Sanguivorant

A fully ranked Iberian skirmisher has a golden helmet on, but when they are walking, they suddenly have no helmet. Just a small animation bug that I think should be looked at.

I could see a boom working if there was an easy wall, or if a player was in a pocket position in a team game. Iberians could probably perform this kind of boom the best, since they can keep their whole food production inside walls. All they would need is to make the occasional military unit in the booming phase and placing some towers in strategic locations.

I was experimenting around in the game recently, and I tried to come up with some form of booming strategy, that involves the fertility festival tech that is researchable in a house. The fertility festival allows you to train female villagers out of any house. I think this is available to every civ, but civs with cheap houses can really use it to their advantage. So the Celtic civs, as well as the Iberians and the Mauryans can pull this off quite nicely. The trick is to get to the town phase as quick as possible, and then researching fertility festival. Then, the goal is to sustain female villager production from at least 10 houses, which takes around four farms. Once you have that, your economy can start flying off the charts. I have reached the population limit of 300 doing this, by quickly training 150 female villagers and then make 150 soldiers. I managed to do this in about 20 minutes, and reach the city phase at the same time. Though, this would probably be impossible to pull off against an aggressive opponent. What do you guys think?

Games in this branch are definitely more fun and unpredictable than in Alpha 16. 4/20 would play again.

In Scythetwirler's balancing branch, he made ranged cavalry a bit less effective by increasing the range of the CC and making javelineers more effective against them. Because infantry javelins are easier to build, I could often defend myself by building them.

Celts should get a late-game technology that converts all their females into warriors, at the cost of them not gathering anymore.

I'm really starting to hate ranged cavalry. Games are now a competition to see who can get ranged cavalry the quickest. You barely need to micromanage these guys because they already move away from melee units. Their range is unbearably large, to the point where they could take out my farms with relative ease. I even placed towers, and they do almost nothing, because they can get away in time. How can I do anything when I can't even gather food? And how can a few javelin throws destroy a farm? Spearmen are crap against them because they move slowly. The only melee unit that is good against them are the Spartan swordsmen when massed up and micro'ed efficiently. And even they are only buildable in the town phase, well after a ranged cavalry rush is executed. I believe that if their range was drastically lowered in the village phase, they would not be able to cause such a problem, because that is their greatest advantage. Either that, or make them untrainable until the town phase.

The problem with repairing is that the pathfinding makes it too difficult to get the ships close enough to the shore for people to repair it. With intense adjusting, I was only able to get 5 people repairing a single ship, and it took a dangerously long time to get it from nearly destroyed to half health. It's just too annoying to try to repair ships at the moment. IMO, ship repairing can be altered. Make an upgrade in the dock that allows ships to regenerate health depending on the amount of units boarding them. Obviously, the more units on board, the faster ship repair happens. A ship will only repair if: -It is not being attacked or firing arrows. -It is within a dock's range. Or that can be scratched to make it less complicated. But repairing in this fashion would make it less frustrating. It can even be one of those tech choices between hull upgrades and regeneration rate.

Super humans. Would it look bad if units had a realistic height of 1.6-2 metres?

I played a 2v2 game this morning in Sardinina vs Corsica. It descended into a 2v1, because my ally quit, but I swear, I am loving the naval combat already. There was nothing more epic than racing to fortify your base as quick as possible with forts and towers, and building up a huge military that you take over to your enemies' island. I lost the game, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Fish booms are indeed possible in this game. Instead of going for farms right away, I took my berries, rushed to get my dock up and gathered wood and fished, leaving farms for quite a while. I just have to say, I can't wait for what's coming regarding navies. My main concern is that not many people want to play on a naval map. So I have made this thread to discuss possible naval tournaments that can be run in the lobby. This will solve two things: -Train people in naval combat -Test the naval aspect of the game for balancing/tweaking. When I played the game, I did notice some minor annoyances: -It is really difficult to get a ship on land close enough for units to repair. It almost feels like repairing is useless and I might as well create new ships. -It is also difficult to load and unload units. I have to do some intense micro to have it done correctly. -A fully controlled island is almost impossible to take, because you can't build anything. Therefore, in addition to making a successful invasion, you have to take out the person's main army and a civic center. It is almost impossible, which makes sense because naval invasions are never easy. Other than that, naval combat is a pretty awesome aspect of the game.

No, what I meant is that there are maps that are completely tundra or completely desert. If this gets implemented, either the game could become unplayable or you would require more people on food, which is not that bad. It just makes your food supply more vulnerable.

