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darn sanderd, you're an expert at answering questions thanks was messing around with the map editor earlier today, gonna fiddle with both of these maps and upload the reworked versions; thanks everyone.

Guys, how do you delete props lol?

In layman's terms, what exactly did Kay fix anyway?

No need to tourney to find bugs, just play the ladder. There are lots of good players out there, try to beat them and you'll find potential imbalance and stuff. As of right now the game is borderline unplayable in competitive settings.

this topic is pure gibberish to me but i just want to thank Kay for his hour well spent anyway

Answered in bold.

Iberians need a rework in their civ bonus.

Yeah I'm going to be moving trees around more, putting in smaller resources like small rocks, hopefully more eye-candy and that sort of thing. What about the deer though? E: Updated OP with a .zip file (finally understood what you meant nietkb).

Well, it's not such an expensive investment overall given that you >should< be building CCs to get map control anyway. You're pushing out for the map to get natural resources like metal and forests, correct? Why not do the same thing for food? Farming as of right now is oddly one-dimensional, you just put down farms and forget about it. Nowadays when I build CCs (obviously I'm a nub at the game) I just plop them down wherever I feel is nice, which is generally either somewhere that annoys my opponent or somewhere that secures a mine or forest. I think it could be interesting to put down CCs where there is also fertile farming terrain. It's a way of making food a resource which is more map dependent, even though it's an infinite resource. I don't see it raising any more problems than the fact that mines and forests are spread around the map. Sure, there's some risk to putting a CC out on the map, but there's always some risk in pushing for map control, that's what makes the game fun! Proper design and balance can be achieved in a number of ways: balancing the amount of fertile terrain on the map, balancing the bonus fertile terrain gives, putting natural barriers around fertile terrain, etc. There are lots of variables to play on.

Remember guys, I completely agree that players should be proactive about not letting buildings go up in the first place. However, that isn't the issue. The issue is how strong buildings (towers especially) once they are up. I think that a big reduction in pierce and hack armor is the way to go. I also think that going from 20 dmg/s to 100 dmg/s is also a bit too strong when you have ranged units in towers. However if we can make use of sanderd's work on props, have it so that units in towers can actually be targeted, then this somewhat balanced out, imo. As the game progresses, I also agree that towers should get upgrades to make them stronger as the game goes on.

Yes, I do that sanderd. I've played a few games on both maps to check if everything is in order. Had to fix some small issues like deer belonging to player 2! Thanks for the tips, I'll be working on updated versions of these two maps.

Thanks for the tips! I've been looking for the eyecandy things as well by the way. Are they under entities like units?

It says: You can download the file by just clicking incogmaps.rar at the top of the page btw. I made sure to find an upload site that wasn't silly in this regard: http://i.imgur.com/9umyuSt.png

tweak the numbers so that the guy who gets some fertile terrain has an edge but not a game-winning advantage. or spread the fertile terrain around the map so that both players each have easy access to some fertile terrain, yet it will still be somewhat vulnerable .

Hoplites have Hack attack, as all melee units do afaik. Melee units deal some damage to buildings, siege engines with their crush damage do the most damage by far. Unfortunately siege engines aren't available in early town phase, which is when towers are clearly a problem. Later on, as you get siege engines and more powerful units, I think towers should definitely be strong. Upgrades are probably a good solution to this, I agree with hollth.

1 tower with ranged infantry is all you need to hold an area down early game, with 2 towers you're nigh invincible until siege. It's not the amount of towers you have that's the problem. A more direct and simple solution would be to heavily reduce the armor that towers have so that they're easier to take down.

Age of Conquerors, or Age of Empires II with its expansion.

Towers in AoC for example have ~1000 HP and 5 ranged damage. I tested 2 AoC towers with 10 archers against 30 melee men-at-arms. men-at-arms are at 6 attack and 45 HP. I'm not sure about attack rates unfortunately. Regardless, 30 men-at-arms took down everything very quickly and only a single man-at-arms was lost taking down 2 watch towers. Attack & HP ratio seems pretty comparable if we compare 0AD to AOC. Towers in AoC are only 25 wood and 125 stone I think. The thing is that towers in AoC don't have the armor that towers in 0AD do. So perhaps something to consider would be greatly reducing the pierce and hack armor that towers in 0AD have. That's not the issue. It's indeed very easy to interrupt a building being built. Almost to the point where I half feel buildings should build faster. The issue is that once the building is there, it's way too strong.

