DarcReaver

I agree that weapon techs shouldn't be paired with city progression. Instead, unit training should revolve around training levels, similar to like you suggested. Basic, advanced, elite etc. to fit that larger cities were able to field higher qualitiy trained troops. However, There could be additional techs, that don't increase the unit's combat efficiency directly, but makes training them more economic by reducing metal/iron costs for certain unit types. Those could be tied to "advancing" the blacksmith itself. I have something in mind like "capacity increase" or "metallurgy" improvements which allowed in ancient times to produce metal/weapons faster. Additionally, some civs could feature unique techs that allow them to research weapon types that were iconic for the civ, like "Sarissa" for Mace civ to name an example. Or certain types of special steel or whatever.

Actually, something regarding CC training should be considered: If the CC features combat units buildable, I'd suggest moving Barracks to City phase. This way early game is revolving around the simple militia combat-raiding, while having "real" military requires advancing the city. This provides a player choice between defensive style - eco spreading and offensive, militia warfare. Similar to Drush strategies in AoE II.

Which is? *drumroll* Iron Age mostly I suppose?

Mhhh.. I thought 0 AD features Civs during their respective "Iron Age" period or slightly later?

Yes better that is. Just one last sentence: There are many great game concepts that can define a game and make it outstanding - there are games that combine RTS with Trading Card Aspects, RTS with roleplaying aspects like Spellforce, Warcraft, there are games that combine Tactics with RTS (like Warhammer/CoH franchise), there are classical RTS style games that allow unit massive onslaughts of hundreds of units (CnC, AoE) and games about single units (Dota and League are considered RTS aswell, for example). There are battle simulators like Total War, there are round based games that work like chess, there is stuff like Minecraft or games in space where the game levels are 3d, not 2d. Games in which you construct cities, jails, tycoons, pizza empires, Dictatorships in the Carribean. And many more. All are unique and special and have an own flavor. And which game definining core feature is included in 0 AD to make it stand out? Soldiers can gather resources. I mean - C'mon, really?

@drsingh I don't have the patience to write another essay. I'll just leave a handful of comments there: 1) Warcraft III has a Bnet playerbase of ~6.000-10.000 players per day in europe alone (Northrend server). Voobly AoE II has ~1.000 - 1.500, worldwide. AoE II HD has a community consisting of 8.000 players on average atm (increased from 5.000 with Rise of the Rajas Add-on). In the past Warcraft had several hundred thousands of players. Saying that AoE II has a bigger community than warcraft is simply wrong. 2) Warcraft has a lot of gameplay depth because of its hero concept, with items, hero combinations and their unique abilities. Although I agree it's adifferent game, I never said that 0 AD should be like Warcraft. All I said is that 0 ad combat with single unit micro is not as rewarding as in Warcraft III because of how the unit production and unit ingame value is different. 3) Again to your "balancing math". Dude. Soldiers either attack, or they idle. In 0 AD they either attack, idle or gather resources. Now you have 3 options in 0 ad: - Attack : pretty stupid idea with a single soldier in 0ad because individual units are weak - idle : idling never is a good idea, even for military - gather resources : oh look, it's better than idling and less risky than attacking. I'll go with that one! Yes, there is a payoff, that's how economy works. Initial cost as negative value + generated income over time = timeline when something generates profits. So, Women : Investment 50 food, gather income 0.8 50f/0.8F/s) = 62.5s to gather 50 food. Soldier : 0.4 gather rate food = 150s if he gathers food himself + 75 seconds for metal. = 225s (~ 3mins) total. In THEORY. Now 3rd option: woman gathers resources for the soldier: 60f/0.8 = 75s + 100s metal = 175s - already a full minute difference. In direct comparison becuase soldiers can gather aswell, you have to see the cost difference, which only is 10f and 30 metal. 10 food = 25 seconds of gathering, 30 metal = 75. Only 100 seconds for a soldier to payoff itself. However, each woman mining metal is not collecting food (which she does much better). So leave mining to soldiers. 75s for metal. + 75s for food from women = 150 villager seconds. Each soldier makes your economy better, even though he should fight. It's stupid. 4) one more thought on "Citizen Soldiers": I'm going the other way around this time. If you insist that it's such a great feature that offers so much to the game, please go ahead and write up reasons why it's such a great concept that completely defines the game. I'm sort of eagerly awaiting the argumentation. 5) Battalions once more: @wowgetoffyourcellphone @drsinghBFME series HAD single units. It had gatherers (orcs from lumbermills). Those were single units. Builder units were single units. Heroes were single units, Berserkers, Mumakil, Trolls, catapults, rams, siege towers etc. were all single units. I don't see a general problem with having single units within a battalion system per se, as long as it makes sense. Single gatherers make more sense than having a single slinger. Just like Wow said it's possible to combine both aspects. I'd use pairs of gathers instead of single ones, but oh well, it doesn't matter that much actually. It's more important that the fighting units are hard locked formations instead. About stuff like creation time: seriously, who cares? It's just a number that can be changed within a couple of clicks. Put in 120 seconds if it pleases you. Or 60. Or 80. It's completely up to how fast the pacing is intended to be and can be adjusted without any problems. Hard locked formations simply allow a dynamic combat. Single soldiers are a micro clickfest. Imagine a drawn out battle between players. In 0ad you have a manspam train with reinforcement soldiers traveling to the battlefield one by one. How is it possible to utilize a formation properly if you have to constantly select your original formation (grouped with number key) and then keep adding soldiers to it, which then can't get into formation anyways? With a battalion your reinforcements arrive in an ordered manner and thus allow formation bonuses much better than single units.

