McAllisterw

How about wooden bridges acting like outposts and taking damage over time?

It would be an idea for each faction to have its own morale-boosting unit. A druid for the Britons, Eagle-bearer for the Romans, someone would no doubt have a horn

Would playing as a nomadic faction not require larger maps and longer game-play times? As things stand I think it's still likely that if you gave a faction nomadic qualities (perhaps quicker build times and the ability to pack their civ-centre/other buildings up and move on), the gameplay for them wouldn't be much different to other factions. You build a settlement and start building an army. There would be no huge incentive to move on, yes resources would run out, and the food might run out faster as the compromise for the faster build times might be that you have no food-generating buildings or fields; but you could still send resource gatherers out to get them from elsewhere, just as you do with a settled faction. The alternative of packing everything up and moving on might not appeal as by this point you've got a reasonable army and are not far off making some kind of final-assault on the enemy town; it might seem a bit undesirable in game-play terms to have to go back to town-building at this late stage, even if it is going to be a lot faster than for a settled faction. Also your enemy might be considering making a final assault on you and since you've presumably built fortifications to defend yourself, you wouldn't want to leave all that behind and expose yourself to annihilation. If we had some particularly large maps, and the ability to simply build big base, then build big army was nerfed a bit, the nomadic factions might seem like an excellent strategic choice. Resources are more spread out and the fact that you can pack up your civ-centre, go on the move and then very quickly get a settlement going again near to some fresh resources would be an advantage. The size of the map and the fact your enemy isn't as likely to have build up a massive army means that you aren't at as great a risk when moving, of encountering a marauding army that makes light work of killing the units carrying your buildings. You could also have nomadic faction's units enter some kind of migration mode when they have no civic-centre which makes them stronger, just to mitigate against the vulnerability of having your civ-centre contained within a unit.

Phonecia, (Phoiníkē) in Greek, which will need no introduction to most, but for those for whom the word has no meaning, the Phonecians were a dominant culture in the near east and Mediterranean around the events of 0AD, and included Carthage Some mythological suggestions Pegasus Perseus Persephone Pandora Plutarch was a Greek historian Psusennes was a pharaoh who ruled lower Egypt and built the city of Tanis in the Nile Delta Pirames a city in the Nile Delta Persepolis an important Persian/Hellenic city Parthia a Persia-based empire EDIT, sorry, ran away with myself there, Psusennes and Pirames are way too early

I couldn't find much written about this, or a thread for discussion of campaigns, but what are the concepts at the moment for how the campaign part of the game will work? I've seen there are campaign-map style models available in Atlas for things like champions and cities so presume that campaigns would be fought across a map rendered in Pyrogenesis and subdividided into territories in a similar manner to Total War, but I could be wrong. I'm sorry if there is a thread somewhere that I failed to find. As I see it, you could have a Total War (or the various Space 4x games if you choose to look outside Total War for inspiration) style Grand Campaign, where different factions start of with single territories and then duke it out for overall supremacy. In the Space 4x genre, this is often customisable, so the game can be played with different victory conditions. You could play it so that you don't win until you own the whole map, or a percentage of it; or you could set victory conditions that can be achieved by having cultural dominance, or achieving a certain technological level etc. I imagine the grand-campaign will be popular, but was also thinking about historical scenario campaigns which will offer something different to what Total War does, as well as satiating the people's thirst for historical context. These campaigns will have fixed starting conditions, victory conditions and possibly different campaign maps (if th theatre of war was smaller than the whole Old World) I've thought of some examples, not sure what a good engaging victory condition would be for the defending factions in most cases though. Simply holding on to the territories you start the game with could be a bit boring. The Hunnic Invasion: Factions would be the Eastern and Western Roman Empires and the Huns. The objective for the Huns is to recieve a set amount of wealth from either Rome or Constantinople or a combination of both through tributes or plunder; or to take Gaul. The objective for either of the Roman factions is to kill Atilla or reduce the stregth of the Hunnic army to a percentage of its original strength. The Justinian Reconquest: (OK, so it's just beyond the 500AD mark but would likely be possible with the factions in the second part). You start as either the Byzantine Empire, or the Ostrogoths and victory is achieved by taking and holding on to Rome and Ravenna (as the Byzantines) There are also more simple 'duke it out' style wars such as The Peloponnesian War, The Greco-Persian Wars, The Punic Wars etc.

You don't have to manage it, just build it close to a resouce and let it do its thing.

How about, you have to have a prison building in order to take prisoners, they provide an economic boost through forced labour, and the prison is a productive building which you can build next to resources in order to get a bonus at harvesting that resource, but can be freed by your enemies (I did think maybe you could ransom them back to your enemy but this wouldn't work as why would your enemy choose to pay a ransom to as opposed to simply training more soldiers?). 'Take prisoners' could be a kind of stance setting, in which defeated enemy troops, rather than being killed are sent back to your prison.

Just to add my tuppenceworth to the discussion on German tribes. I agree that the Visigoths and Ostrogoths had enough of a different impact on history that they should be seperate factions. Also just on the general numerousness of German tribes, I'm fine with this as I think that is one of the things that characterised that period. The game just wouldn't be the same with only one or two German tribes marauding around, now 4 or 5 different German tribes, each going off in different areas and fighting Romans, Byzantines, each other

With the gradient walls my thinking was walls which follow the gradient of the terrain rather than have a stepped appearance when you build a wall over a hill. It might be a stretch to redesign walls to somehow match the terrain exactly, but could perhaps be doable if there were a number of models of walls at set gradients and the engine picked the closest match for the terrain between any two towers, based on the difference in height between the two towers. Might not be a quick thing to implement, just an idea.

