serveurix

Is it possible that the greek hoplites have a slightly longer spear than other spearmen ? Or are all the spears the same length ? I agree, in fact I didn't think much about the late game in my criticism. In the late game I generally don't worry, as my economy is stable, my civ centres are numerous, and my main city is fortified, I'm not too much under pressure for raising an army (I play against the AI for now). But in the beginning of the game, both have the advantage of cheap, powerful and rapidly trained base citizen-soldiers (archers). Note two things about the Mauryans late-game warfare though : You can use war elephants (expensive) and elephant archers (cheaper) in pair : just send your elephant archers first, and make the fortress/tower/archers focus on them. They wont make much damage, but they will serve as "lightning rods" for your war elephants. Then send your war elephants destroy the fortress while your elephant archers take the arrows. If you have enough elephants (you need a big army, 15 elephants of each kind is a minimum), the fortress won't have the time to damage your elephant archers too much before it gets destroyed. The AI can't use it, but Mauryans have one of the best units of the game currently : Chandragupta Maurya. He's good in melee and at taking down buildings and he can train maiden guards at the same time, which are also very good in melee and against buildings.

This depends on the type of map you choose. One some you can afford to turtle, on some others you can't. You need to adapt your strategy to the terrain.

Celts didn't rely much on towers, so I'm not shocked that they have little power on this side. I guess anyone playing the celts should learn to send his slingers and cavalry javelinists when he sees the enemy massing at his doors, or send his melee units for a sortie. Yes, but they need it only in the middle and late game, so they can spare it in the early game. Celts must rush for wood very quickly, and rushing for a resource that is scattered all over the map is tricky (unless you have a mobile storehouse, like the mauryans).

Yes, but the question is : should they be included in the main population or have a separated population limit ? I would rather have them not being counted in the main population, because otherwise there's no point training them, unless you're completely out of resources, and even in this case, they wouldn't help you if you don't have packs of them. Ok, I wasn't sure (I don't have the game at hand right now, I based myself on the design document in the wiki). I'm surprised. Hoplites look really strong in the game compared to other civ's spearmen. I'll check again. You're right, I forgot. I suppose there is a technical reason for that ? Is it possible to have at least a 45 degree rotation then ? I've always learned that the average celt soldier had better weapons than the average roman soldier (I suppose that people are speaking about blades when they say that, not about the armor of course), and that good tactics and organization was the only thing that made Cesar win against the celts. Agreed. Except that I think unorganized Celt should win against unorganized Romans in almost every case, and that Romans should use their special abilities (tactics, formations, testudo...) to have a chance to win against the celts. But as I said, as formations are not implemented yet, it's maybe a bit early to speak about this kind of balance.

