wowgetoffyourcellphone

All right, after playing some more test games I can't seem to get over the ingrained idea that the civic center should be dropsite. I get frustrate like why is not my dude dropping off his stuff instead of walking all the way to that storehouse across the base? Oh, I forgot, again, that I changed it. lol, very frustrating. Will probably put it back unless there's more discussion pro. I admit that maybe more playtesting could be done, but the feature is not that important to me. Keeping the farmstead unlocking fields though!

That's not exactly how BfME2 worked. In that game, each soldier had their own health, just like in 0 A.D., it's just the health bars were turned off by default. Healing could definitely work just like it does now. In fact, if you read the proposal, I proposed a cool mechanic for the healer to keep them relevant to the battalion system. No, I have told you how this would be prevented. Pop cap would affect everything, even reinforcement. Now you're nitpicking just to nitpick. How "experience" is governed is not a huge issue for me. It just made sense to me that the overall experience of a group, if by experience we're just talking about some abstract number or value, would go down if you add inexperienced people to that group. Call me crazy. Add cold water to warm water and they average out. Not a difficult concept. btw, mentoring someone does not magically give that person "experience" either, only insight, preparedness even, but not experience which by definition a raw recruit does not have.

How exactly do you think battalions of men were reinforced in real-life? Usually, in war, with raw recruits and often during peace time with troops of lesser experience or length of service.

No, I'm not saying that. The opposite, actually. If that battalion lost half its men, then it loses half its pop cost too, freeing up that pop for you to train other units. I can also foresee some mechanics where you could task the understrength battalion to a barracks and it would automatically get reinforced slowly with new recruits, reducing its overall experience, but beefing up its troop numbers to maximum. I could see being able to combine your battalions of like-troops as well. So, hoplites to hoplites, archers to archers, combining understrength battalions to form full-strength battalions, averaging-out the experience.

One can easily foresee a mechanic where if the reinforcement is automatic then it happens up til pop cap is reached.

Lol dude units pop out the front of buildings after being "trained" for 10 seconds. Magic!!! Lol

That's basically what the citizens are.

IMHO, a gameplay design that tries to make every player happy will likely fail to be a coherent gameplay design.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Entity parent="template_entity_unit_battalion"> <Battalion> <LineUnit>units/athen_infantry_spearman_b.xml</LineUnit> <NumberOfUnits>24</NumberOfUnits> <SpecialUnits> <StandardBearer>units/athen_infantry_standardbearer.xml</StandardBearer> <Officer>units/athen_infantry_spearman_officer.xml</Officer> <NoiseMaker>units/athen_infantry_noise_maker.xml</NoiseMaker> <Healer/> </SpecialUnits> <Directional/> <Permanent>true</Permanent> </Battalion> <Cost> <Population>10</Population> <PopulationDivisible>true</PopulationDivisible> <BuildTime>60</BuildTime> <Resources> <food>500</food> <wood>400</wood> <stone>0</stone> <iron>0</iron> <coin>0</coin> <glory>0</glory> </Resources> </Cost> <Health> <RegenSoldierRate>10</RegenSoldierRate> </Health> <Identity> <GenericName>Athenian Hoplites</GenericName> <Formations datatype="tokens"> formations/battle_line formations/column </Formations> <FormationModifiers datatype="tokens"> formations/modifiers/close_order formations/modifiers/open_order formations/modifiers/locked_shields </FormationModifiers> </Identity> <Looter/> ... </Entity> So, there would still be "single soldiers" in the game, easy for modding or modes, or scenarios. The battalion entity simple calls and places these soldiers into the battalion, what you train is the battalion template in a standard match.

Celts and Germans definitely had slaves. Iberians is the only one I am not sure of their status on this item. Some sources claim Persians don't have slavery, others do. The ones that say they don't have slavery seems like semantics to me, kind of like saying the Spartans didn't have slavery, they had helots, which are almost identical to slaves in most respects... But they don't have to be called a "Slave" genericly in the game. "Laborer" is fine for the generic name, while for most their specific name would be "Slave" in their specific language. "Thrall" works too. But we can just say, "this is the Helot, the Spartan slave class of unit," and it still works fine. /The exact word does not matter to me one bit, though I tend to prefer to call something what it is: slavery.

