Grugnas

the territory influence difference between phase 2 and phase 3 is quite big, but perhaps it is just an impression.

Preventing an opponent to build a civic center near own territory borders is quite easy because of the high vision range. Perhaps civic center influence is too high as long as a couple of civic centers are able to cover most of the map ( maybe my pov is influenced by the fact that athenians could build walls in neutral territory but this is never possible because most of times there isnt any neutral territory at all in late game) and a slightly lower influence would let players build more in order to gain influence

citizen soldiers get -10% gather rate and +20% damage and health, +1 armor whenever they get promoted.

how so? do you mean remove citizen soldier thing and train units directly in battalion batches? the definition of "hard battallion system" isn't clear enough to let me think that it would be something better than BFME system. There isn't any advantage into having a battallions only system that a locked formation can't perform except the better flexibility that the latter one has ( i talk from the player experience point of view) as long as units within in formation can behave differently from single citizen soldiers units which are able to also perform building and not military-oriented tasks. Matter of fact having a formations with military bonuses would discourage taking fights without using any formation thus keeping the advantage of micro management and the advantage of battallions macro management when needed.

actually latex is really powerful but i always wondered if it is really worth to use it. What i mean is that this seems more like a scripting language than an "advanced" text editor thus it will require practice and to remember scripts and libraries that perhaps one can easly forget over time thus not so "time saving" even with practice. But sure, if you want to invest more time for something of really fancy, LaTex is the way to go.

Please stop convincing me that a battalion system is the right way to go XD

Formations are bugged because units have problems into finding own position in the shape when near obstructions. This means that the whole formation wont move if 1 unit get stuck (i am sure this mostly happens when the members are reaching own position in the shape when forming the formation ) nor attack thus you are forced to delete whole units within formation. I was thinking about a system like for control groups hotkeys where if you lock a formation through a button in the middle panel ( where u see the garrison, repair, deletr icons) , whenever you select an unit within formation, the whole formation will be selected just like a battallion with the flexibility to disband and modify it whenever you want ( but code comprension is quite nasty)

Units move already at speed of the slowest unit within formation.

the yellow made a nice resistance and didn't resign even in hard times, and that was great. My army was composed mostly by slingers because they don't require metal, stone is easy to gather and because they are effective against building. Another nice strategy with ptolemies would have been to expand with military colonies and train many rank 2 skrmish cavalry which perhaps would be effective even against camel archers. Sieges Towers are fun but perhaps too powerful against buildings ( matter of fact a % of their attack is crush damage ) and really easy to destroy of the damage they do against units. On the other hand they require many soldiers to work ( on a 150 max pop game, you can garrison max 11 siege towers). If orange would have trained a couple of rams, he could destroy all my towers ( this is also the reason why i used slingers. they are quite effective against sieges too ). One of the most common mistakes is to not retreat cavalry and heal them by garrisoning a temple or a civic center in order to get full health higher rank cavalry for future raids, and never get phase 3 because too busy raiding.

I like the idea of having a temporary aura draining resources in order to stay active, but i can't imagine which benefit it could do ( there are several economical and military technologies with a discrete cost that make the job ). Perhaps gathering faster by moving faster only in own territory? ( it would affect also soldiers which is bad ) converting a percentage of gathered good into another good? there is the market already for this kind of task, and if you find yourself exchanging 100 good for 1 good only, there is something wrong with your strategy. Afaik many people talked about a structure able to heal soldiers outside own territory, you call them "altars", but perhaps the building couldn't be built by healers but need them to garrison or pray near it (like happens in DE with the glory resource ) to expand structure healing aura range. I am not a huge fan of garrisoning units into temples because its limit of 20 units only isn't enough and giving priority to most wounded units by micro-selecting and send them to garrison a temple is quite too meticulous task.

lol, part 2 is even more interesting Indeed a "tower spider" city will protect you from skirmish cavalry raids (melee cavalry is healthier and has higher mobility thus palisades may be a better choice) but the idea is to use towers as support to units into defending from cavalry while expanind elsewhere. Matter of fact cavalry is just a better version of infantry and this is a limit to strategies choices because everything infantry can do, cavalry does it better as long as you can mass produce them ( that's the main reason of why ptol archer camels are overpowered ) which is kinda easy in early game because food is the easiest and the most important resource to gather at start ( see berries bushes with 100 wood costly tech and animals ), while later in the game your soldiers production is blocked by lack of other resources even after researching the wood technology ( while 15% wood gather rate isn't that big and perhaps just unlocked to search the next techs and not for a noticeable economy improvement, 50% wood gather rate allow you to keep max 15-20 women or soldiers on wood and use the rest of your population for massive attacks), mostly by lack of wood ( another reason why towering the whole area is hard to do without keeping women uncovered ).