OK guys so here's what's up. The map editor in 0 A.D. is really nice and it's very easy to use. Making maps is a breeze. So I made a few of my own. I have made two maps for this first "map-pack". I am looking for players to play actual games on them, if possible, since I haven't played against human opponents yet. These maps are for 1v1 only, they are not random maps but static maps (everything is placed a specific location). This allowed me to make very even maps, both sides have pretty much the same resource set. Perfect symmetry in this game is not needed, unlike Starcraft for example. My goal when making these maps was to provide some interesting terrain features; nothing ground-breaking, but it's still there. Resources are distributed evenly and they are in relatively abundance. I tried to make the maps as fair as possible; not using random maps has allowed me to do this. Furthermore, building the map myself instead of using a random script has allows for interesting terrain features, without needing to know how to code well. I made the maps so that you have to play to the map as well as the player. Knowing where the sweet spots of the map are for instance is important. This adds diversity to the game, imo. Most AOE games for example will play more or less the same, regardless of the map. The maps you see here are poor in terms of graphics, I'm not much of a skinner. All the maps here are "open-source" so to speak, if anyone wants to use or modify them then they can. To install the maps, download the .zip file I have uploaded here (ty nietkb) and put the files contained in the .zip in the following location: C:\Users\[username]\Documents\My Games\0ad\mods\user\maps\skirmishesincogmaps.zip You should get the maps under "Skirmish" section when you start your game. My maps have "CM" in front of them for "competitive maps" but they're not really competitive yet until people play on them and validate them as fair maps which are fun to play on. Enough chit-chat, here are the maps themselves. Mediterranean Delta: It's hard to see much in that screen shot, oh well. So this is a pretty basic map, it's quite wide-open. The river running through the middle of the map is shallow enough for units to cross. Players start in the 10:00 and 2:00 position. There are two small hills with cliffs which are abundant in resources at 7:00 and 5:00. There's a quarry at 6:00. There's nothing in the ocean to the north, no fish or anything. I'm not sure what to add besides that. Savoy River Crossing: This map is somewhere in Savoy, which has mountains and stuff. There is a river running through the middle of the map with three possible crossing locations. There are mountains and hills which serve as natural barriers as well. Resources are relatively abundant however I think that on this map, there will be some key areas to control. This map is also symmetric however unlike the previous one it's not a mirror symmetry, if that makes sense.

I think comparing with SC2 is a perfectly valid thing to do, SC2 is a great RTS and its better aspects should be examined imo. IF and ONLY IF maps can be randomly generated so that each player gets equal resources and terrain tiles should adding a true farming bonus on fertile terrain be considered. However I have to commend the quality of random maps in 0 AD, generally speaking the maps are well-balanced in this game. Anyway, the real reason I thought of giving a terrain bonus to farming is to give players a (realistic) reason to push for map control. I don't think it's a big issue and it's probably something that should be added way down the line, if at all.

Alpha Quantum ! .... nah i'm doing this wrong

It's not that towers can't be taken down, it's that the price of doing so is very, very high. If melee cav are supposedly good against towers then towers are even more broken since any player who is going for tower rushes (or w/e you want to call it) will have some spearmen defending towers. It's nothing more complicated than that. It's such a costly operation to get rid of some towers in early town phase that it's probably not something you want to do. A tower shooting 6 arrows every 2 seconds for 20 damage per arrow will decimate ground forces very quickly: unlike archers or skirms, the damage is very well distributed without need for the player building towers to micro anything. I just tested this with the map editor, 30 hoplites will not kill 2 towers and 10 archers. These are two towers without units in them either, neither of the two upgrades you can get in towers were upgraded either. 30 hoplites managed to destroy only one tower, which only costs 200 resources to rebuild anyway. When the first tower was down, 14 hoplites had died. So that was already a very good trade. Now imagine doing the same thing except that instead of 3000 resources (30 hoplites) against 1400 resources (10 archers + 2 towers), you do 3000 vs 3000. You do realize that any place where a tower is built is almost 100% secure? So any smart player will try to race to put towers up on his opponent's natural resources. Bam, gg. Nothing the other guy can do about it once the towers are up.

