causative

It's realistic to be able to capture faster than destroy. Which takes longer, using a sword to knock a house flat, or using a sword to evict the current occupants? Completely destroying a house (or castle, or tower, or any other building) using just swords or pikes actually makes no sense and was never done in medieval combat. In my opinion, capturing should even be much faster than it is now, so that it can be used effectively by normal units and not just champions.

I think capturing is good because it makes it somewhat easier to attack. 0AD is a game where it's too easy to defend. Static defenses in other RTS games such as Starcraft 2 are not nearly as powerful or durable as the defenses in 0AD.

Also - kind of related to damage and damage mitigation - priests shouldn't be healers. Considering the backwards state of battlefield medicine at the time, there was very little a priest or doctor could really do to help a wounded soldier. Priests should instead have a morale-boosting effect like a hero aura. Temple technologies should decrease training costs of troops, because of religious propaganda ("Athena is on our side, so join the army today!").

@Loki1950 that's a good point. To be really realistic, armor penetration should be separated from damage. A very fast arrow can penetrate better armor, but once it hits flesh it doesn't poke a much bigger hole than a slower arrow would. Armor penetration would decrease with range, whereas damage would decrease more slowly with range. An "ultimate" armor penetration model would work something like this. For each body part (head, abdomen, arm, leg) there would be a percentage of that body part covered by armor/shield, together with a number indicating the strength of the armor covering that body part. An arrow would have an armor penetration value that gets rolled randomly when fired, and decreases with range. If the arrow hits the armored enemy, first it randomly selects a body part to hit, based on the area of that body part. Based on the "burn percentiles" chart, this would be roughly: 36% chance to hit the abdomen, 38% legs, 18% arms, 8% head. Then it rolls again to see if it hits the armor covering that body part, or misses the armor (the difference between a shot to the helmet and a shot to the face). If it misses the armor the arrow hits. If it hits the armor, but the arrow's penetration value is less than the armor strength for that body part, the arrow does no damage. Otherwise the arrow hits. The amount of damage when the arrow hits would depend on the body part hit, and shouldn't depend very much on the type of arrow or bow. An arrow is an arrow, when it comes to poking a hole in meat. Head wound - very high damage, likely instant death. Abdomen wound - high damage. Leg or arm wound - lowest damage (but still possibly fatal). To be truly accurate wounds should add disability to the unit such as decreased walking or fighting speed. To be even more accurate, wounds should have a delayed possibility to kill by infection. Infection was a truly major cause of death in medieval warfare but the would not kill immediately - only after a delay of some days. The way it could work is, when a unit gets wounded it gets a certain amount of infection points on a timer. The timer should be some amount such as 60 or 120 seconds so that the unit can finish the battle before infection sets in. When the infection timer runs out, the infection points are deducted from the unit's HP total. Abdomen wounds would have very high fatality rates from infection. Being shot in the gut is pretty much a death sentence eventually without modern medical care. Arm, leg, or head wounds would have lower fatality from infection, but still substantial.

Hunting range is not the same as combat range, because to hunt you need to hit the target, but in combat you only need the arrow to land somewhere in the enemy formation. This article estimates the range of ancient bows: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1087210?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. You have to pay for the article but you can read the first page for free, which includes several useful claims. It quotes an earlier article apparently by the same author saying "that bowmen were quite accurate up to 55-60 meters; that their effective range extended to at least 160-175 meters, but not so far as 350-450 meters; and that 500 meters was an exceptional flight shot." The article then qualifies this statement based on additional data, saying "To judge from ancient documents and modern performance, two hundred feet (59.2 meters) is unthinkably short for arrows, sling-bullets, or mechanical artillery; all outreached this limit at least threefold." That article was about ancient bows. Here are a couple of sources for more modern bows, which similarly conclude an effective range of hundreds of meters: http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/8022/how-far-could-an-english-war-bow-shoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_bow#Range Hundreds of meters seems a common figure for bows in warfare. Despite the range, in ancient and medieval times bow combat was limited by the amount of ammunition available - particularly for the defenders in a siege, who didn't have access to trees to make new arrows. It was also limited by the fact that once your own forces intermingled with the enemy, archers had to stop shooting because of friendly fire. In Agincourt, for example, British archers switched to melee weapons once the French men-at-arms were among them, partly because the archers were already out of arrows.

