DarcReaver

What exactly? The Slinger problem again? This only makes sense if you use battalions. Having single units fire with such low frequency makes small amounts of units useless.

yea and while we're at it we can also add more economics like Graders, miners, iron smelters, blacksmiths, millers and bakers and rename the game to "The Settlers: 0AD". The point is that economy takes attention from the player, and the more different economy units and gatherable resources are available the more complicated the economy becomes and the more it distracts from the game itself. The question is... why.... WHY?! must the most boring aspect of the game be bloated up with even more unfun unit management and click orgies? Just automate the economy by placing buildings near resource spots. The the according farmers, slaves, builders, millers or watever can do their duty without the player having to worry about having too much of either type of unit.

Wasn't talking to you specifically, but in general someone should feel at least somewhat responsible for fixing the current mess. Sure there are other, more prestigious task, but If one of you doesn't clean up it'll get even worse.

How about moderators start doing their deeds and clean the forums? So much spam and useless replay topics that do not belong in the forums they were posted in.

I just took the basic rulesets that were presented in the design document and compared them to the actual "game" that is present in A23. That is all. Even a blind person sees that they don't match. And just saying: Neither did I write the design doc nor did I do the balancing in the past. That was done by someone else from WFG. And to me it's pretty obvious that nobody cares anymore. I pointed out some stuff to bring the design doc and the current game more in line. It's a fact that the current alpha contains a random mesh of different 200X era RTS game features (i.e. RoN borderlines and AoE II type resource and teching system) without any real coherent gameplay system behind that and it doesn't even remotely represent the design vision. It's the opposite to be precise. Nobody needs an AoE clone at this point, especially not one that isn't even halfway as complex/well designed as the original game. The HD edition and soon-to-be-released DE editions on Steam are more than enough to please the audience of AoE type games. The core game design is task of the developers. If they are not up to the task, they need someone else to work on this. The idea with having sub mod teams sounds good. However, idk how to make sure that multiple mods are worked on even if it's conceivable that one certain mod is prioritized over the others. Also, I fear that there might be the problem of limiting the manpower for the project even more, by splitting modders/programmers on different sub mods.

lol historical combat realism at its best.

Why are 3 different types of animals required for 3 same effects/ why so overcomplicated for such an easy feature? Why not simply use 1 animal type per faction? i.e. Norse = Cow Greek = Sheep other = CHIKIN/pigz Design path : Build Corral -> train animal -> get food.

Maybe they should finish 0 ad first? tf is this even a topic

Why? Just keep the ban until he has proven that he was not the culprit. Even from just reading the comments he makes on this forum show that he's rightfully banned. I know dozens of this type of guy from my League of Legends times. They all behave as if they were banned accidentally and are TOTALLY innocent in every way (sometimes multiple times in a row) but when reviewed it's pretty clear that they were rightfully banned for swearing, being toxic by griefing etc. And after being unbanned they even brag about it ("lol these idiots removed my ban").

Because design doc. It pretty much describes a total war clone. Single worker micro with detailed economy (which leads to nowhere btw because it's just unoriginally taken from AoE without putting a thought in it) is repetitive micro. “Fastest click wins - In many RTS games, it isn't the player with the most intelligence or the best strategy that wins, it's the player who A] knows the proper order of actions and B] carries them out the fastest. People that practice a general procedure that is usually rewarding and know keyboard shortcuts should be slightly advantaged, and they will still be required; but, the if the opponent recognises their 'cookie cutter' gameplay, they should easily be able to outwit them by identifying and countering the unoriginal/over-used tactics with an effective counteractive strategy. Single path to victory - It seems to be a trend that games cater to a specific strategy that is frequently used to attain a victory. That could be rushing, turtling, booming, etc. We recognise these are valid ways to win a game, but we will attempt to not favour one over another. Players should be able to successfully use (and adapt/change) any strategy to achieve a victory. Sneaky Tricks - Many games overlook some aspects of gameplay that are unintentionally (by the game designers) used to a player's advantage. Through many hours of gameplay testing, we need to identify and eliminate these tricks. Repetition - If you find yourself doing the same action over and over without thought, then we need to either eliminate or automate such an action. Linear repetitious procedures are meaningless and boring. “ About resources: once more: Defender has 10 soldiers gathering 10 res every 10 seconds. Attacker has 10 soldiers gathering 10 res every 10 seconds. Both bases are 1 minute of walking distance away from each other. 10 x 6 = 60 res per minute per player If attacker now turns his men away from his down and starts attacking he no longer gets 60 res. the defender still gets 60 res. Total difference is 120 resources. Player 1 has 60 less while player 2 has 60 more. You can lessen the effect by either make soldiers move around the map at unrealistic speed (currently the case) and by making the individual collection rates low (lower effect of resource loss). But the issue is always present.That's why citizen soldiers without resource hard caps is a broken design.

