 17 a bit ( a few games on both single and multiplayer, as well as a quite deep examination of changes for all units, techs, civs etc), some fixes come to mind first. Mind that I'm not 100% sure on all of them, that would need extensive multiplayer testing which I haven't done. SOME MINOR STUFF: SOME STRANGE STAT ISSUES: OTHER: A BALANCING TEMPLATE UNIT CLASS ROLES GENERAL SUGGESTIONS AND TECH PROPOSALS: CAMPAIGN: FACTION SPECIFICS Trying to make each faction unique through historical attributes. Note that the unit lists I'm mentioning are chosen mostly from a historical perspective, balance and uniqueness for each faction on that field would need lengthy discussions. ATHENIANS The Athenians should have bonuses on navy, expansion, infantry mobility, economy and research, with an expand and defend playstyle. Faster built or cheaper Civ Centers will allow quick expansion (simulating colonization or vassalization of other's colonies) with mobile infantry forces and navies to protect them or raid enemy holdings. Later on, Philosopher units can help the colonies flurish enhancing construction, economy and research, to make up for a slightly weak late game military. BRITONS The Britons should be an offensive civ with relatively cheap and weak (in defense) early units and weaker, faster built (wooden) structures. This makes them a viable booming faction as well. More research needed. CARTHAGINIANS The Carthaginians should have bonuses on naval trade, navy, exploration, expansion, defenses and mercenaries. Locating (with bonused scouting) and securing (with fast built or tough structures) metal deposits, to help them make the most out of their mercenary armies, as well as maintaining naval and trade superiority could be their core direction. GAULS The Gauls should be an offensive civ with relatively cheap and weak (in defense) early units and weaker, faster built (wooden) structures. This makes them a viable booming faction as well. Later on they get access to tougher units and upgrades. IBERIANS The Iberians are the ultimate turtle civ with several defensive bonuses and also specialize at guerilla warfare. Their units are quite varied but their navy is one of the weakest. MACEDONIANS The Macedonians field powerful cavalry, infantry and siege weapons and reliable missile units. A mostly offensive faction at early-mid game, that gets more staying power later on with reforms increasing the survivability of several units. MAURYANS The Mauryans could be an aggressive (rush) civ with weak, cheap and fast trained units, relatively weak and fast built (wooden) structures. This can also allow them to play with a booming playstyle, since cheap citizen-soldiers should give an early economic advantage. Their armies are rather weak with the exceptions of archery units and war elephants. PERSIANS The Persians excel at massing weak, cheap infantry units supported by equally cheap but formidable archers. But what really stands out is their cavalry arm, one of the strongest among all civs. Their structures are strong as well, although a little slower to build. PTOLEMIES The Ptolemies should have a well balanced military, with most troop types and better than average mercenaries, but that shouldn't be the core of their strength, somewhat lacking in champion units and military techs. Farming, research, naval and defense bonuses should make them a booming-defensive faction with a variety of secondary options. ROMANS The Romans might have somewhat weak cavalry, but make up for it with easy to mass tough infantry, strong siege weapons/structures and increasingly good technology as the game advances. SELEUCIDS The Seleucids probably have access to the largest troop variety of all civs, including several elite units and powerful reforms. Their other aspects could stay at average more or less for balance, even though historically they could have many other bonuses and their weaknesses don't translate well in RTS gameplay. SPARTANS The Spartans can be a very unique faction with early available, very limited, super-elite infantry supported by average to poor other units. Late game reforms can provide a reliable, massable unit in Cleomenian Pikemen and improve other troop classes through newly unlocked mercenaries, so that they can stand against other faction's now powerful armies. Helots can be used as a unique worker unit with the best default farming rate (even if slaves are added in general).

I finally installed SVN, and it automatically used greek as my local language. So far, at the multiplayer lobby I've noticed a few issues: At the player list, their conditions (connected/busy etc) the greek equivalent words often overlap each other. Also the time is displayed as ΩΩ:λλ, with Leper saying someone should fix this back to HH:mm so the time can be correctly detected. Will update this with anything else I come across. Edit: Most unit, tech, and building translations are incomplete and more often than not partly wrong, as if an auto-translator was used.

That's beautiful:)

How about a choir of the lobby moderators singing "New Game Available"? Seriously awesome idea! It would fix the main issue that made me not wanting to play over the past few months. It could also have a disable button in the lobby for those not liking it.

