DarcReaver

Thanks for your support, much appreciated!

Position: Application as Gameplay Developer. Do you understand that Wildfire Games is a non-commercial project, work for 0 A.D. is volunteer, and work is done for free? - Yes Do you agree to distribute all your work for Wildfire Games under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license? - Yes Are you sure you are not wanting to work on something programming related? - Yes Name: DarcReaver - Hendrik. Email: I don't publicly post my e-mail, but in case it's needed I'll send it over via pm, np Location: Kassel, Germany. Availability: around 10-15 hours/week. Age: 28 Occupation: currently employed as leading Estate Engineer for a town community. Planning and coordinating the construction of elevators, power supply systems, heating and ventilation systems among other stuff Skills and Experience: I've been playing various RTS games in the past and been heavily employed in game design department of various modding communities, most notably Company of Heroes franchise, C&C generals, Battle for Middle Earth series and Warcraft III. My experience in modding lies somewhere around 10 years, and I've been playing RTS games since around 15 years. I know many different types of strategy games and played quite a few of them on a competitive base, meaning tournaments, ladder matches etc. I worked with different types of editors that allow modification of existing game engines, most notably corsix mod studio and Warcraft editor. Also I'm doing .xml editing for some simulator games, modifying properties, sounds, physics etc. to create authentic driving experiences. Motivation: I know that there is no officially available position as a "gameplay developer" on 0ad, so I'm doing this application as some sort of iniative. However, I do think that there should be more discussion and progress towards creating interesting, unique and outstanding gameplay patterns that will make 0 ad stand out from other RTS games on the market apart from "it looks nice" and "it has a lot of content". Creating a game flow for the game is very important and from my experience in the game making area this is what has to come before betatesting. The current design, while having interesting aspects, lacks original patterns aswell as missing long term motivation for keeping a player base. After the conversations in the gameplay testing forum I decided that I'm officially applying to help out. (link to topic below) Don't be scared of my harsh tone, I am usually nice and helpful towards others, but depending on the situation sometimes more drastic words are needed to underline and emphasize a certain position in a discussion. Being nice doesn't always do its job. Personality: My personality tends to switch between the "terror that flaps at night" and "Launchpad McQuack" combined with enthuiasm, depending on my mood and the matter I'm dealing with. Short Essay: I searched for an alternative RTS game that combines an ancient Age of Empires 1 setting with polished graphics and modern gameplay patterns, that's how I noticed 0ad. Staff: Noone in person, but I had a series of conversations with community members like wowgetoffyourcellphone, niektb and Karamel. Favorite Game: All time favorite is company of heroes. Apart from that I'm into the Dead Space universe and the new Tomb Raider series. Also The witcher is pretty nice. Work Examples: http://www.easternfront.org/, http://www.moddb.com/mods/coheastern-front, http://www.moddb.com/mods/menace-from-outland/

And rain is wet. Apart from that the weather will be cloudy with a chance of meatballs. Thing is : if you're going to copy something, better copy it darn good. There are plenty of examples of clones that actually were more sucessful than the original. But for that the core elements that create the gameplay have to be identified and copied in a way to actually make the game worthwhile. Right now 0ad is somewhat inbetween everything. Too simple setup and few units/teching upgrade choices for an Age of Empires type game, too chaotic for a RUSE/mass production game, and not enough micro options to make it like a tactical warfare game. Most stupid statement that I've read today (not yours I mean the statement "alpha too early for gameplay"). The alpha is where everything is setup and is THE most important phase of the game. The beta is only for bugfixing and stabilityfor the most part.

I was founding member of Sbyllae Vox and played Delenda Est aswell, so yes.

Yes, loot system. Ofc you bring it up. Guess what you need to kill 50 women (!) to gain back enough resources to replace a single !!!! soldier in the current concept. Even if you put in 50% more loot you still need to kill multiple units to actually get something back in return. And even then I still loose resources for every second the army doesn't gather resources. So in short, reasons to keep the army in the city and boom: 1) no risk of loosing soldiers 2) guaranteed income and not by chance of killing enemies 3) no need to reassign replaced soldiers in the base to resources 4) If I attack I risk roughly half or even 3/4 of my economic power (number of citizen soldiers) to actually attack an enemy who has just as many units and gets an advantage while I approach him. Tell me again, why is this risk worth it if I can just build a wall up, start booming and then spam champions + siege weapons to take out the enemy city? Heck I can even train women from every house that the civs have. Depending on the game time that's up to 20 women every couple of seconds. And all those can harvest resources aswell. Ever seen a 5 TC Boom in Age of Empires ? Compared to this it's a Kinder Party.