This still doesn't remove the aspect that soldiers not gathering resources leads to the enemy gaining a resource lead while the attacker starts an attack. Considering that all units shouldn't move as fast as they currently do this is an issue nontheless, even with your (more fleshed out and more original concept). Another issue I have with this is that it adds additional, unnecessary micro for players. In 0 AD it's a nightmare to re-order male soldiers back to work after defending an attack. This is another reason why combat units usually do not gather resources. Also, this can lead to one player rushing the other, then attack and use his own soldiers to gather resources in the enemy base. This happens in AoE and is highly unrealistic - and it shouldn't work that way in a game that is intended to represent "authentic historic warfare". It's a much better thing to put automatic workers into buildings, call them villagers, slaves, hunters or whatever and let them gather resources automatically in range of their economy building. I.e. you build a Farmhouse, when finished 4 farm outlines appear next to it and a couple farmers automatically start generating food. Same with metal mines, wood camps and mines. Enemy units can raid and capture those structures and claim them for themselves. combat units do combat, and economy is done by economy building. The player who fights better and captures/destroys outposts wins.

This one was just about the resources. My other ones should be available here: Also had some other posts somewhere

The question is what someone wants to accomplish with this. AoE is like "we have female/male villagers" and 0 ad was like "ok let's split women and men villagers so it's different". There is no further reason for it. That's why I'm against the concept. I think the game would be better off scrapping the whole Citizen/women system, automate Economy by at least 75% and focus on building up cities and THEN creating armies and fight about map control elements like neutral cities and resources like quarries, Farmhouses and Mines. The whole detailed economy doesn't make much sense unless you focus the whole gameplay on it in a similar fashion of AoE and make the game a proper AoE clone. Which in itself is rather pointless because there is AoE DE, AoE 2 HD and AoE 2 DE coming out soon.

I didn't say that someone should spam women at the start of the match - I said it's POSSIBLE to spam/boom women in general. The game gives enough incentions to do it, along with houses being able to train women for some factions. This isn't really meant to be an earlygame problem but a lategame problem. After a certain point you reach a critical mass of workers and start gathering so many resources that only pop cap/amount of barracks for training units start to become an issue. Sort of the "AoE lategame effect" - and in 0 ad it used to be even worse with training women from multiple houses along with Town Halls. The "build women in houses" tech allows to multiply your economic force after a certain point to absurd gathering rates (unless I'm mistaken and it was removed in the last alpha). By artificially slowing gathering rates you only accomplish a slower game start and delay this point-of-no-return to be a couple minutes later in the game. But this is a design choice anyways. If people are free to spam as many workers for their economy without outer limits you always get to this point - which can be fine if it's intended to be that way. It has advantages but also drawbacks. Another option is to cap workers by having a hard cap on resource spots. Without hard caps on resource spots means that your only limitation for economic growth are your own resources and pop cap (to train workers). Each individual unit then serves as a small multiplier of your economic force. And the economic growth rate is (gather rate) x (gather multiplier)^(number of workers). With hard caps means to limit economic growth along with map control. If someone only has 1 metal mine (or other resource) in his reach he can only get a maximum of / metal/minute. While with 2 mines he can have 2 x Z metal/minute, for 3 mines 3 x Z metal/minute and so on. Same for other resources. Version 2 creates a maximum number of "useful" workers - because after a certain point additional workers will not give the player more economy but only block pop cap instead. This way you limit the effect of loosing resources during attacks, because after some point a player will have soldiers that cannot serve as gatherers anymore because there are no free resource spots left. At this point the player can attack and defend freely without risking to loose resources from walking around. AoE does a mix of Version 1 and 2 with their food production from farms, while other resources are not limited. Empire Earth, Wc3 and Star Craft also use version 2. You can have up to 24 workers on minerals (5 per goldmine in wc3) and after that point each additional worker will not increase your resource income anymore. Unless you expand and take different resource spots on the map.

