FeXoR

I'd like to be able to turn all graphically irritating and distracting stuff off to get the most possible space for information and interactive UI. Don't get me wrong, I like the style! But for me this projects value is the game and it's usability. Focusing more on graphics means focusing less on playability and usability.

What I meant is: - There should be a bunch of maps optimized for multiplayer. Those should grand the players access to all resource types and all of them should be equally hard to reach for all players. Those maps are often symmetric. Due to the focus on playability those maps tend to be quite similar and unrealistic in landscape and resource derivation though. - There should be some maps focusing on realistic landscape and/or resource derivation as well as some maps that grand not "sufficient" access to all types of resources for multiplayer games (I think however the second this is more a question of taste than on playability). Those maps can be separated in another category like "others" while the others might go to "MP optimized" or something.

If I open atlas and generate a testmap of mine (not placing any entity/actor) it works fine. If I go to the player tab and than switch back to the map tab (without anything changed) and regenerate the map errors occur: This is annoying and does not really help to indicate any problem because if the player got no units he will likely notice on it's own (without a Bot raising errors). It would be nice if those messages could be removed. Another question: Is there a bot "template" for the AI-API-v3 (a bot that links to the engine but does nothing)? To be an "API" I think something like this is actually a must.

It would be nice if the top/bottom keys and the mouse wheel would change the item in the selected drop down menu appropriate.

It's similar to the actor "water_log" more flying above the water than swimming if placed there. If the hight over "ground" can't be set depending on if it's placed in water or on land it still would look better IMO if sunken deeper (even into the ground).

The secondary attack of ranged units AFAIK is planned to be weaker than it's ranged attack. So why would that help in any way? It just makes the ranged unit "more stupid" ^^. As ranged units are faster than melee units and due to the minimum range of ranged units combined with the current unit AI leads to the melee unit chasing the ranged unit unable to reach it. Though the melee units would win with ease if the ranged unit stood still (even without minimum range) this is rarely gonna happen right now. What is supposed to be "the right combination"? In real live it still comes down to the quality of the equipment and numbers. If we don't plan asymmetric warfare it indeed comes down to numbers.

Why "shouldn't" ranged units kill melee units (no matter in which state each of them are)? Doesn't it depend on the amount of each? They are about the same price so they should be about as effective. I want as many units as possible IN the battle (and actually attacking)! That's what makes a victory. As far as I know Huns and Mongols mainly used mounted ranged units to overwhelm the European nations including those used to formations - and they didn't used formations for this. Formations are not better in terms of military strength by themselves (nowadays formations are not used at all). AFAIK they are just good to hold a vast amount of simple minded and undetermined humans together using their "will to live" to be converted to a "will to fight" - leaving a formation when the enemy is near is more risky than just staying in. If tribes are defending their homeland this is not needed at all because each individual has it's motivation on its own (just as an example).

2.: To be less vulnerable. But thinking again with a move command the behavior you described is ok. To force the units to staying in a less vulnerable but slower formation an attack move command could be used. Regarding the speed bonus in column formation: I hope you mean compared to other formations. Column formations should still be at maximum as fast as the slowest unit in the formation. 3.: If the formation as a hole is attacked how far does a unit has to go to be able to attack it? And if a unit would only be able to attack one or two units of the formation (because only they are in range) but the random target was chosen differently would it then advance further towards the formation? Your idea might work and seams OK to me but this should not mean that units attacking a formation would need to further advance towards the formation but unly those units reachable are chosen at random. This should only be used for ranged units though. 4.: Stuff happens ^^ 5.: Reduced buttons is OK for me. The gained space, however, could be better used to reduce the GUIs size IMO.

Though that might me more of a topic fitting http://www.wildfireg...showtopic=16242 : I don't like to have a similar amount and distribution of resources on all maps. I like variety. Indeed I'd like to have at least one map that only got wood (and maybe some food). Stone and metal would have to be traded than.