Actually we're just stating 2 different sides of the very same medal. Both versions work, that's out of the question. While your proposal is to have larger gatherer forces concentrated on a few gathering sites (more similar to AoE) I'm proposing to spread out the gathering to multiple sources at the same time by limiting the amount of gatherers per drop site more drastically. This makes makes controlling larger portions of the map important. More mapcontrol = more gathering spots = more resources. Summary: - Your concept makes raiding a one sided option. You kill enemy gatherers and the resource spot is dead, and the enemy has to relocate other workers or retrain his units and lets them travel to the spot again. Or alternatively puts up a different gathering spot. Loosing a gathering spot is a larger deal because it's harder to replace lots of workers + loose the training/travel time to a new resource spot. - my concept allows the enemy to capture the gathering site and quickly train gatherers himself to profit from his raid. So, gathering sites are still risky as they can be turned against their former owner - that's why I actually would prefer "village outposts". Take control of the village and let its population work for the oppressor. Loosing a gathering spot is a disadvantage of course, but it's likely that there are other spots can cover up the loss of a drop site. But the enemy can capture the drop site to increase his own economy and this creates a disadvantage for the player who owned the site before. The difference is the game dynamic/gameflow. That's all.

I'm getting tired of this. Q1: batch training - yes there's a efficiency bonus implemented. So what? Remove it and be done with it. Q2: no, it just allows capturing dynamics instead of raiding and destruction. Players can capture gathering sites and quickly profit from them when they can train gatherers there. I would still prefer a t1 "village center" type building though. "Q6- You shouldn't equate Citizen soldiers to Female collectors for metal/stone/wood. Male citizens gather these better(even wood because of 10%aura). Also take in consideration the cost of the said unit.- 10 females gather wood = 15 citizen soldier (lvl 1 swordsman eg) 10 x 50 = 500 food.; 15 X 60 food 30 metal = 900 food 450 metal. Here 400 food and 450 metal excess requirement means - Barracks wont be used primarily for eco unit production. This means if you are training Military units. then its better to attack with them. Since enemy could be getting much better eco by investing in eco units." You're wrong. to put it short. First, even if soldiers gather worse than eco units. You have to consider the cost difference, which is 10 food. 10 food with 0.4 rate is gathered in 25 seconds, or if a women gathers it in 12.5 seconds. The metal required is 75 or 90 seconds. So the soldier is payed off after around ~ 80 - 100 seconds. After that the soldier provides profit. A woman needs 62.5 seconds to pay off, which is roughly 60%-75% of the time. But she has 0 combat value and is worse at gathering metal. Anyways, Barracks are a second production building, so you can have double or triple eco production instead of only the civic center. More workers earlier = more resources.= more workers = more economy = more military. And still, what happens if you're going double barracks like you proposed? What kind of random assumption is that? How can the player supply 2 barracks producing units earlygame without all his citizens and women gathering resources all the time to get enough resources? And how long should military be produced so a rush becomes deadly enough to deal enough damage to warrant the loss in resource gathering? 2 Barracks = more soldiers. As soon as those soldiers move away from the base the further barracks production relies on women alone which gather metal worse and then the additional production stops because you dont have enough resources to provide both barracks. If women alone can outproduce 10 or 20 soldiers earlygame I question why soldiers should gather at all then?! According to your logic you lose even more economy because you have less eco units and more military, while your opponent can still gather with his soldiers and women alike. More economy and 1 barracks can produce soldiers faster than 2 barracks that can't be supplied with resources steadily. So, depending on the amount of gatherers double barracks might be even worse for rushing than a single barracks. To get your unit costs you'd need 240 food and 120 metal per minute to continually produce soldiers (2 soldiers with 30 seconds train time each is my assumption. If train times are shorter you need even more women). With gathering rates from women you need 240/0.8= 5 women for food and 6-7 women on metal to get a steady soldier production early, and this is without having further expansion of the economy. My statement still stands that it's more profitable to simply use the 2 barracks as production facilities and use soldiers for gathering instead of attacking. Edit: just one more math before my head explodes. I'll take the calculation assumption: 1 soldier 60f 30m 15s buildtime, 2 barracks. Total food required to permanent production (not including houses necessary for pop) = 480f, 240m. Gathering rates for women 0.8/0.3 = 480/0.8*60 = 10 women food, 240/0.3*60 = 13,3333 on metal. Now I simply start using soldiers to gather metal from dual barracks. Suddenly I have 23 women for food and can use the surplus food to further boom my economy. More barracks, more soldiers gathering metal I only need 10 soldiers to produce metal equal to 13-14 women. Then boom more and more. And what happens if I attack with my soldiers? suddenly I loose 30 or 40% of my total economy. You know what happens in AoE if you loose 40 % of your villagers? Most likely you loose. Heck, even loosing only 20% is a huge issue. Anyways, keeping on calculating resource efficiency is giving me headache right now. So I'll stop at this point. Why does military have to collect resources at all? What is the gameplay benefit apart from blurring the roles of economic and military units? How is it a better concept than the one Age of Empires uses? Or any other game that has economic worker units? And why is it a "core feature" of 0AD? I tell you something, Citizen soldiers are made from the concept that the random female / male villagers from AoE are split up into female trainable units and male trainable units. There is no deeper concept behind the citizens apart from trying to ripoff a game mechanic from AoE and provide an own "flavor" to it. It's only justification for being in the game is the duration that it has been in the game. Since there is no gameplay concept it was never questioned. If it had been questioned properly the "feature" would've been removed or reworked massively a long time ago. I've stated numerous times already why it's a bad concept, from a gameplay perspective, from a logical perspective and from a unit control perspective aswell. Q7: manspam train. Why have units travel half the map if they could simply be produced where they're actually required? would make way more sense. Replacing losses is easier, there's a natural population on the map coming from various sources instead of the main city. Where do farmers or woodchoppers live? Do they travel from a capital city to their work place in ancient times which most likely took days to get to? No, they usually resided in their farms outside, or in their loghouses or mines or wherever they worked. It would be more useful to limit gathering sources to less workers to soft cap economy unit spam instead of limiting the training places for gatherers. Especially with the chaos created by military armies gathering resources aswell. Once more: More bases = less risky to gather outside (gatherers can be protected and replaced without travel time) = more reason for early expanson = more life/action on the map = less locust harvesting =more opportunities to raid enemy economies = more action for military = no need to have them gather resources Statement 9: Pretty much every solution because you're fixing stats, that's why. Fixing stats on bad design = bad game with better stats. And as a last point I'm still awaiting examples where single unit micro is rewarding in 0ad.

