Prodigal Son

You're right, the merchant ship already functions as a transport, but I think it needs more cappacity, if not from the start, with a tech. Boarding could be done with having the ships lock together (maybe with some hook "missile" animation, like in RAF:CAW Lion mentioned earlier) and have the capture points determined by marine numbers/strength, losing capture points during the action could also reduce the crew.

Triremes did serve as troop transport, but their capacity was not appropriate to their size and they almost always carried only their marines as extras, due to all those rowers and the thin design. Large expeditions would need real transport ships or huge numbers of warships. My suggestion mixing all the ideas above is: Village Phase: Fishing Boat - just fishing, no combat, no point in micro-ing a very small transported size for those. Merchant/Transport Ship - Can trade or ferry units, upgrades for more transport capacity on a following phase. Bireme Class Warship - Can ram like all warships and board or skirmish depending on crew (or maybe civ dependent crew and role). Can land her starting marines, which makes space for loading extra units. Same with loses. Small crew, say 10 units, landing them could work for an early game raid. Town Phase: Trireme Class Warship - Same with Bireme, but bigger, faster, with a larger crew. Alternatively, Biremes could be boarding ships and Triremes missile ships, or the opposite, but none of the two seems historically correct. City Phase: Quinquireme Class Warship - Possibly less agile than the other warships, with the additional option for artillery crew, or perhaps by default an artillery ship. *I think ramming and boarding were scrapped as features, I hope I'm wrong though. Especially boarding and ship capturing would be very interesting.

It could work easier than that I believe. Capturing percentage modifiers could be adjusted accordingly to the game/combat pace. Stopping to gather the wounded from "corpses" would partly defeat the purpose of winning a local battle to gain the chance to advance on your opponent.

While I generally don't like the current naval combat with garrisoned ships being much stronger in attack to ungarrisoned ones, having them trained with a starting crew is a nice workaround, since it prevents many possible imbalances/annoying cases like having to constantly move new ships around to add troops to them or losing your only/few garrisoned ones and being left with a much weaker navy even if you still have many ships. Having less and stronger ships sounds valid as well, given the huge ship size in the game which makes large navies a messy/buggy display. Marine units could also make sense this way. You can unload the ship's starting crew to land, instead of having some ships train units. Capturing ships with some visible boarding action (or just similarly to structures if visible implementation is hard) would be a nice feature as well. Ships could be geared for ramming, boarding or ranged combat (or a couple of those each) giving different tactics/ship classes and civ bonuses. Still, fighting with fishing ships in a no from me, and transports should be available to ferry land troops, the merchant ship could easily double as a transport.

Water maps could indeed be almost exclusively fish-reliant in food gathering if they are ment to be too punishing for losing water control, but I'm not sure about that. But both Darc and Roek you seem to have missed my other point, maybe because I didn't expand on it. Food is the most basic resource. Farms are most basic/stable way of getting it. Limiting them to pre-placed slots, and given the hard (and imo uninteresting) to totally balance random map generation, can lead to cases with severe imbalances to a resource you'll need throughout the game, not one you can do without for a while and plan ahead to get. Corrals are bit hard to decide on. I kinda like the way AOM handles herdables, having them fatten over time (starting from the time you capture them). You could slay them fast for a food boost or wait to get more later. Garrisoning them for income is also a viable idea, but it seems too similar to farms in the end. Autoproduction with a limit could work too. In my mod I haven't touched them yet, besides replacing the cavalry speed tech which went over to the stables with some "herd techs" reducing cavalry/camel/elephant food costs, that might stay in place of the planned mechanic to capture and garrison animals for cost reduction, as I generally prefer to represent minor things with something simple instead of extra micro. I'm also considering the possibility of removing the corrals and have herdables available only though scouting/as starting units.

Capturing individual units, especially small/numerous ones sounds like too much micro. Reminds me of a less crazy (but still complicated) version of the disastrous feature in Ancient Wars: Sparta and other games of that franchise, where you could pick individual weapons from the battlefield to sell them or equip soldiers with them reducing their costs and creating new unit classes that could be unavailable to your civ. Not every cool sounding concept translates well to gameplay. A percentage of kills as captured slaves granting some bonuses is a nice idea though to reward combat and add another layer of realism. Some Civs could be bonused in capture percentage or exploitation of prisoners.

