desyfer

I found the tooltips to be quite confusing as a new player, they're also pretty huge; so much blank space! The information which is of most use is definitely the cost, followed by counters/is countered by. Stats are only of use to more experienced players, and we can possibly assume that a)they're not going to factor in in-game decision making, and b)experienced players won't need things spelt out for them. I'd suggest something the following: Qeset (Mauritanian Archer) [F]50. . . [W]40. . . [P]1 Health: 90 . . . Armour: 3/2/3 Attack: 20r . . . Speed: 8.5/22.25 + Swordsmen(2x), Cav. Spearmen(1.5x) - Cav. Swordsmen, Cav. Skirmishers Grouping unit costs with the name allows new players to instantly see unit cost without spending precious seconds searching around the tooltip. 'Cost' marker is not needed as it's quite obvious when we have the icons, and stops the tooltip looking like a long list of stats Huge bit of blank space follows health. Armour is also a defensive stat so no reason they can't be shared. Hack pierce and crush will mean nothing to new players; who are better off looking at the counter/countered by section, so might aswell save the space and group them together. "Ranged attack" is too long. I think everybody knows that archers have ranged attacks. Unless there are plans for 2 types of attack by archers in the future? As a new player, I'm not sure of diff. in-game between walk and run, and even if I did, it wouldn't factor in my in-game decision making. Finally, counters and countered by is very wordy. A plus and minus, accompanied with red and green font does the same job much clearer. "vs." takes up too much space, and seperates the information too much; making it unclear. Where can I find the code relating to this stuff? I'd love to give it a look over and play around with it a bit.

Hey Enrique, thanks for taking the time to respond. Sorry for the confusion. By 'hero' I meant the player. Though after testing out a few other maps I've realised that you don't always start on top of a mini-mountain. Guess I just got (un)lucky... Thanks for letting me know about Q and E; definitely something new for me, and allowed me to find a stone-mine tucked away behind some trees. I gave the paths another try; they work as you said. Before I was doing 'shift-rightclick' 'shift-rightclick' 'shift-rigtclick' and then 'rightclick' (without shift) to finalise the path. It turned out that the final rightclick without shift was cancelling everything. Is there any talk on text updates appearing when something happens? When you have a big operation going on with a few civic centres, planning attacks, etc it's easy to lose track of when farms run out, buildings have been built, etc. I do realise there are sounds, but they can easily be drowned out by the music, and simply by not knowing what they mean! 2 other things I've wondered: The requirements of upgrading to a town from a village seem a little superficial. I think there's only 4 buildings available at that time, and I need to build all 4 of them in order to upgrade. The same when upgrading to a city. It would be ok, but the cattle ranch, temple and rotary mill seem pretty useless for me, and I'm only building them just to do the upgrade. Maybe upgrading could be determined by population + resources? 25villagers + 500wood and food = town, then 75 villagers + 1000wood,stone,food = city. The games are getting better and better though. My only concern now is that perhaps the enemy seems a little too passive. This is confirmed by the enemy's map discovery when I finish the game - maybe about 30 or 40% compared to my 80+%. I'll join the IRC. Will look forward to getting taught a lesson or 2 online! oh, and don't worry about the spelling and grammar! It's absolutely fine!