in savanna biome there is always plenty of minerals and stone, this is balanced by the lack of wood (baobabs still yield more wood than other trees), while playing in other biomes you can still use market to barter resources for stone, which is kinda profitable( champions aren't a must to win anymore, and catapults still use stone ). I recall a 3v3 Ambush map where short wall layers could safe a zone at the entrance of a canyon and more than 4k stone stockpiled. Some civs like ptolemies, romans and iberians have higher stone costly barracks but they also have other advantages ( an example is the roman siege wall which costs wood ). I am sure that mines number is proportional to the map size, this means that if you choose to build 10 fortresses in small maps, you are in a point of the game where you could end it already and perhaps to start a self-trade route. Still 10 fortresses cost is 10k stone gatherable from the starting quarry and an additional one. The issue with walls IMHO is that wall turrets kinda double wall layers health and they have no minimum distance restriction like defense towers do, thereby they are exploitable by concentrating many wall towers in a small place, being able to kill elephants with ease ( like someone likes to do ). i guess that 1 wall turret is even cheaper than a sentry tower.

Beyond civic center, wonder, defense towers, fortress (and let's say 450 stone if you research all the economy technologies ), barracks (for some civs) and slinger and catapults (which aren't trained by most of the civs) there isn't any other thing costing stone. Considering that a single mine gives you 5k stone, probably with 2 or max 3, stone walls are really easy to build. A good example is how fast can britons build a fortress despite their economy units are mostly slingers.

this is perhaps the only reason why the strategy worked. At same skill level, this can be a discrete strategy in team games when opponents' focus is spread between the other players, but it won't work in 1v games or in 2 or more vs 1 because you would use too much wood and soldiers to garrison defense structures, which is a lower gathering rate resource to gain than food ( primary resource to train cavalry with ) especially in early game when you are able to research fruit increased gather speed and hunt nearby animals, which incentive also cavalry train. Also, towers have a minimum distance build restriction thus 1 single tower has to deal with more cavalry than they could seriously damage and force to turn around defenses.

this makes me think that perhaps fundations have different size than built walls, thus you are not able to rebuild the tower because the walls obstruction is too big. ( i don't have a solution though )

mycenaean cowy shield looks amazing.

Ubuntu 17.04 uses gnome 3, while ubuntu 16.04 uses unity. By the way, the issues i commonly encountered while switching between distro ( still based on ubuntu but with different desktop environment ) is the alt + enter hotkey to switch into windowed mode.

i recall that it properly works on Ubuntu 17.04

fixed a bug in the 22.1.4.3 related to town bell.

that's amazing. As said before, i wonder if this could be used as excuse to get rid of the support class. Having more units of "support" class with basically nothing in common is a bit messy.

as if it would break the things

Slingers damage on a build is an abstraction to make the game more interesting, otherwise slingers should be faster in movement than skirmishers (pouch of rocks is less cumberson than a quiver of javelins and bigger shield), with higher range and accuracy which seems kinda imbalanced. Having history as main reference doesn't prevent to have some abstraction though. Also, pierce damage damaging buildings is really unrealistic.

Sentry towers required 3 soldiers in a static place, this means that i needed about 20 or more soldiers idle to keep my territory safe. Matter of fact, micro managing soldiers to garrison towers would be messy and perhaps they risk to die through the way. Outposts damage is 16 pierce damage per arrow for a max of 1 arrow, while sentry tower has a max of 3 arrows for 4 x 9 damage = 38 damage ( 45 with sentry technology ). Garrisoning 1 men into the outpost is far more efficient because you require 80 wood and 1 soldier for 16 pierce damage, instead of 100 wood and 1 soldier for 18 damage. The real deal is that sentry towers aren't worth to build as long as they are somehow weaker to pierce damage than outposts because of their low hp. The nice thing is that the combo of outpost + towers deal enough damage to force enemy cavalry to retreat. The down side of the coin is that the combo can't be used against archer cavalry because of the oputposts low range.

Skirmish-Knight vs kizitom ( didn't mean to upload this replay but it is worth the deal ) Defense towers were the core strategy against cavalry raid. This game was kinda hard because kizitom cavalry raid started before i could reach phase 2 and build towers. Outposts are a quite nice defense against skirmish cavalry as long as they are cheap and more resistant than sentry towers in phase 1. towerdefense.zip