Yes and that's a problem. As soon as player A stops foraging with his soldiers to attack start loosing resources because the soldiers are not collecting resources anymore. Now the enemy player B still gathers with all his women + soldiers, - attacking player A looses resources from not collecting (resources A) - defending player B gets additional resources because his army is collecting (resources B). So the total loss for the attacking player is resources A PLUS resources B And on top of that if you don't have women in your base the whole economy is @#$%ed up and you have to reassign every unit once more to gather the required resources which is a tedious task in the lategame. So stop arguing about that the Citizen Soldier system is a good concept just because you don't get te problems that result from the system because you are not directly affected.

Definately not. The bold part already shows that you have no experience about game making and thus your opinion is just that - an opinion from a rookie. Since you're civil and at least are trying to reason I'm not going to further argue with this and let it stand as it is. Also, I'd like to not let this derail into a topic "which cav rush works better than that archer rush XXX strategy" thread because that kind of discussion is completely unproductive at this stage of the game and especially in this kind of thread. I sent you a more detailed answer on my views regarding this topic via PM. But I won't go into further detail because I'm tired discussing matters like this over and over.

I wouldn't go that far, but yes. Overall there can be strong and weak phases of each civ in certain stages of the game. Else you can simply scrap 8 out of 10 civs and just change the paint. Just like in AoE II with full technology tree. Exactly this. The idea should be to make a rework of the town bell. Ring it, all Citizin run toward the Main hall and are equipped with swords and shields. Alternatively, you could create some sort of "armoury" building, or utilize the regular blacksmith building for that. Apart from that there is no point in discussing the "overpoweredness" of some horses in a game stage like this. But I'll try that myself when I should bother playing 0ad again. I'm pretty sure however, that there is no point in cavalry harassment early on if pretty much every civ has basic spearmen in their town hall as basic resource gatherers. I'm sorry about the harshness level, but after a certain point it simply gets frustrating to deal with the same type of arguments (or people) time and time again. It's exhausting. sometimes. @Lion.Kanzen I'll stop the argumentation before it devolves even more in a flame war, so leave it be aswell. It's better for both of us. I believe this also has/had to do with the lack of being able to actually change core mechanics of the game engine ourselves. Just fixing stats won't help the game itself. This experiment also clearly showed how hard it is to decide on design topics if there is noone in charge who actually knows "how" the direction of the game should be heading. That's why it did not work out well. @shieldwolf23 Sure, I'd be willing to participate in the process as long as I can see that there is something going on (in positive matter) and progress is made. there is no problem with waiting, as long as the waiting isn't pointless because nothing happens. (as I've already done in the past with @Karamel and @niektb. Also @wowgetoffyourcellphone has lots of creative ideas of how to make 0AD stand out of the masses. Like I said, I already worked with volunteers myself, and I know the issues and risks that come with it.

Very good post Palaxin, this sums up my view on this matter pretty well. to give one more example to the design process: It's painful, as there has to be decided which stuff is kept and which stuff is forfeit, resulting in work of people to be repelled and pissing them off. But that's the cost of real progress. It's like not going to the dentist: You avoid doing it because the doctor could notice that something is wrong with your teeth. So you avoid fixing the teeth by not knowing about it. But that's not the correct approach unfortunately. The teeth still have problems, and thus you'll get ill someday.

