greenknight32

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I have a refurb Thinkpad T400, with GMA 4500 MHD graphics, 0AD plays on it just fine.

If you require anything higher than DirectX 9.0c, you eliminate all the players who are still running Windows XP. That's a lot of people.

Didn't really think it would be a problem, but since inefficiency was brought up... For comparison I loaded up a save with Britons and had them build a wall on a steep slope - looked pretty bad. Your examples look much better.

Looks good to me. Any performance impact?

The C-50 is one of AMD's system on a chip units - CPU and GPU on the same die, what they're now calling an APU. They tend to be better at 3D graphics than Intel's integrated graphics. It's a low-powered one, though. Reviews I found describe its performance as netbook-level. Some of AMD's newer APUs are quite powerful, but the C-50 isn't one of those.

It finally came to me what game I played that used a system like that - it was Lords of Magic. Of course, movement was turn-based in that game - only the combat interface was real-time - so upkeep was assessed by the turn.Normal troops also had a small upkeep in that game, after you paid quite a bit to train them; mercenaries just took a little gold to hire, but it was more than the regular upkeep and you had to keep paying it every turn. You couldn't afford them for long. The only good use for them was emergency defense for your cities - send them out to wear down an approaching attack force and die. In that game, you didn't have to wait for units to be trained (but it took time to train the buildings to produce better troops - weird concept). Maybe that could be the advantage of mercenaries in 0ad - instant troops for emergency defense. In LoM, when you couldn't pay the upkeep troops just deserted. A lot simpler to implement than the other ideas that have been floated, I'd think.

Spartan boys, from age 7, were raised in barracks-like conditions and given military training - but they didn't become soldiers at that age. At around age 18 they became reserves, became full-fledged soldiers about age 20. It wasn't just some boys, but all of them - this was the only way to attain full Spartan citizenship.

Are you saying that the first attack is wiping you out? That is the most challenging part of the game, in my view. At the beginning, you have to build up very fast and stay totally focused on the most essential production. The tips leper gave are exactly right; I would add that you need to stick to gathering food and wood and making units as fast as you can until after that first attack. You need to build a few houses to allow you to create units, but save the bigger building projects for after the first attack wave. When the attack comes, garrison your women in the Civ Center, so they don't get wiped out.

Pheasants can run very fast, and often do. Chuckars are more rotund, don't seem like they'd be as fleet of foot - but apparently their behavior is quite similar.

I would use the corral if it worked.

What we know as the Viking Age was when the Norse civilization entered an expansionist phase - they were already accomplished shipbuilders and navigators at that time. Since they didn't keep written records, origins of that civilization are more difficult to date precisely, can only be inferred from archeological evidence. It definitely was developing within the time frame of 0 A.D., though.

You could even have the civ center grow larger by having additions appear as you level up, less work than a completely new model for each level - though there still would be extra work involved. Enough space for the additions would have to be included in the footprint of the beginning civ center, to avoid the problem Lion points out. There are more important thing to fix right now, however.

Your welcome. Yes, I like it.

If you're a Firefox user, you can use the Chatzilla extension. Very easy to get, click the Add-ons button in the Firefox menu, in the search field type chatzilla. Easy to use, too.

Keep your population limit at no more than 300, that should be. I find a lower limit works better, but I don't have a really fast computer.

Makes no sense to generalize so much about either Rome or Christendom, they both did good and bad things. A great deal of knowledge was lost when Rome made Christianity the official religion and suppressed the "pagan" religions (one of the bad things Rome did). Mobs that sacked the temples didn't differentiate between religious texts and scholarly works, they just burned everything. Christian monks were the great preservers of what survived - they didn't do much to disseminate knowledge for a long time, but they worked hard at preserving it. This was a great help to the eventual rise of Europe, though the Crusaders also brought a lot back from the Middle East that helped. As for the barbarians - they didn't do nearly as much damage to Rome as the Roman civil wars did. Rome was its own worst enemy.

Mongol isn't historically accurate, judging by the plot summary I read. Sounds like it could be a realistic portrayal of the culture, though. The Mongols left a very nice history of those times, a book called "The Secret History of the Mongols", of which just one copy survived. This had been transcribed into Chinese characters used as a phonetic script to represent the sound of the Mongol words. This made it very hard to translate, but when it finally was it provided an unvarnished account of the life of Temujen, who gave himself the title of Genghis/Chingis Khan. Temujen was never a slave, as this movie has it; he was the son of a minor chief's junior wife who made himself chief through fratricide. He expanded his power by killing his enemies instead of the traditional practice of letting them run away while stealing their stuff. Then he gave all his men a share of the loot so they wouldn't lose out by not stopping to plunder. He came up with this so he wouldn't be robbed any more, but these practices convinced most people that it was a better idea to follow him than oppose him. Thus he was set on the path to empire. Not a very sympathetic character to the modern mind, I suppose that's why they invented a different story for the movie.

Yes, the main innovation of the Romans was their military system - those they couldn't outfight they could generally outlast, due to superior logistics. They gave up trying to conquer the Germanics, though - too costly, for too little gain. Rome depended on plunder from its conquests to finance its very expensive military establishment. The Germans were tough fighters, and had very little to plunder. After losing an entire field army when it was ambushed in the forest, Rome realized it made more sense to hire the Germans as mercenaries than to try and take their land.

Could you add more RAM to that machine? I had an old computer with 512MB of RAM, found out it would support up 768MB. Bought some used RAM on eBay and upgraded, made it perform much better.

I expect the player who said he doesn't use formations just means he doesn't change formations, leaves the troops in their default formation. I have a 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT card, and it runs 0AD fine. Your 1 gig card should do great.

There are no scenarios where "you have all the time in the world to win." You have to build up quickly at the start or you'll be overwhelmed.

I think I should clarify that there are 2 dfferent issues involved - making things straightforward and understandable for the end user, and having the code tight and uncluttered. If this change could accomplish both those goals, there's no question it would be a good thing to do.

I have it installed on this computer, still fire it up once in a while.I think anyone who wants to design RTS battle games should study its combat system. It really brought tactics into play. Flanking attacks could be devastating, different factions required the use of different tactics to deal with their different strengths and weaknesses.

That's exactly the kind of thing that concerns me, avoiding absurdities like troops that catapult hits just bounce off of. The % system starts out simple, but how much adjustment will it take to avoid things like that? If that can be done while still keeping it simple, it would be a good change - but beware of unintended consequences.I've been testing open-source software for years, and I've see many examples of changes that looked simple that turned out to create a hopeless mess. Still, you've got to try things sometimes.