alpha123

If the person controlling the army really wants to use roads, then they can just walk their units down the road. Personally I like to move my armies around in a slightly roundabout way to attack, so that the enemy doesn't see it coming. Also the new pathfinder uses the JPS algorithm, which only supports uniform-cost grids (but is crazy fast). This means that roads will have the same cost to travel over as mountains, which seems a little weird but works just fine in practice.

I implemented some of these: Stop hotkey (#1870) Location hotkeys (#1882) A hotkey to cycle through heroes (#1802) (Malcom did all the real work on this one, I just added the hotkey.) Based on the hero hotkey I was able to quickly implement hotkeys for cycling through civ centers, barracks, and fortresses. Let me know if you think other buildings should have hotkeys. Also, currently CCs are bound to J, barracks to K, and fortresses to L, which are completely arbitrary and I'm not really fond of. If you have other ideas please let me know.

+1 The new pathfinder will improve them dramatically, but that will only help with movement. Their actual gameplay mechanics are still pretty bad for a 1.0.

Title screen illustrations?

LOL I agree with zoot though. Simple, clear American English is probably what we want (i.e. not New York English).

These are absolutely beautiful LordGood. I'm really NOT an artist (I'm a programmer... pretty much the exact opposite...) but they seem to be too dark, which looks good at the size you're displaying them, but I think it might make it difficult to make out at 40x40. Minor nitpick: back then purple was a highly expensive dye and thus reserved for royalty/wealth, so the purple clothes on the woman is inaccurate.

Either: Attack-move there, although that's not always what you want. Force attack there (Ctrl+Alt+right click). I haven't actually tested to see if this works though. Or become Korean and have really accurate clicks.

This approach works both ways, and it's also more general than just in the bounding box (although that's undoubtedly the most common use). Shift+Alt+. (idle workers) or Shift+Alt+, (idle fighters). You currently do have to Ctrl+click them to deselect, but I can't think of a nice way to do that with hotkeys. I'd prefer a more general solution, but having a general and yet fast to use solution is difficult. Select weakened units would be great, especially with the restrict selection key (e.g. 1 Ctrl+Shift+w to select all weakened units in group 1 (although selected weakened probably wouldn't be bound to W, but you get the point)). . selects an idle worker and , selects an idle fighter. Citizen soldiers are included in both of these, naturally. The cool part is that they work with Alt, which is the generic "select all" key. But that selects all of them across the map, and currently there's no way to just select idles in a certain area (more useful, IMO, than selecting them on the whole map). I believe that's Alt+triple-click, and yeah, you could select all veterans that way. But first you'd have to find one veteran (so that you could triple-click him), which may be a bit challenging.

See http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14516 I'm also in favor of this idea, but perhaps it belongs in Part 2 so we can get the details sorted out a bit better. Also, it really depends on proper formations and perhaps larger numbers of units than 300.

I've used 6 barracks without running out of resources; it's really not that hard. Especially since on Hard difficulty, since it gets a +33% resource bonus.

I got this on the latest SVN version (r13286) today: http://i.imgur.com/AubebTG.jpg I was playing with my brother against one Hard AegisBot (yellow) and one Very Hard AegisBot (green). There was an out-of-sync error as well (about 1/4 of the way through the game -- we kept playing anyway ), but I don't know if the AI caused that or some other factor (doubtful; we were both on the same SVN version).

This is kinda what citizen soldiers are supposed to be, I think. I personally do like the idea of special buildings on some maps where you could recruit natives (who might not be from your civ) though.

I never knew you made the Celtic ships. They're definitely my favorites. Also, you know that trebuchet has to make it into Atlas, right? You can't just taunt us with it you know.

I'd be okay with that. So they could garrison 40, but only have 20 arrows? I actually consider the 300W barracks to be an advantage. By the time I reach town phase I have a strong wood economy built up, so it's not much of a problem. The advantage, even, is that I can pop 3 barracks up pretty quickly, whereas I can only do 1 or 2 for other civs before I have to start mining stone. Also, I can use that 300 stone to go toward an expansion, so I only have to mine 200 more stone instead of 350 or a full 500.

Nope, not yet. My approach adds a great deal of flexibility in addition to that, though. Thank you, that's quite a nice list.