Well obviously you make the maps balanced, lol

I am against stupidly strong towers because they make for a bad game. 0 A.D. isn't a simulation, it's a game. There's nothing realistic on how units are trained or the way the spawn. There's nothing realistic on the way units are killed or how they fight either. There's nothing realistic on how resources are gathered and then spent. There's nothing realistic about a commander who has the ability to micromanage troops with a bird's eye view. If you want to use the realism argument explain to me how making a tower costs 200 in-game resources whereas most infantry are ~110. A tower is literally tonnes of material, compared to one guy with some equipment that weighs less than 100 kg. You find this anti-towerism senseless because you're not looking at what makes 0 A.D. a fun and interesting RTS. You can't stick to reality if you want a good game. Have you ever played Starcraft 2? Have you ever been cannon or bunker rushed? If not, then you can't quite understand what I'm really afraid of. My general point which I'm trying to get across is that you have a bunch of units which are all very interesting. You have so many different kinds of units and they're all relevant units. I love that there's a distinction between units carrying a spear and those carrying a sword. I love that javelins are distinguished from bows. I absolutely love that even more when you consider that there is a lot of micro potential in the game, even as of right now. There's beauty in the way units will move when they are being micro-managed. Each group of units is being carefully positioned and re-positioned as each player attempts to gain the upper-hand. It's also very fun to be one of the players who is actually doing the micro-managing. In this game, 0 A.D. it's even more amazing because you have a lot of things to consider. Swordsmen will counter Spear-men for example, yet Spear-Cavalry does well against Swordsmen. However, Spear-men actually do well against all Cavalry. You have Archers which do some damage from long range and you have Skirms which do a lot of damage from short range. So there's a lot of depth to units in 0 A.D., it's amazing to see. The units are all very diverse and very unique. Units being promoted adds even more zest to things. It's really, really, really, REALLY well done. I'm also especially excited for things such as unit formation, where a line of spear-men will be a death-trap to cavalry for example, however if flanked you can get some very effective damage in. It's another thing that promotes positional fighting skill. Things such as surface area, hit and run, proper splitting, knowing when to attack-move, etc. It's all going to matter in 0 A.D. For example, a group of archers will fire a volley and will fire, in one volley, enough damage to kill several units. However, that extra damage gets wasted if all the archers fire on one unit, so it's important to select small groups and have them fire a volley if you want maximum damage. That's very good, it adds depth to the game. It's going to be amazing and micro in this game is already pretty fun. I can say from Aoe3 that positional micro for these kinds of units is really the way to go. It's very, very fun. It's not hard to understand. Yet two high level players micro'ing against each other is a treat to see. It's also a treat to actually be the one doing the micro. These two paragraphs are the tip of the iceberg as well. That's why this game is going to be great, it's why the game is already great. But then you have Towers. Any idiot can make a tower and put 5 ranged units in that tower. That's all there is to it. I wouldn't mind this normally, since static defense is important to have, however Towers are completely immune to units, period. If you build 1 tower, somewhere and put 5 archers in it and have a few more archers around the tower, you can can cost-efficiently take on x10 the amount of units you have in that area. No micro, no positioning, no nothing. It's incredibly boring and it's also game-breaking in that 1 tower and 10 archers will deal with 50+ units easily. If it goes to 60-80? Just make another tower, no problem. What point is there having beautiful units in the game if they all suck compared to some stupid 200 resource building? I hope that with this post people understand a bit more where I'm coming from with my dislike for towers. The units in this game, as well as the way they interact with each other, are amazing. Truly amazing. Yet everything is overshadowed by this silly thing called a tower. Now don't get me wrong, the concept of towers fine. However the stats they have are completely ridiculous. It's just a matter of finding more reasonable numbers. I think that Sanderd's work on units being able to die when in towers and such will also help with this. But as of right now towers are much too ridiculous and they don't really add any depth to the game like the units in this game.

Oh btw while we're at it, I'd murder for a borderless window.