sanderd17

http://www.jamendo.com/ (good for open-licensed music)

regarding cliffs, why not allow a combination between an actor and an entity? Like an actor where you can't walk through, or an entity with infinite health or armour. I think the last one is the easiest (as you're re-designing the health system anyway), but on the other hand, cliffs probably shouldn't be selectable in game. Btw, that not-walk-through actor could also be used for other eye-candy stuff.

Awesome. How do they look when you put them higher than just above the water level? Like on top of a cliff.

This will most likely be an Ubuntu packaging or compilation bug. Can you (as a start) run 0AD from the terminal? And post the output here. It could already give a hint where the error is.

European English is normally more difficult to understand. This is natural. The smaller the group of people who learned the language, the more difficult it is. Take our dialect. Nobody learns to speak it, so it doesn't evolve very fast, and they don't understand me when I speak my dialect if I go 100km from my home place. On the other hand, African (which is also closely connected to Dutch) is very easy to learn, as people from different tribes in South Africa all needed to learn that language. So the pronunciation of different words is more uniform. So unless it can be localised, American English should be used, as it has the most uniform sound, and most people can understand it easily.

It's the SVN from March 16th. Other issue I discovered, it doesn't really see Gaia as an opponent. When there are Gaia warriors in the map, Aegis just walks past them. Only units that get hit react on Gaia units. You can see the screenshots of the Azure coast map. First, female citizens were just walking past those Gaia units. Dying one after the other. And when I changed the gaia units into units of my own. Aegis suddenly send an army towards it. I also have a feeling that Aegis doesn't react on unassigned units. In both cases. Aegis should try to avoid it when possible, or attack it with an army when you really need to pass through. In the images, you see the difference between those units as Gaia and those units as opponents.

If you post it here, you might get really skewed answers. Are you aware of that?

The Iberian player just came out of a fight. I think he chased the remaining Roman units back to their own lands, and got killed there, because there was no Iberian cavalry left at all, but there were also no Roman units on the Iberian ground, apart from those sieges. The citizen soldiers were all busy with the economy. After that, the Iberian started to build his army again. As I said, he already got to 15 cavalry units, but they were all idle (waiting for a complete army). I think the Iberian player didn't react because the sieges were already on Iberian ground before the cavalry units were created. So the Roman sieges were happily destroying Iberian houses, without protection and without being attacked.

I watched a battle between Romans and Iberians (in hard mode). The siege rams still aren't used optimally. After a battle on Iberian grounds, some Roman siege rams were still in tact (because they didn't attack the Iberian units, so never got a reaction). Those Roman siege rams started demolishing every house, while the Iberian player was just developing his army again. He had already 15 idle cavalry units, and still he didn't attack the siege rams. In short. Sieges that aren't surrounded by an army should always be attacked. No matter how big your own army currently is, as your units can't take damage from siege rams. The other thing, how do sieges select the building they attack? They should attack the most vital parts first (fortresses, CCs, Defence towers, ...) but they usually start with the houses. If you demolish a CC, the houses will follow quickly, and if you demolish the defence structures, you have all time to demolish the houses. Also, what's with the barracks? The Iberian player build 6 barracks, right next to each other. There is no way he can use those barracks simultaneously, as you'll run out of resources too fast. I must say, great progress with the AI. I've never seen it playing this good. Oh yeah, and the Romans are seriously overpowered. The Iberian had a better economy score, but the Romans were a lot better when it came to military. But that has nothing to do with the AI.

Hosting an intro cinematic isn't favoured because it's considered as in-game content. I think the AI is more important than the intro cinematic. So online content certainly shouldn't be the only source. The other nice thing about a learning AI is that the level of the AI grows organically together with the level of the player. So every game is challenging again. This won't be achieved when using a central database. And for competition (if this is really a problem). If one plays in a tournament, the organisation of the tournament could host the game with the AI. A second option is that for tournaments, only static AIs could be used (like the current Aegis and qBot). A third option is to look into signing packages, and only allow packages signed with the 0AD key on tournaments. So there are enough possibilities.

I'm always for outsourcing. I know you aren't that much, but here's what I would think is the easiest: Make a YouTube or Vimeo player, and pick a random video from a certain playlist to play. It's certainly allowed by YouTube, I haven't completely read Vimeos ToS yet. The advantages are: Fans can make their own videos and ask the 0AD team to add them to the list if they are good enough. You aren't restricted to one video. Package size isn't enlarged a lot (only extra videoplayer code) Users can see a lot of different videos if they want It doesn't use the hard drive (which is welcome when loading the game) Videos can be updated without updating the game The disadvantages are: You depend on a third party service The user needs a (good) internet connection The quality is quite low (although it improved a lot in the recent years)

They say there's only a single place in Belgium where the view isn't obscured by trees, and where you also can't see any buildings. One supermarket, 3 bakeries, a handful of pubs but not a single butcher in my village. I'd also call it a Boeregat. We do have a lot of banks though, for some strange reason. On the other hand, the cities are so close to each other that everyone is near a city (for me, the closest city center is at 5km).