Auron summed up my feelings about it quite well... However, it's not a top priority, since it works and i don't want to distract valuable modelers from 0 AD, have them learn WC3 specifics etc. I have a link at the last(?) page of the thread I linked above for people wanting to check, since I was mostly away recently, but it has expired by now. I just don't want to spread it everywhere for now. If anyone wants the map I can send it though and feedback is very welcome.

Hey and welcome:) 1) I think it's a design choice. Offensive civ centers near the opponent, followed by other buildings are not uncommon though. 2) Design choice again I think, but it works without problem imo, as requiring less or no buildings works as well. Not sure exactly what's behind it. 3) I've found treasures to be a huge advantage to people knowing the map, I could often gather almost all of them even vs good players. So I'm with you on that one. There's also a little randomness factor but that's not that big of an issue for me since I'm not a very hardcore player. 4) You can always use more workers to speed it up and I think it's pretty fine, but that also depends on the game pace each player likes.

Yeah, those ones, thanks! I was especially looking for the AOM ones though. If such a thing is to be implemented in 0 AD, I can provide my wip list.

If anyone is (still) interested in this, here's were most of the updates are posted.

Do you remember the funny messages the AI sent on various occasions in Age Of Mythology. I'm starting to implement some similar to them in my wc3 mod and thought they might be an interesting and easy to add feature for 0 AD as well. Sorry if it is already be planned, but it hasn't come to my attention. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, it was messages like "May I offer my surrender?", "I will crush your little city blah blah blah" accordingly on events like game start, heavy loses on either side, when close to defeat etc. It made the AI feel much more alive. I've found a lists of AOM and AOK taunts, but can't seem to find the ones I was looking for, and I don't have AOM installed. Does anybody know where to spot them?

Every 5 seconds seems too little, but something similar could be used. In my wc3 mod I have slaves with degenerating health, and at some low health point they rebel. Then each rebelled slave caused (removed for now) rebellion to other slaves nearby with just one hit. It was funny to see your entire mining or lumbering team go neutral hostile (gaia equivalent) in 2 seconds and attack anything in sight, I might re-add this. If by any chance it's implemented this way in 0 AD, it combos nice with healers. A preacher healing/oppressing/whatever your slowly dying slaves makes for a more effective gather team than normal workers.

Kinda hard to balance the game this way. Who would have 30 footmen over 30 elephants? If the design direction goes this way it would be better to relate it with limits per unit type, reflecting historical numbers of units each civ had and the needed balance. But if the issue is Persians being weak, I'd rather buff them in other ways. They relied mostly on numbers and even immortals weren't that heavy.

Slaves could be bought at the market instead of being trained and be a percentage of killed ("captured") units from a global pool, or only the enemies killed by each player or team. Or they could just have a fixed limit, increaseable by techs. They would make the rank techs more viable. Some civs (seleucids only?) have some unrankable citizen soldiers trained only from the CC. This could work for all civs I guess together with your idea for buffing either them or slaves according to each civ. But it could also be an overkill with similar versions of the same units. Mercenaries indeed could work this way. They could use some more differentiation besides resource costs, and they're soldiers, not workers (with some exceptions like those granted land for service).

I've lost to a Macedonian player exploiting the syntagma bug, even if I had a better econ and massed counter-units, are you sure your defeat wasn't due to it? (no clue if it's fixed in the branch though, haven't played it).

Nice iNcog, in fact that's almost exactly how I balance my wc3 mod. I also agree that this discussion gets confusing/pointless since at points we talk for balance hotfixes while at others for a revamped combat system. Three different resources for a unit might indeed be harsh in practice, so even if it makes sense the cost reduction tech way might be better. It can also simulate the increased cost effectiveness of roman swordsmen and the choice to follow up for other civs which reformed their infantry. Romans could even get a slightly stronger or cheaper version of this tech The aura for the ram might be better that it attacking human soldiers, if no pushing can be implemented.