The proposed concept raises a couple of questions. To avoid a large post monster I'll post the questions below: Question 1: Why should batch production be delayed by a required tech into a later phase? I don't see how it's such a strong asset that it's not possible to make it a default feature for the game. It's much more effective to train multiple units with a single click and thus allows concentration on other parts of the game. Individual micro = tedious, unnecessary micro. I mean - what's the point? In AoE you can use villagers to lure boars to your CC, that's pretty much the only point where I say that a single unit has rewarding micro. Everything else is not. Single knight vs. single Xbow? Or single Pikeman against a single archer? looks pretty ridiculous and isn't worth microing. That's something I learnt from playing AoE II in multiplayer. I don't see any point where single unit micro is rewarding in 0ad. If you know situations - please, I'm eagerly awaiting examples. Edit: Another reason why single units are not desirable in 0 ad: units die quickly and are cheap to replace, thus the individual micro has a low reward potential. compare this to a game like warcraft III : each unit is costly and has high hitpoints and low damage, that way the fights are long and there are many options to withdraw a unit to avoid damage and turn it back into the fight. It's a core mechanic and works well. Because the individual micro is very rewarding, and killing an enemy unit requires planning and skill. In 0ad it's the other way around, and thus it's counter intuitive. Question/statement 2: Why is founding additional bases delayed into a later phase of the game? because of the territory system and having store houses etc. are buildable in neutral territory in your concept I sort of question this move. It would certainly be better to allow city creation from the start while nerfing the stats of civic centers or to provide an early alternative to create economic outposts that can supply themselves with workers. (Note: A solution could be to allow gatherer production in store houses/farmsteads) Opinion 3: the idea to force fields outside the main land is a good one and should be followed in general, so I support it. Question 4: if farms already serve as an unlimited source of food, why is it necessary to create another option to gather unlimited food in phase II? Wouldn't it be better/easier to just delay farms into the second town phase and adjust the performance accordingly? One thing I like is the option of unloading cattle for a quick food surplus, though. Question 5: Why is the blacksmith delayed so much into the 3rd phase? The Blacksmith contains integral upgrades for the army and thus shouldn't be a lategame building. Blacksmith technologies are meant to make the player's army to scale against other units. By delaying the blacksmith further you're reducing the reason to produce early military units, which leads to the question why advanced military in general is allowed in the first phase. Edit: actually, this further emphasize to simply use military to gather resources - if a player can't make his army more efficient at raiding there's even less point in attacking because every minute of progress looses him resources (see below) and at the same time reduces the chance of having a successful attack (more time left - more buildings, more military buildings, more defenses). Question 6: how do reduced gathering capabilities fix the citizen Soldier concept? It still remains the same issue as it was. Every unit needs to keep gathering resources to gain economic advantage, and as soon as the army is rallied and attacks, the player starts loosing resources from not collecting. Since you provided some values in your concept I'll give you some math: Army size: 30 citizen soldiers. 15 collect wood, 15 collect metal. Gathering rate : 0.4 res/second Gathering rate for wood: 15x0.4 = 6 wood/second (or 60 wood per minute) which is equal to 10 women (rate 0.6) collecting wood = 500 food (!!) worth of economy units. Gathering rate for metal: 15x0.4 = 6 metal/second (or 60 metal per minute) which is equal to 20 women (rate 0.3) collecting metal = 1000 food(!!) worth of economy units. In total you have 1500 food worth of units collecting resources. Now you put those units to attack the enemy. And as soon as you start marching towards him you loose 1500 (!!!!) food worth of economic units. While the enemy (providing his army is just as big as yours and gathers with them) still has 1500 food or 30 additional gatherers working for him. Even if he has to relocate a couple of gatherers away from your army it's still likely that he has 700 or more food economy than you have. The longer your army is in his base the larger the enemies' advantage becomes from gathering as long as he can keep your army at bay. Since he has barracks nearby and can produce counter units from his economy your initial attack advantage becomes less and less. Or even worse - his own citizen soldiers fight back, and since he can field counter units he can fight your army more efficiently. Thus, attacking with citizen soldiers is ineffective. I hope this actually finally clears up why citizen soldiers are a bad concept. statement 7: I agree with the population concept. It is logical that larger cities have larger populations. I disagree with the fertility ritual though. This upgrade is nonsense from a gameplay perspective. While it's logical that you can produce women from houses it's simply bad. Edit: the reason why it's bad is simple: the intended structure of the game is to secure map areas and profit from the resources in the territory. There is no point in booming more and more economic units in your base area without expansion. It would be much better to allow the founding and creation of cities earlier to allow economic expansions instead. Because that way, players can expand the amount of gatherers where they are needed instead of having to let them travel around the map unprotected (once again - manspam train). In short: More bases = less risky to gather outside (gatherers can be protected and replaced without travel time) = more reason for early expanson = more life/action on the map = less locust harvesting =more opportunities to raid enemy economies = more action for military = no need to have them gather resources Statement 8: Comment on the stat suggestion for citizen soldiers/champions but they seem to be reasonable. Statement 9: I find it rather interesting that you analyze problems within the design in the last paragraph, but your presented solutions will not have the desired effect as they do not change conceptual problems. Fixing stats will certainly improve the overall playability, but if the design is bad, the stats will only make it mediocre instead of bad. The changes simply don't dig deep enough to fix the causes, they only fix symptoms. My 2 cents (as usual. I sometimes ask myself whether I have too much time on my hands to actually write these amounts of texts again and again)...