The problem is that army camps hold too MANY troops. 40 is a bit of an arrow fest; nothing can really approach the camp without being shot down. Nobody has the time to build a fort like that. It would be quite powerful if you could -- 130 arrows is a bit extreme.

I don't plan to get rid of WASD any time soon. That would be a bit too much of a radical departure, I think. I don't use WASD or the arrow keys often though. I don't move the camera much -- too slow -- except by clicking on the minimap. When I do move the camera, it's with the middle mouse. About different keyboard layouts: As far as I understand, we just cater to QWERTY by default, but the keys are completely configurable so that's a non-issue. Eventually there will be a pretty GUI in-game for configuring keys. A hotkey proposal I'd like to bounce off you guys: A "restrict selection" hotkey (I thought bound to Ctrl+Shift, but that doesn't matter). Here's how it would work: Say you just exhausted a metal mine near your main, so there are lots of other workers there. You'd like to just select the idle ones that finished mining. You could, of course, just Shift+click them all manually, but depending on how many miners you have (> 5) that is less than optimal. Here's how you'd do it with restrict selection: Press Alt+. to select all idle workers. Ctrl+Shift+left drag to restrict the selection to the boxed area. You could also do it in the other order: Left drag over the area containing the idles. Ctrl+Shift+. to restrict the selection to idle workers. As another example, to select all idle members of group 2 (for me this is my building group in the early game): Alt+. to select all idles. Ctrl+Shift+2 to restrict the selection to members of group 2. Again this is also possible the other way. I could personally see this being an extremely useful hotkey, but I'd like some more opinions.

Don't expect to remain impressed. Performance is currently horrible (the main thing keeping it alpha right now). Multiplayer is usually reasonably playable (although anything more than 2v2 can be extremely laggy late game), and single player will be sped up considerably in alpha 13, but expect some/considerable lag in every game.

That's certainly an interesting idea. I can't tell if I like this. I'll consider it, but currently the problem can be solved by fast accurate clicking (which you should be doing anyway). Don't draw massive boxes, draw little ones or click 5 individual units. It's not as slow as you might expect. Anyway, if I find the time I'll look at this, but I think other hotkeys have priority. EDIT: I decided I do quite like this idea. I did a little bit of research and it looks like SDL can tell the numpad keys apart from their non-numpad equivalents pretty easily, so this should be trivial to implement. H is already taken for resetting the camera. Why H, I have no idea. Maybe I'll move reset camera to R and stop to H. Perfect. I like this, although the problem is I'd like to use zxcvbnm for buildings (like for training units). :/

Thanks, I was unaware of that. In that case I'll probably use zxcvbnm like for unit training. We do have quite a lot of buildings for some civs though (I'm looking at you, Carthage.) Maybe Shift+zxcvbnm for any over M. I know, and I will probably personally remap stop to S anyway. (I generally don't move the map much with WASD and I use stop a lot.) I'm just trying to think of something else that makes sense. Maybe Ctrl+s or something.

This game is sorely lacking in hotkeys, and I've decided to fix that a bit and implement a few hotkeys. Currently on my list: Building hotkeys, e.g. with a unit selected, press b and then f to build a farm Hotkeys for researching techs, e.g. press r and then z-m to research a tech (maybe, I'm not sure if this needs a hotkey, also I'm not entirely sure how it might work -- the example above is just one idea) A stop hotkey. I'm not sure what to bind this to by default, since S is already taken for camera movement. Location hotkeys, e.g. press Shift+F2 to mark a location, and press F2 to warp back there immediately. Please put your suggestions for hotkeys in this thread, and I'll consider implementing them.

Consider looking at the minimap.

Neither, you just type the command and arguments at your terminal and things happen. That sounds quite interesting. Mine simply uses the built-in classes in the entity XML files, yours sounds like it allows for more fine-grained changes.

See ticket #1757. (I will fix the bugs in that one someday. )

This could all be done, although you might have to dig into the engine code a bit, all this could be accomplished without too much effort. In particular the last item on your list is possible right now, and the second one is probably possible right now. The game does currently support flying units in a rather rudimentary (helicopters were pretty rare in 0 A.D.'s timeframe ) but functional manner. See the test PF-51 Mustang unit in the Atlas editor for an example.