DarcReaver
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Posts posted by DarcReaver
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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/-
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1 hour ago, borg- said:
Pure Boom can win Rush, or Rush + eco, Any strategy can win other strategy, depends on the ability of each player.
And rain is wet. Apart from that the weather will be cloudy with a chance of meatballs.
8 hours ago, wraitii said:Quick meta-input:
It's largely true that we haven't changed gameplay significantly since forever. The main cause of this is that not a great deal of people on the team actually play the game, and the few that do seem largely content with the breakneck speed and the current mechanics. There is a metagame, and it's a relatively simple one since it's rather poorly balanced on the whole.
Furthermore, many devs feel that changing something now is useless since we're still in Alpha. Now this is something on which I could complain at length, but it's there.
Personally, I believe we're a little too hung up on Age of Empires - and my personal preference would be for a complete switch to a production/consumption system over the "one shot" AoE like system of gathering resources. Each unit would consume some resources, each unit would produce some, and houses would give you manpower instead of raising the pop cap (which would then be soft-capped). On the whole it'd make eco more interesting.
I also generally agree that the game goes way too fast in the early stages and that units are inherently too cheap, but that is definitely a matter of personal preference - and many would argue that AoE 2 goes way too slow. We've also had weird effects at play, such as the big unit speed and very large vision ranges, making our maps feel extremely small.
Relatedly, our counters are crap - that's because we have far too few units per civilisations, and made some braindead decisions such as the pierce/hack attack we chose.
But to go back to my first point: even perfect mods won't be played much, since the team doesn't play much, and that means that imperfect mods (such as my trade changes) have basically 0 chance of convincing anybody.
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.
7 hours ago, Enrique said:Reading this saddens me deeply.
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.
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2 hours ago, fcxSanya said:
Did you try gameplay mods: Delenda Est, MetaGameV2, Sibyllae Vox ? If you have a different vision of gameplay and aren't satisfied nor by 0 A.D. nor by the existing mods, you can make a new one (describing the proposed changes in a dedicated forum topic for a start, then community can help you with the technical part).
I was founding member of Sbyllae Vox and played Delenda Est aswell, so yes.
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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.-
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19 minutes ago, Zeta1127 said:
Even with the Citizen-Soldier system, I still separate my economy from my military to a certain extent. I use Female Citizens to gather food and wood, ideally totaling about 6 to 8 batches for farming since foraging is always exhausted quickly, which will probably change once the Corral trickle is implemented, and about 6 to 8 batches dedicated to woodcutting depending on how much wood is needed, and dedicated Citizen-Soldiers, that cost food and wood, in order to gather stone and metal, totaling 2 to 4 batches for each. I usually group my ranged infantry, melee infantry, ranged cavalry, and melee cavalry into separate groups for my army, and use the infantry for building structures for reaching new phases and houses until I reach the population cap. I actually don't use Champions very much, only if I feel I need to augment my Citizen-Soldiers with them, which is usually true for the Spartans and Mauryans.
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.
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50 minutes ago, Feldfeld said:
it seems that game is being close to beta and that balancing takes sense. I have no experience about game making, etc so i won't be sure about what i'm going to say. If we consider that the citizens soldiers system is a good aspect of this game, thus the only issue should be balancing. If the game can be balanced, then we can go on with citizens soldiers.
From what i have shown just before, assuming spear cav rush is overpowered, the game can in some way be balanced. So it is relevant to discuss about that (overpowered strats) in order to know if yes or no, the game can be balanced.
Not sure i explained well my point, i am now waiting for answers.
EDIT : I forgot to mention, but i can, if needed bring replays about successful cav rushes (that prevented food production, captured buildings to destroy it)
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.
