wowgetoffyourcellphone

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I think I will do this to the mod and then bundle it for mod.io. Once again, lack of consensus will likely keep this out of the base game, but at least folks can play it in a mod.

It seems like Italian and Iberian cavalry had small to medium shields, possibly influenced by Gauls. Cavalry shields didn't become prominent with Greek or Eastern cavalry until the Hellenistic age, possibly through the introduction of Tarantine cavalry and later Gauls who settled in Asia Minor (who then became known as Galatians). Due to the lack of a stirrup, most cavalry would skirmish with javelins and then close to melee range with their swords, rather than charge in headlong with spears or trampling. Macedonians introduced shock cavalry despite not having stirrups. They used long spears as their primary weapon, and a machaira or kopis (falcata) as a secondary weapon. It was less their armament and more about their tactics and speed that made them such effective shock cavalry force. Later a kind of "medium" cavalry was introduced in the Tarantine variety (who kind of dove tailed nicely with the new Thyreophoros "medium" infantry introduced at roughly the same time). In all cases, I believe cavalry would use a sword as their "side arm" or secondary weapon. Purely "sword cavalry" is almost a 0 A.D. invention for gameplay purposes (at least in this time period). I'm sure there are others who would correct me here with some nicely dug up obscurata.

Indeed. Aesthetically, I much prefer silver to gold.

They did not have the Wheel, so log dudes should probably just be it for them.

"Ritualized Warfare" - All citizen-soldiers -25% xp needed to promote to the next rank.

Yep, this is exactly how every other alpha's release was handled as well. The only reason this one felt different or "unexpected" was the unusually long development cycle. Players were treating the gameplay as a "done deal."

There are numerous threads on this forum discussing each individual civ.

Already implemented in Delenda Est and it works great. Adds diversity back to the Carthaginian military buildings, and may give a reason for the base game to unlock their Archery Range.

Right, and that's why soft battalions (soft anything really) are not the way to go. It's hard battalions or nothing, IMHO. Adding soft battalions introduces more micro, as now you have to spend time building battalions when you didn't before. Because as you said, if they are beneficial, then competitive players will have to use them. If they are a detriment, then competitive players won't use them and then they are a superfluous feature. Hard battalions eliminates all that and gives us greater flexibility in adding combat features (like flanking, charges, shield walls, morale, etc etc etc) that would be superfluous or more difficult to manage with mosh pit units (I recoil in horror at the proposals that we should add morale management for 100s of mosh pit soldiers, while it would be much easier to add such details and management to a few dozen hard battalions). Also, with hard battalions, all players of all skill levels would have to use them and the meta is consistent at all skill levels.

https://gfycat.com/malehonesteagle-shield-wall

You're right. I accidentally added my own 2 cents without directly addressing your comment. The feature is awesome, the biomes themselves are not. It's hard to show someone a video to get them jazzed about a game when the terrains and game world looks ugly, is what I was getting at before. Speaking about marketing and PR here. And yeah, for sure, it's also embarrassing to try to showcase the game to a skeptical community on another site when the game starts to lag so horribly and players have to fight to get formations to wheel around a building without getting stuck. Agreed. I annoys the Hell out of me that everyone plays the ugliest maps. lol Time to improve the ugly maps I guess.

I agree that the game can be quite ugly at times. It's mostly the terrains, IMHO, and I'm (quietly) working on revamping them. But also because streamers need to lower the specs in order to take video at a decent framerate. That is a def a problem.

That should be fine as long as folks are self-starters and resolve to do this without WFG developers, who are not influencers or marketers, needing to prod this along. Say, if you and @ValihrAnt and a few others get together to decide what they want to do and what support they need from the devs, then awesome.

(sorry if I ignore some of your points for now) 1. I think "influencers" is an unfortunate term as well, but it is definitely useful in this context as an all-encompassing term for Youtubers, streamers, bloggers, et al. 2. I think there is no easier way to see what is happening with the development of the game than to just bite the bullet, install SVN, and get the SVN development version of the game so one can easily get the latest updates. 3. One question that needs answered is: Do we need to do a bunch of PR blitzing at this stage of the game's development? @wraitii I think has hinted that WFG has neglected PR because the game simply isn't ready yet. We can debate that point for sure, but I don't think it hurts to amend the standard release schedule to include extra access for a list of trusted influencers. Just some rando thoughts for now.

Right, I think it may be possible with some actor work and no new code (its' already possible with existing code).

Honestly, it doesn't look too bad in DE's UI to have catapults there next to the other buildables. The only thing strange is that the operators rise up out of the ground with the catapult as it's being built. I've done a couple of tests with the actor to stop this with no success yet, but I think it should be possible to make the operators not appear until the construction is completed.

I always thought "Royal Kurgan" would make a great Scythian wonder.

All of that is true, but to have yet another unit type seems overkilled. Could just have a "Siege Engineers" tech that unlocks building field artillery with soldiers.

That's very true, unless you slow everything down, which we don't really want, I presume.

Yeah, you have to make judicious compromises.

I'm talking about how to integrate the marketing/influencing into the release schedule. It's all related.

Or something like this: Day 0: Feature freeze Day 3: String freeze Day 6: Translation freeze Day 6: Commit freeze Day 7: Packaging Day 8: Release Candidate early access to community partners Day 15: Final bug and balance review (based on feedback from partners) Day 20: Final Fixes freeze Day 20-21: Re-Packaging (if necessary) Final Release Candidate released (if necessary) Day 23: Release There you have 15 days between when community partners are informed of the pending release and given early access and final release "to the public." It also has a built-in 12 day window for final "oh @#&#036;%" fixes.