fatherbushido
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Posts posted by fatherbushido
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8 minutes ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:
I would definitely find that interesting with the strategic potential it could provide. At one point ranged missiles and to an extent melee attacks could be relatively harmless against most shielded units until javelins disable that, leading to a cool hammer anvil effect.
Reducing armor is actually not really different as reducing health. -
Following another topic about the abstraction of resources.
37 minutes ago, fatherbushido said:I like the way it is formulated. Thanks.
17 minutes ago, Nescio said:You're welcome. Off-topic, I also think all military units ought to cost metal, and that structures shouldn't cost food (D2686).
1 hour ago, Nescio said:Slingers shouldn't cost stone
Basically:
- food: something to produce human units, some related technologies, some related structures.
- wood: a basic resource to produce basic weapons/tools, basic structure, basic technologies.
- stone: a resource to produce advanced structures, advanced technologies.
- metal: a resource to produce advanced weapons/tools, advanced technologies.
I am not sure that all military units should cost metal in fact. That seems less evident than some other points.
For structures costing food, I could imagine some specific cases, but indeed some seems removable.
I wrote that before looking at some design docs. Let's paste an old public version from the wiki:
QuotePurpose: Food is a primary requirement to train units, and is also necessary for most tech research and advancement.
Purpose: Wood is used to construct wooden structures, siege engines and ships, and outfit units with wooden weapons and equipment.
Purpose: Stone is used to construct stone structures (particularly base defenses), and outfit units with stone weapons and equipment.
Purpose: Ore (an unrefined combination of precious minerals and metals) is used to outfit units with metal weapons and equipment. Similar to gold in other games, it is also used to purchase services and commodities, and fund expensive research projects.
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1 hour ago, Nescio said:
Damage randomization adds realism, which is why I added it in my 0abc mod about a year ago; I simply inserted a `* randFloat(0.5, 1.5)` (@Freagarach pointed out which file and line I needed.)
The difficulty is not adding it, it's adding it cleverly. For example I don't feel it's something interesting for projectiles (or in this case I wouldn't display any statistics to the player in the gui).
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56 minutes ago, Nescio said:
Stone in 0 A.D. is a building material obtained from a quarry.
I like the way it is formulated. Thanks.
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10 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:
Depending on the type of weight of the sling projectile, I think that there is a valid reason to give them the ability to ignore armour to a limited amount.
One can't disagree. It's actually hard to reflect some physical reality in a consistent way (without making things complex).
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7 hours ago, Ultimate Aurelian said:
Range and melee resistance could also factor into it.
Yes that's the first difference we can make, though not everybody agree with the range scale.
I often saw suggested bow > sling > javelinYou suggest sling > bow > javelin? Do you?
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7 hours ago, Genava55 said:
Slinger much stronger against units without shields (archers, slingers etc.)? Javelin much stronger against unit with shield (infantry, cavalry)? Archer stronger against both but less than slingers and javelineers respectively?
Yes it makes sense as it refers to the different nature of those weapons. I always wonder if it's better to focus on the weapon or on the unit role.
7 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:In Delenda Est, slingers cost food and metal and are bonused against ranged infantry (and swordsmen to a lesser extent). No crush attack, only pierce.
It's more or less the same idea then. Bonuses against low armored unit finally.
Nuking the crush part seems consensual then.
Any reason for the metal cost? (Is it to reflect the fact there was use of metalic projectile? or because it fits in the DE gameplay? or anything else?)
@Nescio used metal for all units iirc in 0abc.
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11 hours ago, Genava55 said:
Highly skilled slingers like those from Rhodes and the Balneares used metallic projectile. And indeed, stone cost is not really justified even for the regular ones.
Historically, Rhodian slingers have been used to counter Persian archers. See Xenophon in Anabasis 111.3. 7 to 20.
10 hours ago, Genava55 said:The Gallic Wars, Book 5, Ch. 43: On the seventh day of the attack, a very high wind having sprung up, they began to discharge by their slings hot balls made of burned or hardened clay, and heated javelins, upon the huts, which, after the Gallic custom, were thatched with straw.
Thanks for those informative inputs. Does it also emphasize there were specialized slingers and casual slingers?
Anyone has an input about Macedonian armies? (Battle of Gaugamela for example)
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7 hours ago, John 5 said:
Do any units give randomised damage? It could be useful to represend some weapon types. It would make combat more unpredictable in outcomes in skirmishes, but be predictable in larger battles as it would average out.
You swing a powerful unweildy weapon, mostly it's D damage, but 1:10 it's Dx20, representing a fatal hit. Unweildy weapon units could be more open to projectiles to balance.
