Mythos_Ruler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI8WT3lVe80

I think "Common Era" is meant to include people of other faiths, yet still keep the Christ-centered dating system. Regardless, it will stay '0 A.D.' for our game.

Actually, we hope to have these factions in the 0 A.D. sequel (more like an expansion pack), tentatively titled '0 A.D. -- Part II.' Imperial Romans -- The era of "The 5 Good Emperors."Eastern Romans (Early Byzantines) -- A mix between the armies of Constantine and Justinian. Heavy cataphractoi, foedorati, limitanei, comitatenses, Scholae Palatinae, et al.Huns (perhaps a generic "steppes" faction with Scythian, Hun, and Sarmation sub-factions?) -- Ox Cart dropsites, buildings that can "pack" and move, etc. Looting bonus.Parthians -- Uber horse archers, silk road.Germans (Goths, Vandals) -- Cheap, fast-building wooden buildings.Dacians -- Falxmen, defensive, reverse-engineered Roman siege equipment.

This isn't bad. It would probably be better to make this a more generic "Steppes" civilization, then branch into Sarmation and Scythian sub-factions (like the Greeks). Because the Scythians, as far as I know, weren't just a simple branch off of the Sarmations. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

HAHA.... well, technically neither does Jubot. A human player will alter his/her strategy when they are being attack (pull units off of gathering, train more soldiers instead of females), but Jubot does none of that either. I only attacked with a few eles and some support troops. The other 100 pop stayed home and ate elderberry jam.

I pwned this AI hard on Oasis II. It was no contest. One thing I was surprised to see was that it trained mercs from the Royal Stoa, which is a nice touch! I don't think they built a single Mill though, nor a Farmstead. No barracks or Fortress either. I attacked after hitting 120 pop and massacred them. They had a bunch of farms bunched up under their Civ Centre, some houses, and not much else. I got the errors, yeah. And another batch of errors after taking down their Civ Centre. I recommend taking a look at Jubot and see what it's doing right (and what it's doing wrong). I'm glad there is another set of brains looking into the AI!

They're okay. The sound quality of the recordings is pretty bad unfortunately. I wish he remade the Greek theme from AOE1 or whatever it's called... "Habbidakis!" "Rogan?" lol... the song that starts out with what sounds like a very midi-ized harp or harpsichord. I can hear the eagle call even now. EDIT: Found it! LOL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm6OZnWMbC4 Rogan? Habbidakis! Hummis? Wooloolooo!

The Olympias is our reference. And what an awesome reference she is!

You can also Alt-Enter and manually adjust the resolution of the resulting window.

A few things have changed since July 2009. It is now very easy to add prop points to collada meshes for our game. Unfortunately the game does not interpret them correctly and places them incorrectly in relation to their home mesh. The prop points get pitched 90 degrees and moved to the opposite side of where they are placed in Max/Blender. I'm not a programmer, so I don't know what the problem is here. I do know that when the collada files are re-imported into Max/Blender that the prop points are in the right spots, so the problem is with the game engine. We've been able to "hack" around this in earlier releases by adjusting the position and pitch of the prop point prior to exporting to compensate for the engine's odd behavior. I refuse to hack around it anymore though, since the more we hack the harder it will be later when the engine bug is fixed and we have to go back and edit all of the meshes. So for now you may see some weird things happening with the garrison flags and things like that. So, point number 1 is that we now have prop point support for non-boned Collada meshes. The problem though is that it's bugged. The bigger issue is something that has not been addressed since then and that's propping separate entities (units, etc.) onto other entities dynamically in-game. I am not sure what this will take. I suspect a lot of template and javascript Kung Fu.In the screenshot you linked to, I had simply propped those unit actors onto the ship like one would prop rides onto a horse. The ship and unit props all acted as one entity, instead of independently.

This is actually the same size (lengthwise) as the Persian Trireme. It's likely we'll just scale down the triremes instead of scaling up the Quinquereme, which is already massive. EDIT: In my mind there simply is no comparison between the old and new trireme. The new trireme has much better geometry. The texture though, I agree, could use some more "character," and that's something I'll work on.

Linky

Higher res textures? Higher res models? Or are you talking about renderer things like distance fog, bloom, HDR, normal maps, etc. etc.?