Answers in purple.

I've been messing around with the xml files and scripts which are in the svn at the moment. I do tests to see how my proposed changes influence the early game and I'm still in a conceptual phase about resource usage, teching phases and building arrangements. From my observations following stuff is easy to do (requires no art/scripts): - teching requirements for units - adjustment of gathering speed, construction speed, unit/building costs etc. - creation of teching paths for unit types - building restrictions (i.e. creating storehouses/farms in neutral or civic centers earlier) - switching unit types from buidings to other structures - Aura editing for morale effects (seems to be pretty easy actually) - tweaks to the territory system to make it a better game feature I'd estimate that those things can be done in a couple of days, as long as the design is mostly set. I can do quite a lot of that myself without help from others. The tricky thing is that I need to combine aspects from my initial guideline into a more detailed concept. I have to spend some time on that, and I can't estimate how long that takes. Maybe some days, maybe some weeks. Stuff that requires more work (create a script or some 2d editing on existing models): - adding metal/silver resource split - creating different damage types for balancing unit types against each other (imo having only hack/pierce/crush is not enough) - creating building dependencies (right now only possible with techs as a workaround) - unit production in batches instead of single units (as a first step into the hard lock battalion system) - adjustment of bad game content (like the current trade. Depending on the solution new Art might be required or additional or edited scripts that affect trading) - hero abilities apart from inspirational auras My guess is that this will require more thought initially but also be relatively fast to be put in the game. As I'm not a talented coder I can't estimate the time it takes to modify a script, but my guess would be that stuff like above could also be done in a couple of weeks. Stuff that will require the most work (below again a selection of features I could think of): - hardlocked formations - unit combat: depending on how tactical the combat should be (and what can be done within the game engine limits) there are entirely new features to be implemented (below are examples): - unit turning & flanking bonuses - charge/trample system for cavalry/chariots/Elephants - sea combat with capturing (in case it's wanted) - unit vision/truesight - varying accuracy over distances - map control elements like neutral Provinces, markets, mercenary camps - in general features that are not present in the current game and have to be created from scratch. I can't estimate the amount of time necessary for new features to be implemented. That's why I'd like to first determine which features are required for the gameplay core to be implemented first. i.e. I'd settle Battalions and a Charge/trample system very high on the priority list, as those will be useful in any case, regardless how detailed the final economy will look like or how unit combat and teching will look like. I've stated earlier I'll try to break down the global concept into smaller steps so they can be implemented one-by-one. I won't go as far as "unit X has Y hitpoints, Z crush armour, buildtime blah (...)" - stuff like this can be done at a later stage when more important features have been implemented and the civ layouts work as intended. There need to be people on the team who can estimate the consequences of design decisions - if the people responsible for the gameplay design have no sufficient experience the decisions might be wrong or result in disastrous weaknesses that destroy the game flow in its very essence. And that's why I applied to take over such a role, to work out an official gameplay guideline A guideline to finish the core game - to make it really unique and independent from other games. Being a copy of AoE II (even if it started as a mod for AoE II) is really not something desirable. There are lots of clones on the market already, and AoE II HD already covers players who like the AoE II game style. Some aspects of AoE II are (from my perspective after watching and playing RTS since over 15 years) simply outdated and should be replaced with modern approaches.

Those points brought up are more drastic solutions how to solve trading as an issue. Like you said, there are other games which use the approach of "self-supplying" resources. Not only Total Annihilation, but also games like CnC Generals (Black Markets, Supply drop zones, hackers) or even AoM (Hephaistos armoury building that creates trickles of resources or Egypt Favour statues) use this. My personal opinion stays - AoE II trading is a weak mechanic and imo it shouldn't be used as a reference - keep in mind that the game is almost 18 years old. Some concepts are timeless, but others are simply outdated. I'd also support a "deep mining" or "forestry" concept. The unfortunate thing is that this would result in new artwork to be required, and new scripts to make it work. To provide an example of actual way of implementation: The last economy tech for stone/metal unlocks the respective "deep mining" structure. The structure can be garrisoned with gatherers and then trickles in respective resources. Maybe something like 50% of a regular mine shaft. To keep the "map control" concept of mines, those structures can only be placed on or directly next to existing metal/stone mine. As a workaround, gathering those surface mines only goes down to 1 resource so the spot stays intact. @Palaxin I think the City phases should not be over-emphasized. I'd rather go with a dynamic that allows management of multiple cities/settlements with a dynamic population increase than forcing everything into advancing the city. I know AoE and AoM do that but I think 0 AD should follow a custom concept. Edit oh nvm, I actually misread your suggestion. Upgrade levels should be tied to city phases of course. Also I agree that the topics should be split up more. Afterall I initially created this thread to create a first basic layout that is to be made more specific. The amount of discussion in here shows how many topics actually are not thought out well and require a rework/adjustment. I'll try to split up the topics into different branches - when I'm done I'll create the according threads in here. Actually, as a suggestion I think there should be a gameplay development sub forum in which matters like this can be discussed. The main threads (i.e. resource gathering, city progress, military) should then be stickied.

