Kimball

Well, this is in part adjusted after play testing. When the walls are reasonably priced for the amount of effort it would take to build them in real life, players are discouraged from using them, opting for units as a means of defense instead (since they're much cheaper). You raise a decent point here, but the result would be stripping out any sort of siege tower rather than having units on the walls. As we've said before, we've omitted it from the game design because it's far too much effort for little reward. There are many better uses of our programmers' time.

In this type of game mode, I think it would be permissible to adopt a CnC sort of approach, where they regenerate slowly over time. Trading with other players would still benefit you, but if all of the resources on the map are exhausted, this doesn't mean the game ends. That being said, this sort of game mode is still largely hypothetical, so take everything here with a grain of salt.

Considering that keystroke, what if you have many units selected, some of which only have one attack, and you attack with Alt+Right click? Do they just default to their primary attack? My thinking is that you could then group archers with archer/melee units and attack at a range first, then have the melee units move in and defend the weaker archers. (Sorry for being completely off topic here)

My point is, some @#$% like myself could just wait around for the new player to respawn and then kill him off in his infancy for whatever rewards that yields. If someone's empire is massive enough, they could likely maintain this procedure over several deceased players at once as a secondary source of income and @#$%ry. So this raises the question, what mechanisms could we introduce to deter players from taking advantage over new players? One thought of mine is not only spawning in a random position on the map (let's say we have 60 designated spawn points for a 20 player map in which we've determined there are ample resources and land to allow no player to have an unfair advantage), but not announcing when the new player enters the room. In this sort of game mode, we need to figure out how to allow players entering mid-game the time they need to develop their economy before a greater faction wipes them out, having been in the game for much longer (and subsequently destroying the opponent that existed before them).

What happens when one player becomes dominant and camps out on a destroyed player's territory until a new player arrives? Would the incoming player spawn at a random location on the map?

Has anyone ever tried exporting from Poser to 0 A.D. before?

There are a ton of different programs you can use, but I would recommend Blender. It's not the easiest to learn, but once you get the hang of it, it is probably one of the most intuitive. Try to find a video tutorial series to follow. As an added bonus, it's open source and 100% free. Many alternatives that we use (3DS Max, for one), are very much not free. As far as the "official" development team, we typically use either Max, Maya or Blender. See the Art Design Document for details on format and procedure.

I hate to ruin all the fun here, but that is the sort of exploitation that we'd like to prevent. We'd rather you build an outpost for that sort of situation, and the game design should encourage you to do so.

Yeah, by implemented I meant once we have more of them and the GUI supports choosing a faction.

Yes, we certainly can. But this sort of thing is currently on the back burner while we work on unfinished and inadequate art. Yes, we do plan to have hotkeys implemented, and chances are, you'll be able to customize what you want each key to do. I feel like this would crowd the UI a bit. Perhaps a concept of some sort would ease my hesitation about this idea. Not a horrible idea. Definitely something we can discuss. This is planned for but yet to be implemented. I'm sure there are plenty of people on the team that could explain this much more adequately than I ever could, but this is just a function of the game calculating the unit's movement. It might be faster in the future, but it's not the end of the world if it isn't. Eventually, wall placement will be much easier. See: http://www.wildfireg...ndpost&p=219782 This bothers me sometimes as well. I hope this is implemented, but it's not really my place to decide. This is an arguable position, but we'll sort this kind of thing out when it comes to beta testing and faction balancing. This is following our concept of the "citizen-soldier', something we decided to integrate into the design from the very beginning. It's a very small example of what sets our game apart from similar titles. Hope that helped!

Not necessarily. This topic has been discussed on and off since 0 A.D. was being conceptualized, and usually we find that the practicality of the units being able to man the walls does not justify the effort it would take to implement this feature. Another subject that falls into this debate is bridges that are both passable by land units while still allowing boats to pass underneath. Yes, this will 100% possible once random maps are implemented.

Good news! All of the bugs you described are just the result of alpha-release software, which means the missing elements are merely a part of the developmental process. These will all be fixed before we consider the game to be officially "released."

Well, I'll be the first to admit that the team has hit a slight speed bump. Our forum crashed for a few months and the team hasn't quite recovered from the lack of communication yet. Though we haven't given up, we could certainly use all the help we can get!

One more:

Seb of the web?

It depends on the faction to be honest. Greeks tend to be very wood-heavy, if that's what you've been basing your observation on. In any case, keep in mind that the game is far from being balanced at this point in development. We're currently working on implementing at the very least basic iterations of all the features we intend to include before focusing on gameplay optimization. Once we've gotten to that point, we'll begin to fine tune unit stats and prices to ensure that gameplay is balanced, engaging and enjoyable.

Hey Salesome, welcome to the forum! We'd love to have you translate the game when the time comes.

I'm getting an absurd amount of errors from this. Just rebuilt the game a few minutes ago.

Yes, the different statistics are actually what set the factions apart, not just their appearance.

I like the zooming in idea, but instead of fading to a 0 A.D. logo, we'll work that in to the timeline itself and fade directly to game footage once the screen is all black.

AI is coming in the next alpha release. If you download and build the game from the source yourself, you can test out the current iterations of it!

We could opt for something along the lines of "Check x page to see what contribution opportunities are available!" instead. If we list specific positions, we're bound to encounter applicants long after they're filled.

This sounds good, but is much easier said than done (I think I have a rough idea of what you're imagining). We ought to opt for something a bit simpler. Also, let's go with a simpler word than "zenith." It sounds rustic and all, but we're not in the business of confusing anyone; especially our large non-English speaking audience. If this is going to be anything like the original trailer, let's also exclude the "volunteer openings." This video is likely to outlast our necessity for contributors, because our videos tend to be quite sparse.

I have to wonder for how many of these people will this be their last post?

Also highly doubt that any more than 50 are spambots. Most don't lay dormant unless they can't post (i.e. haven't approved their email address). That also means that they won't be approved at any point in the future, unless we were to rid ourselves of the email verification rule. If my account got purged, I wouldn't come back and re-register.