wowgetoffyourcellphone

Version 2 for Alpha 23 is up. Thanks @Itms and @stanislas69 https://0ad.mod.io/delenda-est

Building a market unlocks the slaves.

It's an abstraction bro.

Hack = melee. In game context. It never made sense to give them a pierce attack. It only muddied the waters.

Or removing that weird pierce attack given to spearmen and make them hackers instead. All civs have spearmen as far as I remember.

Perish the thought!

Is that even a problem anymore?

In the like 100 matches I've seen casted on Youtube, I can't remember a single player actually building a curtain of walls, but I'm not sure if that's a whole other discussion or if siege weapons should be discussed in concert with walls.

Well, yeah, people have been complaining about rams for a loooong time. Minutes to make the mods. The hours of testing don't need to be done by you or stan or the 1 or 2 other active guys. In general, maybe. Likely, they are the best to just what is best for competitive play. 90% of your user base are probably not very competitive. Though, 90% of those probably would not have any idea why they're not liking the balance, only that the gameplay feels unbalanced or bad or frustrating. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Barely anyone even uses walls. But honestly, I think rams should be more about attacking walls and other defenses, specifically bringing down gates. But we have yet to construct a meta where the player actually is incentivized to use walls and build proper cities. That's what the "normies" and "casuals" do after all.

You don't want it to be too directional because of the various camera angles.

It would take 5 mins to make a mod and test it out. Could even be added to the mod.io list and let players, you know, playtest. That was one of the selling points of making modding so integral to these alpha releases right? So balancing work could be done by hundreds instead of a handful? I reiterate that it is my opinion that fine tuned balancing discussions are worthless at this juncture, unless there is some kind of gross imbalance. The question is whether battering rams are grossly imbalanced (I think they are). So, let's make 2 "official" balancing mods. One where the battering ram speed is reduced, and one where they can't attack soldiers. Get people to test them out and then they can report back here. That's the real way to "balance" these things. Another mod could be adding @borg-'s flaming arrows idea. Or you can play Delenda Est where battering ram speed has been reduced for over a year and flaming arrows have been implemented for a couple civs in some circumstances for a long time too.

An interesting mechanic could be Granaries. You build Granaries and when you have an excess of Food, you can put that food into the Granaries for later. Similar to bartering, you click the button in the Granary UI that allows you to deposit as much food as you want out of the current treasury. That amount of food is taken from the treasury and placed into the Granary. Later, if your farms are destroyed from raiding or you're pushed off your farmlands and your food drain has reached 0, the food drain can come from your Granary until it runs out, preventing your units from losing health. Just an idea. Also reminds me a lot of Command and Conquer.

Yeah, I have the git locally. Still pretty rough.

Just assign someone to do this for you. Stripping out the glory costs and using the standard tech tree from the core game shouldn't be much trouble. The bigger trouble would be the actors.

Indeed! It's what I did in DE.

This is all remedied by removing the pierce attack from spear units. "Hack" isn't supposed to represent some kind of difference between puncturing and slashing, it's supposed to represent "Melee" attacking. Remove the pierce attack from spear dudes and then you don't have to have highish pierce armor for pikemen. By removing the pierce attack you'd necessarily have to increase their hack attack to compensate and now they're better against battering rams.

Thebans and Epirotes from DE have the benefit of mostly being complete (though I am sure they can be greatly improved by new assets that aren't so heavily borrowed from the Macedonians, Athenians, et al). Thracians and Scythians and Greco-Bactrians sounds like great choices. Greco-Bactrians can use the Seleucid buildings for placeholders. Parthians would make another great choice. Perhaps round out with the Pre-Classical Mayans? Terra Magna can add these cool civs and use standard Empires Ascendent gameplay for maximum compatibility with the core civs, and Delenda Est can use them to experiment and push the boundaries.

Be my guest.

The latest issue of Ancient Warfare Magazine is about the 4th century BC Thracians. Pretty cool issue. Scythians can use Xiongnu assets as placeholders,

unfortunately, yellow bars are already used for resource amount.

The pyrogenesis archiver we use to compile the mods into a zip archive does indeed have a compression option. The DE mod on mod.io is 338 mb, while my local working DE directory is 980 mb. (unless @stanislas69 worked some magic and compressed the zip archive even further).

Maybe, but not for a couple weeks.

Some things I'd maybe like to get done for alpha 24's release: Come up with some new socio-economic paradigms for some of the civs. Not all civs should have the Slavery paradigm. Mauryas: Caste-based system Celts, Iberians, Persians: Some kind of peasantry-based system Balance Elephant Archers some more Probably make their ranks increase their attack since I can't add arrows Convince some talented people to make more Cult Statues for the cultures that are reusing the Athenian cult statue Celts: Wooden Epona? Wodan? Draped in flowers and burnt offerings? Persians: Colorful Lamassu Nomads: Wooden Horse statue? Spartans: Bronze Leonidas statue Seleucids: Apollo statue, or maybe Alexander statue Macedonians: Herakles statue or different Apollo statue from Seleucids Thebans: Theban Sphinx Republican Romans: Mars or Jupiter Principate Romans: Colossus Convince some talented people to make Archery Range/Stable/Workshop for the Han Chinese With permission, add Terra Magna's Xiongnu so I can experiment with "nomadic" gameplay style Add the Scythians, based on the above Xiongnu Perhaps attempt 2 different possible "nomadic" gameplay styles, one each for the Xiongs and Scyths Can keep both styles or determine if one style is much preferable over the other Maybe a couple more mercenaries for the civs who currently only have 1. Unit actors More ethnically correct slave actors/textures Fix the Han scout actor (currently using the Greek scout actor) Fix all remaining portraits for everything Experiment with making gaia horses capturable Will add more to this list as I go along

The game definitely needs some Bactrian Camels.

Release 02 is now uploaded to mod.io. Thanks to @stanislas69 for archiving it via Linux for me. https://0ad.mod.io/delenda-est Just waiting for acceptance. @Itms BTW - I tried to make the upload the "primary" release, but since it hadn't been accepted yet it broke mod.io download in-game. I since changed it back.