FeXoR
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Posts posted by FeXoR
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I know you're not really in favour of that HP - effectiveness link proposed here, but such a link could really help ranged units soften up the melee units in formation. Ranged units and defence buildings should not be able to kill a complete formation of melee units, but they should be able to soften them up a big deal.
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.
It would make the battle a bit more realistic because players would want to keep their ranged units outside the battle, and use them mostly at the beginning of the battle.
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).
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2. I really don't see why the player should want his units to stay in a slow phalanx when he's just tasked them to move all the way across the map. They should just form up into a column for a speed bonus (and armor debonus), then reform into a phalanx some distance from the final destination.
3. The damage would not be spread across all the units. Individual units would still receive damage, it's just that the attacker cannot focus his fire onto one soldier within the enemy formation. The attacker's (e.g.) skirmishers would choose random targets within the enemy formation.
4. Well, all right. I disagree, but hey.
5. I would like to reduce buttons and make behaviors consistent.
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.
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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.
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1. Number of formations reduced a little to the most important and useful.
2. There are some "formations" that aren't really selectable. For instance, column formation should just be a "default" formation that units fall into when moving over long distance. You don't have to put your units into this formation because they do this automatically.
3. Formations reduce or eliminate vulnerability to focus-fire. Units (heroes, et al.) within a formations cannot be focus-fired upon, providing a great benefit to using formations.
4. Perhaps 50% of the XP gained by a unit in formation is shared or given to all the other units in the formation--another benefit to using formations.
5. Creating for breaking formations should be intuitive and easy. Perhaps if you create 15+ units in a batch they auto-form into a formation. Maybe since the formations and stances will be reduced in number the buttons can be slightly bigger. Also, hotkeys.
6. Formations of troops (I like to call them "Battalions") should be easily visually recognizable. I have some thoughts on implementing a "banner carrier" unit that appears and is completely cosmetic (cannot attack and cannot be attacked).
7. There should be directional bonuses and weaknesses. For instance, a phalanx should probably have 0 or reduced armor when being attacked from the rear. Perhaps this could just be extended to all units, whether or not they are in formation.
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).
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The problem with this is that the snowball effect is very very strong. There would essentially be no way to make a comeback in a fight (all other things being equal) because from the very beginning, whoever has the most minuscule of advantages will, in the end, win HUGE almost every time.
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.
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There are not 100 different units to balance. A skirmisher from one civ generally has the same stats (and importantly, same bonuses and weaknesses) as a skirmisher from another civ. Our civs are much closer to AOK-style civs (similar units) than Starcraft.
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:
54*15+53*15+...+2*15+1*15 + 54*14+53*14+...+2*14+1*14 + ... + 54*2+53*2+...+2*2+1*2 + 54*1+53*1+...+2*1+1*1
= (15+14+...+2+1)*(54+53+...+2+1)
= 15*(15-1)/2 * 54*(54-1)/2
= 155925
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.
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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.
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...The problem is that map is awful for multiplayer. Terrible resource distribution (some people get stuck with very little wood while others get a ton; metal and stone are poorly placed), no real mines just little piles everywhere (and again, these are poorly distributed), too many little pools of water that make building unnecessarily difficult, bad spawning positions... I've played multiplayer games on Belgian Uplands. It just doesn't work. As I understand it's a pretty experimental map however, so that's excusable. If all those problems (particularly resource distribution) were fixed, Belgian Uplands would be a great map.
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.
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I agree 100%. Maps need more animals, more fruit, and a lot more fish.
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Try random map Belgian Uplands.
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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 ^^.
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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
"Article VI
Anti-dumping and Countervailing Duties
1. The contracting parties recognize that dumping, by which
products of one country are introduced into the commerce of another
country at less than the normal value of the products, is to be condemned
if it causes or threatens material injury to an established industry in the
territory of a contracting party or materially retards the establishment of a
domestic industry."
Citation from "THE TEXT OF THE GENERAL AGREEMENT ON TARIFFS AND TRADE" from july 1986
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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).
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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).
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they dont rech the Dropsite, the Wall impides to do.
but units the path obvius is for the gate, why dont use the gate? because is no programmed to do that task.
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.
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Enemy standing on the wall, he can not see the walls, why he can attack people standing 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)
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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?
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Thanks! That was the link I was looking for...
You know we could trim quite a few items from there by moving all of the naval issues to version 1.1 (or 1.2)
I agree on that!
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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.
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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.
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I believe the only color space that works for everyone is grayscale, and that is probably going too far. But when we use reds and greens (the two most commonly affected colors), we should take care to use, say, a dark red vs. a bright green so brightness acts as an additional cue.
Yes, yes, I'm often going to far, you're right ^^. But basically that's what I was proposing: Maximize the distance in color space for all kinds of color blindness (with higher respect to the more common ones). Making it dependent on the number of players would "only" need 7 pallets (2-8 players) that than are available. With many players it will still be hard but for a lower number of players that should be quite easy.
At first glance there are at least 4 colors that can be differentiated between by all (non monochromatic) color blinded (and named as well for in-game communication):
- dark red
- light yellow (shifted a bit to orange)
- light blue (between blue and cyan)
- dark purple (more like blue shifted a bit to purple but looks purple to me)
(And I like those colors)
Though red (or purple if shifted to far to pure purple) will be seen as gray by some they know what color it is because it's the only gray. Adding the colors name to be shown in the game setup screen might be still helpful for communication later in-game.
