alpha123

Most likely we're going to reduce their range and change the crenellations upgrade to something like 1.4x arrows instead of 2x. Oh, and also foundations will probably be unattackable or hidden until they start being built. Currently you have to build towers very far back to prevent enemy towers from shooting down their foundations before you start building.

#1 most effective strategy: tower pushes. Get the crenellations upgrade, it's highly effective. Particularly as Iberians (who have very strong towers), tower pushing is a very difficult strategy to counter in this game. Also, just spamming ranged units tends to be quite effective (although not as much as it used to be, and these days you'll want to have some spearmen in front to protect from enemy melee cavalry). As for tactics, kiting tends to be pretty effective with skirmishers (particularly Macedonian ones, but really all of them) as they can outrun most non-cavalry units pretty easily. If you have a high APM, assign 5 or so of your ranged units to every one of the enemy's. 5 is usually enough to take out an enemy unit pretty quickly, and once you outnumber the enemy they'll be forced to retreat (having an advantage in numbers is very important in this game). This mainly relies on simply being faster than your opponent, but it works excellently against the AI which has no battle-level rules (it just marches units into your base ). As for elephant civs, I'm starting to learn you need to back your elephants up with ~10 priests, otherwise they go down quickly. Be sure to take out any enemy skirmishers quicky, as those things just murder elephants. Last tactic: try to only fight where you're likely to win. Namely, under cover of friendly garrisoned towers and fortresses, or when you have a clear advantage. Try not to fight near enemy towers or fortresses until you can use siege to take them down. Those are just the things that popped into my head (I play multiplayer pretty often and reasonably competitively). I'll think of some more later.

My vote is definitely for exponential armor, mostly because IMO the behavior of percentage armor and techs is definitely not desirable. It's really not at all difficult to grasp (I do not have a particularly high math education (yet...) but I understood it just fine).

I must say this sounds very cool. Best of luck to you agapsguy! Definitely feel free to ask on IRC. The AI code really isn't well documented at the moment. :/

Aside from crashing the game in addition to leveling the player's civilization, what purpose would that serve?

It wouldn't need to develop it's economy, it could just spawn X units when it's time to send the next wave. I suppose they could just take out its CC or something (it wouldn't have to build any extra buildings, it could just spawn units from nothing). But presumably they're playing it for a little defensive action, so that's not much of a problem IMO. Attack-move works great BTW, thank you!

This is really cool. However, shouldn't this be possible with just a regular AI? The AI could wait for 8 minutes, then attack every 3 minutes (I believe it's already possible for the AI to spawn free units instantly, but I'm not sure about that) and resign after 12 attacks.

Er, good point. But Town Phase is probably too early for them to have stone walls, and their non-palisade wood walls would be too strong for Village Phase. Perhaps consider this scheme: Like most other civs, they have palisades in Village Phase. In Town Phase, they get more powerful wooden walls (a bit like the Celtic walls, but less sturdy). In City Phase, a technology is unlocked that, when researched, allows them to also build stone walls, like most civs get in Town Phase. This sort of simulates the process with which they actually got stone walls. So they'd actually have 3 types of walls, but they'd get real stone walls much later than most civs (or perhaps not at all, if the player is more offensive and doesn't bother to research the stone wall technology).

For human players weaker than the AI, civ balance doesn't really matter much. I'd go with that then. Ashkhadaga does seem consistent with current ranged cavalry (Ashwarohi) and swordsmen (Khadagdhari). They probably didn't call their cavalry swordsmen simply "sword horse" though. I'll see if I can find some sources or something. Currently though, Laghu Aśvānīka is probably our best bet.

Perhaps already-built walls wouldn't change at all (still be wood) but now stone walls would also be unlocked?

Ashkhadaga? I don't speak Sanskrit, but I think that means something along the lines of "sword-horse." (Using some online translators; may not be accurate. Where'd the existing names come from?) Their swordsman is so versatile already I'm a little hesitant to give him a bonus vs siege, so I'd prefer women have the bonus.

Meh, that doesn't really make a difference. How does that make them overpowered? A little mobile economy using the worker elephant is pretty nice in the early game, but in the middle and late game you need buildings for defense. That alone would help quite a lot with their underpoweredness. Another interesting thing would be making elephants bonused against siege equipment, and make them less vulnerable to skirmishers. I think simply adding a cavalry swordsman would go a long way (and is still pretty historically accurate, right?). You might want to consider something similar for the Spartans, although their champion? swordsman can fulfill most of the roles of cavalry (despite not being bonused against siege).