This would have a load of variance and emergent tactics. EG: These units would be best coupled with armour upgrades, as the longer they live in a melee the more times they get their big hits in.
That's an interesting idea. It's simple and actually add something. That needs to be dig a bit. I would keep it for melee weapon as projectile weapon has already some sources of randomness. (Let's discuss about it in another topic if needed).
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That's an overdebated topic.
# crush damage
The idea was to give it a crush damage to make it a bit different from javeliners and archers.
It seems right now that it was not really a good idea:
- strange in gameplay: we can use slingers to destroy building but not javeliners nor archers for ranged units, nor heavy weaponed melee units.
- strange in visual appearance (aka realism): same reason as above
- strange at history: here I should be corrected but I have in mind that there were specialized slingers or javeliners but also a large amount of warrior just throwing what they have. So basically it's a bit exagerated to make slingers and javeliners so different.
Independantly of a specific 0ad alpha version or whatever, who think we should really remove that.
# stone cost
Just because it launches stone, it costs stone. That's fine but sounds weird on another side (the stone resource is just an abstraction). I never succeed to figure out what to think here.
# ideas ?
Should it be someting different from javeliners and how? I guess the question is mostly relevant for civ which have both units in their unit schema.
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2 hours ago, pujok said:
Have the terrain affect unit stats while being walked on?
One thing which is not possible anymore is to have terrain movement cost handled by the pathfinder. So if ever you succeed to do something which slow or boost speed of entities, your units will still take a path which doesn't take that into account when automatically tasked.
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18 hours ago, Chiquita said:
Perhaps changing the Passability Class would do something?
Yes.
Open simulation/data/pathfinder.xml and change the Clearance here:
<ship> <Obstructions>pathfinding</Obstructions> <MinWaterDepth>1</MinWaterDepth> <Clearance>10.0</Clearance> </ship>
Something like 5.0
But the main issue with boat is that their model have a big length / width ratio.
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Answer in pm, it's already too much off topic and I guess we are the only ones interested in that. Nice hippo btw.
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I would
16 hours ago, Nescio said:However, I do like consistency, and e.g.
<food>200</food> <wood>50.0</wood>
is ugly.
I like consistency too, I guess that's why I discuss about that with you.
I would recommend
<food>200.0</food> <wood>50.0</wood>
and even (if needed)
<food>200.0</food> <wood>0.0</wood>
About rP22408 that should have been discussed as in recomanding exactly the converse of removing trailing zeros for modifications.
As I said above the argument is different for templates and modifications but it's about the same kind of issues.
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@wowgetoffyourcellphone Pehraps you can make the [DE] battle simulation map a skirmishes one? I could test more civs on it then?
If it is dedicated to a given geographical zone, just ignore that
EDIT: we would need some skirmish replacers for champs too
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On 4/14/2020 at 7:46 PM, Nescio said:
And avoid trailing zeros.
Nobody discussed that with you but having the trailing zeros is interesting.
As in some coding language, you know the type of the data you manipulate just by looking at them. It can appears as a matter of taste (and I thought that 4 years ago) but I don't think that anymore nor for the json modifications, nor for the xml entity templates (though the arguments are different). -
1 minute ago, Stan` said:
@fatherbushido I wonder if it wouldn't be nicer to find a way to filter the available animations instead in atlas.
That sounds a good idea as now the first selected anim is an anim that almost no unit have.
2 minutes ago, Stan` said:Other than that I discussed it briefly with Alexandermb and he seems to agree with the idea of adding the missing lines for the files above
Nice! In some files it's not needed (some riders and things like that). I got a maximal list.
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19 minutes ago, Nescio said:
Slingers have a similar problem to macemen: crush attack makes them effective vs structures instead of soldiers, which does not really make sense. War elephants too, to a lesser extent.
Sure.
For the elephant, the case is slightly different, I'd be interested to share our thoughts on another topic.
21 minutes ago, Nescio said:True, but since soldiers can also gather resources, changing e.g. their cost or walk speed affects their economic performance.
Indeed, at least for the citizen soldiers. I think more of using other stats (spread, range - even the melee one, prepare and repeat attack time) and also adding other features. The armor stats are also underused (at least not how they could be used).
24 minutes ago, Nescio said:That was committed about six years ago, so I wouldn't call it “recent”.
The game dev started in 2003 (?), it switched to open source around 2010 (?).
With mainly the first design ideas (and basically a decision to stuck to that which is a good thing), then a lot of more ideas and design and changes (that's also a good thing).
Around the alpha16, there was that gameplay (actually more a balance) branch which was merged. Then nothing changed anymore.
I will still think it's recent from historic point of view!
