Mr.Monkey

@Dade CSGO actually didn't do bad in its release, actually it attracted more old CS 1.6 players that barely played CSS because CSS was so bad, and there was competition at the start, just not Professional competition. But there were many people in matchmaking trying to increase their rank, that's competitive play. There is no need to have a huge tournament with professional live-streams, casters and a large price pool, that's absurd. No one is talking about large scale competitions yet. I'm just saying that 0.A.D already has a potential to have a small competitive scene because it is already pretty balanced. Also variety does not mean unbalanced, yes that is the case for many games, but dedicated development can lead to a pretty balanced game. A perfect game to show this is SMITE a game with tons of gods, yet there aren't even top 10 gods out of all of them, yeah some gods are underpowered (2-3 of them), but a skilled player with experience on that god can beat any other god. Every time a new god comes out its either overpowered or underpowered, but the SMITE devs are pretty close to the community and listens to the community a lot, so they usually balance things out in the next update. Such large scale of variety is pointless for a game like this, but making all civs identical would make the game extremely boring. However I agree with you that variety is something for the future, devs should not focus on that right now. @wowgetoffyourcellphone Devs don't have to do anything that we say, this is just simple player feedback. They can take it however they want.

Basically what causative said, play multiplayer, its the best way to improve. His build there is the "standard" build for every civ, so its a good way to go. Further on, when you have played more you can change things up for your liking. Small tips regarding idle workers: In the corner below your mini-map there is a button that finds idle people for you Even better if you hold "I" and drag select, it selects only idle people These tips are really useful for a beginner as you don't have to fumble around looking for a worker that is doing nothing

I will do when I find one again

Nope i am 100% sure they were garrisoned and yes they had walls, I did it by basically doing the points that i mentioned (not exactly, different every time, but more or less)

That makes no sense to me, I have destroyed multiple bases that are similar, if not even harder, there is either something that you missed or something small, in that specific situation made it hard. But it must be a 1 time thing only, because I've had to destroy bases with 4+ fortresses, a civ, 10+ towers and a @#$%ton of walls, multiple times.

I think everyone, specially the developers want more people to play this game. Think about it, they spend countless hours on making this game, why would they want only a few people to play it. As for a competitive scene, yes diversity does help a lot but I think the developers are focusing on other things at the moment, furthermore it is not necessary for having a competitive scene, in fact, neither is it necessary for the game to be out of alpha for a competitive scene to exist. What a competitive scene does is attract the vast amount competitive people that like to train in a game, join a team, and play against others. This is why games such as CS:GO thrives, imagine if the only way to play CS:GO was against bots, not many people would play it. This is why I agree with you about the game being balanced, an unbalanced game cannot be competitive. However overall, the developers have done a fantastic job in balancing the game throughout the making of the game, the mechanics, the values, basically the system is very balanced. You can have a 6 player game, all with a different civilisations and you wouldn't know they exact outcome as skill overcomes what each civilisation is. This is partially due to the civilisations being pretty similar, some having the slight edge over others for small features (for example mauryans have an elephant which is great for a fast economy). Nonetheless, overall, the developers have done a magnificent job on making a balanced system. Here are my small opinions on some small changes that I would like to see in the game in the future: A larger diversity between champion units, and a smaller diversity between citizen-soldiers. A larger diversity of upgrades (relevant to historical accuracy of the civilisation at hand). Setting a minimum distance between wall turrets, more on that topic in this thread (I however do not agree with causative, as I think that the screenshot of the base that he provided as an example can be beaten with strategy). Naval movement (I have a passionate hatred for the boats) As for the historical aspect of the game, its the best part! There is no need to choose between a historical game or a popular game, why can't it be both? I also want to take this opportunity for thanking the developers for all the work and time spent in making the game what is it now, keep it up guys!

