balduin

What should I do to bring the uncover function into 0 A.D. For me it is a very important feature. Should I write a proposal in form of a task/issue in track?

@elexis I am pretty sure you can play it faster. @fatherbushido In the latest Alpha 21 and the previous Alpha 20 it is possible to save/load the game and the AI does not have problems to resume the game.

@Lion.Kanzen Are you referring to AoE 2: Rise of Rajas?

@Lion.Kanzen thank you. However, @Prodigal Son mentioned mostly aggressive characters. In addition I would not associate the name of an AI to a historical person. By the way in which programming language is the AI implemented?

Nice. There any documentation about it? Maybe an issue in track or something like that?

I mentioned before the bear does not have an dying animation. I like small things like animals, trees etc. which are made with a lot of love. 0 A.D. has many such things. Like the various food bush and tree. Or once I was coming across an Pegasus, a small detail, but very neat. Such things give 0 A.D. a special atmosphere.

The 0 A.D. team balanced Alpha 21 very nicely. The previous problem in Alpha 20 was that elite forces have been cheap to train and did not take much time to train. The Balancing made elite forces expensive again and even stronger, which makes them very special. Other changes in the overal balance are positive too. Overall the new balancing gives the game a different character and it takes much longer to play. Previously a game took me 1_5 hours, now the game takes around 3 hours to play.

I really enjoy the new variation of farm animals in Alpha 21. It is nice to be able to train goats, sheeps or pigs in the farms depending on the civilization.

The AI made a lot of progress from Alpha 20 to 21. Respect the AI is now kind of intelligent and very strong. It is now one of the best AI's I have seen in strategy game. But the problem with the AI is still that they show specific patterns and uses the same paths and tactics. In addition the AI on level medium and higher is faster in building economics, army and attacks very fast. The problem is the AI does not change their behavior once you are able to defend yourself the AI will run over and over into your towers, walls and other positions. It would be nice if the fighting style of the different AI levels would differ. I would for example expect that AI level medium and hard would train more elite soldiers and make more use of siege engines. Furthermore it would be nice to have AI characters. Stronghold for example has a couple of characters each of which has their own fighting style. Using this basic idea in 0 A.D. could mean to have: - the Petra AI (attacks fast with a medium size army) - the Bandit (who attacks constantly with small cavalry/infantry your weakest points with the goal to disrupt your economy and kill your citizen) - the Economist (defensive, but has a lot of money and resources. He can easily replace any loss of him or his ally.) - the General (takes time to attack, but if he attacks he attacks with a large army) - the Lord (defensive player, which builds a castle and tower to defend his position) What is your opinion on that?

I had the chance over Christmas to play Alpha 21 with a friend over Local Area Network. It was a lot of fun. The multiplayer works very well. I was surprised how easy it is to setup a game .

Archlinux maintains a 0 a.d. package which is always up to the latest release, there is no need to use the AUR package for normal users and developers should clone and build 0 a.d. directly from the SVN repo (or git).

@wowgetoffyourcellphone If you have a group of 20 chariots and you want to make sure those are not in the range of an tower the best thing you can do is adjust the direction. Furthermore you can put units into formations, such as skirmisher. However, formations are nearly unplayable, because you can not decide their direction. It is not necessary to have any in game bonus by adjusting the direction, it simply gives the human player more control. It is like the feature which allows you to assign groups of units to numbers from 0-9, you press the number and you get the group. This feature gives the human player more control.

@Lion.Kanzen This is exactly what I mean. Thanks for the video

It would be so outstanding to include the old Khmers into the game. @wolflance nice, research and ideas.

Why is Neo-Babylon not included in Part III: Perils of Nations? I know it existed only for a short time, but was extremely powerful.

Is there any reason to not include Hittites (in your map Hatti) in Part II: Rise of Nations?

@Lion.Kanzen Sorry, I wanted to respond to @elexis post. However, if you use the function f(x) = q*x*log(x^(s*log(x))) + 20, I created, with the parameters q = 2; s = 7 you would have to spend almost 30 000 metal to uncover all units, if the enemy has 100 units at that time. f(100) = 2*100*log(100^(7*log(100))) + 20 = 29710 metal if the enemy has 121 units: f(121) = 2*121*log(121^(7*log(121))) + 20 = 38961 metal But I think most players would prefer to spend metal on soldiers and the development of technologies rather than revealing the enemy units. Especially, if you can only reveal the units for one single enemy player. If this is still to inexpensive use q = 3; s = 7 which increase the costs to "uncover" all enemy units. For example, the enemy (yellow) has 100 units you would have to pay almost 45 000 metal to uncover all his units. If this is still to inexpensive increase q or s.