1: I agree. 2: And how can the column formation be avoided by the player (without needing more attention)? This has to be an option! 3.: I somehow agree. But this should be done by cycling troops at the front rather than just distributing the damage (with another artificial rule). Fully distributed damage would make a formation with ranged units about 2 times stronger compared to the same amount of the same ranged units not in a formation. I see no reason for granting such bonus (but for just wanting formations). I think the units at the edges of a formations should be replaced with fresh troops so only they are attackable from melee units. Injured units could be brought inside the formation and, if healers are present, could there be healed. I'm strongly against granting formations any pure arbitrary bonus. Maybe some stats could be changed e.g. 25% speed reduction but 25% less damage (compared to the same unit outside a formation). Any strict bonus (without penalty) should arise naturally from the units behavior inside the formation, not just be given arbitrarily. 4.: If the units are "watching" (not attacking or moving themselves) that would be OK. However, just granting units more XP while they are inside a formation is exactly that kind of arbitrary bonus I would like to avoid... 5.: Automatically forming a formation could be an optional setting inside production buildings. I don't like the GUI to eat up more space. It already covers more than needed IMO. So making the buttons bigger would not fit to my taste. 6.: Sounds good. 7.: I like that. Say units get 1/2 damage from the front, normal damage from the sides and 2x the damage from the rear. Shielded units could than "inherit" the damage reduction from the front to their sides as well. (The extreme values are just examples and are not to be taken to serious).

That's true. Still wraitii's thoughts about formations sounds nice. I suggested (forgot where) to add such more "natural" advantage to formations to make them useful. If units on the edge of formations would always be kept "fresh" it would grand such a natural advantage. Healers in the center could then "refresh" the injured/exhausted units safely inside the formation. Still a slight advantage would in the end lead to a disastrous defeat on the other hand. Sounds realistic to me in some way. The (simplified) general strength of a unit is: attack damage/attack time*health. If health loss also scales down the damage a unit with half life left would than only have 1/4th of the strength left compared to the same unit with full life. Due to this defensive gameplay would be advantageous.

That's why I said it may still be possible to balance if the combat rules are kept simple. Diversity among units like e.g. "bonuses vs.", "armor type", "secondary attack", ... make it harder though. Even if you consider all units filling one "role" to be the same unit type it's 9+8+...+2+1 = 45 situations to balance (a bit less than AoK and it wasn't really balanced IMO). With 15 formation/stance combinations and an amount of unit combinations inside the stance of 55 (if only considering 1 or 2 unit types per stance and ignoring their ratio) we end up at 155925 situations to balance (my earlier estimation of 30K combinations was wrong). Calculation: That's still an optimistic calculation because considering each 1 or 2 unit combination inside a formation with a given formation/stance combination a different "unit type" would lead to 55*15*(55*15 - 1)/2 = 679800 combinations. Dropping formations and/or stances would dramatically reduce this amount.

I thought about that as well and I like it. However: I am worried about the amount of features implemented in 0 A.D.. The number of different units organized in different civilizations already make the game close to impossible to balance (considering having 10 factions with 10 unit types each makes 99+98+...+2+1 = 99 * (99 - 1) / 2 = 4851 different cases to balance). To have different formations (say 5) and stances (say 3) multiplies this (if only formations with one unit type is allowed) with a factor of 5*3 = 15. Having stances with many unit types makes the number of possible combination insane (about 30k situations to balance). This all might still be possible if the ruleset of combat is kept simple but with every feature influencing combat it gets much harder. IMO my point of view is extremely optimistic. It might turn out that that many unit types are not possible to balanced in a reasonable amount of time (say another 10 years) in the first place. A good balanced game with only slight diversity of many different civilizations (like AoE) or a good balanced game with a great diversity of a small number of factions (like SC/WC3) is much better than an imbalanced game with a great diversity between many civilizations (like 0 A.D. seams to head it's way) in the long run.

I agree on that and the map description tries to make it clear. The resource distribution is by high (because the map design more or less totally depends on the heightmap). Would adding a bigger stone and metal mine added close to the starting positions help? Other suggestions for resource distribution welcome at http://www.wildfireg...howtopic=16535. Deep Forest has many vegetables and and animals also. The path finder however and the actual implementation of formations can barely manage to cope with the different density forest though.

Try random map Belgian Uplands.

Further investigations concerning the ancient Egyptians methods of forming hard stone leads to copper saws with a mixture of water, plaster and silica sand. How they managed to form holes with that is still a "mystery" to me ^^.

I mainly agree that open source/open hardware/creative commons/... is just one part of a more community oriented society some of us are going to. I don't think however it will (and even should) replace market economy totally because it has it's benefits: Derivation and assignment of price of "physical"/material goods (maybe excluding resources especially if they need an "hard installed" infrastructure to be distributed - and for sure land). So for me it's more important to decide which part of the society should be organized in which manner. As society works now OS and stuff does indeed need market economy: PPL could not invent stuff in their free time if they had nothing to live from. A problem the OS/open hardware/creative commons community will be facing is that if it gets to strong some PPL loosing power by this trend might sometime use their monopoly, especially that on violence (mainly governments have that) to enforce their "oppositions" breakup. This seams extreme but keep in mind that those PPL have different personal values and might see them violated by OS and stuff. So for them we are the bad guys and their interest is granted by law with the human right of possession (if interpreted this way). Another problem it that it's not clear if general purpose computation will be supported much longer by the economic computer providers. This is not really fitting the demand of the market. Most PPL don't need a computer capable of general purpose computing. My hope is that it's cheaper still to provide them because the number of needed components is less than those of more specialized computation devices. OS/... violates some very general trade agreements as well such as the "General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade" (GATT) today represented by the World Trade Organization (WTO): link: http://www.wto.org/e..._e/gatt47_e.pdf Citation from "THE TEXT OF THE GENERAL AGREEMENT ON TARIFFS AND TRADE" from july 1986

