serveurix

+1

Kicking_Bird : Again, your post is very insightful, and thank you for it, but please don't call the designers lazy : they don't have a lot of resources and do the best they can. For the "regional sets", factions of the same civs already share some building models (see the three greek factions and the two celt ones). As for your persian house, like wraitii, I find it a bit too modern, and the round parts around the roof look like inflatable tubes. But if you can make some more historically accurate buildings with the same visibility characteristics, I'll totally go for it Finally, I would like to add that I share Kicking_Bird impressions on the atmosphere : the game feels dark to me. It's hard to explain, that's why I didn't tell it earlier : it doesn't *look* dark, it *feels* dark. In other words, it's a bit depressing, despite the lightning and the graphical quality. The reason is hard to identify, at first I thought it was because the fog of war was too dark, or that the lines of sight were too small, but as Kicking_Bird says, the lack of variations in the colors and shapes might be the reason (or one of the reasons) for the dull atmosphere. And I totally support the model variations depending on phase, even though I fear we don't have the manpower for it.

Agressive but insightful. Contrast is definitely something to take in consideration (there's been other people saying that they had difficulties seeing the units and fauna).

The vision range of all objects (units and structures) has been increased to match the shooting range, is that right ?

I've followed the svn commits and I've tried to roughly sum up the balance changes between a17 and a18. Please tell me if I'm wrong or if I missed something important. A18 balance changes : Units - most human units deal more crush damage - most melee units have a stronger armor and move faster, but their attack has been lowered - the accuracy of land distant units (human and mechanical) has been reduced a bit, and their shooting rate has been increased - archers, pedestrian or mounted, have a bigger range, but the damage of all arrows has been reduced - javalinists, pedestrian or mounted, have a lower range,but their javelins deal more damage - the minimal range of cavalry javelinists has been removed - cavalry lancers deal more hack damage - pikemen attack is slower and weaker, but their defense has been increased - hard bonuses of pikemen and spearmen have been reactivated and increased : they now have a bonus of x3 against cavalry - range siege weapons have a better attack, and their shooting range has been reduced - elephants are stronger against buildings, but more sensitive to arrows - mercenaries cost more food and less metal - most of citizen-soldiers need a gigantic amount of experience to level up - champions are more expensive, stronger and more resistant - most heroes deal less damage and have a stronger armor Structures - seleucid and ptolemaïc colonies now have an attack, a little bit weaker than civ centers' - palissades can now be built in phase 1 - towers have a bigger range - most buildings have a better armor Techs - "Will to fight" cost has been halved

I don't know which hardware you play on, but the renderer and UI fixes from a14 to a17 were a real improvement for me on the side of general lag. I'm looking forward to the new pathfinder because the lag pikes still remain, but everything's not negative, and the devs are doing a great job. I agree on the fact that stuff like charging and trampling, delayed damage and spreading, secondary weapons and formation bonuses should be implemented before we can have a proper idea of the different units' strengths and weaknesses in the final state of the game, and balance them accordingly, but right now some people want to be able to play the game in its current state, and they are making the balance changes for it. Why whould you try to stop them ? If they are able to quicky balance the game now, they will be able to do it at every gameplay change, I have no worry about it. And they're not delaying the progress of the game either, not more than modeling new civs is delaying development : balancing the templates and implementing new features into the engine are different kind of jobs.

The development team has decided in January 2013, and rightly so, that the most important was solving the performance issues.

It's more like the opposite : they didn't add new features because they were all busy improving performance.

I may be wrong, but as far as I remember, the developers have reached an agreement on a number of 12 for the factions of 0 A.D., and have made a choice of factions, among the most influencial of their time between Gibraltar and the Himalaya. They already require a lot of work, and I suppose adding any more faction would make the game a nightmare to balance. I don't find the euro-mediterrannean-centric aspect shocking for a historical antiquity-based RTS game, since a lot of very influencial historical events took place in this part of the world. With the Mauryas, I'd say that 0 A.D. is among the less euro-centric RTS games I've seen. But featuring subsharian african factions in an RTS would certainly be interesting. Rolandixor, why don't you propose a mod for that ? Also, as me and -I suppose- most people on this forum are not very savvy on subsaharian african history, I suggest you tell us more about civilisations, politics, warfare, important battles and influencial historical events that took place in this part of the world during the 0 A.D. timeframe. This will maybe encourage people to join you and create.

