causative

When you say she can no longer join the lobby, do you mean she can no longer join the multiplayer lobby where you can see many other players and other games besides your own? Or do you mean she can no longer connect to your specific game?

Walls have been substantially nerfed. I think it's just tradition at this point not to use them. In previous alphas, walls and concentrated wall towers were extremely powerful and could drag games out forever, but I don't think they are so strong anymore. Perhaps attitudes will change over time.

Thanks for the expanded alias lists. Also, thanks to temple for sending his replays, bringing the database to 496 games (after filtering and deduping). Here are the updated rankings, with temple's replays and an updated smurf list:

Since there's only 8 players max, it's pretty quick to just try every combination of teams and see which is best. Here's the latest ratings list. Thanks to mapkoc for sending his replays as well. Other changes: I have included single player games, and excluded survival of the fittest. (Pizza was already excluded in previous rankings). I have also taken into account when each game was played, to allow for players getting better over the duration of a21. I've updated the first post in this thread with a full explanation of the process.

This is an updated and expanded version of The Road to Expert for the a21 balance. Don't fall into any of these early game traps: Farms go adjacent to your CC or farmstead, as close as they will go. I've seen many new players who put them a distance back. Don't do that. Don't use women for mining. Don't use men for food gathering. Use women or men for woodcutting. Cavalry are for hunting chickens or other animals. Only cavalry are good at this. Hunting is a very fast way to get food unless the animals are very far from the dropsite. If you have berries, build a farmstead right next to them and have some women harvest the berries. It's twice as fast as farming. Don't let your workers carry resources too far. Put the storehouse right adjacent to the trees when they chop wood. If your workers (except for hunting cavalry) are walking twice the width of a storehouse to return resources, they are walking too far. Don't make a barracks until at least the end of age I. A lot of new players make a barracks way too early, or even more than one. Your CC can produce enough soldiers by itself. Don't make walls in age I either. Good players generally agree not to use walls, anyway, and plus in age I it's just a waste of resources that the enemy can simply walk around. Sentry towers are good only if you are right next to enemy territory and you want to prevent him from building a sentry tower that can attack your workers. Don't start mining anything until the end of age I. You don't need it. Don't use formations. Especially don't gather your army in age I and set it in formation outside your base to defend. That army is composed of workers, and should be harvesting resources at all times, unless you are using it to raid the enemy (an advanced technique). Corrals are an advanced technique because they require more micromanagement and there is a long delay before you get any net food from them (for a minute or two after you start building cavalry and corrals, they just cost you food and wood). Instead of corrals, use hunting, fields, or berries. Practice until you can have constant production of units from your CC (Civic Center) for the first 10+ minutes. That means: You need enough food income to produce women nonstop until population 50-70. You can produce soldiers after that. If you're planning on having a big economy, you can go up to 70 women, which does leave you more vulnerable to early attacks. You can use fewer women if you expect raids. Of course, if you're actually being raided, you need to make soldiers to defend (usually spearmen and cavalry). You need enough wood to make houses - and you need to make houses far enough ahead of time so that you don't get stopped by the population limit. Batch Production: like the previous step, learn to maintain constant production, but now with large batches (shift-click on the unit production icon several times to produce multiple at a time). Batch production by 5 is 38% faster than producing single units. Batch production by 10 is 57% faster. Batch production by 15 is 72% faster. It is absolutely worth it to make a batch of even 15 or 20, if you have the resources and population. You need more food to batch produce women this way. That means more on berries (like 10), more hunting, or earlier farms. You need to plan houses more in advance, too, so that you have enough population open when it's time to produce. A rule of thumb on houses is that (except for ptolemies) in the time it takes you to create 10 population worth of workers at your CC, one builder can build 10 population worth of houses. If you need a house faster than that, use several workers to build it. However, note that using more workers on the same house is less efficient, so build with just 1 worker if you don't need a house faster. However, note that it's inefficient to build more houses than you need. Don't be at 30 pop with 50 pop worth of houses; spend the wood on something else. Produce as large a batch as possible, but don't delay more than a few seconds to make a batch. It's better to just be producing 1 unit if you don't have enough houses or food for a batch. Don't queue up more than 1 batch of units from your CC at a time. Wait until the previous batch finishes, so your next batch can be as large as possible. Minimum batch size is configurable in the settings. Use a minimum batch size as small as you feel comfortable with - a minimum batch size of 1 is "optimal" because it lets you produce as large a batch as you have resources for, but it requires more clicks to produce a batch of a given size. borg-, who is the best player, uses a batch size of 2. Practice not harvesting resources you can't