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I will back up my future arguments with research then, in the mean time I rest my case. E: I posted that because I didn't feel like repeating my points when no-one reads my posts fully. Two things. First off please read my posts entirely before responding to them. You'll notice that a lot of the points people bring up to argue against me are points that I've already discussed in my posts. Secondly, please don't put words in my mouth or misinterpret what I say. I'm not looking to be right or prove that I know better than anyone else here.

I had no idea that actually existed!

That's mostly graphics and animation and stuff. I'll agree with you; tbh. Something that I'm more interested in is whether or not you could make farms produce more food per harvester depending on terrain type. desert terrain has poor turnover for example

I think that simplicity is best here, remember that there are already 6 different land harvesters in the game already and slaves would be the 7th type. You might as well have slaves be a sort of complement to female villagers. Villagers do quite well at farming in the mid to late game. So I imagine slaves would be "good" at mining stone and metal, average at chopping wood and bad at gathering food. Slaves come from captured units, I guess. e.g. capture some infantry unit and it comes a slave. It's actually an interesting idea. I wonder if you could base booms around capturing enemy units. Things like upkeep and stuff are too complicated, imo.

That's exactly the point though. Once the buildings go up it's all over, you're fighting a battle of attrition that you can't win anymore. There is no way any ranged unit can compete with a tower as of right now, the pierce armor of the tower is far too high. A tower costs ONLY 200 resources and is invincible to ranged attack. If you garrison ranged units in a tower, then it goes from having relatively high attack to having absurdly high attack. Melee units can't do ANYTHING anymore. Is that really how you want 0 AD to play like? first player to get buildings up wins? It's a race to see who can get their buildings up faster? Come now, you know that's no good. Buildings should serve as defensive support for an army, but buildings shouldn't be strong enough to take on an entire army. Don't talk about siege units either because I'm discussing buildings in early age 2. Re-read that post of mine and respond to that post instead of taking a single line out of my shorter post. It's so easy to just take a single sentence and argue against that, when I'd already given a counter argument to "claim the territory first or destroy the foundation". I tend to try to always back up what I post with arguments and logic if I can. If someone comes to me and shows me that I'm wrong using a completely fleshed-out and well reasoned argument, I'm not going to argue. This isn't about who's right or wrong, this is about discussing how to make 0 AD a good game. As of right now there are too many design flaws for it to be a truly fun multiplayer game.

The problem is that you shouldn't have to build towers (which are broken anyway btw) to defend against someone who made no more than 8 units. Defender's advantage >should< be more than enough to deal with a rush that comes in at 3 minutes, especially since your harvesters are technically infantry units which can also fight. If actual military units, with defender's advantage and a strong building like the CC can't fend off a rush, then that rush is broken. Put it this way, if you rushed with 8 melee cav (sword or spear), would the rush be as effective? The answer is "no". ^There's your problem right there

Sparta has Allied Greek Cav, which are spear-cav, no? This is what I think would be good to see for every civ: http://i.imgur.com/ZahrAPU.png The problem with skirm cav being available from age 1 is a design problem, not a stats problem. Any melee unit is at the mercy of skirm-cav. If you make enough skirm cav, you can also pick off ranged units one at a time and trade very cost-effectively. You can also prevent units from gathering resources without getting into CC range. Even if your opponent makes lots of ranged infantry to counter your early game skirm-cav rush, you can just run away and come back to harass 10s later, due to the speed of cavalry. The design of skirm-cav as a unit is mostly fine; the problem is you can make 8 of them in 1 minute and just go attack and win the game with just 8 cav units. This is because you can make them at the start of the game, from the CC. Even putting them in a rax isn't that great a solution since you can just make the rax with all your starting units and still have enough harvesters to pump out 8 skirm cav really fast. The unit itself is mostly fine, it's just that you shouldn't be able to make them in age 1. Melee cav have to get in close to do damage, so spear men can deal with them very cost-efficiently. Someone doing a melee cav rush will have to be on top of micro to make the units pay for themselves and spearmen + CC will be enough to defend against 8 expensive units which aren't harvesting early on.

if you just replaced skirm cav with melee cav you'd solve every single problem with a single, simple and elegant solution.

how is the skirm cav rush map dependent?

Well between forking out 300 resources for a barracks and 1600 resources to age up there's a huge difference. I still kind of prefer having to age-up to get to skirm-cav since they're still excellent raiding units. It's actually silly at how good they are at raiding, 8 of them can one shot most units and that includes villagers. Even if you can't make them from CCs, you can still just make a barracks and get skirm-cav slightly later. eh, I don't like it. personally, I don't like it. if you get skirm cav when you age you get an extra incentive to age as well. i feel only basic units should be available in age 1. regardless of anything skirm cav still need a ranged counter

Military units suck compared to buildings. See this post: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18791&p=293349 You don't have siege that early in the game so your opponent can just tower rush you and put in some ranged units into the towers and you can't do @#&#036;%. buildings aren't a strong military unit which doesn't run away as of right now, they're broken things that are x10 more cost-effective than actual units.

