causative

>It's an addition aura (btw I recall Hamilcar aura is global, don't need to drag him along on raids as he lags behind anyway) Fair enough. > With both cheap techs you can train domestic animals at only +27,5% train time of current unupgraded +27.5% train time for unupgraded isn't the issue. It's +70% train time relative to current upgraded (math is: 1.275 / 0.75). Everybody in a22 gets stockbreeding immediately before producing any sheep, or they should. Compare them in age 1. In age 1, in vox populi you get husbandry and in a22 you get stockbreeding. The vox populi corral produces 2.26 times more slowly (+126% train time). The math is (2 * 0.85 / 0.75). That means you need more than twice as many corrals in age 1 for a given production, and more than twice as much food tied up in producing sheep - more than twice the cost. >In a22 you can get by with around 13 cavalry and 10 corrals, with this I'd expect 8-9 In a22, heavy corral players such as JC use more in the area of 20 corrals. That would be increased to 34 corrals with the +70% train time, taking up a ton of space and not being even feasible on more crowded maps. > Keep in mind that having sheep pop out as fast as/faster than they get killed and collected is a bit.. weird It's not significantly less weird if they pop out just a bit slower than they get butchered. I believe the butchering animation can be considered to metaphorically represent all aspects of herding sheep, and then it's not weird.

> Hamilcar's 2nd aura: As you all probably have figured by now, Hamilcar is not a "useful" hero (giving only +15% speed compared to the attack bonuses of Marhabal & Hannibal) > Thus, a new aura has been created (based on historical facts) which decreases enemy mercenary attack values by 20%. That sounds less useful than Hamilcar's a22 aura. I have used Hamilcar before when raiding with ranged cavalry, because Hannibal is too slow to follow the cavalry around as they raid, and Maharbal doesn't boost them. Hamilcar also is sword cavalry which can be good for defending against rams. Compare your proposed aura to the other heroes. Hannibal gives +20% effectiveness for all soldiers. Your Hamilcar only gives +25% effectiveness when fighting mercenaries, which in most games the enemy is not using exclusively; the proposed Hamilcar is therefore strictly weaker than Hannibal aside from his greater mobility. Maharbal gives +30% effectiveness as long as your army consists primarily of melee cavalry, and it's your choice to commit to melee cavalry not your enemy's so you can take full advantage of that 30% bonus. So again, better than your Hamilcar. Maharbal doesn't necessarily need a boost but how about: +25% speed instead of +15%. > Domestic animals base train time doubled, added new technology "Husbandry" for -15% train time and moved Stockbreeding to the Town Phase with maintained -25%. So, this means you need almost double the number of corrals for a given corral food production (more than double in age 1), and you need more food tied up building sheep as well. In addition to the doubled cost, it's hard enough to cram enough corrals within your territory because they take up so much space, even in a22. With twice the number of corrals, the problem of fitting the corrals in your territory would become just a big pain. This would just make players not use corrals. Corrals aren't that great even in a22, except for the minor population boost if you are hitting the population cap. Many of the best players, such as temple, use farms instead of corrals even while building and attacking with cavalry. Other of the best players do use them. But, double their cost and double their space requirement, and they would just not be effective.

Just to be clear - ships only unload onto shore if they are destroyed while at the shore. If the ship is well away from shore, all the units will die, and you can't manually ungarrison them before it sinks either, and both of those things are good. You do take a risk when loading your ship with units. Also, making the player click to unload instead of unloading automatically on destruction doesn't affect the theoretical risk of filling the ship with units. A good player would always be able to unload just before the ship sinks, assuming the ship is at the shore. So your proposed change would not really affect balance among skilled players. For buildings - I don't think there should be any damage to units when the building is destroyed. In ancient combat the enemy was never able to actually collapse a stone fortification like a demolition. They would at most punch a hole in the wall or collapse part of it. That's not going to kill many if any defenders by itself. It might be different for wooden buildings, that could be burned, but the most common case where you'd be worried about defenders dying is when the fortress or CC is destroyed, and both would presumably be stone fortifications. Ancient sieges were characterized by huge stone city walls. The core realism issue is that a ship that is fighting "near the shore" is also considered to be docked at the shore. A ship that's docked can certainly load and unload units, and if someone destroys a ship in dock it's reasonable that most of the people onboard could get to shore. But a ship that's docked should not be able to fight or move. In 0ad docked ships can move and fight - not realistic, but it explains why units can survive a sinking ship or why they can unload from the ship at the last moment.

