[Lagging when using Shift- modifier key]

34 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Only in SVN or even with the packaged game ?

The sound thing is probably just SVN now that I think of it.

[Lagging when using Shift- modifier key]

4 hours ago, elexis said:

Also can someone who does experience the lag test if the lagging is gone if the 'session.massbarter' and 'session.batchtrain' part of misc.xml is deleted? I suspect both of them are equally lagging?

Yes, removing this reduces or eliminates the lag.

Another thing that causes lag [I think] are sound calls, especially when they are first played.

[Lagging when using Shift- modifier key]

6 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Windows Search ?

I tried searching in /public mod with the Windows search feature but it refused to find it. I tried from binaries level and search found it.

mods\public\gui\session\hotkeys 

 

[[Proposal]: 3 And A Half Possible Foundations For 0 A.D. Gameplay]

11 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

Removing single units can limit some strategy micro.

It removes some micro, and then adds in different micro.

[[Proposal]: 3 And A Half Possible Foundations For 0 A.D. Gameplay]

10 hours ago, Prodigal Son said:

I wouldn't blame the removal of citizen soldiers if DE is hard to balance (which seems to be the case since it tries to add way too much imo).

 

How much have you played it? lol

Not to mention I haven't even attempted to balance it yet, since it would be stupid to attempt in earnest while still in alpha. So, I don't know how anyone can say DE is "hard to balance" when it hasn't even been attempted.

[Lagging when using Shift- modifier key]

7 hours ago, elexis said:

misc.xml

Where can I find this, dude? 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone's gameplay design]

2 minutes ago, Nescio said:

PS Although “Principate” is an appropiate and nowadays standard name for the Roman Empire of 27 B.C. to 284 A.D., the term “Principates” is not a proper word (neither in English nor in Latin).

Mauryans is incorrect too, but  Thanks for the lesson, professor.

[Empires Apart. ==Freemium==]

The fog of war boundary has this really weird animation to it, they should remove.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone's gameplay design]

9 minutes ago, Nescio said:

Actually I think removing phases would be an improvement Unfortunately the AI is designed around phases at the moment.

I think phases can be reworked. See the first post in this thread for my ideas.

 

Quote

Having a camel per se, no, it won't, but having a camel as its primary mounted unit is ahistorical.

The Persians in the game represent the entire Achaemenid Empire, not just the Persian home culture. In fact, I toyed with renaming the Persians to Achaemenids, since the Egyptians are called Ptolemies, but I settled for Egyptians (Ptolemies) and Persians (Achaemenids) since I figured it would work better for mod civs and any additional official civs added in the future. I wish the core game and other mods would adopt this naming scheme, along with Indians (Mauryans) and Romans (Republicans). For instance Aristeia could have Egyptians (New Kingdom), while Delenda Est includes the Romans (Principates). 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone's gameplay design]

7 minutes ago, Nescio said:

Variation for the sake of variation seems to be a bad idea. Horse-back riding was the forte of the Iranian peoples (Persians, Indians, Bactrians, etc.). If anybody should use cavalry, certainly they.

The Persians have like 5 other horse cavalry units in my mod. 1 camel unit isn't going to kill their historicity.

 

7 minutes ago, Nescio said:

Gameplay-wise, people should not be unnecessarily restricted, they should have a choice.

Game design is about restricting, else you have a sandbox game. Might as well remove territories and phase requirements.

 

Quote

• give cavalry a population cost of 2

Hell, give infantry a pop cost of 2 and cavalry a pop cost of 3, as in Delenda Est.

 

But that hasn't any bearing on my gameplay proposal, since in my proposal gives pop cost on a per battalion basis. I think we're drifting here, which is partially my fault.

[Lagging when using Shift- modifier key]

When using shift to place multiple buildings or to batch train, a large drop in framerate is noticed. I am not sure if it is my computer's local config [like some kind of "easy keys" option or something triggered by the shift key] or if it's a 0 A.D. problem. I've noticed this for a long time now, but just now mentioning it.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone's gameplay design]

17 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

Sounds like a bold change so close to a release but maybe @temple has some ideas

I don't think Scout Cavalry are that bold of a change. But if you're talking about the other cavalry stuff, like capping them until Phase 2, then yeah, that's pretty bold for a player base who goes crazy over a 10% change in cost from one alpha to the next. lol Better to consider it for A24, along with the new stabs and arches.