If I were in your position in that game, I would have done the following: Send a batch of 5 garrisoned rams to destroy 2 walls, preferably a small wall or a gate, if there are workers behind to rebuild send 5 of them to one. Send 80 champions (with 10 healers) to do extra damage and protect the rams Kill the workers (you should only really lose 10 or so champs), if they have champs in the area, send back your rams, keep up production and kill them with the army (most of his army must be garrisoned so it should be a quick win) Send the rams to the fortress with 40 champs Send 30 champs with the healers to meanwhile destroy the remaining garrisoned walls By this time you should of been able to reproduce around 20-30 champs, and another 10 healers, send them over for back-up Once the fortress is done, the rest is easy, the military colony can be captured, the rest of the walls are finished off. Giving siege an attack bonus for walls specifically is a decent idea, however like I have pointed out, it isn't really necessary, proper strategy can finish off heavily walled bases. The corners idea is also good however it might defeat the historical idea of it. If you hate dealing with walls play with Iberians, Britons or Mauryans, their crush damage units OBLITERATE walls.

I basically agree with everything that causative said in his first post, citizen-soldiers are not worth is unless you want to rush someone, champions are just so much more efficient. The only citizen-soldier I would ever use in battle are the Mauryan archers or the Briton slingers (Or any counterparts in other civs) to give an extra damage boost to another army of champions. Maybe sometimes I would use cheap ranged cavalry to raid someone's trading line if it is a desperate game, but that is it.

Honestly like I said before I think that the actual values for walls are actually pretty balanced. It takes about 20 champs to quickly destroy a wall without loosing any troops, you can easily destroy a wall with 1 siege ram, and it doesn't really stop an army from destroying a base. As for range and damage output, it is actually pretty low if there are only 1-2 wall turrets. This seems reasonable to me As I pointed out its the fact that you can spam walls is the main problem making your enemy destroy various walls to just get in to you base, or even worse, various wall turrets, is way too over powered. This is because it makes your enemy take longer to get to your base, therefore more damage is made to their troops, and so the less troops they have to finish you off. If I am able to completely set up a "Wall turret spam" base, I can literally be unbeatable, no matter how many champs you send. I am not joking, doing various tests, with just one layer of turrets surrounding your civ (in my screenshot I had 2 layers with some of it destroyed after 1200 champs were sent to my base), an army of 100 fully upgraded Briton longsword men can only take out one wall turret before they are completely wiped out. It is basically like having 20 defence towers extremely close together, and extremely cheap. I can make a video of this when I get the time. Therefore in my opinion, the easiest way of fixing this problem is adding a minimum distance of units that wall turrets can be placed, similar to how defence towers and fortresses must be at a certain distance between each other. That is the easiest, and best way to fix the only problem with walls. Making siege stronger, or walls weaker is not a good option as it will affect everything else, and honestly I don't want to see another alpha where siege rams are completely over powered.

I agree with all of you, I think a main multiplayer forum would be good. I'm not exactly sure what would go in the forum, but using the AC forums as an example, their multiplayer forum consisted of the following: Introduction/info for tournaments (organisation and format information, rules, discussion and results) Introductions of clans (Forum links, teamspeak/IRC links and other contact information) Tactics/strategy discussions (Detailed discussions on taking advantages of certain game mechanics etc) Guides (Anything from Videos to long paragraphs of text) Random questions relating to the competitive scene Honestly all of these could be viable points for 0.A.D, you can even do more by maybe having a sub-forum in that forum for sharing random screenshots/demos/videos of fun or interesting online matches. I have no idea how many people that browse these forums, maybe if someone made a quick strawpoll we could get an idea. Even so, the multiplayer community for 0.A.D is pretty big, I have never seen a day where there are less than 10 people in the lobby, and there have been days where I have seen 30+ people at once, with about 10 games on. Putting a link to the forum in the game lobby would be a very smart idea which is sure to get a lot of attention.

Yep Mash and grazy are our best players, whopxer used to be crazy good but he hasn't played in a while.

Bit of backstory: We are a bunch of friends which first met in a game called Assaultcube (a free open source FPS game) which we play competitively. We have known each other for a bunch of years, and one of the games that we play for fun aside from assaultcube is 0.A.D. We only played it for fun but since we are all pretty decent at the game we decided that we might as well wear the tag in this game too, hoping that others do the same too. 0.A.D is a great game and it has a lot of potential of having a competitive side to it, even if it is in alpha. These are our members that play 0.A.D which you might of seen already: f0r3v3r (Protocles), Trionkali (Lucifer), mash, grazy (always wears a different alias, recently BeastModus) and whopxer (Apoktein0). We have others, but they do not play 0.A.D much. Here is the link to the screenshots: https://dnc-game.space/forum/d/39-0-a-d-dnc-vs-prd And here is a link to our forum: https://dnc-game.space/forum/ We hope more people make clans or teams to grow a competitive scene. GL HF

