wowgetoffyourcellphone

Nice.

I'm saying, if the civic center represents the center of a town/city/metropolis, then why do you want it to act like some kind of forward resource camp? There's already such things: storehouse and farmstead.

Nonono, better not remove shuttling. If anything I would like some [minor!!!] complexity added with shuttling: I would like a shuttling speed added to the templates, so that dudes carrying slabs of stone back to the civic center can walk slower. That way, maybe wheelbarrow and handcart techs can affect shuttling speed as well.

Well, all of the aura in the game feel gamey. At the end of the day you have to accept some of these tropes and suspend disbelief. But perhaps the female aura is one step too far for you? For me, it's not so tedious as @WhiteTreePaladin says, because I use enough females that I'm relatively assured that if I send a few of them with the men to mine the stone that they'll have enough "coverage" for efficiant use of their aura. But I have no huge love for the feature though. At one point I removed it from DE -- but put it back again -- it felt charming to keep it, to use Brian [aka WhiteTreePaladin]'s word.

What is the civic center? What does it represent in the game?

I don't know if it favors rushing per se, but it does make it more difficult to defend your food source and encourages scouting and claiming sections of land, which is okay to me since the weird way that 0 a.d. allow making farms in the middle of town protects the food source too much imho.

Yeah, when I think more about it I think you're right about multiplayer. While I don't think it's impossible to do right, I think a lot of players would get frustrated with it, unless you did it so that raids in winter time are fun and challenging, or winter time was used by players for other tasks, depends on how the game is structured. But sure, to just shoehorn it into 0 a.d. or any other RTS without some serious restructuring would be a disaster, as you say. Singleplayer would definitelely be enhanced though, I think, especially scenarios or campaigns.

Respectfully, they are so broken that online players ban them in their matches. I mean, their current form is a decent stopgap to make the corral interesting until its final form is developed, but it's just a stopgap.

D227 sound like an unnecessary complexity. You guys care about this kind of stuff too much, like the hundred or so posts spent on trying to make berries variable and regenerate. What player should need to care about is placement of the farm instead of whatever you're trying to achieve with D227.

Lion, the comparison to aok and aom relics are just a comparison, breh.

I can see he got pwned. lol

I like the seasons. Hmm, let's say in 0 A.D. if it had seasons, combat would be nerfed somehow in the winter, as well as food production, so large attacks are difficult and booming pop in Winter becomes problematic unless lots of food stored up in the summer. So, each match gets a rhythmic cycle. I like clean the UI btw.

Make capture more special. Capture the civic center and gain all of the surrounding houses too. Decisive. Important. Have merc camps around the map to capture for special merc units. Points of contention.

Let me go to bat for the corrals, just this once, and see if I can come up with good pro argument. Corrals as they are now are broken and not good, this is universally accepted I think. But... but... Corrals as they are now are not what they are intended for completion. Here's what they can be/should be use for: storing relics. Wait, the game does not have relics? The relics are herdable animals. No one says relics break AOK or AOM. Herdable animals are the relics of 0 A.D. So, you capture them and then garrison them into the corral to gain their benefit, just like a relic from AOK or AOM. These are not meant to unbalance the game, but to give the player a small edge, like relics did in those games. They provide a nice little benefit of scouting before the enemy does, just like relics, and add a nice little layer to the game. Just remove the animal training aspect from the corral and readjust the techs toward this new paradigm.

Which one this? Look good so far, though the glow is wrong.

He got pwned.

IMHO, since this is in alpha phase, this is not a strong consideration. You are developing a pc game that you hope will be played for years to come by thousands of people. Focus on what you want the end product to be, not on satisfying the couple hundred of people who play the incomplete alpha releases.

Regarding blacksmith tiering: If you keep the phases as they are now, then if you decouple the blacksmith from these phases, you may introduce unnecessary complexity, or confusion, but certainly a tear in the concept of the game. If you have phases, then they must mean something. Unless... unless... The phases just happen automatically. For instance, if you build 10 buildings, then boom, you get upgraded to the next phase automatically, with a nice aural flourish and graphical animation. That way, the phasing is directly, more directly, tied to the number of buildings you are building rather than to the phasing tech itself. Building enough buildings becomes the bottleneck instead of the phase tech cost. So, you may still have a phase tech icon in the UI, but costs nothing and it's auto-researched when the prereqs are met. So, returning to the Blacksmith, it can still have tiers of techs, but what you can do is present these tiers as blacksmith experience. I can imagine teching up your blacksmith from apprentice blacksmith to blacksmith to master blacksmith to royal blacksmith, each level unlocking more techs. Maybe make these tiers have prereqs like "Requires any 3 blacksmith techs" or something like this, in order to gain this "experience", see, and unlock the next tier.

A battalion will actually still have individual entities within it, but they are just locked with pathfinding and other features together. Soldier within the formation can still path around rocks and stuff.

You could ask those same rhetorical question about a lot of RTS games.

It's the simple controls part I am skeptical of, really, and the added micromanagement. Because now you're spending time gathering up like-units and forming them into battalions. Even if you use some clever hotkey configs to make this seamless, probably using the big space bar that is currently useless, you still have to take the extra time to gather the right units together and make a battalion. I wouldn't mind seeing both concepts in action so the team can decide what approach is better. One thing I also remember is with the soft battalions concept you have some players just mosh pit fighting, others using battalions, and still others having mixed singles and battalions all mixed together, and now the combat isn't so "nice and neat" anymore like how we want it. The one major benefit of a hard battalion system, I think, is that the combat is guaranteed to look and act how we want it to. I am not closed off to a soft battalion system with single units needed to be formed up. But the only reason to do that is to make sure to keep the complete citizen-soldier concept intact. So then there's added complexity to the formation/battalion/combat system in order to keep the citizen-soldier concept whole. But once you start breaking down the citizen-soldier concept and removing bits of it or reducing its effects, you have to ask why not just cut it neatly in half and do what I propose: gatherers* are singles, fighters are battalions with building capability. * I can still see some kind of call-to-arms militia feature with the gatherers so they take up swords and pitchforks when attacked, definitely.

1. How does this have to be true? Also, I propose that battalions do not have to gather. They can still be builders, but wouldn't gather. New single villager units -- your male and female citizens units -- would be the gatherers. 2. I agree it would be difficult with the current layout of the game. The single trees, small farms, etc. I would change a lot about the game and battalion gatherers would fit nicely, but it seems folks don't want to go that radical,. as to have gigantic farms and forest objects. So, instead, I propose that gatherers be single units, your villagers or slaves or citizens, support units being single units, traders, healers, and citizens, while soldiers are battalions with building capability. Throwing curveballs here as they say.

I am starting to think there needs to be a compromise position regarding citizen-soldiers. I think we can have gatherers and soldiers, where gatherers, i.e citizens or slaves or villagers, are single units and soldiers are battalion units. We can make soldiers also able to build, albeit slower than your villagers, retaining part of their citizen-soldier abilities. What do you think of this? In a lot of ways this is more "classic" than currently, even with the battalions.

This is not what happened with the design of BfME2. At the time I watch many developer videos about the game. You said so yourself, the battalions in BfME2 made battle management easier, so what are they compensating for when they made econ sooo easy? They were compensating for console limitations. That's right. The PC version of the game was just a console port, with a hero builder tacked into it. Now, build that game for PC first and the game design is blown wide open for more complexity, like true directional combat bonuses and a deeper econ and base building aspect.