DarcReaver

So you agree that a game with lack of strategical choices is bad because this results in bad balance and makes it less fun for the majority of players, am I right?

So? You yourself said the basic buildorder is the same for most civs, I just said that you're correct by stating the default 22 pop for landmaps. How this fact that a 22 pop feudal doesn't work on water maps make the situation on 0 AD better?

Nope it's not enough. There are some tactical choices indeed. military unit training start <-> economic unit training start military building start <-> ecnomonic building start Then you can select between a variety of earlygame units (spear/swordman, slinger/skirmisher, vacalry A/B) All from the start, with no further strategical choices required. AND after that you spam champions/elite units because they're superior to all earlygame units, buildings and other units. And that's about it. And that's a problem. @Grugnas Indeed, Starcraft is also a great game with lots of strategical and tactical depth.

If I watch multiplayer all I see are vietnamese players rushing to bronze age, research the techs for herdings etc. and then spam cav archers from 4-6 archery ranges, so I doubt that you need more that you cannot win with only getting one unit. This has to do with Assyrian free archers +40% rate of fire though. The comparison to AoE is actually a bad example, I admit. Mainly because AoE was made when multiplayer/competitive gaming wasn't really a thing in 1995/96. At least not the way it has become in the last 10-15 years. It's good for singleplayer tho. About AoE II: the initial buildorder is the same indeed, 22 pop -> feudal. But after that you have lots of strategical and tactical options. Way more than 0 AD has (or even AoE). Which is the reason why AoE II is a popular league game, and AoE I isn't (although AoE I has other reasons like missing some technical features that make the game more easy to install/play than AoE II because AoE II is newer).

Because AoE II out of the AoE game series is the only community I'd consider to be competitive. And this is because AoE II is a great game with many nice game mechanics and a lot of strategical and tactical depth PLUS various options to micro. So you're playing AoE 1 I suppose? Then I'll adjust the questions slightly, the answer will be most likely the same though. Although multiplayer in AoE 1 is pretty dull aswell. Assyrian + cav archer spam > all anyways, so I sort of understand why you enjoy 0 AD. But at least you can play stuff like Minoan comp archer spam or mass legions with Chosons or tower rush with Romans. Anyways. "So tell me, how many viable game options, depending on maptype (nomad, highlands, islands/coasts) and different military openings are in AoE? How many viable mid-game options (dependant on your civ) are ingame? How luck dependant is the game? Are there classic "phases" of earlygame/midgame/lategame in which you do certain meta strategies? How does lategame trash wars work and how are they influenced by factions ingame? How does map control work? Difference between playing pockets and flank positions? General buildorders for civs? And how many do you have in 0 AD? And how are these point contained in 0 AD? "

Here. Also please focus on the questions I asked you.

Okay once again, you said you're pro with AoE 2. So tell me, how many viable game options, depending on maptype (arabia, GA, Arena, water maps) and different military openings are in AoE 2? How many viable mid-game options (dependant on your civ) are ingame? How luck dependant is the game? Are there classic "phases" of earlygame/midgame/lategame in which you do certain meta strategies? How does lategame trash wars work and how are they influenced by factions and team bonuses? How does map control work? Difference between playing pockets and flank positions? General buildorders for civs? And how many do you have in 0 AD? And how are these point contained in 0 AD?

As usual a "balancer" who doesn't understand the problem. Let me quote the issue in my FIRST sentence again: "There is no "best buildorder" because there is no teching" So? What does your post with "if you do that you will loose because *blablabla*" How do I loose? With what? By building units? By not building units? By booming? By rushing? I said you have the OPTION to spam women AND/OR citizen soldiers AND/OR the basic military units from your Commandcenter. I didn't say "OMG BUILD 3 WOMEN THEN 8 CAV ARCHERS AND THEN BOOM OP BEST BUILDORDER". To quote myself So maybe you should start to read something about "variety of choices" "strategical depth" and "gameflow" before lecturing me about how you beat up everyone else with your proness, okay? @Grugnas sort of agree with your points. One thing I'd like to add is that people leave because of "balance" - indeed. But most people will leave earlier because of poor gameplay mechanics. I'm currently asking friends I play other RTS games with to play 0 AD games with me and then come back with a small survey about feedback. People already have have Age 2 HD and all its variations with tenthousands of players and AoE IV + Definitive Edition coming soon. There no longer is a need for an AoE clone because the "real thing" will >>>>>>>>> 0 AD both in terms of game mechanics aswell as graphics. Leaving 0 AD with nothing behind.

There is no "best buildorder" because there is no teching in general. You spam women, cavalry, soldiers, archers etc all from your TC adn then go to phase III and spam like 2 types of super units. Also there are only a couple of technologies available and they're either completely useless (especially priests) and no brainers (daamge upgrades etc.). It's like playing a dumbed down Age of Empires with even more booming and no own flavor. And it's definately not going to improve with balancing these aspects. It's like putting new rims on a 20 year old car. The game needs a direction, and then features added according to these design directions. And after that is finished you can balance. And modders can modify aspects or even make total remakes from it.