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5 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
About balance, I agree. I don't care if every single faction is balanced against every other faction. In fact, I want the factions to be imbalanced!!! I want challenging factions, I want uber factions, I want underdog factions. No, I don't want the perfect Protoss, Terrans, Zerg balance, where you try desperately to get a 33% victory rate for each faction.... If Rome curb-stopped a certain historical faction, do I want that faction to be 100% balanced against Rome in the game? Hell naw. Give them a challenge? Sure. The first conceit of the game is history. You want to present interesting historical challenges to the player, yes? Stop with this 0.48% increased attack balancing stuff and focus on making the game a compelling example of what you're trying to achieve first. Does that mean the alpha needs to be crazy imbalanced? Of course not, but detailed balancing should come in beta.
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.
5 hours ago, Enrique said:It has been said already on the thread. There's no tradeoff for making units that can fight and gather so there's little to none benefit on doing pure-economic units. In AOE2 defending villagers is ultra important on high level matches.
Exactly this.
4 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:The problem with that is :to jump in the "soldier mode" when enemy are attacking you?
how many second you will lost?
must be a K-shortcut ?
there are many questions. So the the most fast player have a advantage?
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I do many experiments in my map battle of dirt.
- starting resources far.
- slaves and women at the starting without CS's around.
- no many resources, the poverty of a village.
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.
3 hours ago, Feldfeld said:Yes, but rushing is also used very often. borg (the best player) often uses sword cav rush for exemple. In 1v1 and in team games, early cav rush is used, and not only that, but the roman spear cav rush is considered overpowered by many players. So from my experience in lobby, booming is not the one and only strategy, and in each game we play, we don't know for sure what will happen in early game.
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.
1 hour ago, shieldwolf23 said:@DarcReaver - I totally understand your sentiments. There were times wherein if only I have the set of skills to make the changes myself, I would have done it quickly and presented it to the community. Like @Enrique said, your posts contain valid points of which we can learn. Will you be willing to be part of that process itself? We can have you in our team, if the Council will be okay with it. Can we do that @niektb? My only misgiving is to be patient with us - please do tone down the harshness level. We could definitely use your experience to the betterment of this game.
@Lion.Kanzen - I also appreciate the "loyalty" to 0 A.D. You have provided ideas and contributions to the group as well. Let us accept constructive criticisms whenever we get it.
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.
11 minutes ago, niektb said:@shieldwolf23: Actually we already tried that with a Design Committee where f.e. @Karamel also participated in... Some results of that can be found in the Sybillae Vox gameplay mod, but likely it's not up to date anymore
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.
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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.
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24 minutes ago, Skhorn said:
Look, i'm not the right person to talk about your disregards about the game, as i'm not entirely familiarized with all the game developement.
But there is something i can say to you:
First, check this magnificent and beautiful postYou may think: Why the f|@·~ i want to see that? Well, the way how Sundiata exposed his idea about a faction, led that single idea into a mod. I know its not the same as gameplay, but i think my point is very clear.
Instead of letting loose your rage, why don't you come up with a decent post, explaining your ideas, giving pros, contras, comparing x with y or whatever you think it may be useful for you to explain it. Testing is needed as devs can't go blindly writing code, they got to know what people think that should be done and should be corrected, they need to know another point of view. But there are ways to get to them, one way, is giving a nice explanation, not mere millions of words, just a good explained idea.
So, you think that writing while on rage on the forum it will make them say: Yes, change it!! or you think they will take your words seriously? No, seriously, no. I think some of your protests can be seen here http://trac.wildfiregames.com/roadmap or searching in the forum you may know what has been said about it.
I urge to try another efficient way to expose your ideas. Avoid writing that with rage, be polite.
The article you posted is called "design process". Exactly what I wrote in my last paragraph here:
QuoteYou 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.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.
23 minutes ago, Enrique said:Unlike Lionkazen and sphyrt I understand DarcReaver and share some of his thoughts regarding the core gameplay even if his words aren't as polite as we're used to.
There are some reasons that made the gameplay direction to the current state it is, but it is not a valid argument to defend the current gameplay at all.
