alpha123

I have a patch for exponential armor at #1908. It implements the formula and makes a couple of GUI changes to show both the armor level and the percent reduction. It does not change any unit stats though, so if you do test it, expect some of the stats to be a little weird (mostly that everything has slightly higher armor than it should).

I've just noticed this a few times. It only seems to happen with single units, never with units in formation.

Actually, multiplayer over the internet is extremely playable, more so than single player. I encourage you to hop on #0ad sometime. The network lag isn't bad at all (well, there are some players with bad internet connections, but that's few and far between). Just curious, what kind of computer are you on? My 4-year-old desktop handles LAN games (and internet games, and even single player games) just fine, especially in the start of the game. In the mid-game there is a slight lag, and late game can get unplayably laggy, but it's far from the whole game being uplayable. Fortunately, as others have pointed out, we have different teams for content and programming. Actually, since the programming (including optimization) is going to take a few more alpha releases, the art team decided to add the Ptolemies. I think we've definitely got a manageable feature set right now. The game is not particularly feature-packed, programming wise (we do have quite a lot of awesome art, but the artists have manged to keep up just fine). Well... all the civs are finished so I'm not really sure what your point is. If you mean balance stuff, our civs are reasonably similar so it's not going to be that much work. Pretty great management, actually. You can talk to them on the IRC dev channel. We will probably release some more civs in DLC packs (Seleucids?), but since all the current civs are finished I don't think anyone wants to throw away that work. As great as our artists are, I don't really want them solving the performance issues... xP The civs are surprisingly reasonably balanced already. I play multiplayer at a reasonably decent level, and all the civs are pretty well represented (except maybe Celts, they're slightly underpowered). So at least from that we know there isn't one civ that is grossly OP, or vice versa.

I think this was rejected on the basis of unnecessary micromanagement. I would be OK with it as long as you could still build over the ruins (just losing all the potential resources), but I do prefer automatic looting.

I agree. I think corrals should be less efficient than farms, but since they require no pop to operate (we're assuming proper corrals, not the current one) it opens up more army space. Fruit should be very efficient, requiring more pop than corrals but less than farms, but also pretty micro-intensive. Farms should probably be the common food choice: reasonably efficient and easy to use (since they'll be infinite), but take up a lot of space and easy to raid. So each food source will have trade offs. Ideally you would use more than one food source, and the tech tree should reflect this, but it should also be possible to specialize in one (e.g. use almost entirely corrals if you're a very macro player, thus freeing up a lot of pop for your army). I'm not really sure where fishing falls into this, other than that it's not viable right now simply because maps don't have enough fish, and that needs to be fixed. I think fishing should be a viable supplementary food source, although if there was a civ that was known to fish a lot, perhaps they could use it as a primary one. Unfortunately, it only seems that way, since the gather rate is fast, but in reality since it costs 50 food for each sheep, and they only harvest 100 food, it's not that effective. It requires a lot of food to get started, and even then you're not making that much. Not even TheMista used corrals, and his micro was insane.

Oh, right, sorry. That won't be particularly useful though because you'll still have to manually task villagers to build the farms, right? You DO know that there were great civilizations who didn't farm, right? Ever heard of hunter-gatherers? Really, why is that so ridiculous? 1) That's a bit of a fallacy, appealing to other people who definitely aren't even authorities on game design, especially when you don't give their reasoning, and 2) I fail to see how extra options which have strategic implications are not good for gameplay. "Civic center cannot be built on farmland" tooltip would be enough, I think. Also... why would the map designer put so much farmland there isn't room for CCs? o_O

Given that the Jewish Temple was actually destroyed -- twice -- I don't think too many people would have a problem with that. It should be very hard to destroy though. Personally I think it would be VERY cool to see Hebrews in this game. I'm not Hebrew myself, but I'm very interested in their culture and history.

It's already been decided that auto-seed is out. We'll have actual infinite farms. Then... don't build farms around your CC? No need to force that preference on other people. I do think we should encourage building farms near a farmstead and not a CC though. As for the rest of your post... I think you forgot this is a game. We're going for good gameplay, not 100% realism. Being totally realistic is not good for gameplay. That's pretty much exactly my thoughts. Different methods would have different benefits. A micro player might go for maximum efficiency with bushes, while a macro player might use fields and corrals to have a steady income of food they don't have to manage. Corrals would take fewer population, opening up more for the army size, but fields might be more efficient. The tech tree should allow both specialization and generalizing. I agree farmsteads shouldn't shoot. They also probably shouldn't be able to garrison too many, given that the models are fairly small. Maybe 5-10 each, but you'll probably have multiple farmsteads, so I think it doesn't give too much advantage to CCs.

Yup. Formations are pretty useless right now, but they don't really function as they should. I'm probably going to add a no-formation formation (the units get orders individually instead of as a formation) in the mean time. Micro already matters quite a lot. Have you played multiplayer at all? On the other hand, the macro players (quantumstate and Oimat) tend to be beating the micro players (myself and alkazar) more often lately. I think it's perfectly possible to balance them. It might not be easy, but it's certainly possible and probably not too hard (especially given that a lot of our civs are similar, especially Hellenes and Celts) Try it sometime in multiplayer. It used to be pretty much unstoppable, but that's fixed now. We're definitely not narrowing the civs, but the other two definitely need to be done, and are being worked on.