spend. If you're ever thinking "I have more food than I need - but I wish I had more wood" then you need to transfer some workers from food to wood, and figure out some way to spend the food. (Actually, you probably needed to transfer the workers two minutes ago, but late is better than never). If you have 1000 of any resource in age I-II, you have way too much. This can be counterintuitive to some new players, who think that because they have 5000 wood banked up that their economy is strong. A strong economy means you have a high income, not a high amount banked up. Resources you aren't spending aren't doing you any good. If you have extra wood, a good way to spend it is on economy upgrades. The highest priority upgrade is berry gathering, then woodcutting, then farming, then mining. You want economy upgrades as early as possible so you get the benefit for longer, except for the upgrades that are super expensive. Adjust your typical build order so that you avoid having too much of the resource. If, last game, you had way more wood than you could spend, then this game, don't put as many workers on wood so early. And so on. This is the true mark of skill in building your economy. You know you're doing it right when you have just enough of every resource you need, exactly when you need it, and little excess, and are producing in large batches. Watch replays of good players! A lot of people don't know where replays are. From the starting screen, they are under Tools/Options. Switch to that player's perspective in the replay and follow what they do - what they build, when they build it, how many farms they make, when they get upgrades. Then try to copy them in your next game. If you're spectating a game with good players, you can switch to the perspective of the best player and watch them as they play, instead of going to the replay. A list of good players can be found in this thread: multiplayer rankings . The ones near the top of the list, especially if they are also at the left margin, are the best players. Practice using Shift to queue up actions. For instance, don't just tell your woodcutter to make a house - tell him to make a house, then shift-click back on the tree! That way he will go back to woodcutting when he's done building the house, and he won't be idle. I always do this whenever I build a structure. If you change your mind and want him to make a second house instead of going back to the trees, you should first select him, then click (without shift) on the house he's building to clear his work queue, then shift-click to build the new house. If you just shift clicked to build the second house, he would go back to the trees like you told him earlier after finishing his current house instead of building the second one. Work out exactly what you will do in the first minute, with low resources (the usual resource setting). This is a "build order." For every civ, you want to put the cavalry on chickens and the women on berries, and the men on wood. You also generally want the first batch of 6 women produced from the CC to chop wood (depending a little on your minimum batch size), and the next 5 women from the CC to harvest berries, after which you will be at 20 population. The order in which you make a storehouse, a farmstead, get the berry upgrade, and make your first house can vary. Britons and Gauls can build a farmstead at the berries, build a storehouse at the wood, and research the berry upgrade. They will have plenty of time to get 75 wood and make their first house, because they get a population bonus from making the farmstead and storehouse. Most civs have houses that cost 150 wood and grant 10 population. With these you can't get the farmstead, the storehouse, and the berry upgrade all at once, and still have enough wood for your first house. You have to pick between the storehouse and the berry upgrade. If wood is very close to your CC, you can get the farmstead and berry upgrade, and get the storehouse later. If wood is far away, you need a storehouse (and a farmstead), so you have to skip the berry upgrade to have enough wood for the house. With these civs you will need to use 3-4 workers to make the house once you have 150 wood, so that it will be done in time. With a civ that has a house that costs 150 wood, I batch 6 women and put them on wood, batch 2 women for berries, start to batch 2 more women for berries and at the same time start making the house with 4-5 woodcutters (I have woodcutters return wood prematurely to have 150 wood soon enough), make one last woman for berries, and now I'm at 20 pop and the house finishes just as the last woman is produced. Iberians and Mauryans occupy a middle ground since their houses cost 75 wood but they don't have the population bonuses of Britons/Gauls. You can figure something out if you want to play these. Mauryans have an elephant, which can do the job of a storehouse or farmstead and help build houses. Ptolemies need less wood, but at least two workers building houses (perhaps three or four). Work out more of your typical build order. After you're at 20 population, additional women should go on wood. "Five fields as fast as possible" is a good rule of thumb - make sure that you are already building your next house, and then if you have 100 wood, make a field and put 5 women on it, until you have 5 fields with 25 women on them. You can transfer women from wood to farming if your CC doesn't have a batch ready when it's time for the next field. If you have extra berry patches, build farmsteads by them instead of making farms. You can figure that one berry patch with 5 women on it equals two farms. You will need to make farms later when the berries run out. Be aware that berries leave you more vulnerable to cavalry raids, but they're still usually worth it. If there's plenty of hunting, you can build some extra cavalry to hunt instead of women (usually, start hunting sometime after population 20). Shift-click your cavalry beyond the