wowgetoffyourcellphone

Did you illustrate that, Lion? nice. I will post a thread regarding my gameplay proposal and especially the citizen-soldier concept in a different thread. Since it is relevant to this thread, I will post the units/citizen-soldier concept here:

Spellforce III looks soooo good. I wonder if it use Unreal Engine.

Sure, you can look at it this way, but that is how the world works. In the real world, in peace time your people create economic value. Sending them off to fight in a war and die is destroys economic value. I think this kind of reality is what the originbal design was trying to mimic. For instance, a Greek city-state's hoplites 99% of their lives do not fight, they create economic value by being potters, sculptors, merchants, farmers, etc. Sending them off to war stops them from creating economic value. That's life. i know this is a game, but I'm just telling you the dynamic the game is trying to emulate.

And people wonder why I prefer the skirmish maps over the rms counterpart. You're right, care should be made to make the resources "clump." Also see in the Sahel skirmish map the stone mines are arange in a way to make good placement of storehouse.

Yes this seems right. I increased them to 10 in DE for the same reason. Look like at somepoint distance between units was reduced. Anyway I reduced it downto 5 and it looks and works good.

I don't understand why 5 gatherers per tree is "less manageable" than 3. Certainly it is "more manageable" than the current 8 in that case. I can already see a big difference in the way the units spread out, while maintaining the benefit of the 5 batch. I think the benefits to sticking with multiples of 5 outweigh the benefit of going with some other number that'll seem random to the player. Just my opinion. I added groves for a few reason. You can give them various auras, which are nice because you don't have to give a bunch of little auras to a bunch of single trees. I also made trees and groves passable by units, so that the groves can give a bonus in trees to guerilla units and it may or may not give a noticeable pathfinding benefit. Also, it's just nice in atlas to place a single grove than to have to click and place 30 trees. Other benefits too I'm too tired to detail. lol

This remind me there should be a random team option too.

May I suggest that every "max gatherer" stat you implement be in a multiple of 5. Reason being, batch training defaults to multiples of 5 and it just makes things neater, tidy, for gameplay to coordinate. It's a minor detail, but something to keep in mind. So, 1 tree can reduce down to 5 gatherers. I made "groves" of trees as 1 large object. Can have "max gatherer" of 20 or something. But point is, multiple of 5 to coincide with the batch training works really well.

Slingers don't gather faster than pikemen, they shuttle faster because of their faster base speed. there is no "shuttle speed" in the templates, so there's no way to make the infantry shuttle resources at the same speed. BTW, "shuttling" means to bring resources back to the dropsite. In effect, this makes faster infantry more desirable as gatherers than slower infantry, when it is my contention that this should not have to be a consideration for the player and gameplay so a new element in the templates needs to be created for shuttle speed. That is... if soldiers gathering resources is kept for the game. But it would still be a nice element to have in the templates regardless.

Yep, my point exactly. Every infantry unit should start at same shuttling speed. Right now, it's way betteer economically to train slingers or javelin dudes to gather because they shuttle much faster. imho, this should not have to be a consideration, and they should shuttle at the same speed.

Perhaps then that each civic center casts its own territory, and new ones you build aren't at the highest tier, but are village centers, then are upgraded to town, city, etc. There's not one giant contiguous territory added to by civic centers, but rather dynamic provinces created. Your outer provinces are villages and towns, while inner provinces are cities.

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.