The article you posted is called "design process". Exactly what I wrote in my last paragraph here: The article collects references for usable units, buildings, art style, technologies etc. to find a way to implemetn this civilization into the gam, so it would be part 3. Regarding the red marked area: Dude, I did this, numerous times on various occasions. The only stuff that came back was ignorant babbling. Even when I created something more substantial in EVEN THIS THREAD there was no positive reaction apart from "you're wrong and I am right. You just don't know how to play". So tell me, what should I do? Especially from Lion.Kanzen. There's a history of borderline retarded posts regarding the development process and can be read througout the whole forum. If I was in charge I would've kicked him out of the team years ago because of his attitude and way of thinking towards certain topics asswell as the incompetence of comprehensive reading and developing solutions to problems. People like him are toxic for a creative process. Also, being nice only gets you so far. There are situations in which being nice doesn't help at all. Maybe you'll learn it someday aswell. So I'm not the only one, great to hear that there are also other opinions within the dev team. I'd strongly encourage you to experiment. There are numerous options to make the game stand out, just pick one and stick to it. the game has incredible potential that shouldn't go to waste. Edit: oh and don't be too much concerned about balance. Some of the most played games in this world are imbalanced by design. That's not a major problem as long as each player has a fair option of winning. If you create a certain civ outline that all civs follow you can't really mess up the overall game balance much. I speak from experience. On Eastern Front we had lots of discussions about the faction balance and spent many days of changing weapon stats and units. But then we noticed that our approach to the faction design was bad. We changed it and suddenly lots of balance problems were gone without any further work required. Design > balance. Because Design creates balance and not the other way around. Having a @#$% design with good balance is worse than having a good design with worse balance. Because a good design can be improved and balance can be achieved.

And once more to clarify the core argument: It's like you're joining Formula 1 racing with a 20 year old stock car with 20 horsepower. Then you start your first race and notice "ahh crap, I can't win the race, the others are too fast for me". The logical solution would be: reduce weight on the car, put in a decent engine and make its traction and controls better so you can keep up with the high powered special formula 1 racing cars. Or simply kick out the stock car and get a proper racing car for the class I'm driving in. Makign the solution according to the 0 ad guysto the problem "I can't win races with my car" is to put cooler rims and a different coating paint. Alternatively, I buy more Stock cars with 20 Horsepower, but accurate coating paint and rims and say "look, I have more racing cars now! They look completely authentic!" - but they still suck performancewise. And then tell the others to drive more slowly because they're the ones driving the wrong cars. And if someone questions this he's told that "this is how racing works. You have no clue about real racing cars". Or alternatively "I don't have any engine mechanics on my team, so I can't make my car faster. But I insist that even in this state the car works well enough for racing!"

We had around 25 people work on Eastern Front in the past 5 years, of many which were modelers, animators, coders and 2d artists. I know how much work is required to made new models and I dont question the quality of the work. That's why I put the 3d art on the positive list. Just for some references we're using on Eastern Front: Eastern Front Mode ingame and renders Just feel free to browse through the pages and see for yourself. There are hundreds of assets created, tanks, missiles, grenades, at guns, infantry units, buildings, special effects, sounds etc. about the last paragraph you posted, I was clearly exaggerating and joking, hence the "lol" at the end of the paragraph. Of course it's clear that history shouldn't go that far. But this shows the discrepancy between "historically accurate" and a game. A game is a game, and compromises have to be made in order to get a playable game that doesn't feel like a sciFi abomination. edit to clear this up: I respect the vision of having an "authentic historical game". But putting a bunch of historically accurately modeled units and buildings together doesn't make it a game. It's a "authentic historical model/art showcase". You can look at the art and be happy, and that's about it. Like an interactive screensaver. About the other stuff: Yes, the game grows by contributions. But look at it this way: In order to contribute something that can be used you have to have some sort of recipe of which you can cross out stuff that has been done already and stuff that still needs to be done. There has been progress in many areas, I noticed the smoother animations of soldiers, some new ambience music, and finally non buggy path finding and a fix to the lag which made earlier versions unplayable. But in terms of gameplay there is NO progress whatsoever. The uints still are all in the HQ, there is no resource distribution, every unit costs lumber and food although it clearly shouldn't. There is no teching present, nothing. In over a year. Nobody added gameplay related stuff to the design document, no gameplay patterns were created. Nothing. That's why I wrote that you made a nice little interactive museum. A game works like this: You create an enviroment (for example Ancient times, Space, medieval, fantasy or whatever setting you like) then you create a certain "ruleset" for your game to play in. I.e. large scale battles, real time or turn based, micro focused with high hitpoint units and low army sizes, and other options then you go ahead and build your art assets for the game. The ruleset is then tweaked and polished throughout the early stages of the game development, things that work are kept in and others are removed. After a certain time you get something that could be called a prototype game and then you can go further to tweak it as you wish. 0 ad has no _working_ ruleset, not since a few days, but since its very start. That's the key issue. And this is not getting fixed. IN YEARS. And the further issue is that there is noone who cares about this. The devs, like Lion.kanzen clearly stated their ignorance and incompetence in this matter numerous times aswell as their inability to actually make a game, not an art showcase. Instead they go ahead and say "let others fix our game for us, we don't care about it".

