scythetwirler

That was an oversight, I'll fix that. Thanks for the report.

In terms of health, most champions do have significantly more health than citizen soldiers at the moment.Note that ranks may be temporarily disabled for A18 due to the massive amounts of hardcoding and easily overlooked inconsistencies. Champions may be buffed later when advanced and elite soldiers are reintroduced.

If you cannot join the games of others, then that usually means they have not set up their hosting correctly and no one else can join their game either.

Rams are intended for sieging structures; using them to target infantry is not efficient. That being said, infantry can surround a ram and effectively halt its progress. Also, a siege weapon should be considered a top priority target when it is sighted. It's quite possible to concentrate a regiment of infantry on the siege weapon and take it out quickly.

In Alpha 17, 5 spearmen will beat a ram. That's (50F+50W) times 5 = 250F+250W. A single ram costs 350W + 200M. Spearmen are also faster and more maneuverable.

Misworded it. Their rate of attack is the same as before, but their rate of attack is now faster than that of other ranged units (other ranged unit rate of fire was decreased).

Changes made: Differentiation of skirmishers and archersCiv-specific unit\buildings perks and bonusesFormation Enabling/Disabling Toggle (see ticket #2936)Stronger champions and heroesNerfing of Persian Cavalry (so that they are consistent with those of other civs). This may turn out differently during civ differentiation stage, as Persians were noted for their strong cavalry.Disabling of cavalry "auto-micro"Making siege weapons considerably more effective than foot/cavalry soldiers against structures.Decreasing accuracy of bolt shooters.The current stage of balancing is Release Testing. This branch has been merged into SVN. XP and ranking up are currently disabled until relative templates are committed for ease of balancing.

There's a bug where you have to press enter while in the text field to save. http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/2451 EDIT: Seemed like you got it

Yes, the gear symbol represents the time in seconds needed either for a unit to train (in the case of sheep, soldiers, workers, etc.) or for a technology to research.

See http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/2451

I'll probably make a new topic for that. No need to bloat this one imo. Once I get that topic up, I'll probably lock this. My answer to when you first asked that still stands.

Try following the directions here: http://play0ad.com/download/linux/#a0A.D.providedpackages

I definitely agree with this. I wasn't able to spend as much time balancing champions as I liked prior to A17. Agree for the most part, but I do think that foundations/half-built buildings should be squishy. I'll have to test this a little more, but I recall thinking that 5 melee soldiers can down a ram pretty quickly. Catapults should be placed behind fortified positions such as a fortress or an army for best results and are quite devastating against enemy units. I'm not very fond of the auto-micro either; I'll see what I can do about that. I'll have to test this a little more. The hero's bonus does seem overly effective, though I don't think that was introduced with my changes.

I've seen you in the lobby these last two days. I'm assuming you've got it figured out?

Sorry to hear that. I'll take note of this incident. Ratings will be reset at A17 (database field changes due to profiles etc.) so it wouldn't make too much difference as A17 is just on the horizon. If you do get this again (after A17), please contact a lobby mod (me or leper) via PM (it's best not to defame people publicly) and we'll take care of it accordingly.

Archers (and ranged infantry) can be garrisoned onto walls in the developer version (and A17).

The current state of gameplay is just mostly a simplified, unified game just to test (through an alpha release) whether the civs are balanced at their current state before we start introducing bells and whistles for each faction (rebalancing after civ perks will be much more difficult if the baseline isn't balanced).

Having no formations is at least a predictable messiness - units go where you think they'd go. Formations that regroup randomly and split of ranged and melee units are much less predictable. Ideally, I'd like an option for the moment to disband formations the same way you could toggle a formation but leave an option for both at the player's choosing.

My stance on formations: Formations are a cool concept, but as of right now, I do not feel they are ready. Sure, they look cool and organized, but there are some (frustrating?) bugs with it. Notably, when a unit in a formation dies while regrouping, the whole formation will try to reformate into a different shape due to having one fewer member in their formation. More often that not in large battles, another unit will die before they reach their formation shape and they will attempt to reorganize again. This cycle repeats until the formation is wiped out without a chance to attack. In addition, having no formations seems to make the game less laggy (this may or may not be true, but it feels that way )

Techs are not done yet (rather far from being done). Notably, the blacksmith techs will be a lot more expensive (probably in the ballpark of 1k of two or three resources in town phase and 1.5k for the extensions in city). The only techs that have undergone change so far are the gathering techs.

You can see discussion here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/2160

Rams attacking units is just meant as a placeholder until the pathfinder can be fixed etc. Wheelbarrow techs (and subsequent capacity techs) have been revamped and implemented.

I'd rather not for the time being, at least until some things have been tested out and fixed. You are always free to fork it and submit pull request for fixes/suggestions. It does seem that way in other RTSes, but I'd like to try out a more generic battling system that doesn't revolve around rock-paper-scissors combat. The problem with cavalry countering ranged units (imo) is that they'd be either immensely overpowered (due to their speed, they decide when they want to battle, and thus, usually only when they have an advantage), or vastly underpowered if we nerf them too hard. Right now, I'm giving them a sort of raiding niche to attack unprotected workers. Metal, imo, was too precious to spend 200 on each healer. Merely having 25 healers was enough to deplete your entire starting 5000 metal mine. Perhaps they should cost a little metal, but currently I want to increase the usage of healers to see how people use them and go from there. Swordsmen were almost never being used beyond early rushing, due to their high metal cost. I'm not sure where wood would be used for a swordsman, but right now, I'm just trying to balance it. If metal cost is decreased too much, they become too strong early game. Thus, I had to add another cost to make them on par with other soldiers. Realistically, you would not stand in front of a ram because you'd be bowled over. Previously, you could just send any unit (healers included) to just block the ram. With its large obstruction size, rams became useless quite often - they couldn't reach a structure to attack. I rather like this idea. I'll give it a try sometime. Another note: It is still in the experimental phase, many things are subject to change.

Can you try running it again?

Did you download the whole repository or did it stop midway?