I wanted to start a thread called "General thoughts about civilisation's designs" but I realize that what I'm writing is becoming very long, so here is a post about the balance only. I'll dedicate an other thread to civ's differentiation (note that this thread already contains some proposals for Celt's differentiation). So, with the current game engine's state, some civs are underpowered. See the Celts, for example : They need a lot of wood, early in the game, which gives them a malus on desertic maps (this is logical) The special buildings/techs which could give them a big economical bonus are unimplemented yet (Update : rotary mill is implemented now, see below) Their walls are passive (this is logical too, for historical accuracy) The units that usually give them advantage in combat are the slingers and the champion units, eventually the cavalry units when they are numerous Brythonic special units don't give them a big bonus : Chariots are pretty useless for the moment, as trampling, charge and turrets are not implemented yet (they're just fast, resistant, expensive and large cavalry archers) Dogs are rapid and cheap but, they are weaker than a human citizen-soldier and can't perform economic tasks. Currently no one would want to spend his food and population points in a few packs of dogs. Dogs don't really give any advantage for now. Longswordsmen are very good, but slow. They're good in battle, they're good at taking down buildings, but basing yourself solely on them to take down a fortified enemy base is risky. [*]Gallic special units are a bit better : They have longswordsmen, like Britons, expensive and powerful infantry units They have a champion cavalry which is quite cheap (needs food and wood only) In my opinion, Celts are underpowered in the early game. At the beginning you will need food and wood, so you will focus your economy essentially on these two resources. So you'll train either spearmen or javelinists to gather resources and prepare to defend your city. Javelinists are cheap in wood, but as they're not very precise, they are pointless if they're not numerous and grouped. So you'll need to train a lot of them and perhaps build outposts to be able to gather your troops before the enemy reaches our city. The best choice is probably to train spearmen mostly, and women each time you are out of wood. Even when not numerous, the spearmen can perform good enough in battle. But, contrary to the greek hoplites, for example, they're rarely able to maintain a gapless frontline to protect ranged units, so the only ranged units I train in the early game are cavarly javelinists, who can runaway when the frontline is breached. The other reason for training cavalry javelinists is that I base my food production on sheep and not on farms, in order to spare wood, and cavalry is very good for this. But the problem is that you'll consume a lot of wood anyway, and your workers will quickly move away from your city, as you're deforesting fast. As a result it will take more time to call them back when your city is attacked. And this is when you choose the option of taking the time to develop your city, equally sharing the resources between your economy (buildings, sheep, techs, phases) and your soldiers, trying to maintain an army able to defend you when the time comes. You can also choose the option to put all your resources on economy and buildings in order to rush to the 3rd phase as fast as possible. And once you've reached the third phase, you can build walls, fortresses, and a couple of very strong units capable to face any attack from your enemy. From my own experience, the second option seems to be the best. When I played "Savannah Ravine" with the Celts (it was with the alpha 12, now with the barracks available in early game it might be a little bit different), rushing through the phases was the only thing that worked. So, as a consequence, it appears that Celts have a great interest in skipping early phases, have an accelerated development, put their wood and stone in buildings and spare the rest of the resources to build an expensive, aristocratic army while protected behind their walls. This looks unrealistic to me. Celts should be able to sustain in the early stages of development, and be able to have a big army of cheap, disorganised, non-professional soldiers and be able to waste some units to defend their territory. Here is what I propose : Citizen-soldiers should be a little bit cheaper than other civs citizen-soldiers, and maybe train faster. Houses should be a bit cheaper. Briton's female citizen should fight like men, and should be as reliable as them to defend the city. One possibility is to give them the same hack and pierce points as the average soldier, but less crush points, an other is not to differentiate Briton's infantry citizen-soldiers and female citizen at all and simply make one unit, good in economical tasks and average in combat, costing something like ~50 food and ~10 or ~20 wood, and make the models randomly male and female. War dogs should be used to disconcert the enemy by flooding the battleground rapidly. But for that, they need to be numerous, and to be numerous, they need to be cheap. The cost of a dog should be lowered, maybe inferior or equal to the cost of a sheep. Maybe dogs should take 0 population, like the sheep, with a cost that increases with the number of dogs trained. Or maybe they should take 1 population point every ten dogs (I don't know if it's possible) to simulate the fact that you have one dog trainer per group of ten dogs. Or maybe we should create a "dog's population limit" which will allow the celts to train a limited amount of dogs that would not count in the main population. Maybe we could also make dogs able to scatter enemy troops, by making enemy fleeing a certain distance when bit or chased by a dog (like female citizen flee when attacked). That would make them worthwhile as "champion units" (there's no need for a unit who can't perform economic tasks if it doesn't give a significant advantage in battle). Update : As an afterthought, I don't think it's a good idea. Players would just try to force the units to attack the dogs instead of fleeing. It would just give them the impression of being forced to micromanage and that would annoy them more than anything else. What about the opposite ? Dogs on the battlefield would rather target the archers, forcing them to strike back with a melee weapon, making them unable to use their ranged attack support their melee companions. Rams are the only celtic siege unit. They should be cheaper than the rams of other civs (especially if they have less hitpoints), in resource or in population points. On the artistic side, I would suggest that the celtic houses are randomly turned when you place them. I agree the rectangle greek, carthaginian and roman houses should be parallel to each other, but I think it would look better if the round celtic houses were all turned in a different direction. It's a little bit early to speak about this but currently the formations are not implemented, and the Celts struggle against other civs like Romans and Carthaginians. It should be the complete opposite : the average celt warrior was stronger and better armed than the average roman soldier. Romans should have no other option than using formations to win against Celts. But as I said, maybe it's a bit early to brainstorm on this. Currently the player's experience is pretty much the same with Britons and Gauls, and Mythos_Ruler proposed to differentiate them a bit more on civ design and art : http://www.wildfireg...pic=17554&st=20 This is a very good idea, I already like the modifications made to the towers and the houses. Great job ! Mythos_Ruler proposes to make the Briton's civ center buildable on the shore, and act as a crannog. I like the idea, but what would be the benefits of this ? more room on the map to build civ centers possibility to extend your territory from the shore (good if you're close to a river, and want to forbid the enemy building on the opposite shore) civ center less vulnerable to attacks from the ground (less room for melee soldiers) but vulnerable to ships (triremes' ramming, iberian fire ships) have a superstrong port, able to shoot arrows on enemy ships (but shouldn't we give this kind of bonus to the carthaginians first ?) have a civ center able to train ships (that would be good if the CC-crannog can be the starting CC) Britons were not know to be good at sea warfare, so maybe the CC-crannog could give economical advantages rather than military ones ? For example : speeds up gathering of all fish resources in the range of the CC. more ideas ? Apart from that, there are all the proposals I've made above about war dogs and citizen-soldiers (maybe those would tend to give an advantage to Britons, the Gauls having only the advantage of their cavalry, so maybe we should find a few other cool things for the Gauls). Update 1 : I've played alpha14 with the Gauls, and the possibility to make barracks in phase 1 and to train champions in the barracks helps *a lot*. The rotating mill technology is a little bit useless, as it is only available in late game, when your economy is supposed to be stable already (it would be better to have a food boost in the end of phase 1 (with an expensive phase 1 building) or the beginning of phase 2). It still looks like Celts are screwed if they don't build walls. I haven't played a14 with the Britons yet. Update 2 : Ok, I've played the Britons a bit. They're still underpowered, the barracks stuff doesn't help much. Some civs look overpowered, like the Persians. This is a little bit more difficult to advocate, as the Persians and the Mauryas look very strong in the hands of the AI, but not so strong when I play them. So maybe there's something I don't take properly advantage of, but I'm pretty sure the AI develops very quicker when playing the Persians and the Mauryas than when playing other factions. Maybe it's because of the population bonus ? On the other hand, the Greeks look very strong in my hands (I don't need to build walls, I just keep training hoplites, they are basically a moving wall \o/ ), but very average when played by the AI. The Persians are probably the more bonused, their cavalry is almost invincible, and their fast-trained immortals and cheap archers support them very efficiently. What would you think of having a different way of handling pop cap bonus for the Mauryas and the Persians, that would lower the advantage of the persians in the early game ? For the moment the current population cap is always inflated of 10% during all game, right ? So, what about keeping this rule for the Mauryas (they keep having 10% more population every time) and have a 10% population bonus only for the maximum population for the Persians ? So Persians have a bonus only in late game, and they need to build a few houses more.