Women can be spammed massively, that's why they are not allowed to build all types of buildings. To reduce the snowballing effect of multiple worker units when someone reduced build times of units in some alpha years ago. This issue can be reduced by making gatherers more efficient but less spammy (i.e. doubling the training time) and put hard caps on gathering spots (one of many options). You can ofc do that, still doesn't really fix the old issue that military units doubling as resource gatherers is an issue. It has down sides in controls (if you use them to attack the enemy you need to micro a lot to get them back on track again). Also as soon as your military quits to march to the enemy you immediately start loosing resources. Just a quick math example about my point: You have 10 soldiers, each gathering 10 metal every 10 seconds. Enemy base is 60s away and also has 10 soldiers. If you march your soldiers over to the enemy you loose 6x10 = 60 metal just for walking over to the enemy. While your enemy mines 60 metal. This leads to a 120 metal difference between attacker and defender. That means three things: 1) you need to make infantry/units move quick around hte battlefield to keep the resource loss low, and you need to outmicro your opponent because he potentially has more resources for defending - which gets larger for every second the enemy is not forced to fight with all his soldiers. I.e. 30 seconds of not loosing a unit means another 30 metal difference difference that can be used to make defensive units. 2) the attacker puts a lot of risk into his rush because he needs to disrupt the enemy eco while the enemy is already ahead - and this is not by choice but by design, that's why it's an issue and there are only very few games that mix military and economic units. 3) to lower the negative effect of this you can make soldier gather rates low, to reduce the amount of resources lost when launching attacks (which is why most soldiers do not gather super fast). This makes economy snow balling harder. It's like having an exponential mathematic function. Id you take following assumption: 1) each soldier gives you a 10% bonus to your resource income (fast gathering rates) and 2) each soldier only gives a 3% bonus (slower gathering rates) 10% bonus stacking means: 10x1.1 = 1.1, 10x1.1^15 = 15 additional workers mean 41 times more res/minute. if you apply only 3% you need 10 x 1.03^48 = 48 workers instead to get 41 times more res/minute. It's a bit abstract but I hope you get my point. Right now these effects are not showing all the time because the individual gathering rates of all units are relatively slow, and you need a lot of workers anyways. If you switch those stats you'll get lots of issues though. In 0ad currently each military AND economy unit gives you a low bonus, and over the course of the game you get an exponential curve at some point if you spam enough soldiers. This can't be wiped unless you rework the way the economy works though. I've met quite a lot of people here and I haven't seen anyone being as immature, stubborn with such a toxic, griefing attitude. You're just stating nonsense that does not help anybody. Telling people that the devs should stick with the design doc - LOL. I've written a large essay around 1,5 years ago how the current "game" you love so much is completely the opposite of what's stated in the design doc. I won't list up all the points, but almost every gameplay mechanic present is nowhere even remotely related to the original vision. That's why I proposed the design doc should be revisited (and it currently is). If you enjoy the alpha - well that's completely fine. Different people enjoy different things. But expecting OTHER people who play RTS on a regular base to like it regardless is not. defending this by saying "but I have 10 other people who play the game regularely aswell kthx" is just as bad. A healthy community grows overall and if a game is good you don't have 10 guys playing but instead you have thousands. And this only happens if the game is actually good. 0 AD vanilla is mediocre at best at this point. And stating that Borg only plays god mode and sets off above all others is just random malice. Balance and game design are tightly related and you cannot change one thing without the others. Since you're not even understanding this super basic principle you've disqualified from being taken seriously by anybody in any discussion about balancing or game design. I have years experience with modding, gameplay editing and different RTS games on my belt, and have lots of friends who I tried to play 0 AD with. They all abandoned it after a couple of games because they found it boring for various reasons - and most of them are into Medieval/ancient RTS game (won't start another discussion at this point though, I think everyone knows my points by now). @Lion.Kanzen Yea buddy, if there's a more polished state I'll give my 2 cents towards the process. But until then I'll remain a bit in the shadows. Sort of busy with other stuff at the moment.