Farms built only in farmland might be hard to balance, especially placing them in random maps and even more so, how would they work in maps with small islands? Have weird looking islets full of farmland, or have almost no farming for those maps? Overall almost any (relatively) flat ground should be farmable imo, and for balance reasons at the same rate. In my impression RTS games who have huge placement limitations to very basic resources didn't work that well. Some old discussions could be revisited though. Maybe the Civ Centre could have a small-ish radius around it where structures can't be constructed (or just farms) but units can pass through. This would make the econ more vulnerable to raiding, while being realistic, as you wouldn't farm in a City Centre. I'd prefer farming being available from the village phase, for realism and for preventing early defeat in cases where the opponent has map control and you can't venture far from your starting region for hunting. At the same time, starting mines and to a lesser degree forest masses would be nice to be a little more distanced from the CC as well, for similar reasons. Also limited starting exploration of the map to the Civ Centre's vision instead of the whole territory would make scouting more important, especially coupled with the ideas above, since you would have to locate your starting resources. I more or less agree with the OP in the resource and ranged unit dominance parts.

I don't really like capturing as a classic RTS mechanic, it feels to me more weird and messy than soldiers just attacking structures when you have to control basebuilding, combat and a rather detailed economy at the same time. That said it might turn out good in it's final form. Certainly though more expensive units (considering overall mass-ability through resource/time costs and how many structures can produce the unit - fortress only units could be considered slightly more expensive for example) should have more capture points/second else massing weak units will be a huge advantage. In addition to that, Swordsmen and especially champion ones can be extra bonused here as assault infantry, while units like Pikemen are more effective in open field battles.

It's quite normal for a game in (laggy) alpha stage not to have a huge multiplayer community. On top of that we're not in the golden age of RTS anymore, and like others have said when you log in plays a part too. I'll strongly agree with av and sanderd on keeping the multiplayer free of buffs and extras that affect gameplay. It's unfair and a recipe for disaster, as AOEO proved (AOE III did it in moderation and was less of a failure, still AOM and especially AOK hold better despite their years). Ranking without buffs is fine ofc, cosmetic trophies and single player content could work as well, thankfully due to the game's direction not as freemium nonsense:p.

Athenaia would be the correct in modern Greek, it means woman of/who lives in Athens. Athenaike is used for a "female" object and Athenaikos for a "male" object (so Athenaios is the correct one for Athenian male units in a similar fashion). The same should be true for ancient Greek, and several Greek names in the game estrange me. But there were various dialects and changes over time and on top of that my ancient Greek were terrible at school, let alone now years later, so I can't be sure on anything.

It seems that for now it's an exact copy (stat-wise) of the regular cavalry archer for balance reasons.

That's great, thanks for adding the mods including mine:)

I'll download and contact you for playing within the following days:)

Thanks and np:) I've got some pretty major changes coming up soon btw. End of off-topic:p

Perhaps you could slightly edit the terrain to make the east more of a block of land by removing that north-east "lake", and place a new Isthmus to the west? This would make the geography of the region much closer to accurate without major edits. Still Marathon and Athens would be rather misslocated though. Besides the geography restrictions the use of the pre-made map causes, it looks great:)

That solution is like 5-10 mins of work, so it's worth it even if it's going to be replaced at some point. I'm not even sure the decision on auto-skirmish or not will change once more game functions are implemented anyway, we'll have to wait and see for that.

I wasn't trying to justify minimum range historically, that part of my comment is on the debate on if ranged cav automicro should be removed, gameplay wise, since that debate is going on for a while now. I suggested a happy medium solution. Want your ranged cavalry to skirmish by itself so you can focus on other things? Pay for a tech.

If scythed chariots were to be used in their normal role, I'd say have them be low defense, high attack units with trample damage and a weakness to piercing attacks. Since they are essential a buffed horse archer currently, we could treat them as such, maybe with an extra weakness to crush, since they are large targets. Ranged Cavalry/Chariot automicro could be gone, and unlocked with a mid/late game tech adding back their minimum range as an intermediate solution.

Qwerty if you consider the corrals worthless because they require extra micro and because the late game needs your attention elsewhere, why suggest adding micro to farms as well? That would just have the same result for farms. Imo corrals actually work pretty well if you're willing to manage them, but as a macro player I avoid them to focus on other things. But when I experimented using them, I ended up with an insane food production using only a few horsemen in the late game and a mass of extra sheep filling my base. Btw editing the game files for my mod I came across an idea for fully implementing the corrals in their supposed role: Sheep can get a garrison-type aura adding a food tickle and get allowed to be garrisoned only in corrals (if that's not already the case). I think it's possible without extra code.