I'm 28 and I'm doing this in my free time aswell. I'm employed as leading technical Estate Construction Engineer for a large community. Also you're right heading towards the route of "never launch a game". BECAUSE YOU DONT HAVE A GAME. YOU HAVE A BUNCH OF PIXELS THAT CAN FOLLOW ORDERS. THATS ALL! I could just go ahead, take some of our Eastern Front Model assets, put them randomly together and say "LOOK THIS MY GAME ISNT IT BEAUTIFUL!?" Because that's what you're doing. And it's the wrong way. But deep inside you know it already. As I can't properly quote the first post I'll post directly in the quote in red (edit since you aswell took red colour I switch to purple): The last two paragraphs are pretty unclear to me because the english is too weird for me to understand. English isnt my main language so idk. What do you actually mean? In case you still don't understand the reasoning behind the criticism: The point is that 0ad is an uncreative, soulless clone of Age of Empires 2 without a working economy concept, military concept, no unique traits that make the game standing out from it (except for the capturing system which has some potential to be fair) and the horrible citizen soldier system that creates more problems than it fixes. If I'd make a list with pro's and contra's for 0ad compared to AoE 2 it would look like this: 0 ad Pros: - nice 3d graphics - other civs than AoE II, and "historical accurate" with no fantasy involved - interesting map layouts 0 ad Contra: - as stated in the name "0" gameplay - no original ideas to make civs differ from each other - no military counter system - no teching progression - no cohesive teching options for military and economy - no strategical depth - no longtime motivation to actually get into the "game" - chaotic feeling throughout every match, no red line in the game to get a progression effect for players playing it Other negative points like missing game features, animation bugs and so on would be unfair since the game isnt finished at this point. If I'd split up certain points (like strategical depth or teching progression) this list would become quite a bit longer. Since you yourself say it's an alpha I won't go into the details as much aswell, because the game can evolve, right? Sure, you have historical weapons, names, building architectures for your civilizations. But that doesn't make it a game. It makes it an interactive museum. No Rise of Nations clone, no nothing. Just a museum that moves. State me otherwise? I'll just post a dozen AoE II HD stream recordings from youtube between some players and put your (admittedly nicely recorded) youtube channel content against it. After minute 10 there should be a significant difference to see where 0ad is lacking.

Stuff like this needs to be the core of the actual game first. The developers have to have a vision of the game, how it should be played and build it accordingly. Leaving everything to modders or total conversions does not help. Of course opinions differ, but if someone of the dev team would set up a line for the gameplay there would be no reason to create mods to fix the game for them. I don't even care if its a system similar to mine, but it should _WORK_. And in the current alpha it's more than obvious that the dev game version does NOT work. And the worst thing: I came here over a year ago (!) and there has been ZERO, ZERO !!! progress in the game design department. It's almost the same when I left at alpha 18 or 19. that's the real problem. They don't care. They even created a "balancing" sub forum that states "Hey look our game is awesome that we don't need to improve the game design. Just help us fix the stats and it's awesome!" which is utterly bulls***. There is so much great art and potential in this game and they're not even remotely using it to make something great out of it. Of course it's a difference if you're an Indie developer compared to the great lords of games like microsoft or Blizzard. But that's no excuse to get your own stuff to work properly. Hence my rambling.

