alpha123

No downloads are working right now, as the server they are hosted on is currently down. It's been having a lot of trouble lately.

Starcraft refutes all your points. In 1v1 each race does not have an advantage over the other, and there's no reason we can't do that. It is certain possible to balance two civs perfectly without them being identical. See Starcraft again. Their races are much more different from each other than are civs are, so it should actually be considerably easier for us to do that.

The server that Trac is on is currently down. It will be back up sooner or later.

It would take quite a while to chop it down. Any half-decent player would simply find another place for the fortress. Maybe the solution is to allow you to delete Gaia entities in your territory. I'm not really thrilled about that idea, but I think people probably would burn down a small patch of forest so that they could put a building foundation there. No-attack timers are for noobs who probably have more important things to worry about than farming efficiency anyway. Only playtesting will tell, but I don't think anyone wants to implement such a feature, especially not while farms are the only source of food.

Exactly. A Mauryan player isn't going to go into a spearmen fight against Greeks... that would be a bad idea. Instead they might use elephants to trample the spearmen, and lots of archers attacking from a distance. Some civs will be stronger in some areas than others, obviously. That's what makes the game interesting. But overall they will be the same strength. I will not settle for less.

I don't really like that idea. First: unnecessary micro: you have to constantly check the berries and pull your units away if they get low. I consider myself more of a micro player and I wouldn't like this. Second: realism... you don't eat the bush. Even if you gather all the berries on it they'll grow back next season.

That sounds awesome idanwin! If you make some nice maps I could modify the AI a bit for you (tell the story through chat messages, move a few units around, etc).

Nope, I'm not going to admit that. All civs will the be same strength and none of them will be better or worse against specific other civs. Different civs will just have different strategies that they work better with (e.g. Iberians will be more suited to guerrilla warfare and less suited to Greek phalanx type stuff).

Yeah, it would be for all food.fruit sources. They might have different regeneration rates though. Mythos suggested that. I'm open to it. We can tweak some values here and there to see what the best combination of delay and rate is. No. I'm not even sure if the engine supports this, but that's hitting that point where too much realism hurts gameplay. See that's the thing, that's not going to happen unless the bonus is HUGE. OK, you go expand to a fertile valley, spend a lot of money and time on a CC, while I'll be happily at home farming less efficiently and then destroy you. I think we could combine them. Makes them less micro-intensive (you don't have to keep replanting them). I was trying to figure out the details how planting orchards would work. Would there be a special building that grows orchards near it? Would regular units be able to plant orchards? Would they have a time to grow? We're going to have to explore one or more (probably both) of planting and regeneration for food.fruit to be a viable food source (which IMO it should be).

1) Open a Command Prompt window. 2) Type: cd "path o\0ad\binaries\system" replacing path o\0ad with wherever you downloaded the SVN version to and press Enter. 3) Your screen should now look like this. 4) Type pyrogenesis.exe -mod=somemod replacing somemod with the mod you want to run and press Enter. 5) ??? 6) profit

Currently that's pretty far from the truth; farms are the early and mid game food source, and 99% of the time the late game food source unless the player decides to use corrals, which currently are only viable late game and even then it's kind of iffy. Personally I think all food sources should be viable at all stages of the game. I actually like that better than the food.grain thing. Less confusing and easier to display in the UI. OTOH, it doesn't actually solve the problem of farms near a CC -- the player could build a farmstead and then build a farm near the CC regardless. I was the guy who came up with the food.grain thing along with Mythos -- I think it's probably the easiest way to solve this problem, but really it's just an ad hoc way of requiring a farmstead for farms. We might as well just do that. Another idea I was toying around with is making berries regenerate food -- this is slightly more realistic (berries regrow -- you don't eat the whole bush ) and also makes berries viable as a food source for longer. The berry gather rate would have to be reduced to compensate, and the regeneration rate would be pretty slow (1 food every 10 seconds or something) although we could have techs to speed it up.

You bring up a good point. We're trying to think of ways to make corrals and bushes viable sources of food though, that should solve this. They'd require more micromanagement, but less pop and less room.

LOL It actually took me a second to get this one. The bashing on AoEO and the modelling in prison stuff made me laugh. Also now that I notice it all the crimes they got you for are pretty hilarious.

Wow, that looks great idanwin! Congratulations! Could you add a unit for scale? It looks a little small to me.

quantumstate explained it very well, but I'd like to add: The cost of food is not the cost of the farm but rather the time it takes to gather it. Really, 100 wood for every 2000 food is NOTHING, especially given that wood is so easy to gather. It's also the pop that it takes to farm; I tend to have 30-40 women farming, which takes away significantly from the size of my army. Also, with the suggested implementation, the number of workers is limited to 5 and the optimal efficiency is 2-3 workers. That means you'll have to defend a very large area.

They'll be removed if the patch in #1318 gets merged. Out of curiosity, why do you prefer reseeding?

Those seem like very nice features that would be nice in the normal game. However the team did decide to go with infinite farms instead of reseeding farms (see #1318), but the other ones would be great. It would be nice if the keeping previous orders applied to citizen soldiers as well as women, or preferably if there was just a general "back to work" button on females and citizen soldiers. That way you could have some soldiers go out to defend against a raid and then immediately go back to what they were doing. The escorting thing sounds great, especially if it works for example having a priest guard a hero or some citizen soldiers guard and repair a ram whenever it gets damaged. But anyway: I think I'll try the defense mod; it sounds quite fun.

That's absolutely beautiful LordGood! Exactly what I want to see in a unit portrait. One of these days Zaggy is supposed to make a rainbow-farting unicorn unit....

Actually, the remaining problem isn't really the last remaining ticket (#1881, IIRC) but rather that AegisBot breaks saved games. Tell them, "when it's ready."

I'd guess around next week, hopefully at the latest. Slightly, thanks to sbte's patches. The overwhelming majority of the lag is from the pathfinder however, and the new one is not finished yet.

Conceivably for releases we could compile regular JS to asm.js. A JS->asm.js compiler doesn't yet exist, but I'm willing to bet one will pop up sooner or later. That may actually not be that bad of an idea; it could speed up the GUI and maybe some other stuff. Also I think they're planning to make the asm.js -> C++ bridge cheaper, so all our mixed JS/C++ components would have less overhead.

JPS (the algorithm the new pathfinder uses) only supports uniform-cost maps, so this isn't possible with the new pathfinder (although it is possible with the current pathfinder). @Mythos_Ruler: Your post gave me an interesting idea: what if formations could be combined? e.g. you have a phalanx of spearmen and a line of skirmishers, you could combine the phalanx and the line into a box formation which would keep its component formations. Whenever you moved all of those units, the skirmishers would move in a line behind the spearmen.

Mythos gave them a cavalry swordsmen in SVN fairly recently, and that has gone a long way (they can at least now counter enemy siege), but they're still regarded as slightly underpowered by the core multiplayer community because they only have elephants for siege, which are expensive and still go down rather easily.

The thing is thanks to WASD and Z-M for training we don't really have all that many available. I think I'll move location hotkeys off UIOP though, that should open enough spots, although they may be pretty arbitrary. They already can. All the hotkeys are in the config file. Also I got building hotkeys working great for all the standard buildings, I just need to add some for special buildings.

The horse looks a little tired or something to me. Perhaps the head should be a little higher. Otherwise, wow, that's fantastic. Also, I smell an easter egg with that unicorn.