Why does the water make a grid like this ? And: How the hell can you get 60 fps ? O.o

The carthaginian and persian blacksmith lack a bucket of water, IMO. And the chimneys are a bit too clean, there should be some black soot marks, at least on the top ring of the chimney. Apart from that it's perfect.

Moreover, if you or an ally "capture" a farm by making your citizen work on it, it doesn't prevent nearby military units from attacking it. Maybe the farms should be gaïa by default ?

Isn't it same as gathering resource from it until it's gone ?

I'm not shocked by the fact that you can't build over a sheep corpse. A dead sheep is a resource, and you can't build over a tree or a mine, right ? If you want to remove it, just ask your citizen to do so. IMHO what is concerning is the fact that it is not treated as an obstacle (building placement is allowed).

Excellent.

Excuse me, but apart from that I'm still dubious about the webpage thing. When I download a webpage, am I technically the one who makes the copy ? My browser just sends a request to a web server, and the web server decides (or not) to send bits of the webpage over the network as a response. To me it looks like it is the server who makes the copy, not the client. Am I wrong ?

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro for the english version.

I wouldn't say the temperature difference is neglectable, but it's true that it isn't big. However there's a big difference of climate. In some regions like Brittany, Normandy and Nord-Pas-de-Calais, it's very, very rainy/cloudy. The weather is similar to Great Britain's. In some regions of the south like Provence, it's quite rare to have a cloudy sky, even in winter. And the air is very dry. It's not exactly an italian or iberian climate (except in Corsica, but I don't know if you count it as a part of Gaul) but it's quite close to it.

I would advocate for the opposite. When you live in a country where it rains often, you'd probably want to be able to move your tools and materials and workshop under a roof quickly. That's why I didn't like the second model : there's no wide and direct communication path bewteen the chimney and the shelter, the blacksmith would have to make long trips to put all his stuff in the shelter, and if he uses a cart to carry everything in one trip, the door orientation would not make it convenient. A smithy is a place to work, not a place to live, but we could imagine it has several parts (like suggested in those concepts), at least one with a wide entrance giving onto the workplace/chimney (in the case of a chimney separated from the main building), which would be a place to work and store stuff, and a more closed cozy annex where the blacksmith would live.