animal, and then shift-click on the animal, so that when the animal runs it will come back to your base. Don't make too many cavalry; make sure you're getting enough wood in proportion to your food income. Hunting gets you a lot of food. To transfer women from wood to farming, select the women, then shift-click on the storehouse so they drop off the wood, then shift-click to build the farm. This ensures they do not waste their last load of wood when they stop chopping. You can also go up to six, seven, or eight fields, and indeed you should if you are booming your economy. Use hotkeys for at least your production buildings, perhaps also other units. Select your CC and press Ctrl-1, and now you can select the CC again just by pressing 1. Your barracks can go on group 2. This helps you to keep production going smoothly even if your attention is elsewhere. Learn to use attack-walk. This is the hotkey "ctrl", combined with a right click. Units on attack-walk will attack enemy units in their way. If you don't want your soldiers to attack buildings automatically (usually you don't), you can use ctrl-q-click to have them target only units. I actually have edited my local.cfg file (see https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths ) so that ctrl-click targets only units. During a large melee combat, repeatedly select your units and ctrl-click. This makes them choose new targets close to them, and stops them from walking to targets far away. Doing this increases your army's DPS. Learn the difference between attacking a structure or siege engine, and capturing it. Ctrl-click on the structure for your units to deal damage to the structure. Bear in mind that most units are pretty bad at damaging structures, the main exceptions being slingers and siege engines, and swordsmen to a lesser extent. Otherwise, a regular click will make your units try to capture the structure, which may be impossible if the structure is garrisoned, unless you've heavily damaged the structure first. Usually you want to kill the enemy army before attacking or capturing any structures. Otherwise you will take large amounts of damage while attacking the structure. Rushes! Cavalry rushes are hot in a21. It's best to use melee cavalry, because they kill women faster: Macedonians and Romans have melee cavalry in age I, and many civilizations have melee cavalry in age 2. Attacking your enemy is a good idea if you've been using cavalry for hunting, after the animals run out. It's best to use at least 10 cavalry for raiding. That way, they kill things fast enough, and damage will be spread over the group so that fewer cavalry die. Target women preferentially, or enemy soldiers in small groups. Run away from larger groups of spearmen. Put your cavalry on a hotkey so you can control them more easily. To attack, run the cavalry (without attack-walk!) past the enemy units, until the cavalry are mixed with the enemy a bit. Then ctrl-click to have them all suddenly attack, or alternatively press "h" which makes them halt their current run order, and attack the enemy. If you're attacking and more enemy soldiers (especially spearmen) show up, run away just before they get there. You only want to fight where you have a big advantage. Keep running away and attacking a few times, until you notice the average HP of your cavalry is getting low (if the average HP is below perhaps 60% or 70%, that means many cavalry are on the verge of death). Then you should retreat your cavalry and put them in your CC or in your temple. After they've healed, you can attack again. You don't want to let your cavalry die if you can avoid it; you want to maintain a high kill/death ratio. If the enemy is chasing you with too many of his worker soldiers, you can just keep running around. As long as they are chasing you, they're not working, so your attack is costing him resources. If the enemy defends with cavalry, you should kill them with a large number of your own cavalry. If he has too many, you have to run away and think about your own defense if he counterattacks. If you're raiding in age 2, build a temple to heal afterwards. If your first rush is effective, just keep making cavalry to make it even more effective. You can keep two groups of cavalry, one in the temple healing, the other out raiding the enemy, and switch them so he is under constant pressure. They should be under two control groups. Your production buildings need to be on hotkeys as well so you can keep your economy going while you are raiding. To defend against rushes, it's first important to use the bell icon on your civic center. Click it when a raid is coming, and all women will try to hide in houses or your CC. This will prevent the enemy cavalry from slaughtering them all. There's another bell icon on your CC to end the alert and send your women back to work. Also mix spearmen with your women. If rushes are really bad, you can try farming with spearmen, or just leaving some spearmen idle by the fields. Building a solid wall of houses around your fields can help a lot. Getting cavalry of your own is also good. Sadly, towers are not that effective at stopping cavalry rushes. They do help, but cavalry can just keep running by them unless you really have a lot of garrisoned towers. It only takes a few seconds to kill some of your women, then the cavalry can go back and heal. It's better to rely on spearmen, walls of houses, and your own cavalry. Hold down alt and drag over your woodcutters or miners to select only the soldiers, and not the women. After you've used some soldiers to chase after the raiders, you can click the "back to work" button with the soldiers selected (looks kind of like a brown wagon wheel or maybe a basket) and your workers will go back to chopping or mining. Skiritai rush Play Spartans, ideally with a 200+ population limit. Boom to 60 population with only women (hoping you don't get rushed), then make 10 spearmen and put them on mining metal. Go to age II while making 2 