I like to have most common shortcuts on the left hand, and use my right hand to operate the mouse. So I move with WASD, and for the group selections, 1234 are my most important keys. I don't use zxcvb that often, but maybe it's because I don't play enough games. So if we're not discriminating the left-handed people too much, I'd prefer it stays that way. Btw, how are the keys being read? In Belgium and France, an AZERTY keyboard is quite common, but I switched to QWERTY a few years ago. The problem with AZERTY is the the keys A,Z,Q and W are all swapped around. In AZERTY, it should be ZQSD instead of WASD. If the keys are being read by their position code (so positions 18,31,32 and 33), then there's no problem. Most AZERTY users know that, when games talk about WASD, they should try ZQSD.

Where I live, it was mostly swamp. The only Celtic place quite near me is the Kemmelberg, where the celts probably had a power centre. The hill was quite new in that period though. A few thousand years before, Flanders was largely flooded, and the Kemmelberg comes from a dune. But in the timeframe of 0AD, the Kemmelberg was believed to be a fortress of Celtic aristocrats, complete with dikes, dirt walls, and on some places stone and wood reinforcements. But as it was all dirt, there's not much left from it. And people just guess what has been there. In any way, the Kemmelberg didn't become a city. Our medieval cities were mostly founded near rivers, and not on hills like the Celts did (which can also be a result of the changing water level).

one thing I would like: numpad for number of units selection. Say you have 10 skirmishers, it's easy to select them all (with the various ui elements). But if you want 5 to work on one building, and 5 to garisson in a tower, it's hard to do. If you could just hit '5' on your numpad to select 5 units out of your current selection, it could become a lot faster. For the stop key, why not "H" (from halt)? Germans will love it

It is easy to implement the controlling of allied units I expect (as you can already do it in developer mode), but there are some design choices you must make. Like, do you share all resources? That means, if you start from both teams, you have a high population cap as a start, as you have two CC's. You easily reach 5 buildings with two players, and you can gather all stuff very fast. Or does each ally keep its own resources, but just has the ability to control units of the other? So you have to build the 5 buildings twice before both allies go to town phase. Resource sharing isn't really needed since you can tribute. Another interesting thing: have you tried putting units of different factions under the control of the same player in mapmaker? When you select them to build something, the UI gets cluttered because you have a another building with the same function for each faction. Can a player only build buildings of it's own faction (may seem silly if a cartagian controlled by a celt can't build its cartagian dock)? Or do allied factions in such a game have to be equal?

I don't think we should bind in with the overpowered factions, but rather give the underpowered more power. This is because I like diverse factions, and every diversion is extra power to a faction. Just my opinion though.

I thought it was a known problem. As naval warfare isn't really completed yet. Some factions also are very bad at naval warfare. Like you can't transport any Iberian sieges, because they only have a merchant ship. Anyway, naval civ balance will probably only be useful when naval warfare is at a better level.

What's the difference? Maps you make in Atlas also don't arrive in the main game. Units you mod yourself don't arrive in the main game ... You all have to spread it yourself, or ask the designers if they want to get it in the main game. Btw, the game "WILL" not be moddable, the game "IS" moddable. The thing you play now is the public mod, the default mod of 0AD part 1. Also, please stick with the subject. We know you have problems with your delete key, you already made another post for it.

A big disadvantage when it comes to elephants is with naval maps. You can't transport elephants by ship. I don't know if this is a feature or a bug, but to me, it sounds more reasonable to be able to transport elephants by ship than Macedonian siege towers.

I think the problem with the delete button is worse than the infinite scrolling (from a usability point of view). How can you edit a map if you need to get everything right from the first time? It's like going back to the typewriter age. I never had problems with the delete button though. @OP, are you sure you use the right cursor (the 4-way arrow cursor)?

how do you win the game? If you can stay alive for an hour or something?This doesn't seem too hard with the currect AI, as they don't rally search for opponents, and they're bad at taking down buildings. Just watch how a game of AI players turn out. Most of the time, one AI is clearly lost, but the other doesn't bother to finish it.

as the game isn't balanced yet, and the AI isn't ready, all such tutorials will be obsolete very fast. so I guess these tutorials will only appear when it's quite stable. now for example, the AI can't use naval warfare, so you don't have protect coastlines. AI also can't research any techs, so if you research as many techs as possible, you have the strongest units.

Yes, you can promote your political party, if you don't mind to be blocked. Your favourite political party can't be punished for your actions. Btw, it's already deleted in the English Wikipedia. Some administrator didn't agree. Not because I was promoting or recruiting, but because I wasn't discussing the content of the article. Anyway, I hope the Basque are more friendly than the English speaking.

It's not 0 AD that posted it, it's me, and I clearly stated I'm not affiliated to you. So if the Wikipedia users still think it's no good, they can block me, but 0 AD has nothing to do with it. And it's for a CC-BY-SA project. So they should understand it.