Mythos_Ruler

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Tried the updated script and it's looking great! Do you mind a few more suggestions/requests? -- Try sprinkling in some Cretan Date Palms. They are my favorites. -- Use Medit Forest Floor A for the forest floor texture instead of Medit Grass Wild. Medit Grass Wild will probably be replaced/updated at some point, but right now I think it looks funky. -- Same goes for Medit Grass Shrubs. It's kinda not good, so maybe substitute it with Medit Shrubs. -- See if you can concentrate Shipwrecks near the center islands, shipwreck debris floating between all of the islands in the open ocean, and fisheries near the starting islands. -- See if you can't put some space between the side of the map and the shore of the starting islands. At least enough space for some ships to pass through. -- If you want all of the starting islands on the map, regardless of number of players, perhaps leave out the city tile texture for these empty islands.

Don't worry. It's all in good hands. Persian CavJav is Median Cavalry. The CavSword (cavalry with a hatchet) is Hyrcanian Cavalry.

The Persian cav lineup is pretty much decided. The Cavalry Spearman will be Cappadocian Cavalry. The Champion Cav will be the Bactrian Lancer--less heavily armoured than they currently appear in the game, but still formidable. At the very least the War Elephant will stay in the game as an editor unit for custom scenarios. Who knows, we might try to wriggle it into the civ lineup somehow, but I'm not really concerned with that right now. As an aside, I can tell you though that the Elite Median Spearman looks different than what you have there. After a few months of internal discussions with the main historian, Shogun, we've decided to make the Principes a promoted version of the Hastatus (Infantry Swordsman), that is given the ability to throw an initial volley of pila before closing with the enemy. This opened the infantry skirmisher slot for us to include the Veles, which allows for those cool wolf helmets and suchness. This has already been regularized in the Roman civ profile in the DD: http://trac.wildfire...A_Romans_PreImp

Good sleuthing, SMST. This is exactly why I threw those textures into the Public SVN, to see what a motivated sleuth would come up with! I do have to say you are pretty close on some of these. A lot of the textures and actors for these units will be modified heavily before they will be released.

Ensemble Studios map makers poring over a print-out of a map concept...

Custom Scenarios or Random map scripts?

Yeah, make sure you are using an up-to-date SVN copy of the game, rather than an Alpha snapshot.

It wouldn't necessarily be a duplicate of functionality for the end-user though, even if the code is identical.

Alright! We need a better way of doing this. I'd say islands about the size of the players' starting islands. Other requests:-- Fewer treasures, more fish. -- We need to fix whales (not your problem). -- A little bit more distance between islands for more room for naval action. Keep working on it man! It's a great direction so far!

Not necessarily, if you play the game how we are designing it. Ranks don't just determine battle prowess, but economic prowess as well, and there is an inverse relationship between the two. Also, you may want to either put your Basic units in front, to level them up by killing weaker opponents, or move your Elites in first to deal with tougher opponents. Basic units are also generally faster than their Elite counterparts, making them better for catching vexatious enemy units. I've shown you how they do matter. Whether they matter enough to require an extra click or not, I am unsure. But before you pass judgment you need to understand the differences between ranks, and they aren't black and white.

I think we all agree on this. The current behavior was put into place, I think, because units tended to ignore being attacked sometimes or something like that. We all agree that player commands should override most low-level behavior, including incidents like this. I too have become frustrated sometimes when units do what you describe. I've lost quite a few units because they don't follow my orders to retreat, etc.

In Sim1 this was done in the entity. I'd like to instead do this in the actor, perhaps with a checkbox for simple terrain conformity. Perhaps more complete terrain conformity will need to be done in entities, I don't know. But it seems like overkill to require an entity be made for simple decorative things like rocks. I took a look in Atlas. Very nice! Some comments (the first two aren't aimed at you):-- We really need some dialog or something to tell us that the Map Script was "working." It took a while to generate the map and I thought Atlas had frozen or something. -- We also really need a way to choose the number of players before generating the map in Atlas. -- I think the grass areas can be less mixed. -- Check out the map "Cycladic Archipelago III" for some ideas on how islands can look, specifically terrain blending, the terrains I picked, the trees I used, and how cliffs can look. Check out the map "Sicilia" for more ideas on how cliffs and beaches can look. -- I made a new tree-type, "Cretan Date Palm" which would go great with your islands (there are three varieties for your pleasure, clump, short, tall). Check them out. -- Need some more underwater terrain blending, specifically the black terrain for really deep water. -- If you break up the large center island into a couple of smaller islands, I don't see why we couldn't use your script as the "official" Cycladic Archipelago random map in the next release.

