wowgetoffyourcellphone

Essentially, yeah. I just got into the weeds talking about armor values. You summed it up nicely.

Your point is what then? Get on with it.

I mean, the game's meta already changes every Alpha. Might as well make it a feature instead of a bug.

I didn't blame Trump for the decline (I am sure he would prefer to pump as much carbon into the atmosphere as possible; he certainly does so through his own mouth). You blamed Biden.

Indeed. "Personal Responsibility" with climate change is right up there with "Vote With Your Wallet," lol. One can't choose personal responsibility and vote with their wallet if the options they are given are limited. There is no ethical consumption possible (on a large enough scale) in capitalism.

Relevance?

Honestly, it might be an internet meme.

I see this kind of comment all of the time. Climate Change is real and a clear and present danger whether or not political leaders and the rich act virtuous.

0 A.D. Sigma 1. But for real. There may come a time when the game is so complete that development can switch to "seasons" or yearly releases that are balance and content packs. 0 A.D. Season 1, Season 2, etc. Multiplayer Players can have 2 ratings, an "Overall" rating and then a rating for that Season. If a release is in early January, then the team continues to work on the next release all year. Feature freeze hits on September 1st, with Balancing continuing until December 1st. Final polish continues until January 1st. Of course, the schedule can be adjusted based on when you'd really want the Release to occur. Beginning of the year? The week before Christmas? Late Autumn?

My guy, the biggest drop in that graph is when Trump is in office.

Right now, all spear units have a mix of attack values, with both pierce and hack damage. If you just give them hack damage and remove the pierce damage they give, then re-adjust the armor values of cavalry, you can make spear units better against cavalry by default. It should be thus: Cavalry Low hack armor (vulnerable against melee units) Spear cav are the anti-cav cavalry, bonus attack vs. cavalry (in DE this is reversed, but let's not argue anymore about this, I'm just going with EA's counter scheme) Since spear infantry have their piece attack given back to hack attack, spear infantry are now a natural counter to cavalry High pierce armor (strong against ranged units) Combined with fast speed, should make short work of ranged infantry High crush armor Ranged Infantry Low hack armor (vulnerable against fast melee units, such as melee cav) They should melt away against any melee unit that reaches them Their range and pierce attack should help keep melee infantry at bay, but melee cavalry close the gap too quickly and massacre them Medium pierce armor (good at dueling other ranged units, but not great) Low crush armor (vulnerable against splash damage from catapults, eh hem) Melee Infantry High hack armor (good at dueling other melee units; resistant against melee cav) Pierce armor Medium for spear Infantry Low for sword Infantry Sword infantry are the anti-infantry infantry, bonus attack vs. infantry Medium crush armor I mean, we can quibble with exact values, but something like that^

If you get rid of the dumb pierce attack with spear units, that also solves some issues. But apparently it is a sacred cow that must not be touched.

Indeed. There is no oil "shortage" caused by Biden's actions. It may have caused futures to go up, but that is a completely different thing.

Well, they have the same health as spear cav. IMHO, a problem is the armor. Honestly, I'd revamp cavalry entirely, but that's none of my business.

This is a good approach. In fact, if I were to "redesign" the mod, then I would narrow the focus a lot. Focus it around the Byzantines, like how the base game's center is the Romans. So, your civs would be the Byzantines, Umayyads, Bulgars, and maybe 1 more civ. (I'm just spit balling here, Avars perhaps; I'm not well-versed in the year 1000 AD). I'd have 2 branches of the mod: standard and experimental. The standard version of the mod is the base-game compatible version. The experimental version would do things like add a Religion system, Religious Relics, Jihad, Economics, etc. The experimental version would have the standard version as a dependency. So, you'd put all of your focus on the standard version, and then any experimental stuff you want to try is a smaller side mod.

Hard Battalions are something like Battle for Middle Earth 2. Some people use Total War games as an example, but I don't like using that example because it comes with a kind of anti-bias. Battle for Middle Earth 2 is a perfect example, because it's an RTS game where you still have resource collection and base building in real time. Basically, soldiers are trained, live, fight, and die all in a battalion. You don't have to manually form the battalion or create a scheme where battalions are auto-formed somehow. They just are battalions from the beginning. They stay close together and fight in formation. They also fight other battalions because the enemy is using the same system. Your soldiers don't roam around and break formation chasing individual enemy soldiers or units. -------------------------------------------------------------- Soft Battalions are what I like to call any scheme where you add battalions and formations as a layer on top of the typical RTS combat method. Your soldiers are largely still individual units who are/can be trained individually and then the "battalion" is applied later, either by the game automatically or by the player. And then the battalion can be broken and reformed and broken again, either by the player or the game. This is pretty much how Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War did it and how it currently is in 0 A.D.'s dev repo. If anyone disputes these definitions, please discuss. -------------------------------------------------------------- Why do I prefer Hard Battalions? I think Soft Battalions add unnecessary steps and additional complexity over a Hard Battalions system, when such systems are supposed to reduce unnecessary management. The current 0 A.D. implementation also tries to split hairs and still allows the battalions to devolve into mosh pit fighting. This is what happened in Rise & Fall too. Your battalions look all nice and neat standing still, but once combat happens everything looks exactly the same as if you never even created a battalion, but with the added frustration of having to hotkey your units out of the battalion to micro-target the enemy (because the enemy too is moshing, not fighting formation-to-formation). Even if it was made that once your soldiers are placed into a battalion that they start acting like a BfME2 or TW battalion, it's still an unnecessary step. And then you have to decide how to reconcile that your units are fighting in battalions and your enemy has decided to forgo battalions and mosh his units at you; how is targeting done in this instance? Again, unnecessary complications. Just make hard battalions so you have battalion-to-battalion combat. See: My BfME2 video I posted above.

Yeah, but an old one, right?

Because of the mosh pit combat, the soldiers instantly move out of formation and start ranging across the map. And because of the mosh pit combat paradigm, you need to have very fine granular control of your units. Slapping auto-formations on top of everything now means you have to use hotkeys (which currently have no defaults?) to select individual units or to squad out your soldiers to perform micro-targeting (because even though yours and your enemy units are ostensibly attached to "formations" you can't attack just the abstract formation, you still attack individual targets). This adds an additional level of attention you need to just select and target your units, when formations are supposed to reduce this kind of thing. It's why soft battalions just will not work. It's either hard battalions or no battalions.

These kinds of videos always use the worst footage for 0 A.D.

Guys, the Princess Camp is a fantasy element that takes the civ so far removed from the other civs that you jeopardize their inclusion.

People want battles. People want formations to mean something. People want Delenda Est.

Yeah, the current SVN setup needs adjustments for sure.

Okay, I add you to the DE team. XD

I could see some kind of "Marriage Alliance" diplomacy option in a Grand Campaign. Or even such an option in an expanded Diplomacy settings.