Imo buildings are strong not because they have too much hp or armor, but because they (still) have too high of an attack when garrisoned (compare it to AOM or AOE games for example). Actually most buildings have too low of a hack armor, often at the same levels with their crush one, making melee units better siege weapons than the actual ones due to massability. I see more of a problem when about 15 swordsmen easily kill a CC than 40 archers. What I'd do and will do for my mod is buffing their defense a little but reducing the bonus arrows per unit. Defensive buildings should this way be what they are meant for: - Hard to kill, but not killers. - Protecting chock points or economy (with some fire power and garrisons slots for civilians). - Able to last until help arrives if you're not too slow or your army is at the other side of the map, giving some response time. It should also reduce the effectiveness of forward building which seems to be the dominant strategy.

I like what you aim for, I just don't believe most of your suggestions would help to achieve that. A good game takes in consideration players of all skill levels. A very different economic model from civ to civ, besides frustrating many newbies, will just end with people copying the most successful builds and civ choices. A balanced one helps prevent that, actually adding more variety in the long run. Keep in mind that when water maps are really playable and corrals properly implemented, the early game will get more variety just by that, having two more viable food sources on many maps and one more on all of them. Which will also lead to various side effects.. corrals fitting with cavalry builds, fishing boats allowing civic centers to focus more on military production and goes on. If you want to discuss anything in detail, I'm currently (and pretty often) on the irc dev chat.

I get the point but I wouldn't represent leather as food (nor we need to represent every tiny gear piece on each soldier, just the most obvious ones). It's not coming just from animals anyway. If we wanted too accurate resource costs, then almost all soldiers should cost food+wood+metal+more and we'd need to add many extra resources as well, while 4 is seems like the limit in all successful RTS games and 2 resources types per unit seem to also be the limit while we already have 3 for some units. Major starting economy differences would make it hard for begginers, not because they already know the game, but because they'd have a hard time changing from civ to civ. They also are REALLY hard to balance in a game with 12 civs. Even in games with few civs major differences come little by little in the tech tree and mostly later on, for a good reason. A rather unified early game is a good way to go. Same with not having players focus on too many different resources early on. Same with units of the same type costing the same resource types for all factions. Differences like civs having a focus on wooden or clay (free) structures is acceptable and realistic, but adding many extras on top of that is not. Things that would be easy to change without being gamebreaking are unit strengths (with appropriate cost adjustments) but the citizen soldier concept isn't very generous with that. So, we need more well thought ideas on it. Unless we go with things like what you suggested like "faster macedonian skirmishers carrying less resources to balance it out", but this looks like poor design and unrealistic to me. Same with things like Athenian houses costing more in total, two resources instead of one, handicapping the stone they would need for a slinger strategy that is also one of the two "rare" resources (and why they should be different from other greek (etc) houses of the same look and materials?). I'd love to be enlightened on why the stone fortifications of the "barbarian" Iberians would be better represented by wooden palisades than by a stronger Civic Center. And still that wasn't my major point. I could go on and with more detail on many of those suggestions. Don't get me wrong or get angry like it's something personal, I just disagree with you on many concepts. I still believe a good portion of your suggestions here and in general is interesting and realistic (mostly the environmental/pve things) but still it's majority wouldn't fit well for RTS gameplay, especially the 0 A.D. kind. I've noted the ones I liked here. Another portion of them are not well thought as if you ignore the aim of history meets gameplay in order to just to propose something. Unless you just don't explain some of them enough and I get something wrong. By hard to implement I mean the ones that require extra programming.

Ancient Empires for WC3 released (first beta) The map is at a playable state with a working AI on all difficulties, including 5 Civs: Athenians, Carthaginians, Macedonians (with 3 successor sub-factions), Romans and Spartans. I've decided to push a beta release to be able to focus my modding time on 0 A.D. Made the map a bit smaller and player count got reduced to 4 to prevent some lag/crash issues that no one could solve (delaying the release for months now) and since then it works great so far. Link (awaiting authorization - should work soon) To install simply un-zip and put the map file in your WC3 maps folder or any sub-folder of your choice. If someone wants to play (I'm on EU battlenet) pm and I will If I'm around. Known issues: Starting Phase - Post Imperial doesn't work for AI players Some tooltips need improvement A few hotkeys might not be working Some Icons need changes or passive versions

I doubt it's the first guide, I think the official game channel has some for quite a while now. Might make more sometime in the future.

Cavalry now have reduced pierce armor, spearmen deal pierce damage, so they counter them.