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.

It is a bit weird for me to think about a focus on "the basic aspects of ancient warfare" in an RTS. Because RTS games in general are just so immensely unreal. Not just the abstraction but the way you control the units. Total War is perhaps the closest game to any true simulation. Even something like Fields Of Glory which is somewhat closer is turn based. There's no structural reason that spears or pikes is good against cav for instance just a completely artificial stat bonus. One major problem I see in general in the development thought process of 0AD is taking generic RTS tropes/mechanics as a given and then subjecting the novel features to a heavy "isolated demand for rigor" as they call it in philosophy. Trying to make formations function at a significantly lower level of abstraction than unit counters or other mechanics doesn't make a lot of sense. And formations are somewhat iffy in RTS in general. There is a reason Total War games put all units in formations at all times. Because single unit micro would be objectively superior if you had the APM in all cases. You might consider whether 0AD should simply require TW style group based units all the time. Otherwise you'll have to make the kinds of compromises that are already made for "counters".

@The Undying NephalimOkay good news. So mostly the limit on particles is performance. Do auras of particles work well? For the new structure building options I want a couple to have glows and stuff.

@The Undying NephalimWell defined or like sparkle beams? With multiple attack skills, especially for mages, and the "Hero" AI for making Majesty style stuff I'm curious how good you can get particles to look, like lightning, shadow, fire, ice, water, etc. I think Heroes from the Wizards Guild would have several elements available and typically have 3-8 attack skills depending on how the player specializes the Guild. Would stink to mostly have different colored masses of sparkles like Glest particles.

@The Undying NephalimDo you have a video of HC with lots of particle action happening? I'm getting ready to do the Mandate style health/shields/mana changes and then probably adding items and the new construction styles but I'll probably get around to particles after that.

That appears to be identical to the in game structure overview from the learn to play button yeah?

Ah an ideological dispute. I suppose as a Bernie Bro I can understand some level of principle over power.

Phab and Trac are cool but who still uses IRC? If 0AD community moved to discord or something that would be a huge boost because no one wants to download a program that was deprecated before they were even born.

This is true but it somewhat defeats arguments that are functionally similar about other features. Like you can't build a boat with 10 mediocre trees. Or the fort model has a ton of wood compared to tree models. So regening trees/a forest over time would make sense as long as it was okay/balanced gameplay wise. Should be some consistency in discussion over mechanics choices.

Ah you do a lot of your own art assets as well. Yeah I imagine that makes stuff take longer. My plan is probably to grab houses from one of the base game factions as well as use the HC structures for guild buildings. The units might be trickier. That way I can focus on the mechanics of the game.

I was assuming you meant non-dynamic by hard coded so hyperbole confusion avoided. Yeah that code looks like a mess. I'm already having some trouble with the regular JS in the component section so that GUI stuff looks scary. I miss my sexy headers from c++. Headers with well defined make it so all code understanding problems for new programmers can be solved by moderate TextCrawler abuse. Of course you have to compile so it isn't all upside. I am a pro-composition anti-inheritance fanatic so the JS code is painful for me but only for personal preference reasons.