Mythos_Ruler

I'm obsessed with leading Macedonians to victory! ;D

I got Rise & Fall running on Windows 7. I took some screens of their ships and water. I was playing as the Egyptians. Despite the overall feel of the game being garbage, a few parts stand out favorably. First the bad: -- Base building and Buildings: Dumbed down considerably compared to Age of Empires. The building textures are excellent but the building designs and models themselves are not aesthetically pleasing one bit, nor are they realistic. There are no houses; you build a granary and this brings the pop limit up to 50% of max pop. You keep upgrading this one granary to bring the pop limit closer to max pop. There are no farms. It was very difficult to create a "city" because nothing really fit together or looked authentic. -- Economy: Dumbed down considerably. No trading. No bartering resources. No hunting. No herding. Only two gather-able resources: Wood, Gold. One "dropsite": The "Settlement" which can be upgraded for dubious benefit. Gain another resource, Glory, by building statues. That's it. -- Ships are hard to use. The ramming function is frustrating to use. I'm not entirely impressed with the idea of having units running around on deck. It feels micro heavy, but it's an interesting experiment. -- Things are very unhistorical. The Persian heroes are Nebuchadnezzar and Sargon, for crying out loud. Ships look ridiculous, as you will see. -- No random maps. Map selection is very limited. -- I am confused regularly by the GUI at the bottom. It's not designed well and conveys information poorly, if at all. -- Game is laggy and glitchy even on my quad core rig. -- HORRIBLE MAP EDITOR. I AM CAPITALIZING THIS BECAUSE THE MAP EDITOR ACTUALLY ANGERS ME. Atlas is already much much better and 10x more usable than the RAF editor. My god. -- The Campaigns are poorly designed and buggy. The Good: Most of the big good things have to do with heroes... -- The Heroes level up with input from the player, kind of like researching Ages. Each level gives you access to Advisers in the Advisers screen, which are basically techs that you research with your "glory" resource. This is basically the tech tree of the game. -- Hero Mode: You can eventually take control of your hero, RPG style, and slash through hordes of enemy soldiers. This is kind of satisfying. There are even commands you can make while in this mode to coordinate the actions of your soldiers with your hero. You can run onto ships, up ladders, etc. I just wish this was a little more developed. You'd need to design the game from the ground up for this kind of feature, so it's not something we could just retrofit into 0 A.D. -- The "Hero Medallion" as I call it in the upper left corner of the screen. We something like this for our heroes. -- The water is just gorgeous, as you will see. -- Like how a tree flashes white momentarily when you task a slave to go chop it. We need that in 0 A.D., that visual feedback. -- They have multiple real tree species like how we're doing it. Not sure why they added this bit of detail when everything else seems so devoid of detail. -- I like how units can run around on walls, BUT it seems like to do this they had to do a lot of weird things with walls, not least of which they made them absolutely MASSIVE when compared to other buildings. Don't like this. -- They build siege engines like they construct a building. They don't build siege engines in a "Siege Workshop" or Fortress like 0 A.D. does. I'd like to do this in 0 A.D. for siege towers. -- Soliders spontaneously form battalions/formations. -- Last but not least, the music in the game is very very good, and pretty much Hollywood-level quality. This makes sense since the composers actually work in Hollywood. The best music I have heard in a AAA RTS game, bar none. Admittedly the bar is set kind of low. I do want to praise Omri though--some of his stuff seriously approaches AAA quality work akin to Rise&Fall. This will be a high point for 0 A.D. as it is for Rise & Fall. Things I would like to have seen: -- Customizable heroes, like in Battle for Middle Earth 2. Example: -- A more authentic unit rosters. Spartans are cool and all, but no Pezhetairoi or realistic Hypaspists? Once again, Hypaspists are generic swordsmen, le sigh. There is 300 years worth of Hellenic and Hellenistic soldier-types to choose from and they pick the most generic line-up imaginable. Same for Egyptians, Persians, and Romans. -- More special things beyond big ships and hero mode. Should have made the control points more interesting. -- True battalions like in Total War or Battle for Middle Earth 2. So, here are my screenshots of the Egyptian boats: I screenshotted this one right as it was destroyed. The dudes fly up in the air (kind of comical) and the ship breaks apart. I do like the look of the first level of the "Settlement" dropsite. This is the "tent" on the right side here. It could be a good basis for the Huns' Civic Centre in 0 A.D. Part 2. You'll also notice that they used selection circles that are exactly like our current ones. The one pixel selection. This makes the game look unpolished, IMHO. A lot about this game is unpolished, which is sad.

I could see including into the game as an "Easter Egg" object the Solomon/Herod Temple in Jerusalem that was destroyed by the Romans: It just depends on what we have time to include. I'd like to at least get the 7 Wonders of the World included, then add things like the Temple shown here and the Colosseum in Rome. The Ishtar Gates of Babylon will definitely be included.