I think experimenting with more radical gameplay changes, even if imbalanced, would be a better way to find the correct gameplay systems' mix to get a fun game instead of trying to balance the alpha to make it enjoyable for its current playerbase. Sadly, we don't have a lead gameplay tech/dev and normally each member has its own game view.
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.
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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!"
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31 minutes ago, Skhorn said:
It seems there is one thing you miss from all the concept behind 0ad and it's constantly repeated trough the forum: its a project that grows by contributions. You say you don't care of development, but the work that took several days, weeks, months or years can't be thrown away just because there is someone that does not like it, specially with not enough good arguments to make more viable the idea. At least have some sort of respect, you don't know what's to code or to do a whole set of buildings for a faction. IT TAKES TIME
I seriously encourage you, to be more patient an try to read and clear the idea of what 0ad is, as a game, as an historical/accurate game that you just seem to joke about, why? With that in mind you may have more decent arguments, than just babbling.
As for the more hilarious thing in your post,I don't get your point once more. As if 0ad would be anywhere near historical. If you'd have a historical game there would be much more emphasis on actual numbers of armies, multiple cities, empires that rise and fall and so on. Arguing with historical accuracy is always a mess. Who would want to play romans who in reality got destroyed when the barbarians invaded italy? Ingame you'd need romans to auto loose after 30 mins because they're invaded by barbarian tribes. lol.
Dude, seriously? That's not an argument for someone of your age.
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".
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1 hour ago, Lion.Kanzen said:
MUST? hahaha. your idea must... nah I dont like it sounds like another bad EE idea same mistakes thats bring them never launch another game like that.
some modders are Developers like Niektb, Lordgood, etc.
How old are you? the people here dont work or have as Job this game, we have a life outside. is this hard to understand, and you how you are helping? are you helping?
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):
1 hour ago, Lion.Kanzen said:No, you must probe this is wrong and is an Inaccuracy.
I already did state numerous reasons why the citizen soldier concept is bad and I won't do it again. Just read the posts I wrote earlier inthis thread kthx.
I Agree with that but I dont want a Battle for Middle Earth game. I like more like Rise and Fall : CAW.
No, this mostly of worst thing of RoN. we have infinite resources to do that.
I never said this should be another Battle for Middle Earth game. Neither did I say infinite resources. Apart from that your famrs already ARE infinite sources of food. the unit costs were just examples how training multiple units at once could be accomplished. It's an early concept, and even then it's more advanced than everything you've accomplished in over a year of development with at least half a dozen people or more. Enough said.
edit: I say BFME series and several other games had very interesting and refreshing ideas to mix up with traditional RTS traits. In particular for BFME this was a battalion system and the possibility to apply flanking bonuses to units aswell as trampling soldiers and defending against trample with Pikemen type units. Just like it can be seen in games like Rome Total War series. Epic fights with cavalry charges, flanking and demolishing enemy armies with superior tactics. Units getting experienced in battle and leveling up, allowing them to deal more damage than their rookie fresh trained counterparts.That's stuff that is way more advanced than building X barracks and spam infantrymen from them faster than your enemy. That's why I've taken these games as examples in the past for great progress in the genre.
I dont see problem with your proposition for resources. thats need a topic itself.
yes, and this is a CORE TOPIC AND SHOULD BE THE FIRST THING TO ACTUALLY FOCUS DEVELOPMENT ON. DEAR GOD.
So you even had idea i proposed The call of arms before. but not like RoN. that turn Citizen to soldiers unlike have an animation or click a button(UNNECESSARY MICROMANAGEMENT )
I don't care too much about the actual implemetation. It should be in spirit of the citizen soldier system to live on but be less retarded.
why these costs?
Historical inaccuracy so far, even is a cliche, Iberian have more HP than others. the others have different costs in materials.
Yes, however this is minor stuff that is settled in a later phase of the game. Actually, stuff like hitpoint bonuses for units or build times are something for an actual playtest beta.
you are runing the concept without investigate, how about Ptolemies? and some civil buildings.