Compare the gameplay to Starcraft, the amount of tactical and strategical depth, or any other game that currently is played by larger online communities. Oh and did I mention that Starcraft from 1999 is played by thousands of people simultanously? And even old Age of Empires has more rooms open at the worst time of day on gameranger. The game is nothing more than a tech demo at this point, face it. And the community is small. Indeed. But then the developers need to deliver quality single player content. Which isn't the case either. You either tell a story or you make compelling multiplayer. You can't not do both. That's what I wrote in the first place. However, balancing stats only works if the design is solid. That isn't the case yet.

Mods cannot do it. No game needs mods even before the core game is finished. That is because mods are not meant to create/simulate core gameplay mechanics. Mods are only for adding additional content to the game (like editing graphic sets, adding units/factions etc.) or make total conversions (i.e. change game setting to sci-fi or medieval) AFTER the game is finished. ofc they can take content of the community mods to include in their base game if it fits. But the mods itself will never be a replacement for a good, polished vanilla gameplay. The game has to be finished in its own way, with its own gameplay design by the developer team.

Don't you get it? The game isn't finished. Core gameplay mechanics are either missing or not fleshed out. There is no point in playing it "competitively" or expecting a solid gameplay experience. Take this 0 AD alpha as a tech demo, nothing more. If you change some weapon stats of a unit it won't make a difference, because another unit will be spammed for rushing. That's because you can train military units from your main building, among other issues with resource gathering and overall gameplay speed. Stop complaining and l2p Age of Empires/AoE 2 if you want a solid competition. 0 AD is the wrong place for that.

flip charts are best charts.

In theory you have multiple approaches: Option 1) You make slingers and archers the same role (ranged anti inf) with only different stats. And each civ only gets the type of unit they used the most - i.e. Egypt and Persians used slingers, while other factions use archers exclusively. It's then pretty much just a skin difference, a bit like the difference of Meso Civs in AoE having eagle warriors while regular civs have scout cav. Option 2) You differentiate slingers and archers by stats : Both are available to most factions by default. slingers have high damage and good accuracy on shorter ranges and relatively low rate of fire. .They also are fast, but have low health - this makes them good early raiding infantry to do hit & run. Archers have lower damage, but good accuracy on all ranges, fire faster and deal damage more consistent and have better armor/health than slingers while being slower. If you further out this system you could apply a modifier for ranged unit rate of fire with its shooting range. In CoH you have 4 different combat distances, in which you can modify accuracy, penetration and rate of fire of a gun. I.e. infantry rifles take 0.95sec. to aim at a target at 35m but only 0.6 at 6m. Option 3) You differentiate multiple archer/slinger classes (this option profits from battalions) Slingers are on par with basic archers, the characteristics are similar to option 2. But you also have certain advanced archer/slinger units that players of certain factions can deploy. Ie. egypt have basic slingers instead of normal archers, but they can deploy composite archers later in the game. You can then train a battalion of Slingers, consisting of maybe 10 Slingers that move and fight in a loose formation. Archers come in larger numbers per battalion - maybe 20?- and fight is close formations. Also Archers could have a "rain arrows" ability that allows them to barrage a certain area with fire arrows to scare or instantly burn enemy units ("weapon critical damage"). Slingers could have a chance to stun enemy units upon hitting them from close range. Some factions also have access to special slinger units/upgrades or special archers that allow unique tactics compared to other factions. And battalions allow to either make larger amounts of cheap "trash archers" or a bunch of elite archers, depending on civ and map choice. This version would be mostly interesting if you can apply armortypes to units and add flanking damage. Slingers would be used to "dance around" enemy units, trying to hit them from side/rear. While archers can inflict damage more consistently. from a "closed frontline". This sort of reflects the characteristics of both unit types more accurately, but is certainly the hardest option. Option 4) You use multiple archer/slinger classes and use them regardless as assets for the game, leaving it up to the player which units to use. Stats like dmg, rate of fire etc. are done for each unit similar to option 2. This is the version currently present and has large drawbacks, esp. in terms of inner faction balance. This is prety much the easiest along with option 2. There probably are even more options, those were just some I could think of in the nick of time.

