MoLAoS

EVE Online A Tale In The Desert Field Of Glory 2 Field Of Glory Empires Glest Forks Star Dynasties Banished Driftland Many Others

I sometimes play Field Of Glory: Empires since I don't like to play Paradox games anymore. FOG:E allows for you to manually play out combat in FOG2 using a savefile trick. In FOG2 the experience or managing troops is extremely realistic. Foot and horse skirmish units have a distinct use compared to medium and heavy infantry. It really feels, even being turn based, like you have skirmish screens. 0AD lacks this feeling though perhaps it is because formations don't work fully yet. Hopefully it isn't a larger issue with RTS games. Skirmishers are basically untouchable by medium and heavy infantry and even heavy cav or chariots, unless you block them in so they can't run. However their ability to deal damage is a bit limited. Skirmish units can lock each other into melee as well so heavier units can hit them. Typically in a battle both sides send out their smirmish troops and fight for superiority. If you have a size advantage or simply win the skirmish battle quickly you can start picking away at heavier units. Skirmish units can also be used as more mobile flanking or backstabbing units though their charge is weaker. Is there any plan to provide that kind of experience either through formations or some other method? Also the combat between the heavier units feels a bit better in style as well with lines of battle, flanking, and envelopment.

Hyrule Conquest has burning alcohol barrels for tower use. Dunno how the animations worked cause I never got attacked while I had it researched.

This is good. Maybe a uniqueish Han trait is their throwy boys are a little shorter range but their archyboys are a little longer range thanks to crossbows. It appears they definitely lacked slings though. Even the literal slingers.com forums couldn't fine pre 900AD sling.

https://www.uslawshield.com/tactical-slingshots-mere-toy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whistling-sling-bullets-were-roman-troops-secret-weapon/#:~:text=Deadly in expert hands&text=In the hands of an,your head%2C" Reid said.

Since I can't post in the balance thread about this: The Chinese had sling staffs in the 900s but that is probably too late. There is documentation of javelins in extensive use(30000 soldiers in an army with 30k crossbows) as far back as 600 during the Sui invasion of Goguryeo I believe the 3 Kingdoms exhibit at the Tokyo national museum had what they claimed was a Han Dynasty javelin but I can't read kanji so I dunno their legitimacy.

Luckily once it is implemented people can mod the damage values and stuff and figure out where the ideal balance is no? Is that a normal cav or a champ? Also it probably has limited damage against a single fast moving unit.

Slings could kill horses or men in armor with a good shot. Of course full plate might provide more safety than leather. A major value of slings was herding elephants. Like when they break in total war and run amok. Similarly if HP in 0AD represents morale and not life points then slings could easily break elephants even if they couldn't kill them without a lucky headshot.

Total War, and every other game, also use elephants as anti-siege, though typically as gate breakers rather than smashing stone walls. Could they be shifted to that?

I don't know about specifics of each bonus but I agree with the idea in general. You can't keep every Civ balanced but giving them truly distinct flavor is totally doable and trying to keep the unbalanced civs at like 2-3.

I've gotten like 10+ of those popups following one of Stan's links.

This is what would make the overlapping bonuses method I described so incredible. The positional integrity of the formation would determine the degree of bonus. Ideally you'd use battalions but it could work even for individual units. You could add some small pathing improvements but the key is that setting units to maintain cohesion would trade off with flexibility. Indeed this was historically a key element of the phalanx. It would allow allow maintaining the "line" and provide interesting flanking functions. Perfect alignment would maximize your defensive buffs while minimizing the offensive buffs of the enemy. Faster turn speeds or move speeds would obviously break formation cohesion so you'd have to make tactical choices. You could even allow veterancy status to improve cohesion in difficult situations which would provide and interesting reason to keep troops alive. Just having units in "formation" get a raw +x to some stat is way less interesting. You'd make the sides of the formation weaker since they'd be adjancent or "near enough", depending on the overlap method choice, to fewer units. You'd also make ranged attacks more interesting for debuff as well as damage purposes. I think a system based on positioning would also slow down combat somewhat because it would be harder to organize an offense much higher than a defense so you'd have some reduction in APM issues. Similar to how people argue in TW over "arcade" vs "realistic" combat.

Adds a 6th AI bonuses setting modifying build time and resource rate.

Yeah I wouldn't do it that way. It is boring. If the game were to move to battalion only combat, which is usually better than a mixed system, it would provide far more verisimilitude to avoid single auras for formations. Or you might avoid auras if they are so slow as Stan claims. Providing aura bonuses based on formation cohesion and stuff like flanking in a sortos pseudo total war style would be way more interesting tactically. You could still employ a "leader/officer" bonus as appears to be the flavor of that json file but that would be in addition.

My argument is that you should have a consistent level of abstraction. So if we are willing to use damage bonuses that is a high tier of abstraction. Same should apply to other features. Having battalions actually lowers the abstraction level since it makes more sense. Spear/pike was effective against cav in formation not individually. A single spearman vs a single sword cav the cav should win easy. It is when you have 120 spear boys vs 40 centaur boys that spear boys wreck face. For formations: I actually did a legion system as one of my improvements on base GAE for my fork. Had formations, AI stuff. Legion AI didn't get finished though, just move command stuff. Think mixed order combat functioned at the basic formation level though. I would probably implement formation bonuses with individual auras. So for every unit in formation in position within 2 tiles to unit +1 defense or something. Should be quite fast because you only need to check within formations and between engaged formations.