barracks ASAP. Once in age II, start producing batches of only skiritai from your 2 barracks, with your CC idle. As soon as you produce each batch of skiritai, send it over to the enemy. You can use them like cavalry raiders to kill farmers, and you can also fight the enemy army unless they have greatly superior numbers, because skiritai are stronger than normal soldiers. Unlike with cavalry raids, usually just let the skiritai keep raiding until they die; they are too slow to walk back and heal. If all goes well, his army and economy are dead by 10-11 minutes into the game. Briton slinger spam This is a very powerful and common strategy. Boom a bit with women in age I, then start making slingers and mining stone. Go to age II, continuing to boom. Here you can make some celtic cavalry to go raid the enemy or just keep booming. Switch to making spearmen later in age II so that you have enough stone to get to age III soon. When you're going III, make sure you mine enough stone for a fortress, from which you make Cunobelin. Then select Cunobelin and all your slingers and spearmen (alt-double click on a slinger to select all slingers, shift alt-double click on a spearmen to select all spearmen, and bind the whole army to a hotkey), and send them at the enemy. Make sure Cunobelin doesn't die, because his healing is very powerful. It's good to keep making celtic cavalry in age III to raid or to kill enemy archers. Elephants and archers Boom to age III with any civilization that has both archers and elephants. For citizen soldiers, make archers. Once in age III, make a fortress (or persian hall, or elephant stables) and 3-5 war elephants. Select all your archers (should be 100+ archers) and attack (make sure you have temples to heal after). The elephants go in front. The enemy will be forced to kill the elephants, which are very tough, while the archers shoot the enemy. When the elephants are dead and the enemy is coming for you, send your archers back to your temples and heal, and make more elephants for round 2. The enemy usually loses more soldiers than you do, each time you attack like this. Also can work well with cavalry instead of archers, or cavalry mixed in. If the enemy has cavalry you might put some spearmen among your archers to defend. Seleucids can use massed Dahae Horse Archers, which become very tough with the Seleucid cavalry hero and the Seleucid bonus cavalry health upgrade. Caution! You cannot kill rams with archers. It's best to keep around some swordsmen or have an ally who can kill rams for you. Elephants can kill rams, if you manage to maneuver them into the same place, which is not easy. Trade In a long game, mines will start to run out. It's important in this case to start making lots of traders, to defend your traders, and to kill the enemy traders. 50 traders per player is a good number in a 200 population game. For both raiding and defending against raids, you want melee cavalry, and don't forget the walk speed upgrades at the corral. Having many fortresses and towers along the trade route helps as well, in part because you can garrison the traders in the fortresses/towers (also in houses or CCs). Long trade routes give more income, but are harder to defend. You want to set up the longest trade route that you can defend. Champions There is a difference of opinion on the value of champions in a21. I personally feel they are usually not that useful unless the game goes on for a long time, such as because there is a narrow chokepoint or it's a naval map. I prefer to get upgrades for my citizen-soldiers before I start making champions (except for war elephants, of course!). Massed archers, slingers, or war elephants can fight effectively against a couple dozen enemy infantry champs at a time, which is why you attack before the enemy has amassed larger numbers. However, there are some experts who swear by champions. An exception: Athens has champion archers which are basically the reason to play Athens. Athens can produce these archers from relatively cheap buildings, which makes it easier to mass large numbers of them. Use citizen-soldier spearmen to defend the archers against cavalry, and to tank damage when fighting enemy infantry. The downside is that Athens have no rams or elephants, only catapults which deal damage very slowly, so ideally you would have allies to send rams or elephants for you. Melee cavalry champions are effective at raiding later on, and can capture buildings and even CCs if the enemy army is busy somewhere else. Coordination with your allies Before doing a big attack, look around and see if your ally has an army that can help you. Ask him. A combined push is much better. If you are getting attacked, or if you see a large enemy army on the move to one of your allies, or if you see enemy cavalry raiders, don't forget to tell your allies what's going on. A simple "purple attacks mid" when you see the purple player send an army through the center, can help your team a lot. If an ally is getting attacked and needs help, one option is to help defend him. Another option is to counterattack and kill the enemy's undefended base. Which you do should depend on how close your ally is to you, how fast your army is (a fast cavalry army can defend allies better), and whether you have an army that can kill buildings quickly (slingers/rams/elephants). When the enemy is attacking (or when your teammates are attacking) is also a good time to use your cavalry to raid his women and traders, because the enemy's attention is split and he may not react in time to your raiders. Another possibility if an ally is under attack, is to send them resources. However, for this to work, the attack needs to proceed slowly enough that they have time to spend the resources. If you need resources, or have extra resources, don't hesitate to ask/offer. In a 3v3 or 4v4, it's good to have at least one player on your team who commits to making tons of melee cavalry for raids and for assisting allies.