Just some comments to the video (I more or less painlessly managed to watch it ^^): Whoever tells you he's telling you the "truth", don't trust him. Exactly: The word "exactly" does not fit for any kind of knowledge we have beyond maths. Carelessly in science if a theory withstood many tries to proof it wrong it is assumed to be right or even a fact - though it indeed should be seen as "the closest thing describing reality of all the things we thought of and have thoroughly tested". Still it's the best we got IMO. So all measurements are not at all "exact" but only "extremely precise". Ley-Lines: If you take anything appearing regularly like e.g. phone boxes, you can connect most of them with only a few lines. Still no one would assume that they where placed there on purpose. This effect even gets stronger on the surface of an orb. Meters: It's extremely unlikely that the length unit "meter" was used by Egyptians. This length is just a totally artificial and arbitrary social convention and could be any other length. Same with the convention that speed of light is most of the times given in km/s. That km are 1000 m is a convention as well. So 3 conventions need to be the same back than and now which is extremely unlikely. (I feel ashamed for the Physicist who didn't at least state that if nothing else). If the "main ley-line" would have marked the equator back than the structures would not have been oriented according to the magnetic poles at that time. So at least one of the conclusions have to be wrong (But who knows? They might come up with a theory that they managed to predict when mankind would be able to get their massage and oriented their monuments according to this ^^). What seems indeed quite unlikely to me is that ancient Egyptians cut there stones with other stones. Maybe we have not yet found the tools they used ore maybe they vanished over time so we might never "know". But assuming how they did it does not really help without evidence. I agree with idanwin that historic sciences systematically underestimate the abilities of ancient cultures. But that's mainly because they are cautious (some psychological effects might strengthen this though).

I love the GUI of Zero-K (http://zero-k.info/) that uses the spring engine (originally from total annihilation). It's clean and occupies little space. @FIFE: Have you played Unknown Horizons? I like the game concept and follow it's development. But the GUI is quite buggy (especially the configurable resource menu: The settings are not stored and it's not clear what you will hit with a click: The button or the game world).

Yes, this sometimes does not work properly especially if the possible way is much longer than the distance. The pathfinder recognizes walls though (as well as any other building). However, that is a totally different matter than units shooting above (good IMO)/seeing through (bad IMO) walls.

I'm sorry but it's extremely hard for me to understand what you mean: "Enemy standing on the wall,...": There are no units on walls yet. And who is the "enemy"? The walls owner or the player outside the wall attacking the base? "...he can not see the wall": Why should anyone don't see the wall? Players not allied with the walls owner should not see through the wall. "why he can attack people standing walls": Guess standing behind the wall (since there are no units upon the wall)? Please try to write understandable posts. People might be able to give more helpful answers then. (It might be the word "own" that leads to miss-understandings here: I mean "own" like "is property of" not like "is tearing down" which would be exactly the opposite player)

IMO ranged units should be able to shoot above a wall but only target units visual to the player the unit is owned by. And walls should block sight. So an owner of a wall has an advantage because the towers grant sight on the enemy exclusively to him (and his allies) while an enemy of the walls owner would have to get a unit into the wall first to enable his units to attack units inside (on the other side). Is any kind of "line of sight" implemented at all or is everything inside a specific range revealed?

I agree on that!

Just wanted to tell that many keyboards including german ones have "Y" and "Z" swapped. So yxcvb should be used instead of zxcvbif if it's such a keyboard.

Base building is an important mart of 0 A.D. IMO like it was in AoE. Many modern RTS games have effectively removed a "base building phase" by making the buildings build-time and costs quite low. That removes an important part of what makes AoE so good. Additionally nearly no modern RTS game allow to build good price/value defensive structures for the late-game so the base is pretty much just there to produce units and you don't need more than one building of each type. It's defensive capabilities are nearly irrelevant in late-game so beating the army essentially means winning the game. That is quite linear, simplistic and unrealistic. So IMO it's a good thing building a base takes time and defensive structures are still effective in late-game.