Because this way I'm doing YOUR work as developers. YOU should be the ones who actually should think of stuff like this and not me. You could try to take the opinion and rethink your game and come up with working solutions from experience from other games. It's not as if there aren't plenty of great games to take inspiration from and merge it with 0 AD to form something even greater. Instead you're ignorant "you jsust dont know how to play" "no its not broken just needs experience" and then you expect me to fix the game for you.

Oka, I'll just give you a starter, this is Something I wrote together in ~2 hours. It's nowhere near finished, but since you want specific infos that you can then ignore I'll just post it here: Improvement Concept: - scrap the Citizen Soldier system - units are trained in batches. that means: you click on the "train button" and once finished a certain amount of units is spawned instead of single units (I'd still suggest to have battalions because with the tiny units on the map it would simply make everything way more easy to overview, but anyways. I'll go with this for now as an improvement) - unit cost is increased accordingly, building times aswell Resources: - food (herdables, huntables, fish, replenishing food for later stages of the game) - wood (forests, bushes etc.) - metal (from mines on the map) - stone (from mines on the map) Usage: - food is key element to economy teching, training economic units and ofc. training military units - lumber mostly used for creating buildings and training units that shoot missiles (or have spears for that matter) - metal used for any military unit and to tech up certain military and economic upgrades - stone used for creating buildings aswell as walls towers etc. This system is consistent for all civilizations. The more specialized a unit is the higher is its respective cost. New gather system System 1 civilized/hellenic tribes/romans/Karthago * 2 trainable types of Gatherers : Women and Citizens - proposal: women cost 150 food, number of women per training: 5 - gather food (only) Citizens cost 200 food, number of Citizens per training: 2 - harvest metal, food, wood, stone Citizen can be "called to arms", transforming them in a garrison/defense type unit (like a Hoplite for example) for a set amount of time (like 30 seconds - 1 minute). After that they automatically become Citizens again -> defensive type civilizations that rely on using their citizens to defend their cities -> can create Outpost buildings that allow to increase the build radius. Without outposts they can't build in neutral territory -> outposts can be garrisoned with infantry to defend themselves, citizens can be called to arms on those buildings aswell -> utilizing the "combating Citizen" gameplay concept without all the unnecessary micro involved Buildings constructed in t1 phase: (only citizens can build them) -> quarry (store stones) -> mines (store metal) -> some sort of Agora building that stores food -> outpost -> towers -> wooden walls -> lumbermills (store lumber) -> farms -> houses System 2 "barbaric tribes/nomad" tribes * 1 trainable unit type : Villagers - Villager cost 200f, number of units per training: 5 - can gather everything, but slower compared to Women/Citizens - have no defense mechanics by default but can be equipped with armour techs like military units (cloth, better weapons/axes and so on), - can be turned into warriors for a resource cost permanently, but they are weaker than citizen militia Barbarians have weaker buildings compared to hellenic tribes, but they are cheaper. -> resources can be collected with Ox carts or cheap stash buildings that only require a couple of resources to be built. Can be built anywhere on the map no matter if friendly or neutral territory. -> allows early expansion and swarming the map with units, setting up camps for ambushes and harassment Buildings constructed in t1 phase:-> storehouse/mobile ox carts (stores every resource) -> barracks type building (like tribal house or whatever) -> palisades/wooden walls -> hunting lodges (increase pop cap) -> building that creates herdables as a food source for later stages of the game, similar to farms, but fit a nomadic style of a civilization combat unit system: - units take up different amounts of population, the better/larger the unit is the more pop cap it uses - mace/sword units 1-2 pop - spearmen 1 pop - hoplites 3 pop - siege weapons 4 pop - melee cavalry 2-4 pop (from light -> heavy) - archers take 2 pop - skirmishers take 1 pop - mounted skirms take 2 pop - ships take 5-10 pop, but are much more powerful and expensive compared to now Just like Citizens/Women/Villager military units are trained in batches. Depending on the type of unit (spam/low tech unit/high tech unit/cavalry/siege equipment) the number of units spawned varies. example Sparta: - hoplites spawn 10 men each - elite spartans are only 5 germanic tribe Axemen/Swordmen spawn with 15 soldiers each and so on. The costs are applied based on their hitpoint/damage ratio. there is a difference between a trained army and tribal warfare. Experienced, well equipped soldiers are better at fighting and are more powerful in direct combat. They have to be weakened by nomads with hit and run tactics, ambushes and other stuff. Each unit gets a hard counter that is significantly cheaper in one area. Yes, it's easier to order people to do something if you pay them. However, if you have no aim to work with it's even harder. We on eastern front did the following: "dude cool Panzer Model. However, would you like a finished, working, fun game and see your Panzer from hundreds of players? or would you like to keep posting screenshots and videos of it because the game around the tank doesn't work or is played at all?" The result was most of the time that people did what had to be done. Yes, and 0 ad has potential to become a @#$%ing Blockbuster. There are no great ancient times RTS games on the market. I also dislike Starcraft II but at least it makes sense when you actually play it. I don't like SciFi scenarios so I don't like the races in there. But even then it was logical and fun to play because it's a working game. Astonishing ignorance. Wow.

