Spahbod

From all the suggestions here, the idea of more powerful/less-gatherer as someone ages has been the best one I have seen. Should we do this by promoting all the current and the future citizen-soldiers per age or just making it the effect of a tech?

Mythos: Can you give us your opinion?

But we have a lot of towers, and a lot of towers will create a hell for your army. Besides, we are going to have a town bell or something. That would help with micromanagement.

Another solution would be using a smaller population cap, like 150. This way players will reach the limit mid-game and won't be able to have an economic boom later. But this has another problem. Less population limit = less troops = less likely to be able to breach a well defended base.

They are quite powerful right now, and in the way I suggested, you can still have the towers shoot. Just you have to garrison someone into them for that.

It is something like what I said above:

Before everything, I had another suggestion that I forgot to mention in the main topic. It is about female and male citizens. Currently the only differences between a male and female citizen are: 1:males cost wood 2:males can fight, build better buildings and gather resources faster. This makes the males much better than females in many cases, and whenever someone has wood, he/she would train males instead. I think we should increase the population cost of all males by 1. This way, you may be able to train a much better unit, but you could have trained 2 females instead. This would give us a reason to train females at all, regardless of wood cost. Well, 0 A.D. is a game that has been able to bore someone who generally turtles (aka Spahbod) and that's quite an achievement! I personally would prefer a little faster economic part and a slower action. Something like AoE3. As for the speed, I think we should make the game as customizable as we can so I prefer to have more detailed options. It is even in the design document that the final version should have a large selection of options. It won't be much harder than creating a "general" speed option. That is one of the good reasons to have these options. If we want to attract a large amount of lasting players, we should make the game to be as flexible as it can. And what I am suggesting doesn't require a very large change or something. It is just giving the players more options to shape the speed of the game into whatever they wish. I understand what you mean. But think of people who prefer a faster gameplay. Should we drop them from our vision just because "we" "want" a slower, more strategical game? I prefer the latter myself. But many others don't. Also, when we are creating a game with 12 different factions, we can't make very distinct civs in terms of gameplay. The technology part of my suggestions can play a major role in this case though, as we would have more options that can vary between different factions. The whole idea about my suggestion is that we (developers) should not impose our view of a game speed into the game. We shouldn't make a game that is only enjoyable to someone who prefers a certain speed. If someone wants weak but expensive buildings and larger armies (Battle for middle earth style), he should be able to customize the game for it. Same goes for someone who likes faster-and-cheaper-to-build structures but stronger units and slow battles or a very long game like what we have right now. We don't necessarily want a game attractive to professional gamers. But we want a game that many people can shape and adopt to their wishes and styles. I am generally in favor of more variation. But balance between civs is something, and a general balance between different phases of the game is something else. True, but we are generally speaking of the speed. Maybe I couldn't express what I mean because of my poor English. But by balance, I mean the general balance of speed and attractiveness in different phases of the game.

