Nescio

True and true, Cossacks was undeniably a much simpler game – but we've also advanced eighteen years.

Well, I don't know. Cossacks could easily handle tens of thousands of units without noticeable lag on an ordinary pc in 2001.

You're assuming the 7th C BC Iberians are the descendants of the 7th M BC "cave-people". That's a big if. History is not static. People can migrate and a lot can happen in thousands of years. I don't know about Spain specifically, but in most of Europe the "original" populations have been replaced more than once over the past five thousand years. Again, same problem. The Britons were Celts and Celts only started to migrate to the British islands gradually after 800 BC. What others did in Neolithic times is irrelevant here. Yes, they do. Slingers are different from archers, but they can counter them. To clarify, I'm not opposed to Briton and Iberian archers per se, but I'd like to see a reference first. Failing that, I agree it's better they don't have archers until then. I vehemently disagree with your radical idea. Archers and slingers were quite different units. Archers were typically massed and thus quite effective vs massed targets (including cavalry) but also vulnerable themselves to projectiles. Greek sources repeatedly state slingers easily outranged archers and that slingers were loosely organized (they needed space for swinging their slings); they were effective vs archers but vulnerable to cavalry. Slingers could sling anything from large stones of over 500 g (high impact, shorter range) to lead bullets of less than 5 g (too small and fast to see or dodge, highly penetrative, very hard to extract) and everything in between.

Apparently I broke it again: Unfortunately mod.io forces the uploader to click "go live".

There is a difference between "having archery" and "using archers in combat". If it is attested they did, then yes, I agree they should have bowmen in game. Be careful, it is perfectly possible the Iberian cave art was not made by Iberians. "Iberian cave art" (dated before 3500 BC) is cave art located on the Iberian peninsula; the "Iberian civilization" is that of people who had Iberian language(s) (dated after 700 BC) as their native tongue. There were Celts and Celts, and there can be huge differences between them. Find me one attestation for the Britons specifically and I'm happy.

Yes, and that's problematic. Historically macemen were highly effective vs armoured units and slingers vs foot archers (because they could outrange them). However, in 0 A.D. all soldiers have ridiculously high crush armour, which make crush damage units not very effective.

Rome and Sparta frequently deployed Cretan archers. At its peak Athens funded a standing corps of thousand Athenian citizens - all archers, of which two hundred had horses (the Scythian "archers" did not participate in warfare, nor did they fight with bow-and-arrow; they were state slaves who performed police duties and were equipped with ropes, sticks, and paint). It is well attested Gauls had foot archers who fought alongside (spear) cavalry. So who are left then? Britons and Iberians, although it's not impossible they deployed archers too (archery is a basic skill known by mankind for millenia). However, I disagree with your "without exception". Not giving a specific faction archers should remain possible.

And I've just written a mod to show my suggestions: siege.zip Feel free to try it out yourself A very good question! Because I had no idea either what would happen, I play-tested how 0 A.D. would handle it. It turns out the unit training is paused as long as the trainer is garrisoned; a sensible solution.

Things that are possible right now: lower battering ram base damage and give it a bonus attack vs gates or defensive structures prevent battering rams from attacking non-mechanical units by inserting <RestrictedClasses datatype="tokens">Organic</RestrictedClasses> in their attack give all factions a battering ram in town phase enable siege workshops for all factions (they're already there) in town phase (and remove all siege weapons and technologies from the fortress) introduce a new, vulnerable unit, a siege engineer, which can train battering rams and siege towers lower battering ram and siege tower movement speed to about 50% of the slowest melee infantry give all melee infantry a restricted "ranged" attack vs siege, ships, and structures (and restrict their normal melee attack against those classes), to ensure they are all equally effective and probably quite a few other things I can't think of at the moment

Oops, wrong topic

The last A22 version of 0abc can be obtained from https://github.com/0abc/0abc-a22.git I'll gradually redevelop this mod for A23, available at https://github.com/0abc/0abc-a23.git

Why limit mod version numbers unnecessarily?

That solved it, it now appears to work:

Yeah, I've just tried out the mod selection (with official A23 package for Fedora 28) and I have the same issue when I clicked "Download Mods" (perhaps because there were not any to be selected?):

Just insert <RestrictedClasses datatype="tokens">Structure</RestrictedClasses> into `template_unit_infantry_melee.xml` melee attack and insert <RestrictedClasses datatype="tokens">Unit</RestrictedClasses> into their (new) ranged attack, to prevent them from "torching" enemy units.

Not on average; 23 releases in eight years works out at a mean of about four months each. Other than that, great, I'm looking forward to your contributions

Only calves ought to be trainable :) They can be slaughtered directly or later be upgraded (or promoted?) to cows or oxen. And there are a few other possibilities I can think of for mods.

Yes, that's exactly what I want. We already have separate templates for the lion and the lioness (no lion cubs yet, unfortunately), and I think we should have separate templates for the bovines too, e.g.: gaia/fauna/cattle_bull.xml gaia/fauna/cattle_calf.xml gaia/fauna/cattle_cow.xml gaia/fauna/cattle_ox.xml gaia/fauna/sanga_bull.xml gaia/fauna/sanga_calf.xml gaia/fauna/sanga_cow.xml gaia/fauna/zebu_bull.xml gaia/fauna/zebu_calf.xml gaia/fauna/zebu_cow.xml (And ideally also mithun, yak, banteng, water buffalo, aurochs, gaur, wild yak, kouprey, and the wild Asian water buffalo.)

That black-and-white pattern looks nice, but I'm not sure how common it was in Antiquity. The modern Friesian Holstein breed, now widespread, did not exist back then. As you probably know, "male cows" are called bulls; castrated ones are called oxen, bullocks, or steers. Ideally every bovine in game should have calf, cow, ox, and bull variants. There are many different species of goat, all are used to rough terrain, but not all can scale steep cliffs.

Did you try if the .DELETED (rather than .DELETE) suffix still works?

Can't you see the settings before you join a game? (I don't know, I've neither the time nor the ambition to try out multiplayer.)

0abc contains close to three thousand xml files and as a result setting up the AI when starting a new game takes minutes instead of seconds, which is quite annoying. If caching solves this I'm interested.

It makes the game faster? Well, I might try it out later, if and when I have a A23 version available.

Thanks for the offer, but right now I'm not interested. I've signed up over there to have a look, but it looks overtly complicated (graphical), plus I don't see the added value for me personally. Uploading a new version of a mod to github can be done in seconds via a command line. Besides, I still have A22; A23 has not been released as a Fedora package yet.

All true, but there is more. Nowadays we keep cattle primarily for milk and meat, and secondarily for their skin, to make leather from. Historically, however, their primary function was to provide oxen for ploughing the fields; their faeces were also used as fertilizer. No oxen meant less crops and smaller harvests. Cattle also represented wealth, especially amongst Germanic peoples, but also elsewhere in Eurasia. It is hardly surprising cows and bulls feature prominently in many mythologies.