Gave the game a proper spin today. Think I spent a little too long looking at new features and trying to remind myself what's what, as when I eventually launched an 'attack' the AI totally caned me. I had the 'difficult' bots on though. Nonetheless, on next boot, I'll be seeking vegenance. First off, the game really looks beautiful. I love how it feels I have freedom on the map as opposed to AOE2 where. every. thing. was. on. a. grid. At the same time, I feel like I'm back in an old-skool RTS game where I know what's what, without trying to be too clever. Getting a little more in depth, a few things I noticed, which might be of use, or not: 1: Does hero always start on raised terrain? Second game in. First on the default scenario, second on skirmish - highlands map. Due to the zoom (especially on a laptop), it makes clicking units further away a little difficult as camera defaults to zoomed out due to terrain differences. Additionally, it feels too much of an artificial safe-haven - I want to build my own defenses and have a new challenge with terrain every time! 2: Sheep. With 50 cost for 100 return, is it really worth it? Especially given I need a whole new building for it (and IIRC I can't use this building as a drop off for farms when sheep run out). What's the benefits of killing sheep as opposed to knocking out farms? Additionally, would it be possible to 'tag' the sheep like in AOE, possibly with the dog, to send them back to base? That way I can use dog as a scout (not sure how useful he is actually, he got killed early on) who can gather food resources at same time. 3: Is it possible to set a path for the scout? I tried shift to no avail. I want to send him on a circle around base, but it's too much micromanagement to do this in early stages, and ended up just sending him to 4 corners of map. 4: Think I love the territory feature. What happens when my territory eventually meets villains? Do I just have to knock down his civic centre to allow further expansion? I can imagine the map in later stages will look great when everything's carved up and people are fighting over bits of map for territory. Much better than TC in AOE which had little 'real' value on the map bar being a fancy lumbercamp,etc. Again, maybe this already happens, but if it'd be possible for terrains to overlap for 10 tiles or so at borders, that could lead to some interesting development (people trying to knock out and defend towers, etc to get that stone mine). 5: Metal and stone looks very similar. Maybe that changes with replays however. And on the topic of resources, I've always wondered where - in game - all these ficticious resources are held? We have caps on population, would it be too complex if farmhouses gave +500 max food capacity, banks gave +500 metal capacity, etc? This way, we also need to make sure we defend our 'little' buildings to avoid being plundered. In terms of civs, 'more civilised' civs would be likely to hoard, whereas the 'barbarian' civs could be constructed to raid. 6: Being new to the game, I wasn't really sure which pictures represented what on the hud. Therefore I often made mistakes. It took me some time to realise that right clicking canceled the build. I'm not sure about others, but for me, 'escape' was my instinctive choice to cancel build. 7: Is there any benefit to being able to rotate buildings? I know I can do it, but it doesn't seem like there's any point to it. (Unless I can rotate map?!) Could entrances to buildings be drop points? Would mean rotating build towards resource saves a tile of travel. 8: Do we need to see what upgrades are available in the next age? Surely that's the excitement of upgrading to a new age for a new player? Also, for a new player, it's a little difficult to see what techs are avaialble now, and which later. Must've spend a fair bit of time checking around buildings to see what could be upgraded, and there always seemed to be something there. 9: I feel a little cut off during the game. I received no visits from villains' scouts, and had no idea about the progress of the enemy. Of course, the latter is realistic, but for a newbie, I had no idea if I'm getting left behind. Scouts without paths are on suicide missions, and I think they retaliate to attacks by default, which makes that unfavourable. Could we have updates on when the others advance an age? Maybe on upgrade a 'messenger' could be sent out to deliver the news to other players. It'd be an invisible unit which delivers the news in relation to the distance between civs. As a final point, what's happening about online play? Much of a community putting together deathmatches yet? Is it reliable?

Getting this game has been long overdue. Heard about it a few years back though maybe it wasn't quite released then. Have gone off games a little recently, maybe that's after shifting over to a Linux box, but was a massive player of AOE back in the day... I'm looking forward to getting to grips with what 0AD has to offer and helping out the best I can with a grassroots gaming project. Only started self-studying computer science, so can't really do any beefy tasks, but if there's any advice you could give me on how I can monitor progress here with pieces of code, it would be great to see the process and look at how I can eventually apply what I'm learning. It's probably a lot simpler than it seems. Also, I'm currently living in Turkey. I know a few Iranians here, so if you need any material for the Persian civ, maybe some recordings or translations, I could rally some people together to help out. And last but not least. I have nothing but envy and appreciation to everybody involved. It's a real inspiration to see people coming together for such a project. Haven't played the game beyond booting it up and reminding myself how an RTS works again, but it looks absolutely amazing. I was late on the AOE bandwagon and never quite broke through into the upper-echelons of players, so I'm hoping I can get ahead of the pack this time round