This can be nice with Nomads not with Celts or Iberians, more Inaccuracies.
Dude I don't care for which civs this would be used. Be it celts or Iberians, I don't It's about creating a @#$%ing gameplay diversity, so stop nitpicking random details out of the concept and treat them as if they're 100% done. They're just examples how the civs can be made more diverse without turning everything upside down. And creating a concept that allows players to switch between civs fitting their playstyles more.
If you had done your job right ideas like this would be in the game already instead of "unit X has 2 hitpoints more than unit Y"Yes I like this is similar to DE the first time i play.
This haven't sense more than gameplay, I tell nope. Aoe3 do things like this. I know this solve the way of use this units Infantry melee over other but isn't the way.
sounds like this... a mobile game? you want do that with 0 AD
What? If you train multiple uints at once you create larger armies/economies, creating an illusion of actually managing a civilization, not a bunch of villagers with stones and sticks, why do you compare it to a random mobile game? I don't get the point.
why?
hmmm no thank you I want RoN. or other game. this no the feeling of we want sounds like fantasy RTS. or RoN that was so inaccurate.
I don't get your point once more. As if 0ad would be anywhere near historical. If you'd have a historical game there would be much more emphasis on actual numbers of armies, multiple cities, empires that rise and fall and so on. Arguing with historical accuracy is always a mess. Who would want to play romans who in reality got destroyed when the barbarians invaded italy? Ingame you'd need romans to auto loose after 30 mins because they're invaded by barbarian tribes. lol.
We have anothers common concept with Slaves. this very similar to TW series, that for me fits so well.
Slave/Capture system:
- not all soldiers/women die on the Battlefield
- wounded enemies can be captured and are put into a sort of "slave building". Either automatically or the ownership is changed and they can be garrisoned manually
- slaves are captured automatically when military units stopped fighting (to reduce necessary micro)Slave building:
Slave buildings work like a market place and permanently create resources.
the building can be built and then upgraded to become a mine (produces metal), quarry (produces stone), farm (produces food). Each building limits to like 10 slaves or 20.
Civs that did not rely on slavery in history instead get a resource bonus for captured units added to their resources.
That means that defensive slaver civs can slowly build up a better economy by utilizing the slave buildings.well this was just an idea to get something rolling, and people to think about alternate ideas for combat/resource gathering interactions.
I'm sure there are more cliches ,
the other part I mentioned in other topic about delete your own units. and the problem now you unbalance the game between factions.
About Conversion.
http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/997
its working game because have money. but what you think about this?
probe it that.
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.
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10 minutes ago, sphyrth said:
Woah! With those concepts you're better off having a team to build a mod for the game... a total conversion even.
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.-
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2 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:
@DarcReaver that is better why you dont start a topic like that my first time I do in that way.
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.
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2 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:
It's an alpha... and you still here with no proposition of this.
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 aswellResources:
- 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, stoneCitizen 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 involvedBuildings 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
-> housesSystem 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 harassmentBuildings 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
Spoiler
--- this is not a finished concept and was just a quick thought on the capture mechanisms. don't take it as 100% done, I would try to enlarge the concept into more detailed. After hearing that women give back resources when dying this system already partly is in place ---Slave/Capture system:
- not all soldiers/women die on the Battlefield
- wounded enemies can be captured and are put into a sort of "slave building". Either automatically or the ownership is changed and they can be garrisoned manually
- slaves are captured automatically when military units stopped fighting (to reduce necessary micro)Slave building:
Slave buildings work like a market place and permanently create resources.
the building can be built and then upgraded to become a mine (produces metal), quarry (produces stone), farm (produces food). Each building limits to like 10 slaves or 20.
Civs that did not rely on slavery in history instead get a resource bonus for captured units added to their resources.
That means that defensive slaver civs can slowly build up a better economy by utilizing the slave buildings.
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 nowJust 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 5germanic 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.