Swordsmen wood cost could easily be justified as part of their shield materials. Cavalry should be given different roles, some being skirmishers/raiders/anti-ranged while others heavy shock cavalry that can cost effectively break most non-spear troops, not all of them being harassers. And besides the realism aspect of it, I agree that very easy to mass preachers isn't a good idea, so half or something of their cost being metal sounds good. Rams ramming units indeed sounds bad, perhaps if a pushing mechanic is easy to implement to have them slowly make their way through enemy units? It could also work for war elephants and to a lesser extend cavalry or even heavy infantry, pushing back the enemy formation.

I think spearmen do both pierce and hack. Also changing their bonus damage multiplier against cavalry could make it enough anyway, coupled with increasing hack armor would make cavalry stronger against swordmen and other melee troops but still weak against spears (if that's what's intended). I haven't played A16 much because I got annoyed by people using all forms of exploits in it, but before that ranged troops seemed too strong even vs cavalry so I'm not sure about making them weaker vs pierce (could be the lack of the ability to attack moving targets for melee troops though). Besides than I'm in favour of even tougher but costlier cavalry compared to foot units, much like in reality, as it's something that is balancable. Most ancient armies had ratios of 1:10 or even less cavalry to infantry due to cost/lack of horses, more training required etc. So a 50% tougher, 50% costlier cavalryman compared to infantryman isn't that accurate. Healers could cost half metal/half food. Priests have to cost metal(;p) and wood or stone wouldn't make much sense. Not sure about the other two. This guide might be helpful (especially its parts about balancing and unit roles), even if more warcraft/startcraft gameplay styled.

I remember something like the combat system you describe from a discussion with Mythos and I'm definitely for it. It can be refreshing, accurate and balanced if it turns out good, and besides total war which is partly a different genre I think no game has done this right. However if it takes too much time to come along, a simple balance fix could work for the next alpha or two.

I'd suggest something slightly different (not something new, just better justification). Keep spearmen and swordsmen different, and just give spearmen to every civ in village phase along with melee cav. Romans actually have a pretty good justification for starting with spearmen. Since the Marian reforms are implemented now and they aren't simply the 2nd Punic War Romans anymore, you can include earlier fighting styles as well. Like Roman "Hoplites" from before the manipular system, or early Principes/Hastati with spears (they switched to swords around the 1st Punic War I think, and even Hasta means spear if I recall right). Or rank 1 Triarii could represent Roman Hoplites since they would mostly be the middle to high class citizens anyway. Or a "pre-rank" of Triarii being the hoplites, then being replaced by Triarii upon reaching town phase. This system might also need balance by giving all civs only skirmishers (or only archers) and the same with spear/sword cavalry, since those units have different roles and might break balance as well.

Warcraft 3 has a powerful map editor, and while it's not open source, mods and custom maps (which work as stand-alone mods) are very common and certainly not banned and posted on forums all around the net. 0 AD will eventually get better than wc3, at least for my taste, but since my time and experience aren't endless, I prefer working with something more stable for now.

If anyone is interested and has a Warcraft III installation, my project is ready for some playtesting.

Thanks guys for one more great release!

I'm from Athens, Greece, which means I'm at gmt +2/+3 I believe, depending on the time of year (with the changes applied to save electricity). My nickname comes from the Bad Religion song of the same name, not directly from the bible. I've always been lazy/weak at finding good short names, such as usernames and song titles, while on the other hand I've got no issues writing long texts or several songs a day.

Nice one! Actually I've noticed something similar in the 0AD facebook in the meanwhile.

I mean it even has "Date of announcement, 1st April 2014", who could miss that even if lazy with remembering the date and not estranged by the content. Anyway I'm thinking too much I guess:p

I used the corral and cavalry to gather from the sheep trained there for a while in multiplayer, in combination with a rather small number of farms. It was extremely effective after some point in the game, having a huge food income (that constantly booms when you start being able to train bigger and bigger batches of sheep) gathered by just 2-3 cavalrymen. It needed too much attention though, especially in the early to mid game and I couldn't cope so well against most decent players, so soon I reverted back to the lazy ways of only farming. But in long games that you're not under heavy pressure, it should become increasingly superior over farming. As the Mauryans I was able to support huge numbers of food-draining elephants with this strategy while having a bigger army and more spare workers for the needed metal as well. Have in mind that it's function will change though, I believe to something like a steady source of food from each sheep garrisoned in the corral, rather than killing the sheep and gathering from them and it will get balanced afterwards. Edit: Just noticed Lion already mentioned this.