 

14 hours ago, Servo said:

Food only requirement to train cavalry will just make the game worst imo. Food is just too easy to produce in the game.

 

My Scout Cavalry cost 100 Food, but are very weak. They are literally only good for scouting and hunting. All other cav types cost Food+Wood or Food+Metal. You might be able to use scavs [scout cavalry, just coined the term right now in this post; thank me later] in some desperate circumstances to take out enemy siege weaponry if they aren't properly guarded by the enemy, but I doubt you'd just have a squadron or two of scavs just waiting around for this possibility.   No, 99% of the time you'd use them for their intended purpose.

 

Regarding the scavs, since @Alexandermb's new camels are committed, I'm thinking of making the Ptol and Persian scouts into Scout Camelry, "scams" if you will, for a little civ variation.

 

11 hours ago, Servo said:

Most players can afford to lose units carrying resources in the battle and tbh it’s not a nice sight. Units must be able to fight only without carrying any resources. If they don’t drop it off there should be time to make them combat ready and lose the resources they are carrying. 

A bit too much micro I think. You're brainstorming ideas at least.

 

11 hours ago, Servo said:

On barter side it should be really a real barter. If you don’t have goods to barter then your trade cart should auto stop. The sight of trade caravans in huge quantities are just too unreal. If the amount of goods to trade can be much much more then the players don’t need to use too many trade carts. The population can have more cap to much needed units like soldiers.

I'm not a big big fan of the barter feature. It's this big "meta economy" feature plopped right in the middle of a strategy game that takes place in a game world. That's not 0 A.D.'s fault, as it has become a kind of RTS staple over the years. I'd rather take out bartering and replace it with a Market trickle feature, where you use the 'Upgrade' feature with the market to make it trickle one resource or another. Or, you could have a feature where you sell large batches of one commodity or another at the market and gain the coin. It would be a feature that has to recharge so you can't just flood the market and gain coin whenever you want. It would be similar to the Bartering feature, but each sale or trade is more significant and has a bigger impact. Just brainstorming here.

I also think Tribute could work in a less meta way too, as you allude to. Right now, trading in 0 A.D. has a tribute-like feature where your ally gains resources every time your trader stops at her market. You could integrate tribute into the game by allowing the player to "switch" his traders from gathering trade resources to tributing trade resources instead. So, in a team match each player chooses whether trade benefits them, or benefits their ally. If you do stuff like this, I think econ elsewhere would need streamlined a bit, like perhaps Slaves appear automatically when you build a Storehouse or Farm Field and work automatically to gather those resources. The strategy here being where and when you place those assets rather than microing gatherers around.

[Black Panther]

47 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

So I should watch Logan huh?

Eeeeeyah.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone's gameplay design]

Bump, since improving the core gameplay is now a topic again.

 

In DE, I have implemented Scout Cavalry for the game and they work beautifully. They're good for hunting and scouting. You get one free Scout at the beginning. If you build a Stable, then you can train 1 more Scout [or do you use that stone for a barracks or archery range instead? Decisions, decisions]. No other cavalry are available in Village Phase. At Town Phase the cavalry cap for all types, including scouts, is lifted.

[Black Panther]

Yeah, I didn't want to classify every single superhero movie and franchise.  For instance, I didn't mention Logan, which is my all-time favorite superhero movie largely because it mirrors my own relationship with my own daughter, minus all the gunfire.

 

 

[Black Panther]

Just took my son to see Black Panther this weekend. It's pretty good. I'd rank it next to Iron Man 1 and Wonder Woman as a solid tier-2 superhero film. For reference, I'd put Man of Steel, Ant Man, and Thor films at tier 3, and then it gets precipitously worse after that [the less said about films like Catwoman and Batman vs. Superman the better]. Tier 1 for me would be films like The Dark Knight, Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and Captain America: Civil War and Avengers 1.