Locust gathering, yes don't get me wrong - neutral gathering sites of course surely works a lot better than the system present in 0AD vanilla. No question in that. What I'm referring to is that if you loose a couple of gatherers from a raid it's hard to replace them from the Civic Center. Example: Imagine your workers have to travel 30 seconds to get to the gathering site. The gathering site has 5 workers on it Enemy comes by and kills all 5 workers and then retreats. The raid will then cost the attacked player: - resource cost for 5 workers - construction time of 5 workers worth of gathering time - travel time of 30 seconds per worker to the gathering site Those newly trained workers _could_ be intercepted on their way and killed aswell. Hit and run at its best. Another point combat dynamic: if a drop site can train gatherers, it's actually more efficient to capture those buildings. Since the enemy has the option to quickly train workers himself he can utilize a benefit from the drop site. If he has to shift over gatherers from another spot it's again the travel time issue. edit: to circumvent the "travel time" issue you can of course increase gatherers' base speed and or training costs. This effects early gathering aswell though, unless using technologies for that. AoE has hand cart/wheelbarrow techs for this. They knew about the issue and these technologies partly reduce the effect. However AoE gathering is mostly limited around the main city for Age I and II. With Age III you get the option to build town centers, and this is mainly used building for new gathering spot from there on (because you can protect villagers and at the same time train new villagers right next to the source),

Yes, I agree that units shouldn't cost too many resources at once. However, that's sort of intended with the complicated resource system already in place. Imo, if the resources are streamlined, stone should be kicked out aswell, or you keep 1 general resource (food) and 2x economic sources (stone and wood) and 2x military sources (iron silver). Another option would be to kick out food and replace it with an upkeep system instead. Towns/villages/farms produce a fixed income of food/second, and units consume food/second and replace the system of food as a building requirement. It's a rather drastic change though. This way you essentially do the same as currently is done with food/pop cap, and you only have 3-4 "real" resources to manage - wood, stone, metal(iron/silver). Moving mines towards the edges would help, yes. Instead of drop sites in neutral territory I'd vote for Expansion Outposts still. Maybe it would be sufficient to make basic civic centers weaker and allow them to be created in Phase I. Alternatively, drop sites can create gatherers aswell, so if raided those buildings are able to resupply themselves. The thing I would want to avoid is that there's a manspam train from the civic center main base towards all kinds of outer resource spots. The hard caps on gathering would certainly make eco booming harder, even with gatherer creation from drop sites. Since there are hard caps for resources it's ineffective to build more and more gatherers at a single spot, and that's what I'd like to accomplish. Gatherers are then limited by logical sense (size of the resource field) and locust harvesting is reduced significantly.

Yes, but unfortunately, if you remove stone and metal from the current starting setup, it's pretty much impossible to gather them at all. Like I stated earlier, there is no early "outpost"-type building available to increase base influence around the map. Civic Centers are delayed way too much to actually serve as economic outposts. I don't mean that they're useless, it's just that they are unfit for a quick expansion, at least the way they are right now. Putting resource drop sites on neutral territory would help, but since they cannot train gatherers it's a gamble if the sources are raided since it throws back attacked players quite much. Yes, I agree that units shouldn't cost too many resources at once. However, that's sort of intended with the complicated resource system already in place. Imo, if the resources are streamlined, stone should be kicked out aswell, or you keep 1 general resource (food) and 2x economic sources (stone and wood) and 2x military sources (iron silver). Another option would be to kick out food and replace it with an upkeep system instead. Towns/villages/farms produce a fixed income of food/second, and units consume food/second and replace the system of food as a building requirement. It's a rather drastic change though. This way you essentially do the same as currently is done with food/pop cap, and you only have 3-4 "real" resources to manage - wood, stone, metal(iron/silver).