sort of... I don't care for marketing appeal or making money. It's simply for the concept behind the game. to make it short: Any game needs rules. Those rules are setup by the developers, as they decide which type of game they want to make. For these rules to apply you create an enviroment. Those two aspects work together. 0 ad first does the enviroment and has no rule concept. Ence the game feels empty, unpolished, unfinished and has no long time motivation to play. So, to get people to stick with it there is more and more art stuff (models, maps etc) implemented to fill up the hole. Just that this hole can't be stiffed with content. that's what our former lead gameplay developer said aswell "IS 2 are not imbalanced against King Tigers beating them in frontal combat. You're just using them wrong". That was before I bashed him so hard with IS 2 tank spam that he finally noticed himself there is something wrong. So, no, you're wrong. You just don't know it yet. We've had stuff like this on our games in the past years, and experience is a hard teacher. the difference is that I know what I'm taling about and you don't.

Just a couple

Okay, let's split hairs then. Edit: as for your first sentence that I just noticed: unique does NOT always mean good. Wow, women give resources if killed. You need ot kill 50 !!!! women to gain back only the resources for a single soldier. Sure, this value can be adjusted by increasing the amount of resources per woman killed. The exp. point system is nice of course, but still. This game is in its current state about masses. How many units should a single veteran soldier equal out? If there is enough economy for pumping out 10 soldiers at once your veteran would need to equal out what? 5 soldiers? 10 soldiers? 100 soldiers? better arm it with a MG 42 then ... xD Joking aside. towards your last sentence: Are you a game developer? Did you create a working game that was played by thousands of players? I did, google "Company of Heroes : Eastern Front". In total there were around 500.000 players who play and played it in the past. When we released the first version we managed to crash the official game servers because so many people went online and started playing it. I also made modifications for Warcraft III which also are played by thousands of people. Furthermore, I played various RTS games in the past 20 years, starting from Age of Empires, over stronghold, Warcraft III, Rome Total war series, plenty of The Settlers, Cultures, Battle For Middle Earth Series and a couple more to mention, and I've been in the modding departments of a lot of these games. So I sort of know what makes an RTS good and what not. Don't try to lecture me.

Dude. citizen soldiers are the most broken concept ever made. It may be unique, but it's not good. edit: actually, when I first noticed this game I also thought "woah cool, soldiers can gather resources. That's something refreshing". But after 3 games I already noticed that the system is flawed in its very essence. There is a reason why in 95% of all strategy games there is a difference between combat units and non combat units (aka resource gatherers). It doesn't make any sense to have main combat units gathering resources, because this always creates a disadvantage for attacking players. During the time my own army marches to the enemy, taking that both sides have equal resources (Which should be the case in this kind of mirroring civ games) the player attacking will loose, depending on the game time and population up to thousands of resources. And those resources are not only less for the attacking player but also more for the defending player and he can use this to defend his city + the attacking player's ecomonmy is weaker because his units are not in the base gathering resources. It's a slippery slope. Furthermore there are techs and design features that favor booming even more. Why should I try to rush an enemy if I can build a dozen women at once for gathering resources when I teched the "train women in houses tech" and replace my losses within seconds? There are much better ways to actually accomplish a working offense-defense balance. On top of that it doesn't even make sense the way it is implemented at all. Why should soldiers go to forests and fields and gather resources with their pikes/swords/axes and instantly be able to repel attacks as if they'd beam their weapons into their hand? Guess what: a much better system would be simply to keep the diverted women <-> citizen system and instead give certain buildings, like Town hall or barracks the option to "call to arms" which then arms citizens with characteristic weapons that were used by said civ for a period of time. During that time they can fight but no longer gather resources. And the best thing is that it actually resembles how Citizen Soldiers worked in that time (At least almost, because for certain civs the weapons were bought by the soldiers, like most greeks or romans). This is just an example of how flawed the whole "game" is at the moment (I'd rather call this "playable graphic model showcase" for that matter instead).