I'll start for example, with an easy example that's already been discussed, this is just to give an idea of what the thread is about. Skirm Cav (or Jav cav) shouldn't be available in Age 1, since you can make 8 skirm-cav at the start of the game and you can then pick off almost any unit in one shot before the opponent can do anything. Given their range, their attack and their mobility, you can't do anything about a skirm-cav rush to deal with it efficiently. Except perhaps doing your own skirm-cav rush. This is silly. I think that all ranged cav in age 1 should be replaced with melee cav so that spearmen and CCs can deal with any rush easily. This would be much less broken than the current skirm-cav rush.

OK so this thread is the "official" "I think something is imbalanced, here's why" thread. I made this thread because discussing each issue individually would probably clutter up the forums. Basically, if you think that something is imbalanced or if something in the game is broken, you can post it in this thread and everyone can agree, or disagree and at very least we can discuss it. You can discuss imbalance which is specific to a Civ or a unit ("oh I think Nubian archers are too expensive and need a buff") or you can discuss game design ("I think Romans should get Siege Engines in the first phase"). Discussion is always what leads to the evolution of ideas and thoughts. Remember that. If enough people agree that what's being discussed is indeed imbalanced, I'll add it to the OP. This way the thread can serve as a quick reference as to what the community thinks is imbalanced for the coders. This is not a bug discussion thread, so we don't need to hear about the phalanx bug and all of that.

Upkeep cost eh? reminds me of something I wrote a long time ago: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/433402-dream-rts-22

I don't agree. If you balance things now then you have a solid base for balance to work on for later. We're not talking hardcore balance you know, we mean fix the obviously broken design issues. Skirmcav need a counter and need to be moved to age 2, towers need a huge nerf and some civs need their civ bonus to be reworked. This isn't quite about unit stats or anything, it's more about design flaws. If you want to attract more players (which is the goal isn't it?) you need to make sure that the game design is sound as early as possible. So many potential players would come if they realized how good the core game design is, but they'd be chased off by the design flaws. These design fixes aren't exactly ground-breaking either, it's just moving some things around in the tech tree and making sure towers aren't the ridiculous thing they are now. I talked to someone online the other day who practiced skirmcav rushing and said how he tried to skirmcav rush against a skirmcav rusher and how the other guy was just a bit better at it so he won. is that really what 0 AD is? I've played against borg lots of times and I've had a few ggs with him. I played one game against another top 5 player in ranked and the nub just tower rushed me. Borg plays the game how it was designed to be played, the rest of the "good" players are just exploiting the big design flaws to get the win instead of the fun game. I had another nub exploit the phalanx bug and explain to me how he was a better player than me for knowing about the bug. http://i.imgur.com/Dj6tpOi.jpg Design fixes need to be implemented asap. Nothing ground-breaking or difficult, but stuff needs to be fixed. I for one am passionately against stronger buildings or units in buildings by the way. This includes walls, towers, CCs, I don't care. Players should use a standing army to do their military work, not buildings. see screen shot.

I actually hate buildings, they do too much damage. To be fair I've never even looked at stats before making this post, I decided to fire up the game to check what the stats actually look like and I'm in disbelief at what I'm looking at. A single tower costs 100w 100st, which is about twice as much as two ranged infantry units. Yet for so few resources, you get something with 1000 HP, 99% pierce armor and 20 attack/s, with a range of 57! A tower basically can't be killed at range. So if you're a smart player you just make lots of ranged units to counter the melee units that are needed to take down the tower and go tower rush by building a CC close to your opponent's city. It's actually way more broken than I thought. Now, before someone tells me that you should have an army to prevent the CC and the towers from going up, let's actually think things through. All the tower rusher really has to do is get a CC up. It's MONSTROUSLY difficult to take out a CC if there's an army to protect it. Then, all he has to do is progressively make towers, they're really cheap, closer and closer to your frontiers. You need the melee units to take out towers however melee units are inherently weak against ranged units, especially if the ranged units are on there own turf and can garrison into towers. You can't use your own ranged units since towers have that absurd pierce armor. What about making your own towers for defense? That's also quite stupid. This is 0 AD where you have lots of interesting units in skirms, cavalry, swordsman and spearmen. This isn't Tower Wars. So I wrote most of that post and then I decided to build a tower in game and put in 5 ranged units. From 10 attack/s you go to 50 attack/s. That's just absurd. Tl, dr, towers need to be nerfed to the ground. Really bad. I had no idea towers were that strong. If you want to make towers interesting and relevant in the game, then have them be outposts. Increase the cost of towers and increase the amount of units they can garrison. Decrease pierce armor. Decrease health. Make sure they only get 1 arrow every second. Don't increase attack with units inside. Have towers be able to obtain a small, very small amount of territory around it. Now towers can be used to spot areas of the map. The territory they give means you can build drop site for resources. This means that you can go gather something remote on the map without having to build a CC. You have the vision and the garrison space to protect against cavalry raids. More importantly, towers aren't the absolutely broken thing they are now. Edit: Might just make another thread about this like the cav thread. Some things in the game are so good yet some other things are totally broken.