Update concerning economy: I'll work further on the concept and will upload a new version of the design guideline when I finished some other aspects. However, I wanted to share this before going further in the text to summarize aspects that were put up in the discussion. Several interesting proposals were made which I want to incorporate into the guideline. There are more other aspects that I'll pick up, but this is one of the most important things for the game flow and thus I used it first. Aspect design concept: Resources, Gathering and Map Control The resources: The game features 5 resources at the moment: Food, wood, stone, metal and population. From an analysis standpoint I tried to break down the use of each resource. After considering player's opinions the detailed resource system is a strength rather than a limit to the game and thus should be kept and further fine tuned. The system is very similar to Age of Empires II and of course there is no further elaboration why AoE II uses those resources. I think the system needs to be revised a bit to clear up confusion about which resource serves which purpose and to make gathering a more interesting objective apart from massing gatherers and sending them to the gathering spots. One thing I noticed and found interesting is that food and population actually serve a similar purpose. Both limit the amount of units that can be trained. Population is an overall hardcap (for performance reasons in Age and to prevent large army massing) and food is a soft hardcap resource that determines how much military can be trained. The more gatheres aquire food, the more military can be trained. Resource roles: Food is the backbone of everything – without food there is no teching possible and no unit training. Fast gathering. Wood - basic construction resource - is essential for expanding the economy. Medium speed to gather. Stone - advanced construction resource - is important to build military buildings and advancing the city phases. medium speed to gather Iron - basic military resource - gathering determines how much military can be trained at a time. medium speed to gather. Silver - advanced military resource - is important for military improvement techs and used for training superiors, elite units. slow to gather. Population - instead of being only connected to houses, population is influenced by city size (village - town - metropolis). Required to train units (obviously) So far, this is not that much different to the current game. The resource split from metal into Iron and Silver is to me important to create a pattern in the resource distribution. If we keep "metal" as a single resource, the result should be that stone is kicked out aswell, or merged with wood to a resource called "building materials". I don't know which one is better, I suppose it's necessary to playtest and see whether the economy draws too much attention with 5 resources to manage or not. The main difference from how gathering itself works from the current alpha: Gathering spots for each resource are much more limited. Each resource spot only allows a handful of gatherers to collect from them. There is no option for dozens of gatherers at a single drop site. Instead, if players want to gather more resources they need to spread out. Gatherers become inexpensive and cheaper to produce and maintain. loosing a couple of villagers hurts, but not as much as it currently does. In the following spoilers I put up some numbers that could work. Not set in stone, but could be an orientation: Usage concept for resources: Gathering dynamics: First a quick word on what "Gathering dynamics" means: Gathering dynamics refer to how the resource collection process works. to put up a quick example (as usual): command and conquer. While it only has one resource ("credits"), it's a limited resource. Let me explain: Credits are created by refineries. Refineries train harvester units which collect Tiberium that is spread around the map. After collecting enough Tiberium the harvester returns back to the refinery and unloads his cargo to create credits. Each refinery only supports a maximum of 2-3 harvesters. If there are more they have to wait to unload their cargo. Thus, to have a larger economy, a player needs multiple refineries. But if he has many refineries his starting resources deplete quickly and he hase to move his gatherers into more dangerous parts of the map where they can be raided. To avoid this, players can create colonies at other tiberium sites to make the gathering more safe. Another game : Warcraft III Gathering gold is limited to gold mines. Each mine can support a gold income of 10 gold/second. no matter how many gatherers are using the goldmine, the income is fixed by the time a worker spends in the mine to collect the gold. The others stand in line and wait. If the player wants more than 10 gold/second he needs to capture another gold mine. Which is risky, and thus requires planning ahead to avoid being disrupted by the enemy. Third game : Starcraft Similar to Warcraft and CnC, but with higher worker limits, a soft version of Age of Empires unlimited gatherers per drop site. as you can see, gathering resources requires players to spread out at a certain point to profit from a higher total income. This has effects on various other game dynamics that I'll cover later. Act of War / Act of Aggression: Map features oil sources (and aluminium, rare earth sourcer for AoA) which are exploited by refineries and have a hardcap of 3 harvesters As you can see the gathering rates for those games are all hard capped at some point. If a player wants more resources per second, he needs to start gathering at a different position aswell. So, back to 0 AD: In 0 AD you can gather with almost every unit at any place and profit from the resources. Problem(s): The way gathering works in the retail game is somewhat unhealthy in my opinion. - gathering is too city oriented. Only until very late it's necessary to expand the city towards other resources outside the main base - expanding is hard; civic centers take lots of resources to build - raiding is limited. Most economic units are next to a civic center, thus raiding is risky while not granting large benefits (albeit the raiding system itself needs to be looked at regardless) - armies can gather resources - a hard to raid blob of units that can defend themselves. Similar issue like gatherers next to a town center. Just more mobile - blob gathering is a gamble. many units on a single dropsite, and gradually moving along the map slowly from one resource to the other. This reduces the pace at which the map is populated. My personal phrase for this would be : Locust gathering. A large force of gatherers flood a part of the map and leaves only empty ground before moving somewhere else. This isn't necessarily an "issue" but I think a modern game doesn't need this year old system. - there is no reasoning behind City Phases apart from being copies of Age advancing in AoE. Simply copying the "Age of Empires unlimited gathering" almost 1 to 1 is not a good idea. In AoE raiding the economy is very fatal. Each gatherer killed is a large drawback. Defensive structures must cover up for that fact by being very deadly towards early armies, thus raiding becomes a "I run around the main base in circles and kill every unit I can reach with my ranged soldiers" task. Buildings apart from houses or gathering sites are not realistically to be destroyed, slowing the game down artifically. This issue obviously has been noticed by the devs as a problem in 0AD too. That's why the capturing feature was implemented to make the game more dynamic. Players should simply capture buildings instead of destroying them. Unfortunately, because the core issue from AoE is transferred to 0AD this doesn't work as intended. Gathering and Map Control, the vision My vision would be that players start off with a single base, and quickly start creating colonies. Imagine it to be a design concept that works similar to Age of Empires "Age Advance". In Age your civ advances from early dark Age through the middle age to gain better economy and military. Similar to that, in 0 AD you get to a point where you have solid enough economy to expand the Empire. Construct and conquer province cities which help the player's civilization to have bigger influence and larger military. "City borders" transform into Empire/Kingdom borders. The further the Empire advances, the larger their Capital City (the player's starting location) becomes. This would ultimately result in players battling for Border cities and trying to increase their influence by taking over enemy cities or burning them to the ground to remove them from the opponent's reach. Ultimately the main City would fall to a massive siege, being cutoff from its vital provinces. This would be an interesting mix between strategical and tactical choices, combined with micro and macro and certainly way more unique. How the concept of "limiting gathering sites" influences this: The larger the city, the more provinces are required to supply it. Since food is very important and free gathering sources deplete over time, a couple of “farm provinces” are needed to supply a player’s city with enough food to keep going. Food is important and prone to raiding. The relative near to the city makes defending farms easier, as farms would naturally be closer to the Capital city (food is required early and steady, so fields are necessary at an early stage). Forests and mines are more exposed and thus require more careful protection. However, in case a player loses a gathering spot he’ll just gradually be slowed down, because players need several gathering points for stone, iron and silver. That way there’s no issue with “oh no, I lost a gold mine and all 12 villagers gathering. Gg I can leave because I lost my economy”. Protection systems like palisades become more important as it’s hard to protect every gathering colony with an army and allows players to buy time to transfer an army there. To gain a better defense mechanism I propose an “outpost” building. This serves as a light version of a Civic Center, with less hitpoints and defenses. This building can be built in early phases and also be upgraded , similar to a civic center. Just at a smaller scale. Outposts can supply a “garrison” army, thus they can train a basic infantry and a basic ranged unit which can be used to react to attacks. Military target variety: Right now, there is only one target for military: raid the enemy's main city. There is no other objective for military except to interfere with the opponent. This makes fighting somewhat limited and promotes rushing. Soldiers only move from the player's city towards the enemy city, on the most direct way. It would certainly interesting to allow players to utilize their military to gain influence over the map gradually instead. Partly this will be accomplished by being able to raid economic outposts. Outposts in their very nature are easier to attack because they lack defenses comparable to a main base and the attacks are more rewarding as they weaken the enemy’s economy at the same time. Neutral Provinces The statements from others about a province system caught my attention. As a more unique approach, the map could feature neutral cities near large gathering sites that can be captured. It would further emphasize the “main city – colony/province” city building aspect that is featured by the City phase upgrades. Players would fight for the neutral cities and colonies before applying pressure to the main city. Having neutral provinces would emphasize an alternative way to gain map control: either invest from the own economy to create an own “province” or simply use military to take over another one. The capturing mechanics from the current game would also become more important. Raid a province and then quickly take it over yourself for profit. Overall this would create more dynamics and progress around the map without problems like “siege camps/barracks spam out of nowhere” sneaky cheese strategies present in Age of Empires. On top there is more dynamic, there is more to explore. Scouting to check out good positions for economic expansion and seeing which neutral provinces are worth acquiring provide strategical planning and are fun as they keep the player busy. Multitasking becomes more important, planning ahead for preparing defenses, fake attacks on a province and then attacking another spot with the main army make games more surprising and allow comebacks. No more “I look at my main city for 10 minutes and watch my gatherers harvest resources”. Conclusion Resource gathering should be more dynamic and map control based. By including the economic tweaks the spirit of City management plays a larger role. Raiding and conquering parts of an empire gives reasons for City borders. Neutral provinces put the scenario maps to life. Strategical planning becomes more important, and rushing military can be postponed because players can be kept busy with city building at first and it's not necessary to immediately send over lone riders to capture enemy women. also, this would reflect history more. There were many cities that evolved and prospered from nearby resources. Others were founded because they were at a important strategical position. Those cities were often attacked and taken over by enemies to increase their influence etc. Opinions?