In this case "reaching age 3 will take few minutes regardless." it should not be needed.

For the "Deathmatch" similar game mode the uncover functionality could be disabled for the first 5 minutes or so.

@Lion.Kanzen My idea was that you can use the special skill "uncover" (Omniscience) against an enemy. The enemy will be selected from a list or something. Depending on how much units the enemy has left you pay. If the enemy has only one unit left you pay 20 metal. Uncovering the last 3-5 remaining units is still cheap. This is basically the "reveal enemy units" functionality at the end of the game, which I asked for at the beginning of this thread. If you want to use the "uncover" skill during the game it will be much more expensive. The function is complex enough that most people will not be able to predict the cost to unit relationship, which is wanted. In addition parameter q and s can be changed according to the difficulty level of the enemy. The "uncover" skill should reveal all enemy units and buildings to you an your allies. In a multiplayer game one player pays and all allied players can see the enemy units and buildings you selected.

I submitted my post under @wowgetoffyourcellphone post approx. 1 second after him. However, I really like his idea. This could be implemented as technology, which has to be developed and could be disabled if needed. I would furthermore propose, that the all enemy buildings are also revealed if somebody uses the uncover functionality (Omniscience). But @wowgetoffyourcellphone proposes a linear function f(x) = x * 20 where x is the number of units: f(1) = 1 * 20 => 1 Unit -> 20 metal f(3) = 3 * 20 => 3 Units -> 60 metal f(100) = 100 * 20 => 100 Units -> 2000 metal I would use a non-linear function such as: f(x) = q*x*log(x^(s*log(x))) + g x -> number of units g -> min. metal to uncover 1 unit q and s -> two constants to influence the function for example: q = 2; s = 7 uncover 1 unit pay 20 metal uncover 3 units pay 70 metal uncover 5 units pay 201 metal uncover 10 units pay 762 metal uncover 25 units pay 3646 metal uncover 50 units pay 10732 metal uncover 75 units pay 19592 metal uncover 100 units pay 29710 metal uncover 300 units pay 136659 metal the intention of the function is that uncovering a few last enemies is really cheap, but uncovering 300 is really expensive. However, the function can be influenced by choosing other values for q and s. for example q = 1; s = 2 uncover 1 unit pay 20 metal uncover 3 units pay 27 metal uncover 5 units pay 45 metal uncover 10 units pay 126 metal uncover 25 units pay 538 metal uncover 50 units pay 1550 metal uncover 75 units pay 2816 metal uncover 100 units pay 4261 metal uncover 300 units pay 19539 metal I created an interactive SageMath* worksheet, which is attached together with two PDF's with graphs for the above output. *SageMath is an open source math application, which can be found in the repositories of most Linux distributions. gold_function.pdf gold_function2.pdf Gold function interactive.sws

@svott Right. The threshold could be 3-5 units combined with the condition that the enemy does not have a civic center anymore.

@fatherbushido Right I could do that. I played with the default settings both on Windows and Linux on the same system. I would expect the same performance on both operating system, but I did not. In addition I do have a powerful laptop 16 GB RAM, i7, SSD, integrated Intel and dedicated Nvidia graphics card should be enough to play the game without problems on high resolution. My question is can I provide any statistics, any logs or or other information to help 0 A.D. developers to find existing performance bottlenecks?

@Loki1950 I find it wired that I need a proprietary graphics driver to play an open source game. I don't like the Nvidia driver, because does not integrate well in the system, especially on laptops with optimus technology. Optimus is the technology which should save energy by allow switching from the integrated Intel to the dedicated Nvidia graphics card. However, even with the Nvidia driver switching is only possible by using open source projects which are not supported by Nvidia. I basically have hardware which I cannot use properly, even with the proprietary driver, because Nvidia is unable to provide the needed software. That is the reason why I would like to see 0 A.D. working really well with the Noveau driver. Furthermore, the proprietary Nvidia driver can not be audited or verified from a security perspective. Basically, Nvidia can implement spyware, malware or what ever else in their driver without the user ever knowing about it.

@Lion.Kanzen Thanks for the explanation. However, I thought about something more simple. At the end of the game revealing the position of the last few units. For, example enemy has only 5-10 units left, the positions will be revealed and you can go and kill them.