It's one hypothesis but it's disputed. I think noone really knows in fact. The Yupik people of Alaska and Siberia are said to accept the word Eskimo quite well, because it differentiates them from the Inuit people who reject it. Well, this is complicated.

The first one is very "open", but it's too similar to the barracks to me. It looks almost like simple barracks with a chimney. I like the L shape of the second one, I just wish it was open like the first one.

Some of the Bantu people will probably not be upset. "Bantu" comes from the Kongo language and means "Humans". So I guess at least the Kongo people would not find it offensive. But maybe Bantu people from other ethnical groups than Kongo would take it bad. That's what happens with Inuits. Thay don't want to be called "Eskimos" because they don't want to be put in the same basket than any other people from the Far North. Even though we don't mean to insult them when we say "Eskimos".

Well maybe you're right, I have a very european-centric vision of copyright. "Accessing a resource in the conditions the copyright holders have set up for you" has the advantage to work for all kind of distribution. What does the law says for paid content then ? When you download a copy of a film for money, is this copy always preceded by a text granting you the legality of the copy you're going to make ?

No no no, you are allowed to access a resource in the conditions the rightholders have set up for you. When they publish a web page, you have the right to download a copy of that webpage and put it on your computer for your own use. What's forbidden is for example to distribute exact or modified copies of that webpage to other peers. The craziest example of this kind of rule is the publication by the rightholders of a content under classic copyright, EULA or any non-shareable license on a peer-to-peer network. Technically, what each peer is authorised to do is to download the content from the source peer (the IP of the original publisher), but not to share parts of the file with the rest of the swarm. In other terms, they can only using the P2P network as a server-to-client network. As most P2P clients are not configured by default for this kind of use (and I don't know any client which can provide this kind of use on a per-file basis), most peers are likely to break the copyright on the published work. In practise, the peers are very unlikely to be pronounced guilty, but if we follow the rules strictly, this kind of behavior (publishing non-shareable content on a P2P network) is a legal trap.

You're not the first one to ask for nonfree content as easter eggs. If you want to have nonfree easter eggs please make a mod or a derivated version.

What's wonderful in 0 A.D. is that you can click on the animal and see its name. Someting you can't do in the wild. They run too fast. Edit: And you don't have a mouse pointer. Real life sucks.

Which period of history is it ? Edit: Close enough : https://en.wikipedia...stribution3.PNG

Oh, you were speaking about unit levels. I thought you were speaking about the game phases, sorry. I don't know if it's worth it then. I've played Warzone 2100 a bit and this game is really oriented towards unit preservation (units are extremely expensive, most of them are very slow, they have like 5 or 6 experience levels, there is a stance allowing them to go back to the closest repair point when hurt or severely hurt, experience points are kept through recycling, etc.), but 0 A.D. seems to have been thought very differently. It appears that 0 A.D.'s gameplay design is almost entirely modeled on Rome's history and warfare. Romans used to fight a campaign til the end (that was particularly true during the punic wars), senators (who were also military leaders) were very ambitious and rarely moved back, even if the situation looked completely @#$%ed up. This behavior brought them glorious victories but also heavy defeats. During the first punic war Rome completely lost his fleet many times, but always found a way to rebuild it, whatever the cost was. Anyway, for the Roman faction, 0 A.D. gameplay is very relevant (minus the lack of formations, which currently makes the Romans weaker than they should be). I just wish it had the same relevance with other factions (but I have no precise idea on how to change that).

Battering rams limited to 4 for 0-200 pop? Battering rams limited to 6 for 200 and infinite pop? No limit. I fully support Sighvatr on this. How should group bonus work? I guess there would be no need for group bonus once formations are implemented. But maybe it could be interesting as a per-civ bonus (I'm thinking about the Celts.) More phases (in the (far) future)? I think it would require a colossal amount of work (art, historical accuracy, balancing, general game design...), and I don't see any significant benefit for this. The french wikipedia mentions that in Carthage, the gallic mercenaries fought very individually and were used mainly as shock troops by Hannibal, who was unable to make them fight in order and follow formations. Impressing and weakening the enemy by launching risky attack was the biggest honor for them, so they loyalty didn't decrease despite their heavy losses.