Giotto

My God this game is beautiful

I simply meant it would be nice to have an army based approach to combat rather than a mash of soldiers together. Total war style. Where you place your troops makes a difference. At present you can ajust troop placement in a few seconds and have no need to scout or make any basic efforts to arrange you troops in anyway. Perhaps grouping them together as a single unit is odd but at least you could actively strategise, placing spearmen in front of archers etc. Now you just jumble them together or they move too quickly. Maybe make the consequences of having an unorganised army greater. At present the AI sends troop after troop at you in one long line of assault. And they can win because army organisation doesn't play much of a role. I would decrease unit speed, meaning more time to think about unit placement, and battles would need to be planed.

Sounds like you are doing good work! It is great to see. More clear unit roles would be awesome if you want to discuss that.

In my opinion it is crucial that these battalions can be merged together to form an army. At the moment taking individuals and grouping them together does nothing other than make it easier to select all your melee combat troops or cavalry. I think the player should arrange their battalions on the map, then group them together forming an army. The position of these battalions would remain in the same position relative to the army. You could then move it as a single unit into battle.

Syllepsis +1

So can we clarify what that feature is? I would say: focus on clear counters and battalion/army structure in order to develope a more macro based game that emphasises the strategical value of units working in groups. This would be accomplished by reforming the current combat system(increasing unit bonuses) and allowing units to be grouped together as a formation, then grouping to form an army (or at least make it so clicking on one unit in a formation selects that entire group) you could probably reduce a large amount of lag with this as well.

I like the counter's above. It's too hard to position troops in place anyway atm so strategy should be developed elsewhere. Also i still like the idea of groups of ten soldiers, all bound into an army.

Goal needs to be fixing the core system instead of implementing new concepts and then spending years fixing them. Get a balanced combat system with clear unit definitions and expand upon the differences between the civilisations. I don't know why aoe 1 was so brilliant, i personally think it had something to do with a darker color palette, and a more definitive order of progression. The music was great as well.

Stop adding features and consider the 3 best aspects of gameplay and absolutely polish them up. My 3 would be: 1. Territorys-fine as is in my opinion. 2. Different civilisations-the differences feel vague and undefined at the moment. These need to be clarified and expanded. 3. Combat-at present it is unclear what does what and why. A massive unit clarification and enhancent of formations needs to happen (army+units maybe?) Look at YOUR top 3 and ask what and how you can improve them. Too much time is spent on minor aspects when what makes a solid game has much more to do with the core gameplay. As a game developer I know this project is very complicated and interesting but lacks consistent gameplay.

I completely agree with the above point, and the comment that we need more clear unit roles (that was what I was looking at with hard counters). I believe all effort should be put into developing a clear and consistent game.

I agree with the weaker buildings, less resources and hard unit counters points but believe the problem lies more with the fact you are not pressured by a slightly weaker player. Once you have more troops/more territory you have won thus turtling at 40-50 percent and training as many troops as possible is the only strategy. I like my idea earlier because it forces the player to plan battles and leave room for much more strategy at the endgame with army's. I love the territory sytem though, I would definitely keep thatm

Yea! I think two or three basic formations and the player gets to use those to make their own army. All you need is a way to group them all together and keep them that way which was working out fine for the formations earlier.

Unit and army formations: 3 or 4 basic unit formations for 1 type of unit, e.g cavalry in square, line etc. Then several different units are arranged together by the player and then grouped (but so they stay in the same formation). This way players would create their own army formations to counter the other players. I would recommend making all units have hard counters (1x, 2x against certain troops). The concept would be easy to get for beginners and would offer much more intuitive combat for experienced players as well.

The game feels like it is too micro based atm. I think there should be unit formations and army formations. The units (of 5-30) would operate as a group, then they would be arranged into an army formation for battle. It would be nice if users could create their own. You would have the basic unit formations at present then would group them together to form an army. That way the users would be free to test different locations for ranged and melee units etc. The combat could be reduced to hard counters for units and it would become about the way you arrange your soldiers that allows you to win. E.g scouting revealed you opponent has their archers near the front, so you position your ... Whatever in the front to counter that.

Same here. It's both. Bits are missing and combat is over done.

Combat should be as simple as in aoe etc. It is tried and tested, works and doesn't confuse the heck out of some people. Too much time is spent in micro mode at the moment. The game is great, it just doesn't have the rich feel of aoe and other historical rts's because the combat is vague and overcomplicated. A game should have as simple rules as possible and from those rules strategy can be developed.

I believe the combat is the main issue at present. I think the current system with melee, pierce etc attack and defence is too complicated. There are no clear counters to enemy troops. I believe we need a system where units have hard counters against other troops. E.g 2x, 1x and 0.5x attack against different enemy's (archers, cavalry etc). The difference between the factions troops can be small bonuses (eg Spartan spearmen get a 2.5x bonus against cavalry instead of 2.0x). The system is far too hard to grasp at present. Too much time is spent on figuring out what troops to use. Please implement a clear counter system. The only problem I can see is that it might simplify tactics, but simple is much better than complicated.

As far as I can tell with this idea you have the amount of a resource as normal figure and the food(or metal) gain/loss over the last minute or so. Question: If your troops are supplied by some amount of food each turn, what happens when you stop farming? Do they die? Ideas: Could you distribute your resources to buildings based on proximity to civic centre? Buildings further away tend to be more vulnerable so naturally the resources are shifted closer to the centers. This could just be done with traders or something by the player but then why not move all of it to the centers? Why should resources remain on the outside?(I suppose they must if you don't have enough traders or something). A negative income I think is a good idea. If you have an excess of food for instance you should be able to train loads of troops for a quick attack and feed them off your stockpiles. Civ centers are your main storage point as they should be the center of your empire. (Also slightly off topic: Civ centers should give a bonus gathering speed, building speed, population cap to houses etc as at the moment they end up rather desolate). I like the capturing idea.

Probably been done before but anyway: how about returning some resources to the player when a troop dies early. I was thinking troops require feeding in real life, in 0ad the troop gets his life food supply (or whatever) at the start, however if they died early the food could be returned to the player (only a portion of the initial food cost). Though to some extent troops killing each other cancel the cost out (they lose a troop as well which is equivalent to both people getting some resources back)

Or if you want: go full on and remove troop cost to train completely and simply have units take away from your supplies. you could have a gain/loss per minute and overall balance. Would be much more realistic and opens the way for more tactics surrounding rush training troops etc.

Sounds good. How about divide the resources evenly between civic centers but keep the overall values in the top? That way you can't lose everything in one civic centre attack but also lose a little of you overall wealth.

I agree. After capturing a civic centre you then receive all the buildings around it. Would mean players must also look out for their civ centers instead of sending all their troops afar. At present I find I end up having 3+ civ centers completely redundant behind my main wall. The area around them is empty which is strange considering they should be the hub of your civilisation. More than a territory impact would be nice. Increased farming ability for instance.

I tried putting it in all of them. One is located at home/.cache/0ad another is at home/.config/0ad and the last is at home/local/share/0ad

Sorry I bet this question has been asked quite a bit but seeing as the method changed after alpha 16 (I think) it would be nice to get some clarification here. I have searched up 0ad in my home folder and it comes up with 3 folders. Inside each one is a folder for mods. I have tried putting the mods into these folders and extracting them but nothing shows up when I start 0ad and enter the mods page. Btw: am running Ubuntu, latest version if that helps.

OK sure but increasing the map size seems like it will cause alot of performance issues as well.