I pretty much agree with the review. The things you are forced to unlock, like buildings and ships and units, etc. were things that came without this requirement in past games. The only "innovation" in the game is in the way you are forced to unlock everything. Want to play with powerful heavy cavalry? Too bad, you have to grind through 15 hours of missions first. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! I liked the customizable tech tree at first, but really? I have to grind through 50 missions first before I get the ability to build a castle? Screw that. If you are forced to unlock things, they should be special things, not items you should be able to build normally (a watch tower, really?),

We already have ctrl-click for garrisoning.

Requiring territory for construction of buildings is already a HUGE deal. I play the game every single day. EDIT: The only reason I introduced the decay(loss of loyalty) concept when engulfed in enemy territory is that I felt there should have been a benefit for the enemy player for engulfing your building and a consequence to you for allowing your building to be engulfed. All this extra stuff about decay happening when disconnected from a civ centre and all the edge cases involved with that (building in allied territory, etc.) seems superfluous. As far as placing your buildings in allied territory, I think they should have no effect on territory boundaries whatsoever, and if we ignore the whole "cut off from your own civ centre" idea, then we don't have to worry about this at all. You just have to worry about your ally backstabbing you, turning enemy, and now some of your buildings are cut off and losing loyalty (or health, whatever) from you to him.

@ Philip: I think it will just need playtesting. Too many hypotheticals at this point. My main beef is just the decay that happens when disconnected from a Civ Centre. Why should a fortress, a couple of barracks, 20 houses and mills, and all the player's buildings start to lose health just because the enemy got lucky and knocked down the Civ Centre? Seems like a bit much. My preference is that building in allied territory should be limited to a small number of specific buildings. And my preference is toward no decay in any case except when swallowed by enemy territory. I'm actually regretting even introducing the concept.

Now that to me sounds like needless complexity. What if the player sends a hoplite over to recapture his building that has gone to gaia? Does it immediately begin to lose Loyalty again or does it wait until the hoplite moves off? So now we're talking about the presence of units determining whether it decays or not, which is adding more complexity. The simpler way would be to just make it so that there is decay (health or loyalty, either one) when surrounded by enemy territory. To make it simpler, it would have to be surrounded completely by one enemy player's territory. If cut off and surrounded by multiple enemy territories, it would hold fast and require one of the enemies to send some units to go capture it (although I like your metaphorical "white flag" proposal in this case).

Long sentence is loooong. There are a few reasons why this fear is unfounded: The territory radius of a house is generally not big enough to do this. If it is (perhaps the small Celt houses can fit) then you would need to build a looooooooot of houses in order to make such a daisy chain. So many houses, in fact, that it would be an order of magnitude cheaper to just go and throw down a Civic Centre. It seemed obvious to me: When the building's territory is completely engulfed by enemy territory. Edge cases be darned, IMHO (a house butting up against a cliff or the edge of the map or whatever). The Loyalty drain/capture effect promotes and supports the capturing feature we hope will be a large part of the gameplay. The health drain if disconnected from a Civ Centre simulates the cutting of supply lines (and I threw it in there as a bone to those who may want health drainage).EDIT: I'd rather not have any decay or anything else if simply cut off and not surrounded. I've shown why the daisy chain justification is a non-issue.

Pretty cool man. works exactly as advertised. I like the flashing borders; very intuitive. I think two things though: 1. The Health drain is too drastic. The 20hps is good for a proof of concept, but should probably be walked back to something like 1-2hps. 2. Not sure if I want the buildings to drain health if not surrounded by enemy territory. I'd say "no" but it wouldn't kill me to keep it. But if we do keep that, I think the health drain should be half the health drain if it was swallowed by enemy territory. When we get capturing enabled, we could switch it up: Slowly loses Loyalty when swallowed by enemy territory, slowly loses health if detached from Civ centre (as is now).

Just like how not all units construct buildings, the ones that can't repair would go stand guard over those that can.

Not sure where you got that impression, but it's not a bad idea to include such an option.

Unloading units onto the shore works perfectly! Nice. It actually makes island maps playable! Now the problem is getting the ship to meet the units at the shoreline when you order the units to garrison aboard. One step at a time I guess! Not sure if I'd prefer one-click garrisoning or one-click repairing. Right now we have one-click repairing for buildings, so I think it should be consistent all the way around, one way or the other.

I started some preliminary work on the Roman unit textures, SMST. Triarii I've also been thinking of a concept for Roman ranks. Thinking maybe the Romans could have two ranks instead of 3, Recruit and Veteran. Recruits are analogous to "Advanced" while Veterans are "Elite." Roman units would take a few seconds longer to train and they'd require a little bit more XP to promote.