To be really accurate the biggest change would have to be food. Food would be a resource continually consumed by all units, instead of just buying a unit for a fixed amount of food. If your food production is interrupted and you run out of food reserves your units would begin to starve, suffering lower stats and losing HP until they die. 95% of people around 0 A.D. were farmers so this is really important. Why was the starvation method of siege effective? Because the defenders needed very large fields to get food for themselves, and they couldn't afford to build and defend walls around that large area. This was an essential part of military strategy. Fields should be huge, covering large areas of the map, and hard to defend. Corrals would require large fields too (sheep have to graze).

Using houses and other buildings to create barriers is an accepted strategy. They aren't nearly as powerful as walls because they can be quickly captured and destroyed by champions. They also have no gate so they block allied units as well as enemy units.

Thanks for the link.

This is a thread for summarizing balance changes in a20. I'll start: Fixed a bug so "battlefield medicine" now only works on idle units. This weakens massed champions significantly. If you have 50 damaged champions attacking an enemy base, they would be healing 25 damage per second in a19. With 12 pierce armor, it's the rough equivalent of the opponent having 4.5 extra garrison arrows. Your champs also don't heal while walking from base to base now. The Mauryan Pillar of Ashoka now grants a trade bonus. Fishing upgrades Fields have less hack armor Shared dropsites Promoted units have more capture attack Palisade walls are much less expensive, faster to build, and less durable. Stone walls are somewhat more expensive, slower to build, and less durable. Wall turrets do half as much damage. That list is based on me skimming the change log and I could well have missed something. What other balance changes are worth mentioning?

Never played it, what are the walls like?

http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Manual_Settings

I have a strange suggestion that could simultaneously make walls balanced, preserve more historical accuracy, and prevent pathological uses. The concept is that walls were historically used mostly for walled cities or forts, and therefore they should only be made at some distance encircling a CC or fortress. All walls would be like the Iberian starting walls. The concept is that you do not build walls individually; instead they are purchased at the CC or fortress for a suitable amount such as 1000 stone. The purchase could be called "fortification" or "walled city." Once purchased, a circle of wall foundations is automatically placed at a distance around the CC or fortress that purchased them, provided the space is clear. You can then assign workers to build the foundations into walls. The result is exactly like the Iberian starting walls. These walls can be repaired by workers, but if they are destroyed the only way to rebuild them would be to spend another 1000 stone to buy "walled city" again, which places new foundations. Deleting the foundations should not return resources to you. Anyway, just a funny idea. The Iberian starting walls provide a very powerful defense, but not imbalanced, and they are more realistic to the historical use of walls.

What I do is include the following lines in my local.cfg, so that the "find idle worker" key is g (instead of the default comma) and the "select idle units" drag select key is v instead of i: [hotkey.selection] idleonly = "V" idleworker = "G" That way I can press them both with my left hand, while my right hand stays on the mouse.

Aside from any specific build orders, there are some basic economic concepts. The two most important things to keep in mind are these: Your CC and workers should never be idle as you advance from age I to III. You don't want to "float" too much of a single type of resource without spending it. If you have a lot of one type of resource but can't usefully spend it, rethink what you're doing. If you're really on the ball, all four resources will stay low. If you can do those 2 things, then it's hard not to have a good economy.

Show me a screenshot of one of these games just before you attacked.

Probably your opponents failed to fully garrison, or they didn't have walls preventing you from getting at their defensive structures.

