chaosislife

you can also set it as a group with the ctrl + (0-9) to call up later. If this works in multiplayer you could totally screw with your friends by having their allies attack them.

If you first select one of your units, and then the enemy's units you can command the enemy to attack their own structures and units. I still have to check out whether I can use the same premise to cause the enemy's units to delete. Edit: Nope.

I think of it as the campaign mode. Better than AoE/M's campaigns which end out more as a "play a movie" mode because the plot is already chosen for you and you can't say take over troy and defend it from hordes of barbarians or make peace with them and build a grand empire. You just end out building the horsey and sending it to the gates because that what the game says you have to do. I suppose there could be a way to "win" by taking over the entire map and holding it for awhile without new players joining but that would only happen if no new players join due to being busy doing other things or by everyone just reaching a consensus that you've won.

This idea both horrifies me and excites me, horrifies because the micromanagement necessary to keep my ranged units fighting and excites because of how much easier it will be to slaughter AI units since it adds another level of complication that likely won't be handled well by the AI. There'll be masses of ranged units just standing around for me to kill.

There is one problem with regenerating resources given the present mechanics. How would metal and stone mines grow? I suppose we could have a map that starts with alot of mines but once those are out new ones would have to rise up and be explained away as erosion or perhaps some sort of deep mining building since all the mines that seem to exist now are clearly surface pockets. Perhaps some sort of trade buildings that generate metal like the plantations in AoE3? I don't really like the idea of all the stone and metal coming only from markets as you'd have to trade something to get the resource you need and it leaves the question of where the resource comes from in order to get to the market in the first place. Plus who are you trading the resources with if you've conquered the map? The market just seems too much like "hack w/e resource you need" to me. I can see them being used to generate income in the form of metal tho. We could also stave off the need to magickally find new mines with collectible debris field 'corpses' for buildings wherein the buildings material cost could be left behind when the building is destroyed. Of course that could very easily become a hack if techs were created that made buildings cheaper to build because the debris would be worth more than the building cost to build. Tho I suppose the tech could also change which debris field entity was left behind too.

Part of the bonus for units with secondary weapons is that with ranged units they'd be able to stab the enemy if they they got too close to fire upon with the bow/javelin. Also......ninjas.

I have no idea how the engine would do Persian units as there doesn't seem to be a RangedAttack and an MeleeAttack....it's just attack....but i would love to see that fixed.

Part of having resources drop tho could be that if you were paying attention and planned well enough you might be able to steal the spoils from a conquering army by watching a player who is quite obviously about to be wiped out, setting up an platoon to occupy the invading army after the destruction is done and sending in some gatherers to pick up the treasure and run. An added bonus is that if you keep the invaders interested in that platoon you could retreat them all the way back to your "Wall of death" tower emplacements and watch the invaders get slaughtered. One problem with this premise tho is that people wouldn't want to just give up their hard won territory but can't play for days on end with no sleep. This could be solved by having them be able to give their territory over to AI control while they're offline and then take back over when they can play again. The AI could be set to simply defend and farm only. There's still a chance that they'll be destroyed in the meantime but the loss of their investment isn't as certain.

Ideally yes. The new player should spawn in a black zone, but if there aren't any such zones available then the new player should just spawn randomly at the farthest possible distance from any other players civil center.

Idk about respawning the resources but one thing that annoys me is that when an enemy is wiped out all their remaining resources just disappear, it'd be nice if they'd be left behind to be collected by the victors or by scavengers.

I'm pretty sure there's nothing stopping you from putting an archer just on the other side of a wall, switching his stance to stand still and having him fire at the enemy from there, same effect, less needed work. Unless the unit AI gets jiggered with so archers won't just shoot past an obstruction anyhow. That would be tricky to do tho since you'd have to specifically name what obstructions they can't shoot past so they could still shoot past other units in battle instead of requiring a clear line of sight to the enemy. Otherwise it would screw up later mods. I suppose you could set it up not to be able to shoot past buildings....but the small wooden and stone fences would count as buildings and it wouldn't make much sense if they couldn't shoot past something they could see over in real life. Just seems like alot of work for little purpose.

Where do I stick the files at so I can try it out?

Eh I'm all for complication but then I don't play quick lil 15 minute battle scenes, I play long drawn out episodes of torturing my enemies by giving them just enough resources to stay alive but not enough to win. Winning and losing both mean the end of the game and if the entire point of playing the game for you is to get it over with then I don't see why you even bother playing. Personally I'd like to play with the same map flat out forever with new enemies randomly appearing from the edge of the map to set up bases and attempt to take my bases. I'd like units that 'level up' and gain random unique powers. I'd like to never run out of resources on a map. Basically I'd like a fully moddable Seven Kingdoms 2/ AoM hybrid.

Chaos is life because Order is death. Explaining it further gets religiousy.

While we're on the topic of making things more complicated we could do something a bit like Seven Kingdoms 2 and base conversions on reputation. We could give each player a reputation meter which would go up or down dependent upon certain actions, like killing women would lower your reputation and make your units more likely to defect while acting peacefully would slowly raise your reputation and make your units more loyal.

No, we should totally do it for rams too, Trojan Horse. Bwahahaha. Personally, I'd like all units to be convertible if they're horribly out numbered. It would make a tad more sense than 3 soldiers trying to take on an army.

Is that what that auto build thing is for?

the main point of the svn is compiling from what i can tell but oddly enuf i've found that i don't have to compile it to run the game, the textures load slowly at startup but everything else runs fine and i can see what the team has done since the last alpha. Honestly, I've found myself wishing i had more things to spend my vast amounts of wood on, it's metal and rock that disappear too quickly and i can't farm for either one. This would probably be more of a problem if I couldn't rule the map with just spear chuckers and some towers. Does take forever to take out a town with ranged units tho.

Ah yeah i get it now, it's saving it in roaming instead of local. Thanks.

All except this one. It's on the videos for it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY-HCWfsZ0M Explains why it looks like it was designed by disney.

In my copy of Alpha five on windows 7 Atlas doesn't seem to be saving new scenarios. It goes through all the dialogs and appears to save but when I try to find the file again in the save directory it's not there.

Age 10 and up. All you really needed to know.

Should prolly put some work into just where it builds it's towers as it keeps building them all willy nilly behind the civ center instead of in defensive positions. I imagine figuring out how to tell it to take advantage of hills and passes would be difficult, but could you get it to at least build them in something like a square around the civ center?

At most you'd only get a handful of enemies through unless your units sit right on top of the gate and hold it open for some reason. Unless you've done some horribly bad base design a few units past your gate should just become a few corpses in no time. I still say it make no sense that an enemy unit shouldn't be able to walk through a gate that's wide open.

Heh, I usually don't know how to type out the exact tag so I'd have to copy paste it anyhow.