Working counter system would do something, but not help in the current state imo. I think the whole damage system needs to be redone, and more damage types need to be applied to make it better. Also, penetration system might be helpful. If you have units that are virtually unharmed by some thing (like having heavy cavalry that takes no damage from slingers, or low damage from sword weapons etc.) would help to make armies more diverse and make people think about spam. AI is just a general problem but I think that would be fixable by giving it modifiers to economy booming (like maximum of workers per diffictulty level - like easy: 30, medium: 40, hard: 50 etc.

Read these topics before bothering me again, kthx.

The problem is : what do you want to balance in this state? The 6 units that are all available without teching and the 2-3 types of soldiers that are spammed lategame? There is nothing to balance because the game isn't finished and a lot of core gameplay features are either placeholders, missing or not thought out well enough to be ingame. Balancing is the last step after all design decisions are set. With the progress speed you may re-apply as head balancer in ~ 10 years from now, I think it's realistic that you can expect a finished beta by then.

Which is the opposite of what's currently ingame, yes.

There is a design document. But it's useless since noone cares about it. The game in its current state is 90% the opposite from the design doc. In this document I take a couple of references to gameplay related stuff in the design guide that doesn't fit to the current game found in "Part II: Solution Concept using Atheneans as example civilization". Feel free to read it.

You may try to host some competitive tournament if you think that this already is so great in terms of gameplay depth and is huge fun and listen to what other peoples say about this tech demo. People who actually play RTS games, on a decent - high level. Try visiting and putting advertisements on sites like https://www.aoczone.net/, https://www.gamereplays.org/portals.php (CnC Generals section maybe) and maybe https://www.coh2.org/. There you should find some players who might be interested. I'm actually quite interested how a competitive scene judges the game mechanics. Also I'd invite you to actually play some different game competitively to get a general overview how other game mechanics work. Also @everyone: Also, once again: I never said that that my concept should be used or that every aspect has to be done that I proposed. I said the game needs to be coherent and have a general direction. AoE clone, seperate game, single player game or whatever. I always said if I don't do it someone else has to decide it. And he has to be competent and experienced with game design. Unless he is meeting these criteria this will be a huge mess aswell. Maybe even a design TEAM would work aswell, but since noone here has experience in that area idk who should do it. But yea, whatever.

Like I stated - first comes the design decision. "Do we want directional combat? - Yes/no" "Do we want hardcounters? - Yes/no" "Do we want battalions? - Yes/no" Etc. etc. Edit: to clear my point more: First you have to know if you need something, and if you need it it's worth the effort to make it. Because once done it adds value to the game and brings it forward in development. This is something that seems to be forgotten here. And also this is the reason why I do not create another sub mod for 0 AD - much effort with no benefit because it's not taken over into the core game anyways. Just like DE or any other gameplay improving mod. After these decisions were done there need to be tickets/sub sections to think of ways how the details of such game parts are shown ingame. And then programmers should start working on the implementation or suggest/discuss about ways to implement it in a cool way. After that playtesting, thinking of ways to improve it and then tweak again until you get a nice result. Then you get a useful progress. The people who are part of the team will see that the tech demo becomes more and more of a game with each design step fulfilled and one day you get a proper release that you can call "playable beta" - which then is a real game, not a graphic demo anymore. If even the devs themselves do not want to play the game - why should someone else want to play it? And once again - I didn't say you have to take my concept and put it live. I just said that someone has to take charge on this matter and without it 0 ad will fail. As can be seen in every discussion that I read over here.

I certainly won't waste dozens of hours to create another base game mod that noone plays. It was meant to actually make the dev team think of their concept, and how they're doing the exact opposite of the design document of 0 AD. And this hasn't changed in half a year. Again. I said I would start working more in practise if I become staff. But since it didn't happen I didn't contribute either. Unfortunately - but I have other projects that are more beneficial to spend my time on. I said that I offer to make a proper concept myself as a part of the core team OR someone else needs to do it. From what I've seen there are a couple of ideas going on, but apart from that nothing significantly happened. So it's neither me doing it nor someone else, leading the game's progress ad absurdum once again for half a year. You can't tell me that someone would not have been able to make a gameplay concept in such a long time. Even if not working on it full time. I ask you something: Why do ppl play singleplayer? Usually to either be entertained with an interesting story or somewhat "open world" style stuff that allows them to make the game the way they want. At least that's what expect from single player games - either to be entertained like from a movie or with interesting new experiences, or to relax after a long day of work. 0 AD has no interesting stories, and only a pretty limited "open world" character. At least unless people mod it for their personal needs (which again only a very small amount of people is willing to learn or to do). So, it's not even an option at this point, because there is no dedicated content that justifies a custom multiplayer/singleplayer split verison of 0 AD. I'm not unhappy. I'm just saying that the way things are done here are the opposite of how it should work and that the game cannot be completed or even be remotely successful as a game because it's missing almost every integral part that makes a game worth playing. It's just a playable tech demo with pretty graphics. Not a game. And it has not enough content for dedicated singleplayers, and not nearly enough gameplay depth in multiplayer. Which disqualifies it for both audiences. Yes, common ground is important. But it's more important to get a base that can be agreed about. This is absolutely necessary at some point. But this point has not even come yet. Also you like mods - well so do I. But guess what? Not everyone likes mods. And furthermore everything that is a mod is usually not put on the same level as the base game. I.E. competitive gaming always revolves around the basic game. Look at Hannibal_Barca - he plays 0 AD with competition in mind. He doesn't play DE mod or any other one, he plays the basic game. It's always like this. If you buy a car you need to make sure which type of vehicle you want before you actually start discussing about rim sizes, tyres, color etc. What currently is happening is that you have a car without tyres and only a partly functional engine/transmission, and no interior except for seats. But at the same time you tell people "yeah you can choose your car's colour, lightbeams and interior by modding it, so go have fun with it! The car itself is great already". This has not happened yet and is pretty urgent. If there would be at least a SOMEWHAT plan how the game should end up a lot of issues would fix themselves.