Nowadays there is AoE 2 HD, AoM : EE and AoE 2 DE in the makings you already have 2 superior clones of AoE 2 on the market, supported and published by major game companies along with superior graphics. So there no longer is a need for another AoE clone since the base products are vastly superior in every aspect at this point. But at least "we want to make 0 AD an Age of Empires clone" would state a goal/vision for the finished game. If you cannot compete with ideas of your own - steal them and work on improving small details to smoothen the template. Altough I sort of doubt you're capable of that because it could have happened 10 years ago/the core gameplay could've been centered around this. I'm also quite sure the base community would be larger by a multitude if that was the case. AoE 2 HD has a player base of more than 10k people at all times. about the "community enjoying the game" I heavily suspect that most of the people "enjoy the game" for reasons that have nothing to do with the gameplay itself. They either like that their favorite faction is in the game or that you have unit Y available, not because the game itself is compelling. As an example for external feedback I only ever saw people on YT creating content for 0 AD who said "alright this looks pretty" "okay some XXX here and there", then some battling/skirmishing and afterwards I've never seen them play the game again on their channel. Sure - some players only present unique videos per game, but there are others who have a pool of games to choose from and play those from time to time during their streams/videos. For all those "pool players" 0 ad never made it into their game pool, for reasons unknown (or maybe known?). As a random sidenote: my RTS mates which I invited to play 0 ad with me all stated "oh well it looks nice but it's boring".

It's the core game mechanics that are lacking. The balance itself being bad is just another minor side effect of that. If the core game is bad, a good balance can only improve the game to become sub-par/mediocre at best. Good core game mechanics/features with a bad balance can be fixed with stats changes to become enjoyable. @Feldfeld It's not about hesitating. It's that noone has a clue how the game is supposed to be in the first place. That's what is missing. If you have an idea what you're working towards you can adjust the components necessary. That way you automatically start the balancing process. Because every new feature along the way towards the goal, the finished product, serves a purpose and can be balanced around that purpose. BUT If you don't know where you're going you end up with a couple of loose ends that do not fit together - which we have right now. And balance complaints will always be there, no matter what happens to the game. Even in chess there are people who complain that white is better than black because white always starts the match.

Well, the main question always was : how is the game supposed to be played? All the current features ingame are not glued together. They're taken from AoE II and other games and combined roughly to represent "something" which isn't clear. Gameplay balancing can only work when the game is in a stable version and the basic gameplay decisions are set. Which includes (simplified): - how much is the balance economy/warfare (in terms of player micro) - how detailed is the economy setup/how do map control elements work - how much is tactical/strategical micro - how is the basic counter system/tech tree (shared tech tree or unique tech trees for each faction) - which factions are included and how unique are they designed - etc. I just pulled those out of thin air, there are probably a lot of other points with even higher priority EDIT: Nescio put some nice points: edit2: these @#$%ing quote mechanics, half my post is gone... fck this.

Hmm looks liek the quote system got f'ed up. I'll again reply in the post directly. I stated that there are significant differences between the design document and the current "game" that is presented and published. I proved my points multiple times and stated options to put the game in line with the existing design document. I also proposed that a game design dev (or at least someone familiar with game designing) should be included in the team who actually is responsible for the balancing and design aspects of the game. Because that's what the game needs. A proper design followed by some intensive care from balance testers prior to release, instead of fiddling with randomly setup numbers and call that "balance fixes". I also stated that the design document should be revised to actually provide a unique vision. Noone needs AoE II clones when there is AoE 2 HD and AoE 1 DE which provide the same, but better. Afaik no dev actually plays the game at all. That's how enjoyable the game is in it's current form. Not even the game makers want to play it.