There's a margin of error.

FeXoR, Feldfeld explained it pretty well. Rankings here are not based on whether your team wins or loses the game. They are based on whether you have a higher (custom) score than other players on your own team. I've experimented with some other methods of ranking the players. The method I described in my first post, where I divide the weighted sum of wins by the weighted sum of losses, is pretty ad-hoc. I have settled on something called WHR (whole-history rating) which has a more sound statistical basis. Also, I've incorporated Hannibal_Barca's additional smurf list, and I'm no longer displaying players with 0 wins in my records, and I've added a vertical bar ┃ before each ranked player, so that if the line wraps you know it's not a new line. Here is the updated list:

The name "Hannibal_Barca" appears twice in the list (not to the right of an arrow). The second time, your name is preceded by the unicode character U+200E which is a left-to-right mark, an invisible formatting character. No other player has that symbol in their name, so it's not a systematic bug in my code. Perhaps someone was cleverly impersonating you? Thanks for the list of aliases. I see you have zztop = Please = JC. Is zztop = JC? Also you have TheLegendary = LeRoiScorpion = Please, so that would merge those three lines together, i.e. Please = smirno = Burger_III = Burger_II = BurgerExpress = JeanClaude = JC_TRUMP_World_&_Partners = LeRoiScorpion = TheLegendary = zztop Is that right? How certain are you of all these? zztop in particular has been around for quite a while. Thanks for the replays too. In the following list, I incorporated 4 changes. I added your replays, used a slightly abridged version of your smurf list, excluded pizza games, and added player strengths. The purpose of player strengths is so you can add up the player strengths on each team, and predict which team will win by which team has the larger sum of strengths. To find player strengths, I started with the ranked list of players, and randomly adjusted player strengths with the requirement that higher ranked players have to be stronger than lower ranked ones. If a random adjustment improves the accuracy of using strength to predict game outcomes, I keep it, otherwise I throw it away. At the end I scale the strengths to a 0-5 scale. I classified 224 out of 297 games (75%) correctly, using player strengths. So it's not super accurate, but perhaps it can serve as a rough guide for setting up teams. Note that betam is above borg- in these rankings, which is wrong, but he has a good record: he outscored Hannibal_Barca, causative, maxticatrix, Hannibal_Barca, causative, Eurakles, Feldfeld, cb3001, META-BARONS, Hannibal_Barca, and maxticatrix, while losing only to Feldfeld and caesar_salad. I also tried your suggestion of leaving out trade from the score. I think trade is important in long games; the team with more trade usually wins in the end. But why not. Here's the no-trade list:

Thank you! With Feldfeld's replays here are the updated rankings. I also tweaked it so that each player is counted for 2 extra losses against their best win, instead of 1 extra loss - this reduces the rank of certain players with a 100% win rate but few games.

