wowgetoffyourcellphone

Just get rid of the Cretan Date Palm from the Saharan biome. It's not accurate anyway.

AOE3' GUI is hilariously intrusive.

Yes, those would commonly be called turrets or towers.

You mean the towers?

Ranged units are garrisoned on top of the wall and loose their own projectiles. The units on the wall receive a range and armor bonus.

Millet fields @AIEND

I have to admit, before I started modding the Syracusans, I was very ignorant of their exciting history. They're actually a very dynamic faction that easily rivals or surpasses Sparta, Athens, and Briton.

Admiral Lysander? A naval hero for Spartans.

Of course not. There are ways to add more culture to the game that don't prevent players from achieving military success. I don't understand your line of reasoning at all. Then let's drop the pretense of attempting to depict historical cultures.

I think the issue here lies in the pace of the game. A player rarely has time to set up a nice city and match it up against the enemy's city, before the action really makes that a moot strategy. The people don't use walls much also drives this home. It feels like you're just building a military base with the optimal layout to maximize military production. There's not a lot of cultural exploration there.

Because 1:1 an artillery ship > arrow ship in dps. Ranged units tend to just park and shoot, while melee units close the distance and deal high dps strikes.

The cool thing about a simple RPS system like this, with its small number of classes, is that we can do it fairly easily with no specific attack bonuses. Mechanics do most of the work. Melee ships (rammers and boarders) beat Artillery ships because they bridge the gap too quickly for the firing rate of the Artillery ship to compensate. The melee ships are soft countered by Arrow ships because the Arrow ships can fire more rapidly and more precisely than the Artillery ships. And then the Arrow ships are massacred by Artillery ships because of the way ranged combat works. Boarders throw a nice monkey into things to see if you can't capture some enemy ships. Rammers are the hard hitting, nearly suicidal, units (they survive due to some good micro). And even better, it's all pretty intuitive.

Sure, the BuildingAI arrows can be removed. Not wedded to that, only to say it would be nice for the melee ships to have some kind of ranged defense, even if minimal, but maybe that dilutes the concept a bit. Sure, initially we can use the existing parent templates, but I think eventually we'd make brand new ones. EDIT: But also if we just make brand new parent templates right off the bat they can exist parallel with the old ones and we don't have to worry about screwing up the existing paradigm (such as it is, lol) by editing the old parent templates to work with our experiments.

A free Scout Ship would be a really nice little feature. Every civ can get one, along with an Arrow Ship. Yeah, pretty much the same. I may suggest splitting the Dock into the Dock (economic) and Shipyard (naval), but that's a separate consideration. I'll see what I can do. Obviously there would need to be some modeling work, specifically to reduce the ship model sizes and make them less unwieldy.

With 100 soldiers you'd only need 5 ships.

Increasing melee attack damage also nerfs turtling. The counter to turtling should be rush or siege weapons, right, not archer range?

After several discussions over the years, I think there is a broad recognition that ships are in need of improvement. I've synthesized some ideas here, but be warned: not everyone will be happy and by no means do I think this is the "perfect" naval system for an ancient-themed game, just something that may be interesting, fun, workable, intuitive, implementable, and not too historically problematic. The main thing I would like to see is to differentiate ships along roles or classes and get away from the "multi-role" ship idea, where all you do is build bigger and better versions of this same multi-role ship. While the multi-role ship is historically accurate, it's problematic for gameplay (for myriad reasons that have been chewed over a dozen times). Better to go with the "historical authenticity" principle that gives us more leeway to develop classes of ships dedicated to their roles. So, let's discuss some ship roles or abilities and come up with classes of ships to approximate these roles and abilities without making things overly complicated. Some roles and abilities of ancient warships: Arrow Platforms Troop Transporting (I think this is one thing all ships can do: there doesn't need to be a dedicated ship for this) Artillery Platforms Boarding Ramming Scouting With the above in mind, let's come up with classes of ships to depict these actions. Note that garrisoning units aboard have different (small) effects based on ship class. When garrisoned, you don't see anything appear on the deck. Ship models are small than they are currently in the game for pathfinding reasons, so would look strange with giants standing on the deck. Scout Ship Role: Scouting, Gathering Treasures Attack: None Garrison: 5 Garrison Effect: +5% capture resistance per 5 units. Has no attack and is basically an arrow-less Light Warship (can even use the same base model, minus oars, just a sail or vice versa) Can only train 1 at a time, but is super cheap (perhaps free?) so can be rebuilt very easily. Can be used to land a small scouting party, maybe good for scenarios too. Arrow Ship/Light Warship Role: Arrow Shooter; harrasser Attack: Arrows x3 (unit AI), Arrows x1 (building AI) Garrison: 10 Garrison Effect: 1 extra (unit AI) Arrow per 5 units; +5% capture resistance per 5 units This is your bireme, your liburna, your hemiolia, your pentekonter, your pirate ship. Very good against Merchant Ships (perhaps with an attack bonus) and Melee ships (Ramming Ships and Boarding Ships) due to having no minimum range. Countered decisively by Artillery Ships. Ramming Ship Role: One-Hit kill ramming attack. Attack: Melee Ram, Arrows x1 (building AI) Garrison: 20 Garrison Effect: +5% speed per 5 units; +5% capture resistance per 5 units This is your famous Trireme. Athenians get a special technology for these ships. Its primary role is to sink enemy ships with a melee attack, which has has to recharge. They are tough ships, but are vulnerable to Arrow Ships during the approach due to their paltry 1 arrow defensive ranged attack, and Boarding Ships if their ram attack did not sink the boarding ship in one strike. Due to recharging nature of their melee attack, these ships require the most APM/micromanagement and are often naturally suicidal if not microed effectively. Very Good against Artillery Ships and other Ramming Ships. Boarding Ship Role: Capturing enemy ships and docks Attack: Freezing capture attack with a Boarding Ramp for Roman civs (a bonus) or grappling hooks for other civs; Arrows x1 (building AI) Garrison: 20 Garrison Effect: +5% capture attack per 5 units; +5% capture resistance per 5 units This represents the boarding actions common in naval battles. Romans have the Corvus technology which boosts their Boarding Ships. These will look similar to the Ramming Ship, but with a ramp for the Roman version and some other identifier for the other civs. Can counter Ramming Ships if they are not destroyed in the enemy's first strike and are good against Artillery Ships if used en masse. Can capture enemy Docks as well. Vulnerable to attack from other ships while it's attempting to capture the target ship. Artillery Ship Role: Long Range siege attacks Attack: Artillery Bolt x2; Catapult Rock (Upgrade); Unit AI Garrison: 30 Garrison Effect: +5% firing rate per 5 units; +5% capture resistance per 5 units Your Quinqueremes and other Polyremes. They come with a siege weapon on the foredeck. These are used for long range bombardment of massed enemy naval formations or shore structures such as docks, towers, and other buildings. Due to their slow firing rate, they are very vulnerable to faster ships such as Ramming Ships and Boarding Ships. They absolutely massacre Arrow Ships.

Indeed. Ranged damage should be a nice bonus or harrasser, not the primary damager of an army. Even range-heavy civs like Persians and Han would have had to engage with their melee troops to decide the matter, let alone the Romans and Greeks and Celts who all used ranged troops in a secondary or even tertiary role.

I agree for the most part, but the changes aren't massive and can be tweaked or changed if necessary quite easily.

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/27410