If you think it's ridiculous that the units unload to the nearest shore when the ship is destroyed - don't you think it's equally ridiculous that the units can unload to the nearest shore an instant before the ship is destroyed? If you are in an ancient sea battle and your ship has been 99% destroyed by enemy fire, it's a floating wreck unable to maneuver. You couldn't get it onto shore or really do anything with it before it takes that final 1% damage. If the sailors are able to make it to shore from a disabled hulk at 1% hp (bringing all their siege equipment and horses etc with them), they would also be able to make it to shore as that hulk starts to sink. In real ancient sea battles, there weren't any lifeboats and not much chance of evacuating the crew and cargo from a damaged ship during the battle. I might like a solution that made ship unloading take some time, say ten units per second. That way you couldn't just unload the entire ship the turn before it is destroyed.

Hardly anybody even knows that not all units will automatically ungarrison from a sinking ship, or which types of units will do so. It's not something that's easily discoverable from playing the game. A strategy game ought to be discoverable through playing it, without hidden gameplay secrets only devs know about. If your ship full of horses or priests fails to ungarrison when it sinks, the average player is more likely to figure it's because the ship wasn't close enough to shore, or there was only enough space on the shore to unload the infantry but not the priests. It's not realistic that units will make it to shore if their king tells them to do it an instant before the ship sinks, but aren't able to do that on their own. People on a sinking ship would take their own initiative to save their lives. It's irritating when your units act excessively dumb. It's like bad pathfinding. It's a similar kind of user interface problem as deleting buildings just before the capture bar reaches 50%. If you want siege engines to go down with the ship, there are better ways. For example, there could be a "swim to shore unload range" that is greater than the ordinary unload range and only activates when the ship sinks, but does not apply to siege engines.

The siege weapons make it to shore if you get them out half a second before the ship sinks. It seems just arbitrary.

You can ungarrison the *moment* before the building is destroyed, though. So it would just mean the units live if you ungarrison a split second earlier, and die if you ungarrison a split second too late. It would have almost no effect as long as the player is alert to ungarrison beforehand. So, I think the building should just ungarrison all of them when it's destroyed, as it does now. IMO ships should also ungarrison everything when destroyed, instead of only certain undocumented unit types. It's counterintuitive that only some of the units will automatically ungarrison, when you could ungarrison all of them if you clicked to do it one turn earlier.

You don't usually have to pay much attention to the scout. Just select it and then shift-click repeatedly on the map so it follows a path to explore around your base. The reason auto-scouting would be nice is that on maps with a lot of impassable terrain such as mountains, your waypoints will make the scout backtrack a lot. Auto-scouting would make mountain maps as easy to explore as open maps.

Ideal bell system: The bell should only work on women. I normally do not want to garrison the soldiers using the bell. I want to direct the soldiers manually. Consider that soldiers do more damage outside of towers/fort/CC than they do inside. The main purpose of garrisoning soldiers when the enemy attacks is to prevent capture, and this should be done on a case by case basis if the enemy is trying to capture. The market should also have a bell that works on all your traders anywhere and makes them garrison in your own or allied buildings. There should be a hotkey to ring/un-ring the bell (once CC is selected) so you can respond quicker to raids. The bell should reserve spots for units so it won't try to garrison 30 units into a 20 garrison limit building. This would reduce the impact of raids because women would more quickly find safety instead of milling around getting slaughtered. If you select women and manually garrison them in the CC or houses without ringing the bell, the "safe" bell should put them back to work. This would reduce the impact of raids because it lets you manually garrison just the women that are in immediately danger, and easily put them back to work afterwards. A smaller-radius bell should also exist on the storehouse. This would let you garrison just your woodcutters. No alert status on units! This would greatly simplify the implementation and prevent bugs. Just two bells, "alert" and "safe," that you can ring at any time. When the "alert" bell is rung, all women in range try to garrison, and remember their previous task. If a woman is working and you select her and tell her to garrison or move (without using the bell), she will also remember her previous task. When the "safe" bell is rung, all women in range that are garrisoned (or garrisoning, walking, or idle) will ungarrison and return to their previous task, like the back to work command. Not enough garrison spots: have them try to garrison somewhere. That at least gets them moving which makes them less of a target. If some units die on their way to a building, no orders change. See (7) above: no alert status. The bell is rung as a one time event that gives a garrison order to the affected units, it doesn't have any lasting effect after that. See how it simplifies things? The reserved spots are only calculated when you ring the bell, and forgotten after that. So, units continue with their orders. You could ring the bell a second time to recalculate the bell order.

