wowgetoffyourcellphone

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

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.