Not in the options, but this might help you : http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15503&hl=isometric Could you tell us more about your eye problem ? Because it might explain some of the other impressions you had (models that look the same, berries that are hard to spot, etc.). For the hotkeys, see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/HotKeys or the "Learn to play" item in the main menu of the game. The citizen-horsemen can carry meat from animals, but can't perform other economic tasks. By click-and-drag or using the "[" "]" keys. That's the principle of territories, you need to expand them to build further. Build Civ Centers or Colonies outside of your current territory and they will generate a territory around them. The minimap alerts could still be improved indeed. The AI is very strong. You can choose a level of difficulty for the AI in Single Player mode to make it easier to beat. Have you tried "+/-" ? If you move your mouse over the map after selecting a citizen, the cursor changes shape so you can easily notic the elements the units can interact with. But I agree the chickens could have a more noticeable design. There's a plan to change some units' models in future versions, I don't know if chickens are concerned by this. Note that Alpha 18 should be released soon (in a few weeks probably), you might be interested in testing this one.

It's just because i've seen it on the design document : http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Civ%3A_Britons#CHAMPIONUNITS

Is the collar still supposed to show the rank ? Or has this idea been abandoned ?

I would intuitively say that elephants should be slower than infantry when walking, but would compete with cavalry when charging. But this is just intuition, we would need some testing to be sure (and the implementation of charging of course ). As for the "damage frenzy" property, this is planned too.

Right. Elephants should be designed to be used *en masse*. It would be relevant to use one or two rams surrounded by soldiers to protect them/open a way for them until they reach the buildings, but such a tactic wouldn't be efficient with elephants. If you're using elephants you should make a lot of them : as they are vulnerable to arrows, one or two wouldn't be enough to take down a castle, and as they are good enough in combat they wouldn't need to be surrounded by bodyguards. Not mentioning the fact that they are cheaper (both in cost and pop, iirc) than rams, so you are encouraged to recruit packs of them.

This is especially true when you compare them to rams. Currently rams are very good in melee combat : they can use their high resistance and attack against living units as efficiently as they do against buildings. It isn't supposed to be like that. Rams are supposed to be very weak against living units but good against buildings and mechanical units, cavalry is supposed to be good against living units and mechanical units but weak against buildings, and elephants are supposed to be somewhere in the middle : very good against living units and mechanical ones, good against buildings (but not as good in this task as the rams), their only weaknesses being their low walking speed and their vulnerability to pierce damage. If you can't solve the ram situation with normal statistics, I think it would be relevant to make an exception and give them hard maluses/bonuses.

It's in the scenario demo maps.

AFAIK svn version only needs to cache the textures once, so if you launch the game a second time, the cached textures should take less time to load. Right after you install a svn version, you can launch the "Units Demo" demo map and wait for a few seconds. This will cache the textures of all units and buildings of the game at once.

@stanislas69 : http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Civ%3A_Britons : I think there's a document or a post somewhere on the website where Mythos Ruler gives two different breed names for the briton dogs, but I can't find it.

It would make a great eyecandy in scenario maps

I've tried to translate some of the related parts of the french Wikipedia. I don't guarantee the translation is 100% correct, since there are a lot of naval technical terms that I didn't even know in french, but I've used all the dictionaries I could find and I think I've done the best I could : sources : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premi%C3%A8re_guerre_punique#Apports_de_l.E2.80.99arch.C3.A9ologie and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89paves_puniques_de_Marsala , license is CC by-sa 3.0 I think.