Not a bug, clearly. They are meant to overlap.

Of course the team can do whatever they want to with my proposal: include some of the ideas or ignore all of them completely. However, I find the battalions to be crucial to the combat mechanic, so much so that I'd rather they just ignore my whole proposal if they don't implement battalions. Soldiers don't fight as individuals in ancient combat. It's just not done. Even in the "age of heroes" with "single combat", the bulk of the battle was completed by formations of soldiers. If you want combat with individuals making great big choices for themselves, then don't make a strategy game based on ancient combat, especially not based on Romans and Greeks who prided themselves in their formation combat! That's just my PoV.

I'm not even sure that guy has ever played RTS game before... lol

Indeed. Happens with many large footprints, actually. See: Warships along the shoreline. Very ugly, not exclusive to DE. About the aura graphics, @Enrique has offered to create nice custom aura graphics for each culture if only the feature was there.

This is because the game uses the <Footprint> for ungarrison and training exit position. In DE, I use the footprint to add the Temple healing aura graphics--it's currently the only way to achieve what I wanted. Unfortunately,they are not fully compatible.

Throw away the current implementation. What I'm talking about is a different implementation.

@Lion.Kanzen, in my design, the Citizens are your militia, who are called to arms with a town bell at the civic center, storehouse, and farmstead. They have a muster time --reduced via techs-- and then they can fight back against attackers or raiders.

Another possible solution would be to remove the "no resources" option in game setup, only allow it for scenarios. I know people don't like to remove options, but think of it as streamlining. How many players really play matches with zero starting resource? I'd wager only 1 out of every 1000 match, if that. One thing i will admit is that this is a pretty big change to get used to at first. When I played a test match I totally forgot about my changes and wondered why my shuttlers were bypassing the civic center to drop their wares. lol It does take a change to the thinking of what your Civic Center's abilities are. You can't rely on the CC to be the dropsite anymore. But after that first match I was fine. Also, even in that match, once resources were cleared from the area around my CC and I had built farther out, the issue was resolved automatically.

That's what I was thinking too. We can come up with ways to make Polar Sea or any other map or gametype work with any new paradigm we come up with. It's all good, as my mother says.

It's true. I like how the Persians have a barracks and stable, while the Spartans have a barracks and military mess hall, and further the Romans only have a barracks. Maybe just have a basic rule than any civ with more than 2 cavalry types is to receive a stable building. I can't imagine forcing a stable building into the Spartan civ building roster. Side note: About AOM, I never understood the Barracks and Counter-Barracks for the Atlanteans. Why would you ever train any barracks units when your Counter-Barracks units hard counter everything? Especially if you're a good twitch gamer, microer, just always train the hard counter units. But I was never a fan of the Atlanteans. Zeus4lyfe.

, I meant player.xml.

I just remembered I don't need to use a tech hack, can just use player.js.

Indeed, a Stables/Barracks split could be possible. I might throw it in there. For your last point. I think maybe battalion formations could get more organized as the units promote to new ranks. Basic level troops their lines would be kind off messy, while Elite and Champion battalions would have laser-straight lines and files.

In my gameplay proposal thread, I proposed that you can build slaves from dropsites. They're econ units only. I could see the possibility for a strategy in a nomad match where the player miiiight want to build a few storehouses and farmstead first, before their starting CC and gather some more resources before they found their city and announce to the enemy where they are. Dunno.

I can do this right now with a hack. Field template <RequiredTechnology> would be something like "Unlock_Farms", which is an auto-research tech with prerequisite of a Farmstead class object. Then with Player.js, make it so for every 1 farmstead, up to 8 fields are unlocked. The first bit is a hack, the last bit isn't. The non-hacky way would be to code the game to allow templates to have a RequiredClass or a generic Requirements element, with different requirements possible within that element. Right now, the only requirement possible in the templates is RequiredTechnology. It's not a super ugly hack, really, and may be the preferred way to do it for all I know. Anyway, we can combine all of these things, really, since they all make sense separately and together.