The most important changes are the following, imo. It comes down to some technical changes and some design changes. I realize that some of these changes are highly demanding but this is a wishlist after all. Tech: - Fix path-finding so that it's less laggy and so that it's well-threaded. Performance gains and more responsive units would be great! - Fix multiplayer so that it's less laggy. I'm not sure how it's implemented as of right now but playing in single player vs the AI and playing online are two different things right now. The game is much more smooth offline. There's some optimization that's needed here somewhere. - Anyone who leaves a game also automatically resigns. That way people can't just leave games if they lose, and people don't have to "remember" to resign when they hit alt-F4. I owe wesono a win due to this. q_q -Building hotkeys, or hotkeys to build buildings with. I put together some sample hotkeys for those interested. It's for QWERTY keyboards, first one is Britons, second is Persians: Design: - Remove ranged cav from age 1 and replace with spear cav or swords cav. That way, you can still use the cav to hunt and scout in age 1, but you can't do the broken skirmcav rush anymore. Skirmcav rush is too strong in that no unit can cost-efficiently deal with this rush. Skirmcav cav can also stay out of cc range whereas melee cav cannot. Pikemen & spear infantry will be able to easily deal with melee cav rushes. Skirmcav need a ranged counter (I think actual skirms would be good), not spearmen/elephants since those are melee units which are either slow or very expensive. - Get rid of the pairing of storehouse and blacksmith techs. At least these two for a start. You will get a deeper and overall more fun game with this. Read through this thread to find my arguments as to why this change is necessary: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18635&page=2 - Ptolemies need to get another bonus other than free houses; I think that slightly cheaper houses (60w instead of 75w) and having them build faster would already be a huge civ bonus. So something along those lines could be very unique and still a very good civ bonus. - Iberians should get some other bonus than free walls / turrets. It's broken in that it's way too strong vs rushes but it also prevents your harvesters from accessing resources. It's an uninteresting bonus overall that should probably be replaced with something else.

There, edited in some information. hop this helps!

that's pretty nifty. thanks for the info

I'm at 15298 atm, not 15291. So an obvious issue would be that someone 15291 wouldn't be able to play with me on 15298 for example. However I don't understand why you guys would want to compile for Windows? What purpose is there compiling for Windows when you the base code works just fine? I don't think I understand what happens when you compile. If I'm on 15298 for example and you guys compiled for windows on 15291, does that mean that me, on windows, will run into problems? Due to, perhaps, a difference between the 4gb of code I have and the .exe file I have? Regardless, I'll edit the OP a bit with your remarks in mind, thanks for going over it. By the way, if I'm on 15298 and my friend updates his SVn so that he's also on 15298. Imagine that we play a 30 minute game on 15298 and during those 30 minutes, the code goes to 15299. Will we get issues? We should be able to play our game normally until the end and even start another game on 15298? It should be fine, as long as we stay on the same version, correct? About the space issues, yeah, my real file doesn't have those spaces dw. I'll edit that in OP though.

no fishing boats or merchant vessels? i wouldn't know i never go water.