29 minutes ago, Nescio said:Related, that 0 A.D. has hoplite templates, slightly differently from other spearmen, is something I don't condone: ὁπλίτης simply means “heavy-armed” (i.e. melee infantry). Speaking of which, I also think 0 A.D.'s interpretation of the kardakes is wrong (but that belongs to another thread).
Kardakes and the stoa's guys were just randomly threw in the game because there weren't anything new since a while...
Let's open that thread!
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2 minutes ago, Nescio said:
Yes that's what I had in mind.
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21 minutes ago, Loki1950 said:
Most battle axes average 5 to 10 Kg just swinging them is a chore throwing not very feasible there where throwing axes who's massed about 1 Kg but use on a battlefield has never been documented after all how many can one solider carry you are literally throwing your weapons away.
Enjoy the Choice
In that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisca
we can see what can appear like an historical source.
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Axes can be used as a melee weapon or as a projectile (or to cut wood).
I don't know if it was used (massively) in the antiquity as a projectile.
It could be challenging to have such a projectile animation. If that's easy it's even better then.
It could be used for mods for example.
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4 minutes ago, Nescio said:
0 A.D. takes aspects of both approaches (e.g. spearmen inflict both hack and pierce damage, but also have a bonus attack vs cavalry; humans have very high crush armour levels, thus necessating artillery to inflict pierce damage in addition to crush damage) and is inferior to either.
I totally agree.
My personal taste is the second approach (in fact now it's to not use any of those stats) but I finally bent for something close to the first one (I could explain why but off topic). There are a lot of other stats, features to use (even without bonus).
8 minutes ago, Nescio said:But that's how it is, changing it would be a fundamental overhaul, unlikely to be committed (the consensus is to favour the status quo).
It's something recent. It was just the merge of the experimental gameplay branch of that time https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/15713#file143.
There are forks and mods where it is easy to commit!
13 minutes ago, Nescio said:Yes, as anti-structure units, they're inefficient compared to rams and war elephants, and as anti-soldier units, they're ineffective because humans have high crush armour.
We can't disagree!
13 minutes ago, Nescio said:Maces were not as uncommon as 0 A.D. might suggest, not just in India and the Near-East, but also in the Americas and other parts of the world. Having a separate parent template makes sense, I for one would be in favour of introducing a citizen maceman template too, as well as separate templates for axemen. (But I'm biased, of course.) 0 A.D. also differentiates between spearmen and pikemen.
Thanks for the input. Properly done (something like in 0abc), it makes sense: if spearmen and pikemen are differents, axemen should be too.
18 minutes ago, Nescio said:Historically, different weapons had different purposes: thrusting weapons (e.g. spears, daggers) were to inflict deep wounds, severly damaging vital organs; cutting weapons (e.g. machetes) to make broad, painful wounds; blunt weapons (e.g. maces) to break bones. That said, regardless of the weapon or wound, wounded are unable to fight properly, and wounds could get infected, so they might die afterwards. Moreover, soldiers tended to have multiple weapons (e.g. spear, javelin, and sword for Greek hoplites, or bow-and-arrows, axe, and dagger for Scythians), but that's something not possible to reflect in game.
Yes!
In my opinion what we call a spearman or an hoplite in game is just an abstraction (I It sounds also a bad idea for a clear classic RTS gameplay to introduce or to generalize mulitple weapons for a unit (as in getting a brown soup with all ingredients mixed).
Proper history tooltips or docs would help.
22 minutes ago, Nescio said:PS The Kushite “Nuba clubman” is really a maceman: all variations of its weapon consist of a stick with a clearly visible macehead.
OK, I just saw https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1354 about that.
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That discussion occured sometimes. One of the best solution I found was that one:
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7 minutes ago, Feldfeld said:
As of right now, balance wise they are not very useful. It could perhaps be interesting to make them efficient vs armored units and less cost effective against lightly armored units . Could be done maybe by introducing new attack type and having other units have very little armor against it.
Thanks for the input, it's always nice to read you!
Introducing a new attack type is obviously seducing but it is something that I think should be avoided : if you need to add one damage type, you need to add one more... But what you mentioned is something which could be done without.
Chevrons and promotion
in Delenda Est
Posted
@Carltonus: there is also the case where a unit can be trained as basic or as advanced or elite depending of the building producing it. In 0ad alpha 23 b, it's like that for the roman spearman (I don't know if it's on purpose or not).
For the Skiritai, your concern is more obvious, as it exists only at the rank 3. It had always had "champion" in its actor name. It's even renamed spart_champion_infantry_runner.xml for the unit template. Now as he has a gather ability, one can think it's better to made it a citizen elite or to made it a champion who can gather, I guess that's a matter of taste.