quantumstate

Another thing that struck me from playing the game earlier was that if we keep the current system we should add another progress bar, otherwise it is pretty hard to tell when a building will finish being constructed.

I have mentioned this to him. Also see http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16986entry260898 .

It would be a ridiculous amount of work and the difference would be subtle, needing a large amount of testing. You would effectively be trying to balance the game twice, since when working on a small number of units balancing is easy you would need to do large scale stuff which is crazy.

This would not help in this situation . The point of the proposal is so that it is easier to balance the game, so unless you stick a balancing team on each branch and let them find out who can balance better you won't get very far .

What happens if I put a house on the edge of a step?

I had a look around for open source octree implementations and I thought that this looked promising. http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/octree-general-cpp_hxa7241_2005.html . Though I am not sure if we already use something for graphical clipping, does anyone know? The places where the octree should help is in the graphical code. Currently the position interpolation, rendering transforms and some other stuff is done globally for all units. This should be restricted to visible entities and some stuff can be cached to save time for stationary entities (like trees). Also the code which highlights things under the cursor loops through all entities at the moment. This should also use the octree so that large maps with lots of trees don't cause lag here. The good thing is that there are potentially huge gains to be made at the moment, though with some areas like the pathfinder this is quite tricky.

Armour does not work in that simplistic way. It has massively varying strength depending on where and how you hit it, many places on the body have no armour. Lighter armour is effective in some situations because you can move more rapidly and take less damage that way, so armour should not be a literal interpretation of just the materials that a person is wearing. Our game has a highly idealised combat system. Units take damage it little pieces, this damage has no effect on their performance until they suddenly drop dead. Real armour covers a limited amount of the body, has weak points and can be used dynamically by the soldier (blocking with a shield). We have rocks which do splash damage, which I can't see much basis for in reality, they certainly wouldn't have caused significant shrapnel, we should have linear splash for rocks if we want more realism. The current system probably is closer to reality, but I don't think that a percentage system is particularly ridiculous so that the players will think it is stupid. As I outlined above I think a percentage system will be much better for game play. I think that since this is a core part of combat we should prioritize game play in this case.

this is exactly what I want. If I arrive at a construction site with a stronger force I want to be able to halt progress. I can't think of any particular justification for either decision though. Are you suggesting that non siege units would never be able to take out a tower? I very strongly object to this because it is not possible to create siege until phase 3. This means if someone starts building a tower near my base it is impossible to stop the construction unless I keep guard over it and kill any units coming to do more construction work. So in my view this severely overpowers aggressive construction (which we deliberately weakened a while back by reducing armour and build rate with more workers).

I think this change is necessary because it will make balancing much easier and will allow the players to learn unit strengths more easily. A percentage system is simple when looking at the interactions what stats are changed. This is because it is linear. So if I increase a units attack by 20% I know that it will do 20% more damage against all units. If I increase armour by 10% then the unit will take 10% less damage (assuming it starts with 0% armour) this will be true for all units which attack it. Thus it is easy to understand how a change will affect fights between units, this makes balance easy and it allows players to more easily learn the damage relations between units, especially once techs start being applied. The current health system does not have this characteristic, it is non linear, so if I increase the attack of a unit by 10% the amount of damage it will do varies dramatically. Taking a case study (carefully picked to exaggerate the problem ). A Macedonian Foot Companion (basic)has 10 pierce and 5 hack attack. It can fight against cretan archers with P2 H3, itself with P9 H4 and thessalonian lancers with P11 H4. By default the damage done is 8+2 = 10 vs the archer, 1+1=2 against itself and 0+1=1 against the lancer. Now we have a nice tech which gives +2 pierce attack. This gives +20% vs the archer, +100% against itself and +100% against the lancer. Now lets add another +2 pierce, we get +18% vs the archer, +50% against itself and +100% against the lancer. Lets say instead that going back to the start we change the first +2 pierce bonus to a +2 hack instead. Now vs the archer the increase is 20%, vs itself there is +100% and against the lancer +200%. This makes things really unpredictable for high armour units. It is quite noticeable with siege in current gameplay, since getting the third +2 attack on skirmishers suddenly doubles their damage vs siege. Or getting the +2 attack for cavalry skirmishers suddenly triples their attack vs rams. One argument that was put forward in favour of the current system is that it is feasible because AoE1 and AoE2 had this system. Our game is already more complicated, since we have more units (especially with heroes), although many units have similar stats even tiny changes as shown above have have large effects. Arrows are more inaccurate, this means that arrow damage must be higher to compensate but then high pierce armour units get messy. We have 3 armour/attack types, AoE2 just had melee and ranged with little mixing, we have spearmen with a pierce attack mixing things up more (this is perhaps undesirable since a spear is quite unlike a missile, but that is a different issue). Implementing hero auras and other more advanced attacks like charge is only going to make matters worse.

Discussion for http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16985 To keep the proposal clean and neutral I will post reasoning in a new comment.

Currently armour works by the following rule. damage = max(attack - armour, 1) The proposal is to change this to damage = attack * (1 - armour/100) So with 20% armour you only incur 80 damage for every 100 dealt. Discussion at http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16986

I believe the Enrique has basically been making the model from scratch using the import as a reference.

I also favour the 100% health needed. If someone cannot build fast enough because the structure is taking damage then it shouldn't get completed.

Probably the actor file again. Maybe take a look at some of the existing buildings, also you can see the available materials in binaries/mods/public/art/materials. I would guess that basic_trans_spec would be what you want.

Thanks, this sounds useful for testing the threaded stuff. Do you know roughly how dangerous would it be to feed bad values into the script?

Cavalry charging and trample will happen.

It looks quite odd to me as well. I think part of it is that the edges aren't dealt with so you get pieces cut in half, the cloth could do with something around the edge as well. The shadowing effect looks wrong to me, the gaps between the plates are very dark, it doesn't seem quite 3D enough, though is is quite vague, it is hard to describe.

The game already has an unusually realistic unit to building size. I don't think we can reasonably make buildings much bigger. Animations for building destruction is a lot of work for eye candy. It is likely we will do something simpler to indicate building damage.

Did weapon racks like this exist in ancient times? I thought that people would have personal weapons which they would maintain.

AoK used a simple system of a fixed number of pauses/unpauses per player. So if one person keeps pausing then the majority have enough unpause actions to keep the game going. Similarly it someone wants to unfairly unpause the game can be put back into pause until the bad player runs out.

These arguments don't seem persuasive to me. How is it different from replacing the words capturing with killing? I don't agree with the killing of female citizens, because I can instead produce military units to work instead. That way I know for sure that they can fight back against attackers. I don't like males to be killed either, because they may get slaughtered if I invade an enemy town, and the enemy may have a greater or stronger force. If my enemy outnumber me then they take fewer losses. I would be more afraid of attacking the enemy in fear of losing units without killing the enemy, and would play a turtling game. For female citizens if they are captured rather than killed then you have a chance to get them back since you can kill the enemy raiders to recover them. The raiders will have to go at the slow pace of the females to protect them. I think the idea is that capturing would be harder than killing for military units so you can only afford to capture units when you have overwhelming force. So i guess it si harsher punishment for tactical error.

I think a stamina bar is the most important after health. It will be a core combat mechanic. Some C&C games use a blink for loyalty, though they make the entire unit flash, not just the bar.

That sounds good

Latex.

The game will inevitably use the GPU intensively. Your hardware/drivers should prevent the gpu from overheating and shutting down your PC, there isn't much we can do.