For the three other posts : I won't comment on the stat changes, I'm not an expert on this. Most of the tech changes you propose are really interesting. I just have a few comments on them : I'm not really an expert on history, but It doesn't shock me that a village or a small city is able to use a citizen cavalry. Horses were used a lot more than now, and in a village you could always find men that would be able to ride a horse (I'm mostly thinking about celts when I say this, but this is maybe less true for greek or persians). Of course we're not talking about a heavy organised cavalry force here. Maybe it would be more realistic to make the light cavalry expensive at phase 1, and less expensive at phase 2, where proper cavalry training could be assimilated to "mass-production". And maybe this could depend on the faction. Didn't the romans have a cavalry force from the very early times of Rome ? Carthage should have a similar tech too. The french Wikipedia mentions that the Marsala punic shipwrecks have revealed that the carthaginians used a technology that allowed them to build warships, including big ones like quinqueremes, at a very fast rate. They already had this technology during the first punic war, which gave them a great advantage against the romans (but the romans were able to keep up because their politicians and upper-class citizen were constantly providing new ships and money for the war effort). If this has to be implemented we should be very careful to show that the bonuses are linked to the culture that the people developed, and not to the god itself. Otherwise it would indeed look like a mythology game, which is almost the opposite of the goal of the project.

Have you tried to activate the detailed tooltips in the options ? There are still a few things missing, but it's much better than basic tooltips. It doesn't shock me that stone throwers cost stone. I don't agree with this. In the current state, empty towers and forts are not enough to make your city impenetrable, even when upgraded. If you want to make them really strong you need to garrison them/put units on your walls and this forces you to significantly reduce the size of your mobile army. Aren't Marian reforms planned for Part 2 ? I agree. Priests should be a bit more expensive : they should be hard to protect and worth fighting for. I have proposed in an other post to make the carthage military dock a special building to unlock some techs or bonuses, because it is big and hard to place, and if carthaginians have to build several of them, (along with regular docks for fishing and trade), it gives them more of a disadvantage than an advantage on sea. (but adding military ships to the regular dock is already a change in the good direction) I agree with most of the other things you say in this first post, or find them interesting enough to be worth considering.

It's a lot less laggy for most cases, but it's still as laggy as before (or perhaps a bit more) when you try to move a large group of units (over ~90 on my case). There it generates a big spike of lag as the units start moving, and the perf progressively goes back to normal as units move to the target. I think it is because units are in a unorganised, very tight pack at the beginning, and when you ask them to go somewhere they independently try to find they way out of the crowd, so they constantly try to turn around each other. This is also the reason they don't arrive to the target as a dense pack : they first try to avoid the units in front of them, then move in a direction free of obstacles, then go to the target.

I don't know what Mythos tried to do exactly with the techs. At a moment I thought he didn't want to add a new technology unless he was perfectly sure to have a good historical reference and a unique icon. But whatever the reason was, the tech tree took a lot of time to evolve. Mythos certainly has a very fine idea of where the game is heading to and needs some time, but I perfectly understand the reaction of the community. They want to enjoy the game, and an unfinished tech tree is sometimes worse than no tech tree at all.Their new balance proposal is quite extreme on some points, but it's a good move. Of course the tech tree needs to be polished and diversified. Like you, I would enjoy some more diverse military techs, tiers and branches (by branches I mean technologies unlocked by other technologies, which doesn't happen currently except for techs of a different phase and of the same type). But I'm sure the tech tree will still be enriched by new techs as the development advances (and we need some new icons, too).

@iNcog : I agree with everything you say about pairs, *especially* the fact that some techs eventually gets ignored, but I'm doubtful about the last example you give of a pairing that would be, in your opinion, relevant. You seem to know in advance how the player will make use of the strength and weaknesses of both his infantry and cavalry, and how he's going to combine those two types of units on the battlefield altogether. I would be more in favor of simple choices, like : ranged infantry move 5% faster but lose 5% health -OR- ranged infantry move 5% slower but gain 5% health that basically make you choose one strength or the other.