MoLAoS
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Posts posted by MoLAoS
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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.
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9 hours ago, Ceres said:
Fun would be it if units including citizen could pour hot water or (burning) oil from walls and wall turrets, too.
But that is not about "formations", sorry.
Are there civs known to have their soldiers burying themselves in the ground, waiting for the enemy to pass by and then come out? If you considered this a "special" form of formation, it could be fun, too.
Hyrule Conquest has burning alcohol barrels for tower use. Dunno how the animations worked cause I never got attacked while I had it researched.
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11 hours ago, ymming said:
The application would more be like tomahawk.
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.
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43 minutes ago, ChronA said:
Hm... Slings are certainly formidable weapons, but to suggest that they could propel shot of a similar mass to a .45 at comparable velocity to modern firearms does not parse. Even .22 LR with an energy of under 200 J can easily shred all but very high quality reproduction plate armor. If slings could approach those kinds of energies, they would have been MUCH more effective than crossbows or high poundage war bows against mid to late medieval armor. Yet I have never heard of any medieval army fielding slingers as a core part of their infantry complement. I'd want to see some pretty extraordinary evidence before I'll buy that ancient slingers could reproducibly break 75 m/s.
Don't take that as me contesting the idea that slings should be effective against elephants though! Even if it was just 50 m/s, slingers with lead shot would still open up wounds that would drive an elephant crazy, and if hit with enough I'm sure would eventually make them bleed to death.
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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.
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30 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:
I think it looks terribly inefficient and ineffective. Maybe it would look different if firing at a (more static) group. But if the damage is lower than a regular attack, I don't know if I will be interested in that feature.
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.
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4 hours ago, Ceres said:
Again I wonder how slingers could do harm to war elephants. Or do we assume that the slingers rather hit the controlling riders, thus kind of "killing" the eles as well? I mention this here, as in another thread a similar question popped up how war eles could be best faced, and there, too, slingers were mentioned. Personally, I find throwing stones at these large animals quite harmless, but maybe I'm utterly wrong.
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.
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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?
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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.
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32 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:
@Stan` Is it normal that I get an exception when going to that page?
I've gotten like 10+ of those popups following one of Stan's links.
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2 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:
The spear/polearm being specifically designed to combat cavalry is a bit of an RTS convention; simply by virtue of much better reach spears were used by and large by all infantry regardless of whether they were facing cavalry or not. Whether a spearman would outperform a horseman one-on-one is a triviality in which matters of other equipment, training, etc,... complicate the matter.
Even if the game does not embrace a battalion system, it would be nice for players to benefit from engaging in orderly formations. Even making it possible if only suboptimal would be a nice change of pace. I personally like to see my troops in proper battle lines, but the stand ground stance is annoyingly restrictive while the defensive stance goes too much in the other extreme.
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.
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2 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:
How exactly?
Adds a 6th AI bonuses setting modifying build time and resource rate.
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12 hours ago, maroder said:
Formation bonus is already implemented, but only used in one case. See: public/simulation/data/auras/units/heroes/athen_hero_iphicrates_1.json
So probably no need to implement it again if you want to use it.
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.
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32 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
The stat bonus is there to focus on a basic aspect of ancient warfare, that cavalry would lose in a head-on fight against massed pole-armed infantry.
Well, if you don't at least make an attempt to simulate ancient warfare, then what is the game simulating?
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.
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1 hour ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:
That is an unfortunate aspect of the current gamestate. In the past there were a few ways the original team though that they could be more useful. These included making individual target random units in the formation in such a way that ranged units and melee could never focus fire a single unit. Others included a number of buffs and debuffs. Phalanx for instance made hoplites generally tougher at the expense of being slower. Seeing just a few of these ideas in the game could perhaps make the mosh pit battles a less common occurrence.
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".
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6 minutes ago, The Undying Nephalim said:
I feel like the way particles work right now is good for most effects, especially things like fire, cloud or smokey effects, sparkles, and bolts of lightning. The only particle that I've not been able to recreate well in 0AD is a solid beam like some kind of laser. There are always gaps in the laser beam even when I set the particle spawn rate to an absurdly high number.
@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.
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15 minutes ago, The Undying Nephalim said:
I don't have a dedicated video trying to show particles, but I'm sure there are instances in a lot of my videos. A lot of my Zora units use particle effects, such as the Sapphire Warden. The Gerudo Ice Archers have an arrow/particle effect combo.
@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.
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26 minutes ago, The Undying Nephalim said:
Magic projectiles are not hard to do, just add the particles in question as a prop to a unit's actor file and attach it to the "projectile" bone.
Particle actors to attach to bones are found in art\actors\particle
and particle behavior is found in art\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.
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That appears to be identical to the in game structure overview from the learn to play button yeah?
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31 minutes ago, Stan` said:
You mean no one wants to use a web browser to use a chat application?
(webchat.quakenet.org)
More seriously though, you can find some devs on Discord (like me!) but some others disagree totally with the philosophy of this app, the fact that isn't open source, etc.
Ah an ideological dispute. I suppose as a Bernie Bro I can understand some level of principle over power.
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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.
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29 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
A fair argument.
Agreed. So much in the game is an abstraction, and that's the only way a game of this type can function. So, yeah, "Health" can definitely be conceptualized in this way.
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.
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22 minutes ago, Stan` said:
Sadly for now it's only some dwarves and two elven buildings. I didn't have much time to experiment as we've been quite busy with the main game
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.
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21 minutes ago, Stan` said:
Sorry hardcoded was an hyperbole on my end. It's just that this part wasn't rewritten to use object oriented programming and still rely on a lot of globals. It's not really harcoded in the sense that the buildings and whatnot are generated from the template. I just meant that the code could probably be nicer
https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/5387
Describes the issue
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.
what games do you play besides 0ad?
in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion
Posted
EVE Online
A Tale In The Desert
Field Of Glory 2
Field Of Glory Empires
Glest Forks
Star Dynasties
Banished
Driftland
Many Others