It is my understanding that "Gauls" is an artificial designation given to all Celts by the Romans, and that there was never really a combined "Celtic" culture, as most Celts identified with their tribe first and foremost. I may only be half-right though.

Of course not. But read that thread I linked. Apparently Adobe and Microsoft keep batting it back and forth like children.

Not sure where to put this, so I'll put it here since it does not directly pertain to the game. Long story short: Windows 7 does not display Photoshop thumbnails. This thread here discusses it: http://answers.micro...73-576042a904b1 However, it is apparently possible for a third-party solution to be had. I was wondering if someone would be willing to program a solution that is free open source software. Any takers? This is definitely a solution that would help the development of the game in a small way.

Other good RTW mods: Roma Surrectum Rome: Total Realism

"Stamina" was actually already implemented in the Pre-Pre-Alpha build of the game and it worked relatively well. It was a simple double-right-click to initiate the run/charge. I also advocate using the 'R' hotkey for it. We'll probably get Stamina/Running/Charging implemented within the next couple of Alphas. Herd Animals, Buildings, and Women will have "Loyalty" in place of Stamina for capturing purposes.

Okay then, put the cache in AppData, screenshots and mods in My Documents, and the binaries in Program Files. Fix'd.

You are using the wrong units to hunt. Use ranged units, specifically ranged cavalry. Ranged cav are excellent excellent hunters and can give a nice Food boost early on.

Why is Program Files against the rules again? I've installed plenty of programs to Program Files on my Win 7 machine.

Herd animals should not run away. Hunted animals should. And animals need to be hard to kill at first so we can have technologies later that make it easier.

Likely we won't have a separate pops for horses and men. I've toyed with similar ideas, but I don't think it fits with 0 A.D. Planned: -- Cavalry (and infantry) Charge capability, with stamina. -- Cavalry "Trample" effect. -- Flanking bonuses for attacks.

I like the idea of bribing the AI player not to attack by sending it tribute. Perhaps have a simple formula with a small amount of randomization thrown in. What I mean is 1000 resources gets you roughly X minutes. Sometimes a bribe won't work at all. And sometimes the wait could be longer or shorter.

If you have an old computer, then I'd say Rome:Total War and its expansions. If you have a newer computer, then Medieval 2: Total War would be good.

Seems like your new changes are basically laying the foundations for something good. Right now though, it seems like Jubot doesn't train any units from the Stoa, etc. like it used to. Fewer Champion units too. I've also noticed that Jubot builds a town almost exactly the same way each time I play against it on a map. In the Oasis II map for instance it always leaves its Northern flank completely exposed to attack. It also needs some updates in order to handle Carthage's multiple barracks. This is understandable though, as we threw you for a loop there with Carthage! I'd perhaps keep the AI 1 step ahead on Houses, as right not it feels like the AI is producing fewer units than before. Not sure though, haven't done any conclusive tests on the subject.Anyway, everyone's a critic! Digging the progress.

Actually single player Total War games have a highly developed economic and social system. You can also have multiple generals and family members with individual traits and custom retinues. It's basically a two-tiered game. Tier 1 is the strategic level with city management with regional economies, a dozen+ unique generals and family members, population problems, army upkeep, etc. Tier 2 is the tactical level with real-time battles and sieges.

Actually, in 0 A.D.'s time period, the Egyptian army would have been very Hellenistic: Tarantine-style cavalry, Pharaoh's Agema cavalry, pikemen (Greek and Macedonian settlers), pikemen (indigenous Egyptian levy), Galatian (Celts from Asia Minor) mercenaries, Thracian mercs, Rhodian slinger mercs, Cretan Archer mercs, North African war elephants (possibly towered), Libyan skirmishers and spearmen, etc.

Pork in English.

I would prefer Auras only show up for specific units. We used to have the aura circles before and they hurt immersion immensely.

I suggest a news post on the front page and an article to our Moddb profile (and maybe gamedev). What say you?EDIT: I would love to make videos, but currently my video making software consists of Fraps and Windows Live Movie Maker. Pretty limited.

"Special Buildings" will always be available to those factions. Super Dock and Embassies for Carthage, Gymnasion and Prytaneion for the Greeks, etc.

I'm not advocating using the darker Starcraft color scheme. I am only advocating adding the 1 pixel black lines around units, buildings, and possibly Metal and Stone mines and Treasures.

Yeah, the purple stuff is Zerg creep, which isn't applicable to our game. Age of Mythology had something similar with Gaia creep. I actually think the black outlines would help player entities stand out even more with our color scheme than with the darker Starcraft colors.

I don't think we have any philosophical reasons against having more than 6 factions per part. It just seemed like a nice round number and limited the amount of work required of us to get the game pushed out. So, if a modding group creates a full faction or even most of a faction and presents it to us, we'd probably take a good hard look at including it in the official game. We are an Open Source community after all. So, if you could get a team together and make a faction, then by all means do it. Even if we don't include it as an official faction, we could possibly endorse it or give a small stamp of approval. And like I said, we are Open Source, so you really don't need our permission to create new mods for the game.