Formations are usually depicted as a square grid, each soldier directly behind the soldier in front of him. But circles and probably soldiers can be packed more densely in a hexagonal grid, with each row of soldiers offset 50% from the row in front of it. This would also enable the second row from the front to see ahead more clearly, since their vision wouldn't be blocked by the heads of soldiers in the front row, which would help the second row to stab at the enemy. (Of course, the overall formation can still be rectangular even though the rows are offset hexagonally.) Is there any clear primary evidence against this notion?

See the strategy guide link in my signature. The "basic" initial build order is: batch 6 women at CC, 4 women make a farmstead at the berries, cavalry harvests chickens, 4 men make a storehouse at the wood, upgrade berries when the farmstead is done, first 6 women produced at the CC chop wood, next 5 women harvest berries, make a house when needed. This can only be done with Brits/Gauls and sometimes Iberians/Mauryans if the wood is close, otherwise the first house won't be done in time. With other non-ptol civs you can skip the berry upgrade in order to have wood for the house.

Yes, age I cavalry is too strong. Some possible solutions: Cheaper sentry towers costing 50w instead of 100w Towers shoot 3 arrows by default Houses garrison 10 units instead of 6, or 5 instead of 3 CC can garrison 50 units (only the first 20 soldiers garrisoned add arrows) so you can put all your women farmers in the CC Make cavalry much weaker in age I, with an age II tech that makes them normal

Off-topic, but I just realized your profile is a "hop"lite.

Cavalry rushes are devastating. I recommend you take a look at some replays of borg- 1v1 matches to see how the game should be played. There are some in this thread:

Sure... doesn't matter though.

Some useful hotkeys: By editing your local.cfg, change your idle worker key to something that can be reached with your left hand while your right is on the mouse. I have idleworker = "G" Change your idle-only key to something that can be reached with the left hand. If you drag-select while holding down this key, it will select only idle units. I have idleonly = "V". If you use V, you should also put under [hotkey.session.queueunit] the setting 4="0" to disable the V hotkey for unit production. Know that alt+g (if you have my settings) selects all idle units instead of just 1. "How do I make a worker build a house and make him build another house when he's done with the first one automatically?" - To build two houses, tell the guy to build the first house. Then hold down shift as you place the foundation for the second house. The second house will be queued, and he will start constructing it when he's done with the first. Another common case is to tell the guy to build a house, and then hold shift as you click on a tree. That will make him chop the tree after finishing the house. "When I train batches of new units, do I need to left-click on the civic centre and then right-click to the resources/building/rally point to make them go/work automatically?" - yes. Although, you can select the CC and press ctrl-1 so now you can just type 1 instead of clicking on the CC thereafter. "How to train multiple batches and make a batch go work on different tasks automatically?" - Don't queue up more than one batch at a time in your CC. Hold shift and click on the unit to make a batch, and only when the batch finishes should you make the next batch. That enables you to make the next batch as large as possible (which is faster). To split a single batch to go to two different tasks, you would set the CC waypoint for the first task, and immediately when the batch finishes you would select some of the units and tell them to do the second task instead. "How do I know when there are no more berries or no more meat from hunted animals?" - just keep an eye on the workers. You can also press alt+G periodically (with my keybinding) to see if any units are idle. See also the strategy guide in my signature. (attached my local.cfg) local.cfg