Because mods like this are completely ineffective. There are half a dozen mods that enable the game to be somewhat playable. Then another mod that disables map types? You can't use mods to fix basic gameplay issues. Mods are meant to supplement the game with additional content, not to create basic stuff that should be in the core game. Modding is important, indeed. And good moddability of a game/game engine is a good thing. But for modding to be useful and successful the base game has to work in the first place. This is THE most important thing. Nobody plays a game that he has to modify with 10 different mods to make it somewhat playable. Everyone takes the vanilla game version, checks it, sees that it's not good and then leaves again. Only a fraction will try the gameplay mods, and of those only a fraction will actually start contributing to the project. People who want to mod will find ways to do it, whether the game is "modding friendly" or not. And for that, the core game needs to be good enough to let people stick with the game. This is an issue that seems to not be understood, and the attitude of some guys on the v0AD game game resembles that pretty well. And unfortunately, his has been like this since years, with only little very little progress. The differences between the alphas in terms of gameplay show almost zero progress, although I first started pointing out issues like 2 years ago. And I already offered my help in the past, but there was no consensus and so the whole thing went apart on without any useful result. Which is because devs can say "well make your own mod (yet another one)" to cover up their inability to fix their game in the first place. Which isn't criticism of them personally, I'm just stating facts. Time has shown that noone used the past 2 years to get a gameplay concept going, or the game vision to be a bit more up-to-date.

Maybe.. Idk tbh.. Was merely a random thought. A fresh project always attracts new people because it's "new". The main issue that I see is that the momentum was lost throughout the last years, and this could re-establish it again. News and game magazines also rather comment and publsih information about new projects instead of old ones. The staff would automatically increase as more people are willing to work on it. But I might be wrong on that ofc.

That's the point. As long as the aim is to make a mediocre AoE clone (that's what I've written and what I refer to as "waste of time") - and this is what the game could be compared to (at best and with a lot of goodwill) it indeed is a waste of time to work in this while the "real thing" is coming. It was already problematic when AoE II HD was announced, but now it's even worse.

So many mods, so many people working on essentially the same - making the graphic demo somewhat playable. Some a bit more design oriented, and others stats oriented. But still. If the dev staff would actually at least use one of those concepts as a base game this would be honestly a huge milestone. But obviously it's better to stick with an unenjoyable mess than to make soemthing out of the potential. Also, see below. tbh after the announcement of AoE II DE, AoE I DE and AoE IV I don't see much reason to work on this unless the dev staff gets their guts together to build something different than a mediocre AoE clone. I said it in the past that it's a waste of time, remember guys? And no, I'm not sarcastic at this point. I'm pretty disappointed tbh. This comment was extremely rude. This attitude breaks communities and ultimately damages the project you're working on.You pretty much showed that you have absolutely ZERO apprecation on wow's hard work on DE. ESPECAILLY considering that 0 AD without any gameplay related mod literally is a piece of @#&#036;% to play, more like an (admittedly pretty) tech demo than a game at all. If someone on my staff in Eastern Front would show this kind of attitude would be kicked off the team immediately, unless a proper apology and reasoning is given - and the issue would not be repeated again. That's the main reason why the resources (the limited time/motivation of modders contributing) must be used as efficiently as possible. The issue is that there should be people on the staff who actually concentrate and channel the "free contributions" into a proper game concept, and then work towards finishing it. This is the main issue with 0 AD, and has been this way since years. And after so many years I think the development has lost all its momentum - and it's unlikely you'll get it started again. Maybe restarting the project completely with a new staff, using the current 0 AD as a base and recruiting new people would help.

Sums up the issue in 3 sentences.

gameplay.

This doesn't help with the issue at all. If you capture and raze the building it's still the same?! What's so hard to understand that capturing and deleting buildings (call it delete or raze over time) contradicts each other fundamentally because structures in enemy territory become neutral anyways? The issue is that you have no benefit from capturing at all, it's the same as destroying because you prevent the opponent from using it. It would only work if capturing is permanent. But right now it isn't. So the only reason to capture is to manually destroy it after capture to cause a damage to the enemy.

The question is : Why should it be necessary to have a delete feature in the game in the first place? Are there necessities to delete entities or structures manually because they are required? From what I've seen it's just unnecessary - UNLESS you're capturing enemy structures. There it's super useful to just delete it after capturing.