Oh sorry. I meant half, not double. I've never been a good speaker/writer

Currently 0 A.D.'s gameplay is too slow compared to any other RTS game out there I know of. It makes the matches take much longer time and the main factor resulting this speed is the economic side of the game. The economic side has the speed of a snail. Construction take a lot of time, costs are too high, and resource gathering is very slow considering the costs. The military side is too fast if you don't take the siege into account soldiers die too quickly. But when you get into siege, it becomes a nightmare. Especially if your enemy has placed a good defensive line. In fact, you buildup a long time, for a fast paced action that doesn't satisfy you completely. One of the reasons the balance is like this, is that we are trying to support 300 population cap, and each infantry unit takes exactly one. So we can have massive battles, and as we don't want such a battle to go around for half an hour, we make units die quickly (low health/armor, high damage). We make building stronger so that one cannot destroy another's town in half a minute with a large army. We make the costs and build times high and gather rates low, so that your 100 citizens or so won't be able to fill the whole map with buildings in 10 minutes. These can be great when you want a very long and slow game. I really don't like some of the new games that are more dependent on player speed than anything else. Omitting long-time plannings in favor of game speed. But we have to admit that we are falling of the other side. 0 A.D. is too slow. Just play a match of Age of Empires/Mythology, slow games in general, and play a 0 A.D. match to get what I mean. The current balance of the game actually "dictates" a long match. You need a lot of siege weapons and soldiers to breach into a moderately defended base, you need a lot of gatherers (more than 50) to have a good economy and you need a lot of patience, a large army, to have an enjoyable battle. As someone who is usually a turtler, I was surprised at being a little bored in some matches. Think of those who usually prefer quick games! 0 A.D. by itself, has a lot of potential. It would be horrible if people download the game because they find the outline fantastic, play the game a few times, and get bored of it. In the other hand, there are people who'd love to play a long and slow game in some (or all ) occasions. We can't also loose this group of players. What should we do? Well, let us go to another successful RTS game:Rise of Nations. In RoN, if you are in a mood for a long, sluggish game, you can set the beginning and ending ages into Ancient and Information age respectively, and set the cost/time option of technologies, which are the main factors of game speed, into "Very expensive and Slow". Then you can remove wonder and territory victory conditions and have a nice, long game. But for a quick game, you can do the opposite, and set the population limit into something like 100. You have your fast game! So the suggestion is to have options for overall "Cost", "BuildSpeed" and "Hitpoint" of the structures, and "Hitpoint" of units in addition to the population cap which is already there. They'll be like 25%, 50%, 100%, 150% and so on. This will make the game quite customizable. Notice that they'll apply mainly to buildings, which are the main speed factors of the game right now. You may like longer battles, that's when you'll increase the hitpoint of units. That's not very critical. All options should stand at something average by default. For example, population cap should stand at 150 and the rest on 100%. We also have to decrease the build time and cost of buildings to have an "average" state, something like the state of Age of Mythology I suggest. This way people can customize their balance of the game to something they like. No one will be unhappy. The implication of this system won't be hard. It can be finished for Alpha 13. Other than that, Walls are too overpowered. We should at least make the wall towers shoot if there are units garrisoned in. I think many balancing issues will be solved by these. There is another issue I want to address here. When playing a game of AoE/AoM/RoN, you have a small selection of units to train, and about six times a selection of technologies. This will make the game more interesting in the early and middle phases (I don't mean something like ages, a general phase) where the player is usually "waiting" for the economy to prosper. The later phase of the game is exciting enough as most of the action is taking place in it. So we have to give the player something to be occupied with before that. Some games like C&C Generals do it with a large selection of units in addition to a good amount of techs to be researched. But Many other games successfully do this by giving the player upgrades and researches to be concerned about. For 0 A.D. which doesn't have a very large variety of units, this looks like the best option. But we have a problem. We have the tech pairs which make the time needed to research these half of what it could have been. Don't get me wrong. I love the concept. What I have problem with, is that we have too few "single paired" techs and some pairs, like "melee-attack_vs_ranged-attack" don't feel right. Each of those can be something like "melee-attack_vs_cost" and so on. Resource gathering techs like wood, stone and metal shouldn't be in pairs at all, and we must have more wood and food upgrades just like the other ones. We can have some infantry armor techs/pairs (even with more than one level), and some "infantry training" tech that increases the hitpoint, even changing the appearance. When a unit is promoted, it goes into a "victory" animation that makes it invincible for a while. But this doesn't stop other units from attacking it. In large battles, this can be troublesome. What I suggest is that we should make the unit skip the animation if it is attacked/given a command and remove the invincibility of course. In short, it will only show the animation if there is no other thing to do at the moment. And there is a suggestion to improve the game's appearance. If you remember the "infantry training" tech I suggested, you see that I said it can change the unit's appearance. Well, the idea came from Age of Mythology where units looked more grand when you researched a certain tech. Currently we have promotions that do the same. But what if we reserve this change for the "training" upgrade, and have other ways to distinguish promoted units from others (like new selection rings). Or alternatively, we can make the "training" upgrade enable the player to train promoted units (all of your current ones will be promoted too). The Spartans can have an additional "level" for this tech for further promotion. This is just a minor suggestion although it can give a better "feel" to the player after they research some stuff. I had another suggestion that I forgot to mention in the main topic. It is about female and male citizens. Currently the only differences between a male and female citizen are: 1:males cost wood 2:males can fight, build better buildings and gather resources faster. This makes the males much better than females in many cases, and whenever someone has wood, he/she would train males instead. I think we should increase the population cost of all males by 1. This way, you may be able to train a much better unit, but you could have trained 2 females instead. This would give us a reason to train females at all, regardless of wood cost.

I think we should remove the auto arrows from the wall towers, reduce their damage/attack-speed, and make them shoot when they are garrisoned.

I think so. Many cities in arid and semi-arid regions prospered because they were located along the trade routes and bazaars were the places to trade those diverse goods. They were the central hub of the city and sold almost anything that could be found along the trade route.

Actually, depending on dialect, there were different words for market. The one you found is from Mandaic, which has had strong Persian influences including the word Bazar (which is of Persian origin)

Something got to my mind: We'd be able to use a "turret" in 0 A.D. for horse archers/javalineers. Making them able to shoot as they walk.

It can be done. Only that the map layout will be broken in this case so not much of good use.

Oh, you're right. But why should we be able to do such a thing ? I don't see any reason behind being able to create 1 player maps in gamesetup. Shouldn't we remove that option or something?

Hmm. I think it is true for many other maps. The basic problem is that it doesn't understand how a canyon map with one player should look like. I don't know if it is worth a fix because 1:it's only in Atlas and 2:even if it doesn't return an error, still the result won't be playable.

We can still work on them in Beta versions.

Hope it will be right after Mauryans.

I don't think we would have time to make another faction except maybe Ptolemies. Also there are other factions that have much better chance to be implemented like Babylonians.

Random maps are designed in Javascript. I suggest http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp if you want to learn it. The alternative is to go straight into the codes and try to decipher some of the existing random maps. If you have some programming experience especially with C/C++/Java, you can try this option. The game path for random map scripts is: /binaries/data/mods/public/maps/random/

Attack move: You can add AOM, AOE3, Battle for middle earth and C&C3 too. I think this is one of the most important features that must be in the game.

It is already added in http://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/13004#file32 These should have been committed sooner (maybe before alpha 12) just if my python script didn't wreak havoc in my workspace.

Fixed some of the bugs, including the chicken one and unreachable trees. Also fixed an ancient, annoying bug with placers that cause unusual behavior around the map edges (See the screenshot: Right:Before, Left:After).

I'm really not that sure about using json to define events/effects/etc. Wouldn't it be better to define the events in C++ and use them in a JS file that has access to the simulation (Something like AI)? This way we don't need to "define" effects. We can directly change the simulation state using its own functions.

I also agree with Magadha