greenknight32

Very nice. Updated automatically on Linux Mint. Now to download the Windows version...

I finally got it installed, the AI doesn't seem that tough to me. Against medium difficulty, I had plenty of time to set up a line of defense towers before they attacked. I was out of practice, my efficiency not that good, I was expecting it to be worse. If a new player didn't think to build towers they might have a rough time, but it's not hard to figure out. Decent tutorials would be a nice improvement, though.

Right - just hunt in the area between you and the enemy, automatically serves to scout for approaching enemy at the same time.

The important question is - what's the effect on overall food production? I did some testing to answer that question. On the Hyrcanian Shores map, which has lots of game and fruit, checked how long it took to get to 1000 food by each method. It took 119 seconds to reach 1000 food if the cavalry did chickens, 186 seconds if not. Much more difference than I thought. One concern I had was the cavalry guy ran out of chickens quickly, stood around doing nothing because I was to busy with other stuff. But it saves so much time that's not really a problem. I tried doing it as an actual game, found that if I was ready for that he wasn't left idle for long. I gained a big jump in production over the AI when I put the cavalry on chickens, so I take back what I said before - it really is worth putting off scouting until after your cavalry has harvested the chickens.

400 food is not that much, and how much longer does it take for women? My early scouting is more about hunting, really, the scouting of the enemy doesn't go beyond locating their border.

I send my starting cavalry out to scout / hunt, put 1 or 2 women on butchering chickens. I don't think the chickens are a big enough food source to tie up my cavalry on, I think scouting is too important to delay. I build a barracks just before I upgrade to age II, so it can be producing units while my CC is tied up with the upgrade.

A18 is old, current version is a20. I have no idea if that's implemented.

Yep, not much wood on the steppes - that's why the nomads (Mongols, etc.) learned to make laminated bows from horn, sinew, and bone, with just a thin strip of wood as the core. I agree that farming should be difficult, but there should be large herds of animals for meat.

Yes, the Ptolemies ruled Egypt in the period the game covers, but Egyptian self-rule had already been ended before that. The Persians had conquered Egypt, it was ruled by a Persian Satrap when Alexander invaded - the Egyptians welcomed him as a liberator.

If you kill off their builders they still lose. I agree, building what you need to advance to the City phase is a better use of time and resources.

If you catch it before they finish, it's just a big loss for them. Have some cavalry scouts out there. They could be hunting, kill 2 birds with 1 stone.

Can you compile with that?

The super-powered slingers are fun, but not realistic - I'll miss them too, but this game does strive for realism. Not very realistic for skirmishers to be really effective against towers, either, I'd say.

Love them slingers! Yeah,I agree, they're a bit OP.

If you install the version in the Ubuntu repository, you get a way out of date version, as you discovered. You need to install the 0 A.D.- provided packages, fortunately not hard to do.

The barebones was $259, by the time I added the HDD (1TB). optical drive, and a copy of Win7, I'd spent around $450, and had $80 worth of rebates in the form of Tiger Direct gift cards. Without the OS, about $350 before the rebates, with no peripherals (already had). Came with a 650 watt PSU, so I have power to upgrade the graphics a lot more. The case has lots of unused bays, too, but I'd have to upgrade the mobo to have enough connections to use them.

My comp I built last year, the cheapest I could manage that would provide acceptable performance and could take advantage of a 64 bit OS. Basically I waited until Tiger Direct offered a barebones kit with more than 4GB of RAM. I upgraded the graphics card recently after I found a good deal on a 20" widescreen monitor, found a better card on ebay for only $30.00. The specs: AMD A4-5300 APU 3.6 GHz 8GB RAM 800MHz ATI HD 5750 - it's an ASUS EAH5750 Forrmula model, has a special cooling shroud supposed to make it run 13% cooler. Seems to work, it runs very cool. Got it overclocked to GPU 835 MHz/RAM 1240 MHz, up from 720/1000. No idea what the frame rate is on 0AD, but can play Rift and rarely drop below 20 fps, which is good enough to be very playable.

Mint with MATE works really well, too - with a single monitor, anyway.

In the old "Lords of Magic" game, troops that weren't paid deserted and became "wandering monsters" - bandits, basically. The equivalent in this game would be to shift their allegiance to Gaea, I guess.

No professional soldiers, but Spartan citizens were more than professional soldiers - they all began military training at the age of 7, and were raised in barracks from that age. They were all hoplites to start with - they despised cowardly forms of fighting like shooting arrows or slinging rocks, employed mercenaries in those roles. Apparently they did serve as cavalry when that was introduced - they were very into horse breeding and racing, so it came easily to them. They also began employing more lighter-armed units later, instead of all being heavy infantry. Spartans always formed just the core of the army, though - they were supported by large mercenary auxiliaries. To be more realistic, maybe the Spartans should have to build a mercenary camp to get any ranged units.

Yes, with my suggested system you wouldn't want to give the attack command until you were within striking distance of the enemy position - though you could form them up in a column and then give the attack move command, if you wanted them to attack anyone they saw while on the march.

I meant that instead of calculating the distance to determine if the units form a column, have them always form a column when ordered to move to a spot rather than sent to attack. Using the attack move command would override the default column formation, units would maintain their current formation or lack of one. This would allow the player to control it, without adding any additional commands to remember. I'm a great believer in simplifying the code whenever you can, and this would be a simple way to provide the functionality.

Seems simple enough to me - if you right click on an objective they should form a column and march there, ctrl+right click for attack move they should stay in their current formation.

Nothing happens without an external power source. Energy flows from a higher energy region to a lower energy region, that's what makes things happen - and results in an increase in entropy. Life reduces entropy locally by increasing it elsewhere, thus it doesn't violate the principle that entropy always increases globally.

The Roman's big advantage was logistical. They built fortified military camps that were basically temporary cities - they sometimes became permanent cities. They were able to support their legions in the field indefinitely. Other peoples, when you defeated them, they went home - the Romans went back to their camp and prepared for another attack.