5 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:Yes but, you must know these couple of things is fine, nobody says we aren't listening.
to something get fixed first you may identify the problem, propose solutions, right ?
one solutions are ready to be enlisted (must community and team approval), the task need be taken, if nobody wants take the task you must be wait for years. So have patience . If don't have patience you must contribute your delft or donate for that.
is easy criticism in a project like this if you compared this with Blizzard, with Microsoft... etc.
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.
Just now, Lion.Kanzen said:If you don't have motivation to play, don't play it, simple. For example haven't motivation of play Sc2. May be AoE 2 but...feels I need another game, for me there is the potential to my enjoy. In this moment nobody is making an RTS with romans.
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.5 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:This guys is the kind is capricious, the citizen soldiers can work, I don't see where is broken for an experienced player.
he statement this because like nostalgia and stay in a safe place his confort zone.
- I think the same about Citizen soldiers but, later I understand how can deal with them and how using them.
Astonishing ignorance. Wow.
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1 minute ago, sphyrth said:
Well, how about the economy I just disrupted? Gaining resources was the addition to that as I mentioned. So, it's kind of a pay-off.
They're actually imbalanced (Alpha 20), and the developers gave the slower train time. By my estimates, 5 Citizen Soldiers or more to take down 1 Champion Unit. 20 for the Heroes I think.
No. Not a game developer, only played a handful of RTS (Red Alert 2, Battle Realms, and this one), and I don't have any experiences in the same way you have. Now that's out of the way, please don't think I'm trying to lecture you. Think of it as me who loves this particular game trying to state his case.
My question, though, is: Are you looking at 0 A.D. from a Marketing standpoint? I'm considering that because majority of the comments against the game's gameplay decisions (especially the Citizen Soldiers) is that "A lot of players won't like this, so it's losing its potential for promotion."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.
Just now, Lion.Kanzen said:Citizen soldiers isn't broken, only you don't know how using it. Simple.
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 now, Lion.Kanzen said:
You can made propositions, you know?
Just a couple
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Okay, let's split hairs then.
15 minutes ago, sphyrth said:And that's the main reason 0 A.D. is unique from all of them.
Because I'll be gaining 1 Food, 1 Wood, 1 Stone, and 1 Metal. For each woman I kill... things that I don't usually get especially in the Village Phase. Not to mention exp points for my soldiers.
For gameplay reasons. But how about Marius' Mules?
Like I said, there are Champion units in the City Phase for that. Not all units are Citizen Soldiers.
I don't actually have a problem learning to play with it. I'm actually considering the fact that AoE 2 wasn't my childhood and I have to learn the game from scratch. You have a standard way of playing RTS and you want that imported here as well. This I believe is more of a battle of preference than actual standard of what makes RTS good or not.
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. -
11 minutes ago, sphyrth said:
The Citizen Soldiers is what makes 0 A.D. 0 A.D. I'll never want that removed.
The main reason you think that they're only used for booming is understandable ("Why should I waste time attacking when I can do is gather->populate->build houses->rinse and repeat? By the time the enemy is attacking, I'd mustered enough units."
Well, you might want to build up until City Phase to get the real non-working soldiers up and running. So you'll have to end your cycle that way.
Also, you know the advantage of attacking? The loot system: Your units gain experience, and you certain resources by killing enemy units as well as disrupting their economy. So it's not necessarily a "waste of time booming".
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).
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16 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:
@DarcReaver you need read more, "hablemos sin saber".
http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Design_Document
you know about our wiki?
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. -
54 minutes ago, Imarok said:
Maybe you should start making specific constructive suggestions on how to improve the situation
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On 28.8.2016 at 11:05 PM, bb said:
yes, but it is very outdated #995
Well, if its done well enough in terms of coding, age isnt a problem, right?
Application - Gameplay Developer
in Applications and Contributions
Posted · Edited by DarcReaver
Thanks for your support, much appreciated!