I made some multiplayer rankings. This is a help when setting up games, to decide if teams are fair. First, these rankings depend on replays (specifically, metadata.json files). If you'd like to improve or expand these ratings, zip up all your a21 replays and send them to me! Check https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths to find where they are on your computer. I have revised these rankings several times as I get more data and improved methods. See the spoiler below for the rest of the original post, with the original rankings. And here's the updated list with all the changes and extra data so far. This updated list was generated by the following process: Start with replays: mine, Feldfeld's, mapkoc's, Hannibal_Barca's, and temple's. Filter out single player games, games with AI players, pizza games, survival of the fittest, games with a matchID that was already processed, games under 200 seconds long Map each player name to a canonical player name, according to a list of known aliases. For example, "Please" is mapped to "JC". Score players in each multiplayer game according to 5*(enemy units killed value) + (resources harvested) + 2 * (trade income) Each team on a multiplayer game is converted into a set of 1v1 matches between players on the same team, the winner of the match being the player with the higher custom score. However, if two players on the same team have custom scores within 20% of each other, each player is recorded as beating the other. 1v1 games are also included. Feed these matches into a WHR (Whole History Rating) algorithm, with rating variance set to 10 per day. This gives every player a rating. Determine player "Strengths" such that the sum of strengths on a team predicts which team wins. It is assumed/required that higher rated players have higher strengths. A set of strengths that minimizes prediction errors is found through random search, and then normalized to a 0-5 scale. Note that these strengths are not very strong predictors; just rough estimates. Strength categories are displayed as headings, e.g. those under the ===== 4 - 5 ===== heading have a strength between 4 and 5. Players are listed in order of decreasing rating. Players are indented a number of spaces equal to 10 - the number of multiplayer games they played. If a player is indented, distrust their ranking. Players with 3 or fewer games are followed by a list of players they have scored higher than, so you can see whether their rank is reasonable (often not). A bar is printed at the left margin to prevent line wraps from confusing the rankings. Players who have never outscored anyone are excluded from the list, to save space. Known aliases are printed at the end.

I was able to reach 300 pop in 12:22 (from low resources) with Britons using Fertility Festival and making only women. 12:22 is the time at which my population counter read 300/300; the last women finished producing around 13:15.

Inverse auras: the hero buffs himself proportionally to the number of allies around him. This is better than simply making the hero extremely strong, because it stops the hero from being OP in hero rushes or low-population games. Immortal: +1 HP/sec hero self-healing for each ally in 60m range Destructive: +2 hero crush damage for each ally in 60m range. Best if the hero has splash (for instance, an elephant hero, if the elephant hero also had splash). Tough: +1 hero armor for each 3 allies in 60m range, to a limit of +20, and +1 pierce damage per ally in 60m range. Squad auras: the hero buffs a limited number of allies in a very short range, but buffs them a lot. Triple damage, +5 armor for all ally melee attackers within 10m 70% more damage for up to 20 ally ranged attackers within 10m Battle duration auras: the buff depends on how long combat has been going on. Ambush aura: double damage and +50% walk speed for all units within 60m, for the first five seconds of a fight. For Ambush, the fight starts the first time you deal damage to an enemy unit within 60m of the hero, and ends once all players stop dealing damage within 60m of the hero's location at the time the fight began. Determination aura: +10 all armor types for all units within 60m, once the fight has lasted twenty seconds. For Determination, the fight starts the first time an enemy unit deals damage to one of your units within 60m, and ends when no enemy units have attacked within 60m for five seconds. Teacher aura: double experience gained by citizen-soldiers within 60m.

I can't replicate this bug. Are you sure the healer is not simply running away from enemy fire before healing? You could put him on a stance other than Passive.

I'm back on this again. I have an update: I believe I've more or less fixed the stuck units problem, by making units slide only if they are following long paths. When following short paths, they behave as before. Here is the latest diff for trunk: I might want to try implementing flocking as well, to make the units more responsive. Units tend to pack too close together and a large group doesn't stop all at once. Instead, units wander around at the destination. Flocking could solve both of these problems. Flocking would also mean only one long path needs to be computed when you select a bunch of units and tell them to move, instead of one long path per unit. mergedslidingdiffmar2017_2.diff

You actually want to garrison units in the temple, which is 3x faster healing than the aura.

Except - ranged units and buildings at higher elevations get a range bonus. The corral lets you upgrade cavalry walk speed and sheep production time, but not the gather rate.