I'm not a programmer, but does preventing arrows going through walls have to mean a drop in performance?

Was gonna say, I'm fairly certain (or rather not me, historians are fairly certain) that the Collosus didn't actually straddle the harbour. I like how the illustration Oshron posted seems to suggest that rather than settle with a single Collosus, ancient Rhodes was more of a collosus factory.

Well I didn't know which forum to put it in.

Naucratis is good, it's the only specific place or person associated with Ptolemaic Egypt I can find beginning with 'N'. Oh apart from Nile of course... which the Greeks called Neilos.

I made this as a side comment on a post on a different forum, but felt it would be best to have it's own thread in this forum. If there aren't already plans afoot for this I think it would be a good idea if the Civilisation Centres had 3 different models for village, town and city level. Personally I think the models in use at the moment are most appropriate for town level, so this would involve creating a smaller and larger version of each model.

My experience with farming so far been that food is the one resource which seems in limited supply, so this is welcome. One thing I have noticed is that for raising sheep, the sheep yeilds double the cost in food to raise it, but the butchery process is quite slow, so this combined with the time taken for the sheep to be 'trained' means it doesn't seem like breeding them gives you food much faster as opposed to just carrying on harvesting the field.

Just thought I'd start a thread for brainstorming ancient places/names beginning with N. Nineveh Nemausus (Nimes) Nile Nike Nero Nubia Numidia

Most of the wonders weren't that big, remember the Great Pyramid was both the tallest and overall largest of them all and this is included as a 3D model... I think I saw the hanging gardens of Babylon in there too. Historic writers tended to overemphasise how large these things were, and even when they gave dimensions, there was no standardised unit of measurement in the ancient world and many of the units they used, the true lengths are no longer known. As far as I'm aware, the Collosus of Rhodes would have been the largest statue anyone in the Eastern Med would have seen, but was still probably far smaller than today's Statue of Liberty.

A possible area for improvement. If you build a wall as close as you can get to abutting the base of a cliff, there is a still enough of a gap for infantry units to get though. I found this out to my cost after constructing a wall and deciding that if the Romans attacked this would buy me enough time that I could afford to send all my soldiers to gather resources. However when they attacked, they found the gap and started streaming through like ants. I was caught completely off-guard. One suggestion would be that you simply have to continue your walls parallel to the base of cliffs, but this seems a but disingenuous. Alternatively the game could recognise that a wall has been built close to unpassable terrain and mark the gap between the two as unpassable. Visually it would be better if the wall also automatically abutted the cliff, but I appreciate this might be complicated as the engine then has to recognise the gradient of the terrain, work out whether simply continuing the length of the wall will work and how long to continue it for, or whether a tower is required to complete the wall (if the terrain is of a lower elevation than the wall); then of course walls didn't just disappear into cliffs, there would need to be some kind of texture along the abuttment to make it look realistic. I don't know how this was really done in ancient times. While I'm on the subject of walls and gradients, it would be awesome if gradient walls existed so that walls crossing hilly terrain appeared to follow the contours (although I appreciate that getting them to follow contours exactly might be a stretch, it could be done with variations of the wall object at differing gradients and then to connect any two towers, the most appropriate gradient is selected).

might I suggest Natural Earth if you're looking for world maps which would be entirely legally suitable for this kind of thing.

One thing to consider is that not everyone might have demarcated territory

The colossus of Rhodes, from looking at the references posted on here, almost certainly didn't have his legs astride the entrance to the harbour... I think the best realistic representation of it, would just to be an impressively large statue.

Hi there... I'm new to the game (only downloaded it yesterday) and would like to contribute some thoughts. First-off everyone seems to have their own ideas of what faction to introduce next so I would like to promote the Egyptians, not only are they cool, but their buildings would be fairly easy to model Secondly, the only bug I've encountered so far (besides the known issues they make you aware of from the moment you install the game) is that playing in the Sahara Oases map, I encountered a gazelle grazing in the middle of a watering hole... whether this is an issue with just this map, or gazelles in general or all animals I don't know, I haven't played the game enough. A few pointers though, things I think might improve the game: I found the method of rotating the camera by using SHIFT+MOUSEWHEEL a bit clunky As far as I can tell there is no way to upgrade an existing wall... it would be good to be able to build, for example, a wall on top of an existing palisade, as opposed to building the wall around the palisade, or demolishing the palisade first. The civic centre (as far as I can tell from the factions I've played as so far) looks the same at each level of settlement. It would be nice if upgrading the settlement also led to a change in appearance. I would suggest that the models currently being used would suit the town phase, and so each one would require a smaller version for villages and a larger version for cities. The description for Celts initially talks about the 'Celtic Empire' and then says that 'strictly this wasn't an empire', well no it wasn't, would it not just be better if the description never used the word 'empire' in the first place? I have a few skills I can contribute to the game myself (not many)... I have some 3D modelling skills, looking at the building models in use I'm sure I could create models given the textures that already exist and the fact I can adapt parts of existing models into new models. (Doubt I could do anything other than buildings though). I have some historical knowledge, I'm not a historian but I have trained in cartography and if maps were required, for either historical info pages, or to show campaign progress when campaigns are implemented I could certainly produce these.