OK so this thread is to serve as a guide on how to install 0 A.D. I will first link to the page where most of the action takes places, it also describes what SVN is. This guide is basically me putting the instructions of that page in an easy to read format. http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/BuildInstructions#Windows As can be read on that page, what you get is an unstable version of 0 A.D. This is the version that is being worked on by the coders; I'm not sure what exactly gets changed on a regular basis you'd probably have to ask them to be sure [edit: see bottom of post to see recent changes]. Either way, this is the version of the game that is being worked on and it gets updated often. So if you want to play on SVN you probably have to check for updates every day (perhaps every time you play). Rest assured, updating the game is very easy. NB: This guide is for windows. I also don't go over compiling in this guide since you can play without compiling (would be annoying to have to compile every time there's an update anyway, I guess). Step 1: Download Tortoise SVN. This is the program that will be used to download the code for the game as well as the updates. It's easy to use, don't worry. Here is the download link: http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.html Step 2: After you've installed Tortoise and rebooted, go the place where you've set aside some space for the 0ADSVN install. Currently it's using 4 Gb on my computer. Make a new folder and call it whatever, in my example I've called it 0 AD SVN, because I'm not very smart and I need to label things very clearly. NOTE: It's better not to use spaces in your folder's name. I did in this example but don't do it yourself, it can muck things up. So ideally I'd have named this "0ADSVN", which is what my actual install is called ( ). You can put this folder anywhere afaik. So, right click on the folder you've created and hit "SVN checkout". You should get the following window: In the "Url of repository" you want to put in the following url: http://svn.wildfiregames.com/public/ps/trunk/binaries/Checkout directory should be the folder you've created. Step 3: This is the most complicated step. Hit "OK". You should get the following window: This window indicates that you're downloading the code. Remember you're downloading 4 Gb of code. Step 4: Getting your download interrupted or something is not a problem. Updating the game is not a problem either, you can update the code very easily with Tortoise. Go into your SVN folder and right click somewhere. Go to TortoiseSVN > "Clean up...". Once cleaning up is done, right click again and hit SVN update. That should update your code to the most recent version. Remember that this is the version of A17 being actively worked on so the code will probably be updated very often. In fact you could play a game and have the code being updated during your game. Bugs will also find their way into the game due to frequent updates, it's your job to tell the coders about the bugs. Step 5: Once the download has finished, go to "[yourinstallfolder]\system" and find pyrogenesis.exe. Create a shortcut to the desktop if you want. Either way, this is the application you use to play the SVN version of the game. Now, as I said before, the game isn't compiled, so when you go in game your computer has to load things. 3D models will be very basic at first for instance, and grey of color. Don't panic, eventually your computer will load everything up and the game will play normally. To check to make sure that you're on A17, you can go to the multiplayer lobby, you should see the following: That's all there is to it. As you can see, it's fairly simple and it requires very little technical knowledge to get it to work. Remember a few things though. SVN 0 AD is being worked on constantly by coders so you'll have to update often, unlike the official A16 release. Also remember that bugs and things of the sort will appear when you play. I'm not sure what other things might arise in SVN, there are actually lots of things that could go wrong (see sanderd's post below) including small subtle issues. Either way, remember that even if you're a player, you're also a play-tester. By playing on SVN you're helping coders find bugs that they couldn't possibly have time to find themselves. Yeah you won't get the Syntagma bug here, but you might get something else. Everything is work in progress! Have fun I don't go over compiling because I think you'd have to compile the game every time the code is updated? I believe that would be a huge turn-off for Linux users, who have to compile to play the game, unlike us windows users who can play directly off the code. Well, if a code has something to say about that let me know and I'll fix things up. E: Something relevant:

It can be updated as far as I know. I'll right the guide, brb. edit: here we are http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18782#entry293198

Install SVN? It's basically A17 in the works and it's got the phalanx bug and other issues fixed. I've been told to install it and I've got it working now. If playing vs phalanx bug is that bad to you why not just play SVN? Or is SVN some sort of closed beta? It's not complicated at all to set up, if you're on windows that is (don't know about other two platforms). Would someone like me to write a quick guide on how to set up SVN easily? It can be done in 5 easy steps, though you have to re-download the game and basically have a second install of 0 AD on your computer. I haven't yet figured out how to compile stuff yet so I just set aside 5 Gb on my HDD for 0ADSVN. There are less people on SVN than there are on A16 though, I guess. You can ask people in A16 lobby to play SVN with you. However if the phalanx bug annoys you that much you can call people out for using it. It's a game-breaking bug indeed because well-distributed ranged damage done at range is more efficient than what other units do by a very long shot. I've had my CC down in less than 10s with that and my units were unable to kill spearmen fast enough to prevent that (with the other player thinking he was somehow better than I was because he was exploiting the bug, ouch). Also when in cover mode (or whatever it's called), ranged units can't attack. This is almost as serious an issue as well distributed damage. It'd be a design flaw to completely reduce ranged damage. I think 50%+ or something better pierce armor while in this mode would be more pertinent, though I'm not sure where the balance/design team is on that aspect.

For sure it's only a game. Well let's be fair though, the economy as it currently is is quite complex and interesting already. We have 4 types of harvesters already: Cav, Infantry, Villagers and Caravans. I'm not even including naval economy. I think Caravans should replace citizen soldiers in the later stages of the game, that should do quite well imo.