I would not recommend building an extra cavalry just for scouting early on, simply because it's not that important. After the chickens are done - which only takes 2 mins - most good players just scout with the starting cavalry. borg- uses the starting cavalry for deer after the chickens, which gives some extra food and speeds up his lightning fast build a little. Although, deer hunting is less important than chickens, because the gather rate is only like 1/3 as fast due to hunting and walk time (depending on how far away the deer are), with a net gather rate comparable to 3-4 extra women farmers, or 1-2 women berry gatherers.

Cavalry harvest chickens roughly 5x faster than women. It's 400 food in 120 seconds for 5 women harvesting chickens, vs. 400 food in 110 seconds for 1 cavalry harvesting chickens.

Your cavalry on chickens is a big, fast early food source - 400 food in 110 seconds. If you watch borg-, he actually doesn't scout until quite late, and then at first he only scouts around the enemy base for potential places to attack. Instead he uses his starting cavalry for chickens and then hunting. Scouting is not that important early, as long as you have a forest.

elexis, I think the wood gathering rates are fine as they are. If women were significantly worse at wood gathering than men, then most rushes would be impossible because people would make very few women and would have enough soldiers to defend. I would consider that boring.

Women are almost as good lumberjacks as men - and they're a lot cheaper. So you can have 90% women lumberjacks until you switch over to producing men. The thing about women miners is that women give men a gathering bonus, so you can put just 1 woman on each mining spot to give the men the bonus. But no more than that.