Why not use green? Because some see it as yellow while others see it as blue (the two most frequent color blindnesses). So it would sort out two other colors.
Any experienced person here to show examples for 5-8 color pallets? (I certainly wouldn't mind if those for higher numbers of players look not that cool cause it's not the common case anyway. The main thing is they work for 97.5% of PPL - meaning Monochromacy and Dichromacy might be ignored for 7 and 8 player pallets. If the color 7/8 color palates look too ugly we can still ignore color blindness in this cases IMO. It's hard enough for a non-color-blind to differentiate 8 colors with blending on the mini-map).
Other helpful resources might be:
http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/
http://unm-bioblog.b...-blindness.html
http://mengbomin.wor...resting-points/
http://www.mrexcel.c...nd-viewers.html
http://colorschemedesigner.com/
http://www.disturbmedia.com/max/colour-blindness.html (Including HTML code to simulate color-blindness)
(Off topic: I stumbled over this one on the way: http://3.bp.blogspot..._viruscomix.jpg
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Couldn't they notice this in match setup and bring it to the other player's attention? "I can't tell the difference between player 2 and 4's colors". Then the host makes a change. I still say discussing it in match setup would clear all this up (ask people to use civs or player names instead of colors, if need be), and also that 8 player multiplayer games won't be that common so that reduces the number of possible conflicts, and finally that once we have color options for match setup, who's to say we can't have palette presets and some of them could be color blindness compatible?
You have a very positive idea of humans (which honors you) ^^. I'm quite sure, though, that this will not work in most cases.
Finding 8 easy to notice player colors is hard on its own if blending like in the mini-map is involved IMO.
What about distorting a color space in a way that less easy to differentiate colors occupy less space in it (for normal users and all forms of color blindness) and then leaving the color to take to the player (while removing an area of size and shape hard to differentiate from a player color already present). That way it should be possible to be about optimal. It may be hard though to find the optimal distortion function as well as the shape of the removed area per present player colors (I guess it would be more a star or a cross instead of a circle).
If we would grand a player the option to pick his "type of color blindness" (with default set to "None") in the player options and have color space distortion functions for all types of color blindness (including non-color-blinds ability to differentiate colors) only those functions needed could be applied to the color space (The shape of the removed space might as well depend on that).
Another possibility would be to calculate the optimal player colors for a given number of players (or just be picked by a person experienced in it).. I don't think it's that hard for up to 4 players (+ gaia and ground textures) but for more players it will get harder. If the number of players change all player colors would be change then. So problems are much easier to avoid with less players (which indeed might be the more common case).
For non-color-blind it would be something like this: http://en.wikipedia....LMS_color_space
It should be easy to determine those functions for color blinded because they generally have the same wavelength they can see just one of them is missing AFAIK. So if not two kinds of color-blind PPL enter a game you have still tree dimensions in the color space (Hue (determined by players ability to see colors), Colorfulness and Darkness/Lightness)
Other resources:
http://en.wikipedia....ute_color_space
If the psychophysical color space is understood well enough it could also be taken into consideration.
(It's funny: Though I'm not aware of any color vision deficit I fail the "Test for deuteranopia" and "Test for tritanopia" in http://en.wikipedia....Color_blindness)
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#1217 maybe?
Yes, thx! My concern within that ticket is fixed now. Not entirely sure about historic_bruno's one though.
Not sure who fixed that. I seem to remember adding foundations to the hele defense tower, so I may have inadvertently fixed the orientation.
Maybe, however, everything is fine now ^^. Thx!
EDIT: Thx for adding http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1855 , leper!
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That seems unlikely. What you are buying is access to a service, not the software itself.
In Germany e.g. you buy the right to use the software - as long as you like. You have no right to change/distribute the code or to get support for an eternity - but you have the right to use it (and so it must work at least theoretically). If you can't use it any more because steam decides not to support it any longer this right is not granted and thus the sale is not consistent with the law.
Additionally you are free to decide what support you accept and what you don't. But steam only supports the version up to date.
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zoot, it's the math.round that does that. As said in the last post integers (for percentage damage reduction) give only sane values up to armor 25 or so. If the calculated damage reduction is not rounded but changed to float, however, it will work much further (about 5 times as much armor per additional decimal precision so 32 bit float values would allow 2M armor [5 ^((2^32)^0.1) ~= 2649998]).
Armor 101 reduces the damage compared with armor 100 by the same amount than armor 1 would compared to armor 0 - the unit gets 10% less damage:
Armor 0: 0.9^0 = 1
Armor 1: 0.9^1 = 0.9
Compare armor 1 to armor 0: 0.9 / 1 = 0.9 <- gets 10% less damage than before.
Armor 10: 0.9^10 = 0,3486784401
Armor 11: 0.9^11 = 0,31381059609
Compare armor 11 to armor 10: 0,31381059609 / 0,3486784401 = 0.9 <- gets 10% less damage than before (Though the % damage reduction only changes by 3.5 percent points but that's exactly the idea)
And it will be the same for armor 101 compared to 100.
[Discussion] Formations Review
in Game Development & Technical Discussion
Posted
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.