The original idea for the Greek Gymnasion was to give a speed bonus to units if you garrisoned them inside. We decided that was kind of a weird and micro-heavy "bonus" for that building for such a dubious benefit. But an "arena" or military boot camp (which the Romans had) where you send your Basic units to be auto-trained to Advanced level might be interesting.

Nice. I think in a small map where you see all of the Civ Centres in one screenshot, the fact that they all face toward the center looks good. However, I think in most matches you will never see a view like that, so making them all face the center really doesn't do anything aesthetically. Personally I'd rather have a consistent "look" to things. Yep! Such detail is appreciated greatly! Gives a "hand-painted" look.

Yup, ur right.I was in a plural mindset for some reason.

Plus units should stay in formation (with corresponding bonuses) when fighting, and not "splitting up" as the ticket suggests. (Current way) Works fine for me. Methinks team members need to playtest the game more, if only because we can then make definitive statements as to our preferences on things like this.

Very nice. One thing I don't like (and this is the case with the other random maps we have) is the random-facing direction of the starting Civic Centre. It's modeled (as are most buildings) to look best facing toward the bottom right corner of the screen. The map itself looks really nice. Some nice blending going on along the shorelines.

I know. I mentioned SSSI in my first paragraph. The winky should have insinuated that as well. And "the publisher (Midway) finished the game" is dubious. Didn't feel very finished to me. Likely they sutured up any gaping holes with a ball of yarn and shoved it out the door ASAP.

There are "Marian" Legions in the game already, with a Centurion unit. It wouldn't be difficult to add Julius Caesar in a mod (we might just add Julius Caesar ourselves as an editor unit), and a handful of Germanic units.The Republican Romans in 0 A.D. Part 1 will have the Siege Walls, pretty much modeled on Caesar's siege walls at Alesia, so the Marians could easily be modded to be able to build them (once the walls are put into the game, that is; I may even add that ability to the Marian legions myself).

Those are generally my preferred colors for those civs, yeah. Not a bad system. I may adopt it.

We could go reverse. Red for non-mercs and blue for mercs. I just want a quick visual on what are mercs and what are not. I think the player color in the portraits is the easiest, uniform way.

Right, ActorEditor is not integrated into Atlas (yet?) only the ActorViewer (which used to be separate from both Atlas and ActorEditor). It is an integral component of creating actors. I use it often.

Yep, I installed Rise&Fall about a year ago on my old rig. It was nigh unplayable due to lack of optimization and very very buggy. One can tell it was an unfinished work. Midway should have pushed the release back by about a year when SSSI folded, but they didn't, and just forged ahead with an unfinished product. There's a reason it's free now. Anyway, yeah, the game had/has a lot of great ideas, just frustratingly executed. The ramming is satisfying, but difficult to do. It's especially satisfying to slaughter the flailing enemy crew as they try to swim ashore. This probably happened a lot in real-life naval battles too, especially after the battle had been decided. Problem is, once the "crew" reaches the shore, what do you do with them? Half the time they are on a separate island or something and not very useful. I liked the ship animations and the rowing and the ramming and stuff like that, they were just unwieldy. Then there were the massive battles. With that many units (1000+), a battalion system like in Battle for Middle Earth II or Rome:Total War would have been appreciated. Hopefully we can put some nice detail in 0 A.D.'s ship movement and attacks and unit formations, but make them easier to use. Ships were so big and their usage so detailed that it was difficult to use more than a handful of ships. I'd rather have large exciting naval battles than putz around with 3 ships. The worst part about Rise&Fall is its anemic base-building. The building artwork is ridiculous and the economic aspect is lacking. No trading. No houses or any real city building at all. The walls are interesting, but wayyyyy too huge. It's almost like the dev studio folded and never beta tested the game.

Yep, if anybody would have a "round" curtain of walls, it would be Celts.