elexis

Here in action:

Like?

Bolts were buffed 5 days ago in r18735, We agreed that bolt shooters were nerfed too much in alpha 19 (r16392) and were not buffed like other siege in alpha 21 (r18037). Thus we decided to give them 25% more attack damage in r18735 and a bit more armor (by giving all siege the same armor). Their range 80m is already more than the one of archers (and equal to the mauryan upgraded ones) and I'm very skeptical about out-ranging things from the gameplay pov. Such things can easily become undestroyable behind some random buildings. or wall of champs. If bolt shooters are still unviable, they can be buffed a bit more. But first need some testgames...(too bad that someone had uninstalled svn). The bolt shooter tech didn't work in previous alphas (r18243), so they get an additional attack bonus. About your proposals: > bigger range to balance the annoying deployment time (at least bigger range than the chariots) : 80-90meters (minimum range of 5 meters) It has always been 80m, so always did outrange chariots (76m). > more pierce attack for a the same given reloading time to balance the cost and the 2 pop : 200-300 pierce / every 5 sec 200-300 pierce / every 5 sec Right now it's: <Pierce>150.0</Pierce> <Crush>25.0</Crush> <RepeatTime>4000</RepeatTime> So the current one does 37,5 pierce damage per second, your lowest proposal is 40 pierce damage per second. > no crush damage at all , it should not replace the catapults in destroying buildings : 0 crush I don't mind a bit of crush damage, but perhaps it can be shifted a bit more towars pierce damage. > the arrow has to punish only a bunch of immobil units packed together : projectil speed has to be lowered and its path should not be straight ( but slightly more like the one of the catapult bullet) , this way, a moving unit will not be killed. There is the spread factor, some attacks will miss the target. That ballistic trajectory might certainly benefit from some improvements like #4241 or adding collsions with walls and mountains. > no splash damage and average accuracy : its has to be less accurate than an archer but more like a skirmisher Doesn't have splash damage. Spread factor is 2.5, never investigated it. > take less place : even if their shoot range turns better, the disposition of many boltshooters should not be too much spread due to lack of space. Indeed, the big obstruction size / footprint of siege units makes them really hard to maneuver. Another issue being that units try 2 paths per second only. If a unit collides with 1 tree, it will wait 500ms before doing anything at all. Those 500ms come from the multiplayermode. It is 200ms (i.e. 5 retries per second) in singleplayer mode (turn length). #3752

Hence the second sentence about banning, that works very nicely

Classical. Somtime in the far future WildfireGames might host rated games and reduce the rating, even if the network connection dropped for legit reasons. (If one can't ensure the network stability and doesn't want to risk losing points, one shouldn't start a rated game.) Until then I suggest to talk publicly in the lobby chat about that, try to get the points back by starting another 1v1 which he resigns. Once it's established that the rated game was quit, there is often the possiblilty to never join the lobby again to avoid confrontation, being banned or sending over the rating.

Review: * The building already has 93% pierce armor, adding 25 more levels seems a bit excessive and also wrong, since stone building ought to have significantly more armor. * Building in allied territory perhaps * Territory influence - perhaps. I likely shouldn't become a root. Since r18049 noone can build stuff in unconnected territory, so it were impossible to build towers there unless there was some civic center behind it somewhere. 50m radius seems a bit much too. * The building once had 40 arrows, but it was nerfed. Surprisingly the garrisoned regenration rate seems to be just about right for this building. Only a few units are needed to garrison it, so that it doesn't convert to gaia / enemy. This wasn't the case in previous versions. So I'm convinced this is a useful building as is. If the general garrisoned regeneration rate is reduced, the rate of this building might have to be adapted.

@niektb Are these icons (excluding the stoa military icon proposal) ready for commit (especially the isthar gate one)?

reqs.generic, meh, that is http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3993 The issue is that the AI, tech tree and simulation have all a copy of parsing that logic (alll, any, civ requirement). Thus if one part is changed or extended, the other logic dupes become broken (as seen in the screenshot). The ticket aims at merging all logic to one place in globalscripts/ but introduces a monster-function with tech-tree specific logic that isn't useful in the simulation nor AI which would get away with 10 lines and 2 layers of nesting instead of 14 layers. Might not be fixed with alpha 21. @fatherbushido would your workaround fix that particular bug?

Nice work guys @niektb would you have time to review these?

The persian gate could use one too, currently we use the regular gate icon (seen in the upgrade panel i think). But that's not as important as the persian hall one.

Crannog icon committed in r18732, thanks LionKanzen! There is still a missing icon for the persian hall. Feature freeze is next sunday, but we can add it in alpha 22 too.

UDP port 20595 has to be forwarded on the router. If you're using VPN, make sure that port is accessible and not blocked by any firewall (and connect to the actual VPN IP).

Treasures Disabled: Disabled indeed. But I wouldn't want to rewrite the entire settings to change it to Treasure: enabled. That has been weird since the introduction of the DisabledTreasure gamesetting. Also notice Treasure: enabled might be misleading, since it won't place treasure if the map doesn't attempt to. So it would say "Treasure: enabled" without any treasure on most maps even. Ceasefire counter: Also thought about that, but not really convinced that the dialog should be updated onTick rather on init. Also there is a counter in the diplomacy screen and an onscreen overlay. On the other hand, it would fit there actually. Broken in Atlas by the way, as reported by Sandarac. -.- Not convinced of adding tabs until its entirely necessary, as it means people have to spend 4 times more clicks.

Perhaps we could replace this site with a red warning sign that 0ad will crash with the provided 32bit pyrogenesis.exe file after some time

Thanks for testing! Should be fixed by http://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/18642

Fixed in alpha 21 (by r18346)

Probably out of memory due to the 32bit windows binary.

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/attachment/ticket/1619/largeaddressaware.patch looks like that might be committed before the release.

Mostly agree. Didn't see sword cav since they were OP in alpha 17. Perhaps their use wasn't found yet. Champion melee cavalry is usually used to kill trade carts, citizen soliders and to lure enemies away from the next attack point. So perhaps sword cavalry could be used as cheap, disposable trade/siege killers. (Since one receives the resources trade carts carried, the profit depends on the size of the enemies traderoute.) Would have to check the numbers again to see if they are profitable. Also I think most mercenaries are too expensive. Historically, cavalry had typically been used to charge attack.

Created http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/4153 as I couldn't find an existing ticket surprisingly. The bug occurs min 24:40 with the blue player.

Yes, but if you use the downloaded pyrogenesis.exe, it will only use 32bit! You would have to use Visual Studio (see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/BuildInstructions#Windows) to compile a 64bit binary. (WFG should release 64bit binaries some time too since it crashes for basically all windows users playing with AI)

Could replay that file without crash. Presumably it's out-of-memory. The pyrogenesis.exe file provided by Wildfire Games is 32bit, so less than 2GB can be allocated. Perhaps you can play longer with less population, less AIs / (lobby?) multiplayer, a smaller mapsize or less graphic effects.

Thanks for those icons!

There is a button in the upcoming release from the summary screen to the replay (and after the replay ended, it returns to the replay menu). Also was wondering whether some buttons like the replay menu and map editor should rather be moved to the main menu, rather than being hidden under "Tools & Options" (which could just become "Options").

There were some plans to make automatic savepoints every N minutes, potentially keeping also one savepoint for 10 seconds 30s, and 60s ago. But actual rewinding is not feasible to implement. Making the simulation computation faster is needed anyway to reduce lagging.