I sent 540 champions to their death, and many rams as well. The position was impenetrable. Rams, as I mentioned, can only approach one at a time due to the trees, and were easily killed one at a time by the catapults regardless of how many champions were with them. The champions themselves were slaughtered without killing any walls. I would send in large numbers of champions - at least 50 each time, more than 80 a few times. They would be slaughtered by arrows while damaging one wall... halfway. At one point I tried an endless flood of champions (brythonic longswords), with the initial flood backed up by constant production from 20 barracks at once, with pathetic results. There was a moment towards the end of the game when my opponent messed up and left a gate open, allowing me to flood in with 50 champs and capture and kill most of his catapults. He was able to mop it up before I could take the fortress or military colony, however, and quickly rebuilt.

This doesn't work if the walled opponent can set up trade routes with himself behind his walls. Even trading on a short trade route for 5 or 10 profit per trip is enough to keep his economy going, if you have to spend 5 or 10 times as much resources to attack his position as he has to spend to defend it. Sure, it would be nice if a "starve" strategy worked, because it would be more historically accurate. Perhaps it could work with some modifications to how trade works. Although, trading with yourself is necessary on many low resource maps, so it wouldn't be a good solution to simply remove that option. "20 champs to destroy a wall without losing any troops" - not if there's a garrisoned fortress behind the wall, or some workers repairing it on the other side. "you can easily destroy a wall with 1 siege ram" - see my screenshot earlier in this thread in which that was impossible. Siege rams can be easily killed by melee or catapults, and in fact a wall can be repaired faster than 2 siege rams can damage it. "Making siege stronger, or walls weaker is not a good option as it will affect everything else" - making walls weaker would only affect walls. Making siege stronger wouldn't affect everything else, if you only give siege an attack bonus against walls specifically, rather than increased attack against everything. Minimum distance between wall turrets would be great and would solve much, although not everything. Requiring a minimum distance might complicate wall placement since it would require wall segments to only be the long kind. I have a suggestion to solve this: make wall turrets be very cheap (e.g. 5 stone) when initially built, and not shoot. They could be called "corners" instead of "turrets." But you can upgrade a wall corner into a turret that shoots, for 100 stone, similar to making a gate - but only if there are no other turrets within a minimum distance.

One might wonder why wall turrets that shoot even exist, considering they duplicate the function of defensive towers. Britons have wall turrets that don't shoot or garrison. Why not make all civs be like that? That reminds me that Britons especially (or any race, if they don't care for the turrets) can simply delete their wall turrets before building them, and only build the connecting segments, resulting in a wall that is less than 30% as expensive.

If walls were nerfed in many other ways then perhaps it wouldn't be necessary to have siege weapons deal so much damage to them. Having siege weapons deal a lot of damage would be a way to make walls balanced in a single step.

If siege pathing was fixed, they'd still be vulnerable and slow, they'd just require less micromanagement. I'd still make walls around my fortresses and CCs (and trade routes) if siege pathing was fixed, siege killed a wall in 2 hits, and players accepted walls as OK. It would still be worth the small cost to prevent invasion by massed champions alone.

If catapult range was increased to maybe 100 meters, so that you have space to put soldiers and walls in front of the catapult out of range of the enemy fortress, then attacking a fortress without champions would be workable for those civilizations that have catapults. However, not all civilizations have catapults. Battering rams have enough pierce armor as they are - they don't die to arrows. It's the citizen-soldiers trying to protect them that would die to arrows. Rams need champs to protect them.

I don't want to see multiplayer relegated to a lesser forum that fewer people visit when all other topics can be posted in the main general discussion forum.

The purpose of walls under this change would be to force your opponent to get siege weapons and maneuver them into position - which takes a long time - instead of simply swarming you with 100 champions. If this change were made and then good players agreed that walls are OK, I would definitely encircle every fortress and CC I own with walls. I don't think 2 hits is unreasonable considering the vulnerability, slowness, and poor pathing of siege engines.

Very nice, except that siege weapons can very easily be destroyed if they don't have an army capable of accompanying them into the storm of arrows! You can't assault an entrenched position - even one that has no walls - without using champs that can withstand arrow fire. Garrisoning your non-champion army inside the siege weapons is no solution either, because they have to ungarrison to defend the siege weapon against the attackers, and then the arrows kill them.