 

The music in the trailer is pretty dire and doesn't do the film justice.

Anyway, I could recognize inspiration taken from all across Africa for the Wakandans. Most interestingly, I saw these shields in the movie:

 

VERY BRIEFLY, near the beginning when Tchala is being initiated as king, there is a flotilla if ceremonial barges with dancing women on them heading toward a waterfall, attached to the sides of one of the barges are these shields above. I said, AHA! out loud in the theater. lol I was also the only one to laughed out loud at the "colonizer" quip toward Bilbo Baggins from Tchala's feisty sister, but that's irrelevant here.  

Tchala's shield during the ceremonial challenge fights looked very similar to the stick shields @Sundiata suggested for the Nuba units. It also looked similar to Zulu stick shields such as this:

 

Lastly, I'll say Nupita Lyong'o was extremely hot in the film. Wish I could make her my queen! 

[[Proposal]: Clearly (Re)define The Core Gameplay]

1 minute ago, Prodigal Son said:

Anyway I could say much for and against the rest of your proposals, but let's not turn this into another "which gameplay details are best" thread, while it's overdone and we don't even have the foundation laid down.

Indeed. Now needs defined what constitutes a "foundation." Give a bullet point list.

[[Proposal]: Clearly (Re)define The Core Gameplay]

2 hours ago, Prodigal Son said:

On the scale and game pace thing, do we really need to have quantity over performance and gameplay quality? WC 3 is one of the most successful games of the genre. It uses 100 pop (in practice more like 30-40 since units cost pop accordingly to their power).

Indeed, my approach, believe it or not, despite allowing for massive battles would only actually have the player controlling maybe 20-30 actual combat entities. Entities being the operative word here, since each of these "entities" represents a battalion of 20-24 soldiers. Add in about 25-30 citizens and maybe 30 or 40 slaves and other support units, and you're only maintaining 100 actual entities in the game. Meanwhile, you actually get the feel for real ancient combat through the use of large armies in battalions, formations, charges, and all the rest.

 

2 hours ago, Prodigal Son said:

Also, high unit speed and huge vision break immersion and make scouting too easy,

Absolutely! I've reduced unit speed and more importantly reduced vision range considerably in DE. This would carry into any gameplay proposal as well.

 

Quote

while incohesive actors for simular units/structures make bits of the game confusing/unappealing (I'm all for realism where it fits, but for example we don't need 5 different cloth colors for the same unit type messing with teamcolor).

I agree this is a huge huge problem for the game's current mosh pit combat, and probably one of the many reasons that AOE games have such similar looking units. With my proposed battalion system this particular problem is all but eliminated.

 

You mention Warcraft 3, which is basically a hybrid RTS-RPG. A battalion system is essentially this. Each battalion is like a unit from WC3. You pick the class of battalion, which has different bonuses and penalties and abilities. You can upgrade each battalion to be different, much like its own character.

Imagine a "battalion" of 5 elephants. This is akin to a character that you can improve with better armor, better weapons, towers, pikes/archers, even a squad of support soldiers [a real thing that happened; war elephants almost always had escort troops], officers ["zooiarkhoi"], noisemakers [bells around their necks, scares enemy cavalry]. You can do similar things with a battalion of Celtic warriors [naked-> clothed-> armored; karnyx; noble officer; etc.]. A battalion of Companion Cavalry. A battalion of Roman Hastati. A battalion of Greek Hoplites. A battalion of Persian Chariots. etc. Weapon-switching becomes easier with battalions. Stances [reduced to 3] and formation [reduced in number as well] control becomes easier. All those cool things about ancient combat becomes easier.

Economics. You can still have multiple resources, but perhaps streamline how you assign gatherers to harvest those resources. Imagine this: Build a Storehouse next to some trees. Click one button once, and that storehouse trains 10 slaves who immediately start gathering the nearby trees once complete. Slaves* are your primary gatherers, while your Citizens are your builders and traders**. 

 

Spoiler

* Some civs would have a nobility/peasantry dichotomy, while most others would have a citizen/slave system.