Here are a couple of simple fixes that could make it a lot easier to garrison units in ships. Ships should not move when you click to garrison a unit into them. This is a cause of many headaches, where the ship was already landed on the shore and you click for another unit to go into the ship, and the ship decides to move from away from the shore where you put it. Let units garrison into the ship from a short distance away from it such as 15m. They already ungarrison like that - let them garrison the same way. edit: I have submitted a patch for this. https://code.wildfiregames.com/D665

I like the idea of being able to transfer workers to fishing and transfer them back later. A problem is that garrisoning 25 units into 5 fishing ships would be a major pain, considering the problems with garrisoning units in ships. Good players do fish, though. So I don't think fishing is something that necessarily needs a buff. A problem with fishing is the fish are a finite resource. It's not realistic because AFAIK overfishing wasn't a major problem for ancient people - they didn't have the technology or the population to overfish. And it does leave you with a fleet of deletable fishing ships after the fish are gone. A good change would be, after a fishing spot is depleted, there is a random delay and then it will regenerate.

You should be able to make more than 20 houses with no special changes required. Perhaps you mean that you can make more than 20 houses, but they don't increase the population limit? In that case you need a higher population limit in the game settings.

IMO, catapults are bad because they deal damage so slowly. The enemy has too much time to react, counterattack, or repair the building after you start attacking it. Also, if the enemy attacks your ally and you have only catapults, you can't counterattack the enemy like you could with rams or elephants, because they can just ignore you for a while since their buildings die so slowly. I see that in Age of Empires II, trebuchets deal DPS similar to battering rams. So perhaps it is possible to balance it like that by increasing the cost of catapults to compensate.

The spear/sword cavalry distinction in a21 is backwards compared to history. Cavalry spears and lances were very powerful against armored targets because they have the weight of the horse and rider behind a focused point. In contrast, swords were effective against unarmored targets; you can easily slice through flesh with a sword, doing a huge amount of damage, but a cut from a sword does not penetrate armor well. If one cavalry type should have a role of harassing peasants and unarmored targets, it should be the sword cavalry, and the spear cavalry should be more powerful in armored confrontations.

If you're talking about PvP: with Seleucids in the late game, you can mass 100+ Dahae Horse Archers. Get the cavalry hero that gives +2 armor and research the technology at the fortress that gives +20% HP. (also don't forget walk speed upgrades in the corral, and regular upgrades at the blacksmith.) Shoot their slow moving infantry with arrows, retreat the horse archers when their infantry gets too close. Garrison injured horse archers in temples to heal. If the game goes on very long you can gradually switch over to chariot champions, or alternatively get melee cavalry champs to raid their women/traders. If the Spartan does a proper Skiritai rush, you basically can't stop it once it gets going. Instead you have to rush them first in age 1. Also, general advice for any civ:

Walls in 0ad are used in non-historical ways. There weren't that many geographical chokepoints that you could block off with walls. Historical walls were mostly walled cities because real-life land is much more open. In addition, new players like to build walled cities, because it's fun and looks cool, until they learn it's not cost efficient. Most examples of abuses of walls, are of heavily fortified walled chokepoints. I think that 0ad needs limitations that encourage walls to be used specifically for walled cities, and not for blocking off chokepoints. Here are some simple limitations to achieve that: Most importantly, say that walls can't be placed unless there is 30m of clear space between them and any invalid terrain. This means that you can't wall off chokepoints, you have to instead put walls all the way around whatever you want to protect. "Invalid terrain" means only terrain; you can put walls right up against other buildings, that's OK. Walls must be at least 50m from CCs/forts to prevent the cheap trick of making walls closely hugging your CCs and forts to prevent capture. In exchange, the cost and build time of walls can be greatly decreased, because now you have to wall all the way around your city to get protection. Perhaps other limitations that prevent walls from being too densely packed would be needed, or perhaps not.

I wrote this a long time ago to try to automatically determine fast builds for britons. It's an approximate simulator of playing britons, with functions to evaluate and alter the build order. Note that it's for a19 IIRC so it doesn't handle batch sizes except 1 and 5.

Well, you can get a fixed local IP on your LAN just by configuring the router.