I think that would help quite a bit. I really like the elephant, although the ear looks kind of like satin cloth or something.

Well, we're already going to have infinite farms, so that wouldn't really work. Yup, that's pretty much exactly the kind of thing we're going for. You'll have to decide which food source (corrals, farms, or fruit) that you'll go for. Each will have advantages and disadvantages. I'm not really sure where hunting and fishing fall into this. I think they should be supplementary food sources, instead of primary ones like milk/farm/fruit. I don't really like that idea, but I'm not entirely sure why. I feel like we should encourage farms to be built around farmsteads, instead of discouraging them being built around CCs. One really convenient thing about building around the CC is that in case of a raid, the CC can be garrisoned to save farmers. Maybe farmsteads should be garrisonable too, just to encourage them a bit more over CCs (in addition to some other solutions). But that's the exact problem we're trying to solve. Corrals and fruit should be viable primary food sources in the late game. A lot of people agree there need to be a lot more bushes and fruit trees on the maps. I don't know why you think it would spoil the realism of the game. Wouldn't it add to it? Most locations have more than one clump of 5 berry bushes.

Oh, sorry. I didn't know that. I thought Philip hosted them directly. Never mind in that case.

1 population is also very cheap. You have 300 population, 50 dogs is nothing. I don't max out every game and I'm a fairly decent player (I'm more of a micro player though, but still), so really I think it's pretty viable to have a lot of dogs. The problem is they get taken down before they do any damage. Yes they should go down easily, but not so easily that they don't do anything. I like that idea. Each kennel could maybe hold 10 or 20 dogs. However I don't think the engine supports multiple types of population (humans -> houses / dogs -> kennels).

Trac goes down a lot. If you think it's down, it probably is. :| Normally just wait a little while and it will come back up.

Dogs are useless currently; they get taken down by anything with a ranged attack well before they can do any damage. Also 100 food is really cheap.

That's an interesting idea. Currently if you do that it won't focus on anything on double-click, but I suppose it could focus on the entity it's garrisoned in.

Right, because you're an expert on that. Seriously, check your graphics drivers. The game isn't laggy at all at the start, unless you're either on a really old computer or have really bad drivers.

Well that's not good. Perhaps something actually is messed up. I haven't experienced such a problem at all however, from Alpha 10 to Alpha 13 (actually 13 feels faster, probably thanks to sbte's work). Are you using up-to-date graphics drivers?

Thanks for finding this. I attached a fix to #1802. Let me know if you find any more problems (it should be pretty solid, garrisoning was about the one thing I didn't test....).

binaries/data/mods/public/simulation/templates/units/maur_hero_ashoka.xml The Atlas paths are just the template paths without the binaries/data/mods/public/simulation/templates/ prefix.

I suspect a lot of that video was recorded without any AIs by someone on a fast computer. I'm not sure what you mean by "smooth" though. What frame rates are you getting? In the early game it is very "smooth" even on my relatively old computer. The lag only hits late game.

lol. That poor Terran player. Any strategy works against a sufficiently noobish opponent though. You could definitely get Colossi in the time it takes to mass marines. You just have to scout, notice that it's likely the opponent will go marines, you'll have time. Now if they catch you by surprise maybe you don't have stuff to counter. That's why collecting intelligence on the enemy is so important in RTS games.

Zoot's completely correct, hence the "alpha" title. I'd just like to point out that mostly the bottlenecks are CPU-bound, not GPU-bound. Pathfinding is our largest bottleneck and that's entirely CPU. Disabling some graphics settings will help some (the graphics stuff hasn't been well optimized, but it's still reasonably fast), but still expect a lot of lag even if you do.

Wow, that's very cool. I would probably make it a bit bigger and blink faster. But you're definitely on the right track. That seems like a fairly bit issue, but I have no idea how to solve it. Yes, it probably should scale to the size of the attack, but oddly enough I don't think that's all that critical, although it would be very nice to have.

Right. It's supposed to be easier to do some strategies than others. Our Celtic civs are going to be a whole lot easier to pull off hit-and-run tactics with than the Spartans, for example, while Romans can besiege a large area and starve the opponent out of resources much more easily than a Mauryan player. Let me know how that goes. If you're playing a reasonably competent Terran, he'll just lift up and move to the natural... a cannon rush basically only works on Protoss (just because they can do it also doesn't mean they will). I'm also OK with some civs being more open cheesy tactics like that. Right, because Psi Storm and Colossi won't work at all in that situation... also if you scout and see the Zerg going Roach/hydra, you might want to build something other than marine/marauder. Again, really it comes down to strategy and not simply massing a few units that are extremely good against the enemy civ. Of course some units should be more useful against others. For example, an Athenian player could scout and see that his opponent is going for massed cavalry, then he should start training a lot of spearmen. However, massed spearmen shouldn't be good against EVERYTHING the Persian player can throw at him.