These steps can be approached and mastered one at a time. By the end of it, you should be able to have a strong economy as you go from age I to III. Other aspects of gameplay matter too, such as specific builds, rushes, or tactics, but having a strong economy is the most important part. Don't fall into any of these early game traps: Farms go adjacent to your CC or farmstead, as close as they will go. I've seen many new players who put them a distance back. Don't do that. Don't use women for mining. Don't use men for food gathering. Use women or men for woodcutting. Cavalry are for hunting chickens or other animals. Only cavalry are good at this. Hunting is a very fast way to get food unless the animals are very far from the dropsite. If you have berries, build a farmstead right next to them and have some women harvest the berries. It's twice as fast as farming. Don't let your workers carry resources too far. Put the storehouse right adjacent to the trees when they chop wood. If your workers (except for hunting cavalry) are walking twice the width of a storehouse to return resources, they are walking too far. Don't make a barracks until at least the end of age I. A lot of noobs make a barracks way too early, or even more than one. Your CC can produce enough soldiers by itself. Don't make walls or wooden towers in age I either. Good players generally agree not to use walls, anyway, and plus in age I it's just a waste of resources that the enemy can simply walk around. Don't start mining anything until the end of age I. You don't need it. Practice until you can have constant production of units from your CC (Civic Center) for the first 10+ minutes. You should never let it be idle until you're in age III. That means: You need enough food income to produce women nonstop until population 50. You can produce soldiers after that. You need enough wood to make houses - and you need to make houses far enough ahead of time so that you don't get stopped by the population limit. In alpha 20 at least, once you hit age III the plan should be to make lots and lots of champion units. Practice not harvesting resources you can't spend. If you're ever thinking "I have more food than I need - but I wish I had more wood" then you need to transfer some workers from food to wood, and figure out some way to spend the food. (Actually, you probably needed to transfer the workers two minutes ago, but late is better than never). If you have 1000 of any resource in age I-II, you have way too much. If you have extra wood, a good way to spend it is on economy upgrades. The highest priority upgrade is berry gathering, then woodcutting, then farming, then mining. You want economy upgrades as early as possible so you get the benefit for longer, except for the upgrades that are super expensive. Adjust your typical build order so that you avoid having too much of the resource. If, last game, you had way more wood than you could spend, then this game, don't put as many workers on wood so early. And so on. This more than anything else is the mark of skill. You know you're doing it right when you have just enough of every resource you need, exactly when you need it, and little excess. Watch replays of good players! A lot of people don't know where replays are. From the starting screen, they are under Tools/Options. If you spectate or play a game with borg-, The_Company, or nobody___, then after the game you will have a replay of an expert. Switch to that player's perspective in the replay and follow what they do - what they build, when they build it, how many farms they make, when they get upgrades. Then try to copy them in your next game. If you're spectating a game with good players, you can switch to the perspective of the best player and watch them as they play, instead of going to the replay. Practice using Shift to queue up actions. For instance, don't just tell your woodcutter to make a house - tell him to make a house, then shift-click back on the tree! That way he will go back to woodcutting when he's done building the house, and he won't be idle. Work out exactly what you will do in the first minute. This is a "build order." For every civ, you want to put the cavalry on chickens and the women on berries, and the men on wood. You also generally want your first batch of 5 women to chop wood, and the next 4-5 women to harvest berries. The order in which you make a storehouse, a farmstead, get the berry upgrade, and make your first house can vary. Britons and Gauls can build a farmstead at the berries, build a storehouse at the wood, and research the berry upgrade. They will have plenty of time to get 75 wood and make their first house. Most civs have houses that cost 150 wood and grant 10 population. With these you can't get the farmstead, the storehouse, and the berry upgrade all at once, and still have enough wood for your first house. You have to pick two of the three. If wood is very close to your CC, you can get the farmstead and berry upgrade, and get the storehouse later. If wood is far away, you need a storehouse, so you have to skip the berry upgrade to have enough wood for the house. With these civs you will need to use 3-4 workers to make the house once you have 150 wood, so that it will be done in time. Iberians and Mauryans occupy a middle ground since their houses cost 75 wood but they don't have the population bonuses of Britons/Gauls. You can figure something out if you want to play these. Mauryans have an elephant, which can do the job of a storehouse or farmstead and help build houses. Ptolemies are weird. Batch Production. This is one of the secrets that separates the good players from the experts. borg- produces in batches of 5 almost all the time, and in batches of 10 when he has enough resources! Even a batch of 15 can be worthwhile. Batch production by 5 is 38% faster than producing single units. Batch production by 10 is 57% faster. Batch production by 15 is 72% faster. You need more food to batch produce women this way. That means more on berries (like 10), more hunting, or earlier farms. You need to plan houses more in advance, too, so that you have 5 or 10 population open when it's time to produce. Don't delay more than a few seconds to make a batch. It's better to just be producing 1 unit if you don't have enough houses or food for a batch. Some players have altered their javascript to let them batch 3 or 4 instead of multiples of 5. This is cheating. Use hotkeys for at least your production buildings, perhaps also other units. Select your CC and press Ctrl-1, and now you can select the CC again just by pressing 1. Your barracks can go on group 2. This helps you to keep production going smoothly even if your attention is elsewhere. Be familiar with rushes. There are many types. The primary purpose of most rushes is to deny wood from the enemy by killing woodcutters. The best way to learn how to do rushes is to watch replays of experts who rushed effectively. I recommend not rushing until you have mastered the normal economy boom from age I to III. Spartan Skiritai rush Ptolemy camel archer rush 3 minute cavalry skirmisher rush Briton slinger rush Roman swordsmen rush borg-'s 10-11 minute champions Not all rushes are "effective." If the rusher killed 20 women but lost 10 cavalry and was driven away, that was probably not an effective rush, since 10 cavalry cost more than 20 women. Check the attacker's and defender's economy scores and populations afterwards to see if it really worked.

Play normal speed (1x). There is plenty to pay attention to in 0 A.D. at 1x speed. If you play on a higher speed, you'll miss out on it. Good players who choose to boom their economy can reach age III with around 120 population by 12 minutes into the game, starting from low resources without treasures. If you can't do that yet, then there is still plenty for you to click on and look at, at 1x speed.

Player skill levels are hard to figure out when setting up multiplayer games. As a result, it's often tricky to set fair teams when you don't know everyone well. Ratings are not always effective at telling the noobs from the good players, since some good players have low ratings as a result of playing against very good players or not playing rated much, and some mediocre players have higher ratings that they got from beating noobs. I have a suggestion: an additional player stat, derived from rated and unrated games. The stat would be the economy score at 10 mins, taking the median of their most recent 10 non-scenario games with low/med resources (rated or unrated, 2 or more players, excluding Migration and Nomad). While not a perfect indicator of player skill, this would quickly allow you to tell who the noobs are, since their econ scores at 10 mins tend to be half the scores of good players. The stat could be taken only from games where the player lost 5 or fewer units by 10 minutes, to weed out games where the player rushed or was rushed.

Elexis committed my patch on this: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/18427 . The patch gives heavy warships the same damage as a catapult, increases their cost to 350 stone 200 metal 350 wood, and increases their range slightly to 72 (from 65).