wowgetoffyourcellphone

You can't say this without giving the whole quote or example.

So ancient, tickets submitted by Cleopatra or Mark Antony.

I think both can work. It's just in my mind's eye I see these cool looking large open-pit marble mines and a couple dozen enemy slaves working on it and how cool that would look and be to wrestle away from my enemy. A big asset added to my empire. A real prize. Not such a big prize to kill 4 gatherers and steal a rock.

I agree. RTS games have moved on from the AOE combat style. I don't want to see "massive" armies of 100 micro-intensive soldiers. I want to see 1000 guys duking it out in battalions -- you call them squads, same diff -- that you manage. Maybe 20 or so battalions of 24 dudes a piece, where the "micro" is used for setting posture, flanking, formation, charging, etc. You know, exciting stuff that actually simulates combat of this era. The thing that makes this era so appealing to player. Any game can have point and click fest micro, but there are better way of giving the player the experience of ancient combat.

Right here. They're already in. Enrique commit them on New Years.

As it should be, right? I mean, what is the use of raiding the enemy's isolated gathering spots if they can just immediately retrain any of the gatherers I kill from the nearby storehouse? Look, resource gathering away from your centers of power should be possible in the game, in this we agree. But we disagree in that you seem to think that it should be without risk or easy to do. IMHO, we should make it a high risk/high reward situation to have a resourcing operation outside the player's territory.

See Principate Romans in Delenda Est for proof of concept. But even without storehouse training, you really don't get that trail of dudes if you have neutral territory dropsites. You exhaust a mine or whatever, and then move to the next one and build a new storehouse or whatever.

I think he saying move the mines away from the CC and toward the edge of the starting terriroty. At least, that's what I'm saying. He and I object to the mines basically being right there at the front door of the CC. Move them away a bit. The mines are space invaders currently. Let's try it. @Removing resources: I don't really see the need to drop stone or food. Still don't understand that one. Food makes sense to keep, since it is /the/ most important resource a city and a people needs -- along with water of course. Stone works great as a resource for defenses, etc. Metal works for technologies, champions, etc. Wood works for buildings and ships. I understand how you're conflating food and pop cap, but in the player's mind they're not related.

Performance has had noticeable increase since the past 2-3 alpha release. It's getting better. Pathfinding and AI is still bottleneck.

I disagree. Phases create a "leveling" feature for your settlement, also a bottleneck that must be overcome in order to level up. This is a standard trope for many games, not just AOE. And personally, I don't want to see a cap of only 4 dudes mining a whole silver mine. I get what you're trying to do, but the cap is way too low. I don't think adding more resources is too hard to manage. The important thing to do is to look at what the current vanilla game does and don't do that thing. Namely, it makes things cost more than 2 resources. This is where it becomes hard to manage, not the number of resources overall, but costs. I don't want to see units or techs or buildings that cost 250 food, 50 metal, 60 marble, 67 silver, and 579 iron. This is an exaggeration, but the game current does this with a lot of stuff. So, if you don't do that, instead keep it down to 2 resources for cost of each entity, maybe 3 for some exceptions, then more resources are not a problem. As @sphyrth says, I think one problem is that at the start there is a ton of resoruces just jammed right up against the Civic Center. Instead, the area around the CC should be relatively flat and clear of obstructions for ease of construction. the resources should be out, away, at the edges, near the hinterlands. Player should have to hunt for those precious metal and stone mines. You don't found a city right on top of a mine anyway.

Garamantines.

@OmriLahav

Right, "Greeks" is a civilization, while "Athenians" is a faction within that civilization. You can even say that about the Mauryans, they are a faction within the "Indians" civilization. But that's semantics. It may be useful to just use civilization because that's the term players are used to, semantics aside.

The current functionality of corrals is not up to their spec. So don't judge corrals based on their current status. I agree, it's own thread.

It's true that perhaps the game should choose one or the other. Civilization sounds broader, like "Western Civilization" while Faction sounds smaller or more specific. One thing that "Civilization" can boast is that it's been the standard term for historical rts, while faction has been used in non-historical rts, at least in my experience.

It's just, I have played rts games with "soft" battalions and rts games with "hard" battalions, and the games with soft battalions made me wonder why they even tried. The combat and behavior of hard battalions in games like Battle for Middle Earth 2 just plain worked, and was very straight forward. That's where I am come from in my views. Maybe others, like Yves, have other experience and have gained a different perspective. Fair.

I like simple solutions sometimes. 1 market per cc, 5 trader per market. Slow traders down by 50% and adjust the gain a bit higher. I think traders should be less numerous but higher gain that make them high value targets. Exact values subject to change. Trading with self is okay imho since cities in an empire traded between themselves. But the profit for self trade can be lowered. Give a max distance between markets and CCs (markets cant too far from a cc) so the markets are tethered to the center of each city.

Well, I like trading because it bring another historical aspect to the game, plus improve teamwork, etc.

Maybe make trader cost more for each new trader. I already do this with cult statue. Works fine. But I think by the end of a long game you want trading to replace gathering by a large amount, maybe 50%.

Including children units is too much, guys. When things like this come shooting out, I think it's time to step back and reevaluate. I don't like "provinces" as talked about here. I'd prefer something more dynamic as it is now, but I grow tired of talking about this stuff ad nauseum. Just play DE to see what I would do with territory and expansion. To make a long story short, I'd prefer to see the player building cities, rather than grabbing huge sections of land. In reality, empires had no real "borders" like we have today. The "border" was a mountain range or a river or a valley, and even then enemy armies easily penetrate and live off the land for weeks or months. That's why I refocused "territory" to be more about city boundaries than empire boundaries. Empires are the control of cities, IMHO, and their surrounding lands. You only "own" the land that you can defend. And the world at this time was something like 2% as populous as it is now. Large swathes of land were uninhabited or untapped, certainly undeveloped, and "control" from the capitol was nominal at best, hence strong core/weak countryside concept in DE. But, as long as the game remains moddable and I can have my way in my mod, then do what you want with hard "provinces." As usual, lots of reinventing the wheel here, for example about farms. Already good farming concepts available on the forum and in Trac last time I look. Check those out. Directionality: If it can make things simpler, perhaps directionality can be on a per battalion basis, rather than per soldier. Just throwing that out there.

Can have stoa be special start structure for Greek civs. The stoa is what gives them their hellenic architecture bonus.

A very clever music video!