Funny enough I posted in a similar thread talking about how walls are pretty balanced. And although my main stance on the matter has not really changed when concerning one wall vs an army, there is a "hidden method" which really makes them OP. The method takes advantage of the fact that you can spam wall turrets extremely close to each other, and since the defence tower upgrades affect the wall turrets, it is extremely OP. Here is a screenshot of the first match where I had ever used that technique, i had been rushed pretty early in the game, and I couldn't be bothered to build up again, so i decided to try out something which I had theorised previously (I had used it in a small scale before) both of my teammates had to go, so it was a 3v1 situation, the game lasted hours, I made 2 of the enemies rq since they had lost so many troops, one eventually beat me by using catapults, since I was basically AFK and could not be bothered to build units. Notice the number of champions killed in the third screenshot. I do not use this method anymore as it is simply over powered, and if you actually produce units you are unbeatable. However one of my friends uses it a lot and has perfected it pretty well, and it annoys people XD. So yeah in my opinion a the walls themselves are not over powered, its just the fact that you can spam them. Devs, please fix.

I think capturing is fine as it is, honestly at first I thought it would be too good, however In my opinion the devs hit it spot on. Neither is better than the other, it is all situational. A fully garrisoned fortress can be destroyed by 20 champs just over a minute, however it is impossible to capture a fortress with just 20 men. It is so slow that they die off and the capture level keeps going back. Capturing is basically a way of recompensing a player that has a large champion army and instead of having to destroy a civ, they have the choice to make it their own. Even with 60 champs and a hero, it takes 47 seconds to capture a civic centre, whereas with the same amount of champions, you can destroy a civic centre in 29 seconds. Capturing is in no way faster than destroying unless the building is un-garrisoned. The capturing system this alpha is almost perfect. Capturing buffs the usage of walls since they cannot be captured (something that most people didn't even bother to build last version). It buffs champion cavalry units since they can quickly and swiftly "capture & delete" important buildings that are usually un-garrisoned (e.g Barracks, markets) with only a few of them. Adds more in-depth strategy to attacking. Nerfs towers a little bit because they can be captured easily, this is much better because the defence tower spam in previous versions was crazy OP, a fully upgraded tower took ages to destroy. Those are the indirect positive effects that the current capturing system has. In-game, the only real positives are: You can capture a civ to further assure your victory (At the expense of it being slower) Same with fortresses (even though I personally just destroy fortresses because capturing is so slow) You can disrupt your enemies champs spam whole you are attacking much faster since capturing barracks and gymnasiums etc is so much faster than destroying I see nothing OP in capturing, only thing it affects defensively is now I have to protect more buildings, which is good because I can't just build 6 towers and 2 fortresses and survive almost any attack.

Good stuff, I can suggest another tip which is a feature that not many people use: the alarm bell, if you are in a tight spot activate it twice to automatically make all your women and workers garrison to wherever, this way if you get attacked they wont die therefore if you survive then you don't have to rebuild your economy. Also something, which isn't really good for beginners however its good to get used to it, build a lot of barracks. I always have around 5 before I even go to second, it slows my production slightly, however it is recompensed since you can start micro-managing sooner therefore your production boosts incredibly fast after it, also it makes if faster to spam champs, having even just 15-20 champs really early in 3rd is very advantageous.

Hi there The other day I was playing a fun and tough game with some friends. When it ended we were comparing stats, such as Economy score, military score, KDR etc and I had the idea of having graphs to show the statistics of a player over the entire game. Something like Economy Score on the Y axis and time on the X axis. That, to me, would be an awesome addition

Well historically Spartans were aggressive and had been known to have the best military, so it makes sense for them being offensive. But honestly the top 5 civs (Spartans, Britons, Iberians, Mauryans and Macedonians) are really close when comparing damage/economy etc, really it all comes up to individual skill. Real pros don't stick to one civ, a lot of people go with Britons because it is easy to set up a good economy, doesn't mean they have the best champion (Their champion is actually only the 4th best champ in game at the moment).