How would crop productivity be implemented in deserts or tundras or islands? It just seems a bit too complicated to make some areas more fertile than others and having players compete for it. But at the same time, it does sound interesting.

In AoK, towers have a minimum range which I think helps them from being overpowered. The villager in AoK can easily take down towers as well, if they can be kept safe from other units. Also, I don't buy into the civic center strategy being overpowered. As the game currently stands, you can see exactly what an opponent is building in an area that you have explored, even if you have no unit there. You can also see what resources your opponent is collecting as well. It just requires a bit of scanning in the map to counter any sort of expansionism.

All the game needs is better performance IMO. Everything else is secondary for now.

Here's one way to do it: It requires that you have built a market. Upon killing a human unit, there is a certain chance of a unit spawning inside a market "Being garrisoned". These can be considered, "Slave Points". Slave points are a resource, and they are used to do pay for specialized units that focus on a specific aspect of resource gathering or can be sold for a stable amount of metal. With slave points you can create slaves. Slaves are units that train incredibly quickly and do very well in a certain aspect of the economy (Mining, farming, etc.). Their downside is that they cannot fight, are very weak, and have an upkeep cost. To support one slave unit, it costs 1 food and 1 wood per second while it is alive. There are various slaves you can train: Mining Slave: Costs 1 slave point and 100 of metal and stone. Mines both much faster. Cutting Slave: Costs 1 slave point and 100 wood. Chops wood much faster. Farming Slave: Costs 1 slave point and 100 food. Harvests from farms much faster. Or you can sell your slave points. 1 slave point could equal 100 metal. The benefit of slaves is that you can boost your economy much quicker, which could help someone who is on the defensive, as long as they can efficiently kill enemy units. At the same time, slaves can substitute citizen soldiers in the labour intensive resources such as wood and mining, which means you have more army to command. The negatives is that once various resources are gone, their use is done and you have to kill them.

#Turrets

I don't know if this is possible, but maybe slaves can "Die" and give you a sum of metal upon clicking a specific button.

If any slave mechanism was implemented in the game, the easiest way to do that would be a metal-costing unit that trains quickly, like the Nubian Archer.

Nubian Archers Seriously though, Ptolemies are the only civ that gets a unit that trains in like five seconds.

Yeah. This would leave the Celts and Iberians at a disadvantage though.

Making siege weapons buildable by military citizens on the battlefield instead of training them in a production building? Maybe both can be kept, and the on-site built siege weapons would be weaker than the ones made in a production building.

Nice micro bro. Dat early game pressing.

We could always make towers available in the early game, but just make them a bit weaker until the town phase. Or if ranged cavalry can only be made in the town phase, and your village phase cavalry is melee, that would also help balance things out, since melee cavalry has to at least get close to attack, so it can be countered by accompanying your chicks with spearmen (lol).

I agree, and in most games you often find that the fastest ranged unit is the most powerful. One time I was playing against a player who massed ranged cavalry on me. Making spearmen only helped if I managed to corner the cavalry, but because the player was good at micro, that was really hard to do. Eventually, what I had to do is wall up sections of my base and put a lot of watch towers in my economic areas. Watch towers and walls are the best way to counter ranged cavalry, which is why Iberians can counter them the best. A fast ranged cavalry rush almost always screws up your opponent's economy. Every game I play, I send at least five ranged cavalry early on. I do find that javelineers are a pretty effective counter as well, when massed of course.

Game rules are only necessary if the game itself does not allow for fair gameplay, and that is not the case. - not building any walls Walls are part of the game, designed for people who want to pursue a strategy other than rushing. It's a viable tactic to wall yourself up. Eventually, walls will be meaningless because they don't win any fight, just prolong inevitability. - not using caravan between 2 markets/ports Trade is part of the game as well. On maps where there is a scarcity of wood or other metals, they are vital. - no ships (ports allowed for wood gathering) on non-naval maps I understand where you're coming from here, because I had some people make ships to prolong their survival in the game, even though they had no chance of coming back. But hey, people are free to do as they wish. - no use of roman armycamps I have never fought with Romans past the village phase, but if an enemy planted an army camp somewhere, then IMO it is my fault for not scouting enough to prevent it from happening. But if you asked me to play by these conditions, I would be happy to. I just don't want any of these features removed from competitive multiplayer gameplay, because they are all legitimate.