**Task a Citizen to a market and another market to turn them automatically into a Trader. They'll walk up to the first market and a horse/camel/donkey appears with them and they start their trade route. Task them to do anything else and they stop being a trader.

 

[[Proposal]: Clearly (Re)define The Core Gameplay]

50 minutes ago, Prodigal Son said:

I'm not in the mood to restart working on the mod

Heh, yeah, feel ya there.

[[Proposal]: Clearly (Re)define The Core Gameplay]

29 minutes ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

All the same, basic overarching design decisions can be made by the team; specifics would have to probably be left to one person, but a general vision is worth exploring.  

I think the general vision for the longest time had been:

Age of Empires 2

+ citizen soldiers

+ territories 

Boom done.

 

But many see some gameplay problems with that as well as a huge missed opportunity to build something more interesting. Hence all the broken mods and bloodbath gameplay threads.

In the end I think just voting on each feature individually as had been done in the past misses some of what Prodigal and Thorfinn are talking about, which is coherence. 

Imho best way would be to have a small number of self contained gameplay proposals that are widely regarded to be coherent and fresh. When you have these 3 or 4 self contained proposals then you can choose one and tweak from there.

Experience has taught us that debating individual features ad nauseam is folly. Each feature has to fit within a whole for a complete and coherent experience.

So choose an overarching theme or idea, like:

"0 A.D. aims to give the player the satisfying experience building and maintaining an ancient empire, through resource harvesting, city building, and conquest through iconic ancient combat."

Gather up a handful of gameplay proposals which more or less fulfill your thematic statement, and choose the one which you think most carries out the potential of the premise.

[Delenda Est is dead? [No, it's not]]

8 hours ago, elexis said:

The problem with that is that the dropdown can exceed the screenspace this way and the players won't be able to select some civs then.

True. Then perhaps set the length to whatever is maxly* possible for 720p.

 

*eh hem

[Persian Rework]

Including a wider variety of units is why core game should look at DEs mercenary camp feature. In it, I provide Persia with Kardakes hoplites, Mercenary Greek hoplites, Kardakes skirmishers, and Scythian Horse Archers. I was thinking of closing one of their unit type gaps by possibly including Nubian Swordsmen too. The Anatolian Skirmisher citizen soldier in the game could cover the Lydian Skirmisher you mention, though I am sure that unit needs reskinned and propped for accuracy. 

[[Proposal]: Clearly (Re)define The Core Gameplay]

4 hours ago, Prodigal Son said:

@wowgetoffyourcellphone Bait for what? Are you implying I'm trying to start a flame war or something else I can't get, while at the same time liking the post and pm-ing me your mod's link as an answer to the gameplay question? I am failing to get your point or was my point that confusing?

The gif is obviously posted in jest since I have previously admired your work and other posts. Perhaps you don't understand the sheer amount of blood spilt over this single issue over the many years. The only answer is modding so you can demonstrate your ideas, else you just start the 50th thread where good ideas go to die.

[Rome Legionary]

1 hour ago, LordGood said:

All of that should be done in the specmap

This helmet does not match the other helmets in look or texture. That's why I suggested that. This texture currently looks flat and dull.

[Viewer]

On 2/22/2018 at 3:31 PM, s0600204 said:

2 - Unable to duplicate (or I'm misunderstanding you).

3 - Unable to duplicate. (In vanilla 0AD) Building a "Sentry Tower", upgrading it to "Defence Tower", then right-clicking the big entity icon: Template Viewer appears displaying stats of the "Defence Tower".

2 and 3 seem to be the same issue just manifesting in different ways. I have found out what is happening. If the 'Upgraded' entity inherits from the original entity, then the Viewer only gets the information from the original entity--it doesn't see the upgrade entity as a new entity. If the 'Upgrade' entity parent is a new parent [template_structure_xxx] then the viewer updates the information accordingly. hmm. Can test this in DE by viewing the upgrade units for the Maiden Archer. The Maiden Fire Archer's parent is the Maiden Archer, and thus the viewer does not display the new information. The Maiden Swordsman's parent is a new base template [swordsman instead of archer], and thus the viewer displays the Maiden Swordsman correctly.