As someone who used to play the Mauryans almost all the time against decent players (and still do from time-to-time), they definitely aren't OP. In fact, I'd actually say they're somewhat underpowered. Mostly the lack of siege and melee cavalry kills them. Elephants are very efficient siege engines when massed and well covered, but a handful of skirmishers and swordsmen takes out quite a few elephants easily. Regular siege is much harder to kill. Also, they have no melee cavalry to counter enemy siege, and elephants are too expensive and slow to be particularly useful against enemy siege (and again, are taken out pretty easily). The lack of melee cavalry also means they don't have anything to counter slingers, which destroy an army of archers (slingers are bonused 2x vs all ranged units). Slingers are only effectively counterable with melee cavalry. Ranged cav is utterly useless.

Oh, you discovered the siege tower thing? And it only counts as one garrison slot... you could conceivably load a ship up with 20 towers, each filled with 20 units.... This actually came up on IRC today, and the verdict was it was overlooked and elephants should be transportable by ship.

Elephants can do a lot of damage as long as the enemy doesn't know how to defend against them. Unfortunately, if they do, 10 elephants go down very easily. Just ask alkazar. Elephants definitely should cost 3 pop. I'm quite surprised they don't. Perhaps put their speed back to 7 but adjust the pop and the train speed (which seems much too fast right now). According to quantumstate's balance tester thingy, they're actually the strongest (although they don't have very good range). However, archers are not very effective against elephants anyway. Skirmishers and swordsmen are, both of whom are bonused against elephants.

I like the slinger changes, although I haven't tested them yet, it seems like they should definitely help. I'm a little worried about the war elephant changes -- they get taken down by a handful of skirmishers too easily already. :/ AFAIK, nobody has ever complained about elephants being overpowered: usually the opposite.

For that reason it couldn't be a permanent change, just a temporary one until enough playtesting is done to figure out what to do about slingers (which unfortunately could take a while). I know that, but since the team is trying to push to 1.0 as fast as possible, someone's going to have to make balance changes at some point, the sooner the better. In fact, at this stage, I'd say balance is the second most important thing next to performance. I do realize that's only my opinion which probably few other people share however. Moving slingers around is more of just a temporary fix, once slingers are balanced, it would probably be reverted. I was thinking 1.75x max vs all infantry (more likely 1.5x), but I rather like the idea of splitting it up between melee and ranged. Maybe 1.75x vs ranged infantry (who would be lightly armored and vulnerable to rocks) and 1.25x vs melee infantry (who would be much better armored).

Skirmishers are as basic as slingers. Athens has skirmishers in town phase (albeit mercenaries, which would probably have to change). No, it's not. Tackling the root problem requires some thinking about balance, which no one except TheMista seems willing to do, and some playtesting. Swapping the phases of Athenian slingers and skirmishers doesn't require either of those. I agree with both of those suggestions, however their bonus should also be reduced. 2x vs all infantry is a bit high, especially combined with their very fast fire rate.

+1 to removing slingers from the Athenians until Town Phase. At least until slingers are properly balanced, which needs to happen ASAP anyway, it's a huge problem. It's no fun playing against an Athenian player who knows what he's doing (i.e. spam slingers and attack around 3:00-4:00).

I'm willing to work on this next (and in fact have already started). I'm doing the white area, and staying within the Celt-Roman theme.

I suggest opening the console (hit ` or F8 or something), which contains a log of the messages.

I'm going to implement infinite farms with diminishing returns, non-dependent on terrain (although that could be added later). I expect I could finish that by this summer (July?), but it depends how busy I am (school and whatnot). Hopefully it won't take me nearly that long though. Also, I'd prefer to wait until the Git migration is finished before I work on this. This is really more to remind historicbruno, but #9 should definitely be finished before 1.0. It no longer applies cleanly to the latest SVN, but it won't be hard to update (I might do that).

Definitely try the Starting Economy Walkthrough. It's exactly the kind of "put 4 on food, next 4 on wood" thing you were looking for. It was written by the legendary quantumstate (the guy who pwned me in that multiplayer game ), who's probably the best player around (except when TheMista shows up). He knows what he's doing.

I'd be up for this. I don't think my Atlas skillz are quite up to Yodaspirine and idanwin's (both of you are excellent map designers!) but I've been doing some stuff lately that looks pretty good (IMO ).

I would certainly be up for that, the only problem would be lag. Even if the recording doesn't contribute to the game much, a really laggy game isn't that much fun to watch. :/