Excuse my double posting, but I can't include the quote into my top post for some reason.. I'd also support this system. One sidenote: if the pathfinder creates problems - cnc and bfme both used "unit clumping" which removed the unit internal collision to move around obstacles. So if the formation hit a building, simply the units would go around it and clump up. It looks a bit weird, but at least it worked. I guess this could be a temporary solution to the path finding issues until the final working code was included.

I already spent a couple of hours with the svn version, downloaded a .js viewer type program and used notepad ++ to checkout file structures on 0 ad. I tried modifying some files and see how it's affecting the game. The stuff I'm doing is of course merely just some random testing to get a "feeling" how the game works behind the curtains. From what I've seen so far, a lot of stuff can be done by simple xml modificiations without having to mess around with scripts. So the "mod-friendlyness" of 0ad is really good, congratulations on that one. Unfortunately, not everything is possible with xml editing, and that's the aspects I'll need help with. The actual "coding", creation and modifications of the scripts. I can try to modify existing scripts with some advice, but it's unlikely that I can create large scripts from scratch, as I'm not that experienced nor talented with creating java or c++ code. At least not now. Idk how far I get with "learning by doing" but there is stuff I'm certainly better at than coding. I can of course help out with creating layouts with tasks and breakdown issues to make them easier to solve. Art is an entirely different matter. I'm not a big supporter of the "do art first then find a gameplay for it" approach, so I'd support using placeholders. I've always used gameplay with placeholders first in Eastern Front, unless the required artwork was available anyways. In that case both artwork and scripts were included at the same time. I general I prefer minimalist and easy solutions to complicated concepts that require extensive work, unless it's really worth the effort. One thing I'm decent at is 2d art, so I can provide icons/buttons, symbols etc. myself if needed. So yes, I think that this would be possible.

wood food wood food wood food some alibi metal and stone. wood food. So you require wood food as most used resources for everything. Why don't military units cost a military resource? Also why are highly skilled cavalry archers the weakest units in the game? Riding horseman archers were forces to be reckoned with in ancient times and feared for their skill in combat and mobility. How can it be that a highly specialized elite unit is a basic unit available from the start? Why do citizens harvest resources with their spears/pikes/javelins at hand and work in full armour? And why would citizens harvest resources while being at war? Why are logistical buildings like a farm or granary restricted to city borders? Afaik there were no fields within most city boundaries? Where is the teching progress from weakest units -> strongest units? Where are basic army composition choices? Why is everything available in the first building without further teching required? How does it make sense to build towards outer resources with houses to increase city boundaries?

While I agree that a "coin regeneration rate" works similar to a hard cap, it opens up the option to build markets closer to each other while not increasing the total trade amount possible. Question is whether distance between trade posts should take effect or not. As far as I see it, the trade distance manspam train looks odd, even with hardcaps applied. That's why I suggested it. About the discussiion about finite <> infinite resource tradeoffs I agree aswell that your proposal creates more variety in terms of eco management, thus creating a need to have both regular gathering and using trade as an additional bonus. However, I'm critical to the implementation of the mechanic in general as it's highly conventional and taken from AoE II.