Already waited for an answer from you. How about this? It's very detailed in terms of history, art and armaments etc and I know that much work has been put in that, but in terms of an actual game it's simply 90% unuseable. Because that's what currently is ingame, and everyone can see that's it's not good. That's what I meant with a design document that actually determines how the game should be played. Right now it's a bad version of Age of Empires. Nobody needs a bad version of Age of Empires.

Specific constructive suggestions? Well how about this: edit: step 0: get rid of that citizen soldier concept, then start from scratch and use the art assets you already have available Step 1: create a resource concept Step 2: create faction concept(s) - create original factions that actually represent the characteristics of the civilizations ingame Step 3: create a teching concept - where and how many buildings should be available at which state of the game step 3a: economic systems step 3b: military systems step 3c: defensive tech systems Step 4: create a counter system - units that are trainable at which state of the game, how many units, unit characteristics etc. Step 5: create a gameplay pattern that the game follows to actually have some sort of game progress Step 5a: gameplay patterns of economy Step 5b: gameplay patterns of structures Step 5c: gameplay patterns of military . . . Step 10.000: balance playtesting of the final game (for which this forum is for) Those 5 things would at least create a state in which you can go more into detail. At this point I'd have to create a design guide for the game, consisting of everything, and would be probably a couple dozen pages long. This should have been done by the team years ago already and programming should have followed it (and by "design guide" I mean a detailed document that is actually worth a darn and not made by a bunch of noobs who don't know anything about actual gameplay), and I can't be bothered to write a design guide for you because you won't listen anyways. I know that there already is some of that present in the game, it's just that the implementation is nowhere near in a state that allows to actually create a gameplay. Also, follow Niektb's suggestion and as a first step read through my posts.

No point in balance testing. The "game" mainly consists of booming like a madman and then spamming units. the units themselves are not visibly different from each other, which makes microing units even worse. It's almost impossible to assign units against their intended counters (another reason to actually use my proposed system of unit battalions instead of single units/formations. It's like microing each soldier individually in Rome Total War ) Furthermore, there is no red line in the factions, thus it's chaotic. On top of that there still is no resource dependency of units. All units cost food, lumber and some cost another additional resource. There is still no idea behind the resources used ingame. I propose you actually create a gameplay to get something that is worth called "balance". There cannot be a balancing process in this stage of the game. I'll go ahead and post a faction concept usable for multiple factions and different types to factions to actually get something that could be used. Right now it's just a mess. Sorry to say that, but it's true.

I'm sorry I have to post criticism, but well. Here we go: How about you create a gameplay concept before calling people to test it? I just downloaded the newest alpha, and gameplay wise there is almost zero progress. Yes, I've noticed there is more content in the game, the game runs smoother compared to before and animations etc. work better now. But this kind of progress doesn't change the fact that It's still an AoE II clone with too much micromanagement on the wrong stuff. Sure, you can capture stuff now, and that's better than I've initially expected it, but that doesn't change the fact that there are inherent flaws in the core gameplay that NEED to be adressed. Those are : - Citizen Soldier system - too much focus on booming - all units available from the start - unflexible teching - economy management -> army transition feels weird (indirectly connected to Citizen Soldiers) - no "red line" in the game which created tactical/strategical depth (indirectly connected to unflexible teching and Citizen Soldiers) These points have been brought up numerous times in the past, yet still there's nothing done about it at all. I really hope someone wakes up and actually takes on the problems the the game mechanics, because art and content are not the major part of why strategy games are played.

Well, if its done well enough in terms of coding, age isnt a problem, right?