wowgetoffyourcellphone

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.

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