True. Still doesn't change the fact that the mass of indifferent looking people does not necessarily have to be single entities that have to be told to move, sleep and work all by themselves. A more automated system certainly wouldn't hurt and would conflict less with the design guide which I didn't create. All I'm doing is to look at the ingame situation, compare it to the design guideline and then create conclusions out of it from a mostly neutral perspective. yea. it's completely fine that civs start with i.e. archer cavalry units at the start of the game. It makes total sense to have the strongest raiding units available by default without requiring teching, tech resources or any kind of necessary requirement. Since it's normal for civs to start with their strongest units to raid enemy villagers. On top of that every unit of course is trained in a couple of seconds so the enemy has enough villagers to raid within the first 30 seconds of the game... What kind of "sudden changes" are you referring to? I actually forced myself to play 2 more games yesterday evening against some random dudes. Apart from lagging the game itself was boring as @#&#036;%. 20 minutes of fiddly economy management, followed by forcing 100 ant soldiers through a cliff to meet up against a horde of swordsmen to be slaughtered. 0 Formations, no tactical micro required apart from "right click next to army" and "set barracks rallypoint", then a manspam train to get the battle going on. What is the point of having to manage 4 resources if all you need is to mass up one unit type for wood/lumber and then clash up the enemy? Second game : cavalry rushing around, taking out villagers until the player left after 10 minutes. Even though there was more action in this game it was still dumb. No strategy required, just build 5 women, train 3 horses and start raiding. without any thought or teching or a buildorder. Sure, it should be possible to rush/boom/turtle in an RTS, but those strategies should require buildorders or teching to differentiate between each other. Minding that I'm aware that Wc3 is a different type of game with a different game layout. But look at how both players use a specific buildorder, have to do economy management and hero choices before actually starting to fight. Also put a note of how the game progresses toward high level tech units and how they complement the game/overall strategy. Example 2: Look at how the game moves on from the weakest starting units towards a stronger unit setup and stronger support ability the longer the game draws on. Also put some attention towards how formations are used in the game to provide simple bonuses to the affected units. And now, to put a slower game into comparison: AoE II. Much more drawn out economic situation early on, then military switch to provide an army. Game 4: CnC 3, more early action, Notice the natural progression of "manspam trains" and how instead of single infantry squads are used to provide a more "mass-of-units" scenery". Also looks how important the correct "build order" is to get the desired strategy into play. Heck, for completions sake just look at age of empires 1 and look how the game design evolves from 3 starting workers to armies fighting everywhere. And now compare this to 0 ad in its current layout: I won't mock the game, I'll just ask to compare how various other AAA franchises handle their gameplay compared to 0 ad in it's current status. Saying that the game just needs a couple of stats fixed, some polishment and has high amounts of suprise, tactical finesse and speed is ... well... difficult to understand. It has lots and lots of potential of course. But potential only matters if it's used. I agree that the topic strayed off quite a bit, but it doesn't matter too much. Main discussion is going on on the other thread anyways. As for "the need of having a gameplay developer": To have playtests you need a concept first. Okay, 0 ad has a concept. It's called "let's steal random ideas from AoE II and AoM and split up male/female villagers aswell. Then move all military into the starting building without teching requirements. Then add more easy to code stuff from other games. Even if it's contradicting our own design guideline, np." So, about which matters do you want to discuss? Raiding cavalry archers in the HQ that can be trained 10 seconds into the game without any requirements? Broken trade that replaces regular gathering in teamgames? Naval combat? citizen Soldiers? City boundaries that serve no use? Formations which are largely useless apart from taking up UI space? 4 resources which are centered around the HQ so there is no map control fighting going on and no dynamics in gathering is required? Units all requiring the same resources instead of having a proper concept for which resources are used for what? Shall I go on? Or is it enough for starters?

Let me ask the other way around: what does the current market/trading design provide to the game that makes it unique and fun so it's worth keeping it and working on it to fix it with your proposal to "hard cap" caravans? As of micro: of course it's fine to have micro. However it's clearly stated that repetitive, boring, unproductive micro is to be avoided by the design document. Having to train and micro a multitude of indifferent looking, ant like units is the epitomy of "unecessary, repetitive micro". Also, hiding behind the "features require coding work" is a lazy excuse. I already said aswell, if the devs would actually setup a road map of how the game should look/feel/play when it's finally done they could hire a coder (or even a couple of coders) with kickstarter money or donations and let them work on the desired features. But yes, like I stated before I'll start supplying some patches for the game and see how it will work out. But first I need to get the hang on how all structures are connected.

Like I said, I'll check out hwo the track system works and will try to submit a couple of concepts that I thought of. I'm fond of .xml editing and already checked out a couple of dependencies within the simulation sub folder in my svn version. I also see it like that. Having a mixture of single units and battalions also contradicts the state of "no tedious/annoying/unnecessary micromanagement" from the design doc. Applying squad based combat is a simple solution to apply more overview and tactical freedom. Especially considering that most units in 0 ad look as small as ants and it's hard to check which unittype looks like what. I frequently have to zoom in very closely to actually see which type of unit is approaching. Having battalions by default makes ´battles less chaotic. There's a reason why many of the "newer" RTS games with large amounts of units use battalions (CnC 3, BFME, CoH) instead of single units.

The issue with hard caps in general is that it's basically stating "we know it's broken, but we avoid fixing the mechanic by limiting players instead." It's a much better idea to limit trading mechanics by adjusting the trade concept itself rather than applying hard caps. like said before a mechanic that trading as a "resource" can be depleted if overused it better. Also it's logical. A small market can only support a couple of traders at once and then it's full. If you want to trade more you have to improve market size. I'd go with the "markets produce resources over time and deplete with each caravan" concept, since it's more logical and applies a similar effect as hard caps without limiting the player. But overall applying a map control concept for markets make the whole trading mechanic more unique and dynamic instead of being a simple copy paste from Age of Empires (especially considering that trading in AoE II is something I'd consider such a great mechanic that it absolutely should be copied in the first place).