I agree with Paladin that the Spartans lack on pretty much everything else, but that health boost is REALLY good, it basically means that your Hoptiles take less damage when capturing things, and killing things, again it all depends on your play style, if you are pro and you can get a fast, and good economy and you know that you are going to be the first to attack, then Spartans is a great civ, probably the best. Just look at players like Phalanx, give him 80 Hoptiles and he will kill at least one person with just that army. If you prefer playing more defensively, then Spartans is a poor choice. However I like the idea of champions being able to level up, I mean nowadays there are a lot of good players, and building an army of 100 by minute 20 isn't really a challenge. However if this is to be implemented in the game, then it should apply to all civs.

I think the boats should stay put, and then the units are the ones that have to try and find the boat, that way the units should move exactly the same as when you garrison a fortress for example, that would make loading troops much easier.

With Mauryans I was able to get 130 in 10 minutes once, but with anything else I get around 115-120. I wonder what everyone else gets though, that would be interesting to see.

Something that is interesting, is that the Roman skirmishers have the exact same damage output as the Britons due to the fact that their hero does the exact same, they have the same upgrades and the same base attack, HP and armour. However the Romans are not nearly as used as much as Britons. Furthermore, the Mauryan "Maiden Guards" and the Iberian "Champion Swordsman" are stronger because of the upgrade "steel working" which boosts their attack to 20.1 hack, instead of the Britons which have 18.1 hack. However the Iberians fall back as their heroes currently do not have any effects, and I am not sure just how good the healer hero that the Mauryans have when comparing to the Britons and the Romans. Even still, the winners are still the Spartans, they are indeed the strongest champ due to the Agoge upgrade, that extra 50HP seems to actually give the champs a HUGE advantage over the Britons, test over test, making it as even as possible, Spartans win every time. EDIT: regarding the problem on the imbalance between swordsmen and cavalry, it all depends on the way you play, I know some pros which know how to use cavalry champs really effectively. To put it very simply, cavalry is used as a hit and run unit. Its perfect when the enemies army is in the middle or busy, and you can just run into their main civ, past everything, capture something, destroy it, fall back, regain health, and repeat. This way you slowly chip away on the enemies economy without loosing almost any resources, for example, going for the traders and disrupting the trading line is EXTREMELY annoying, and if pulled off correctly, it's very effective. Note, this works well with around 20-30 of them, to make sure that they can push in and fall back as quickly as possible, this gives you space and time to build more sword champs while you distract and set back your enemy. What would be nice is to see a bit of variation between cavalry as they are all pretty much the same, and there are no special upgrades for them (only special cavalry are the Iberian, the Roman and the Seleucid ones). Iberian being the best, due to that crazy crush damage output.

Interestingly, the Roman champion meelee infantry has the exact attack as the britons (they have the same hero, therefore their damage output is also exactly the same) but more people use britons which is weird.

I think civs like sparta where you can build various "special barrack", its fairly balanced, as Spartans are the best champions for sure, it makes sure that spamming them is a bit more expensive. However Persians, yeah it really needs to be changed.

Yes you are probably right, i wasn't sure what exactly it was that makes some units better than others despite them having the same stats on the structure tree, more hidden stats makes more sense.

The data from the structure tree is not 100% accurate, me and my friends have done a lot of in game testing and although they all have the standard 6, 5, 0.75 with the same armour, some are somehow better than others. For example, the champion which seems to beat out most champions are the Spartan hoptiles, this is mainly due to the agoge upgrade, however Briton longswordsman beat them. More interestingly the Mauryan maiden guards, which have the same stats as the Britons, cannot beat the Spartans. The only champion which seems to be able to destroy the Britons are the Iberian champion spearmen. IIRC Persian immortals beat the Athenian city guards, the Carthaginian infantry, the Roman infantry and the Seleucid infantry, so they are definitely an above average champion. As for the Ptolemies, your strat seems very interesting, I would love to see it in action but the fact is that I haven't seen anyone using Ptolemies for ages (not including random picks). If you could send a demo that would be great. Sure the champ spear cavalry isn't bad, however it has no difference among other cavalry champs, infact if you want to go with building cavalry then the Iberian ranged horses are by far the best. they do everything a cavalry champ does but it also has a lot of crush damage, infact it has the highest crush damage output from all the champions.