ValihrAnt

Returning to the old train times is something that has been requested by quite a few people. Rotation times have also been unsatisfactory for some and the ranged infantry move speed equalization has been reverted, but not as extreme as it used to be. This mod is here to test out these changes, see if players would really prefer these changes and also avoid surprises in case of backtracking, because as a24 showcased there can be many unexpected side effects. The rotation times are only changed for citizen soldiers, so champions, heroes and siege still take a while to rotate. The train time increase in a24 was to reduce spam. In my opinion, it only increased spam as the meta went from 1 early barrack to 2/3. Equalizing ranged infantry move speed worked to make archers unpunishable because if they were caught out of position or overextended they couldn't be punished. Changes: Citizen soldier train times back to A23 values. Rotation times for citizen soldiers lowered. Archers 0.6 lower move speed, skirmishers 0.6 higher move speed. Archers 0.5 extra spread. New version: messed with rotation times slightly, gave archers the 0.5 extra spread they have on the release version to see how it fares in combination with them moving slower. RotationTrainTimes.zip

That's my point. Most TGs there will be no action until the 15 minute mark because aggression just isn't viable due to booming being unpunishable as it's effectively the same as turtling. It makes the game quite boring.

One of the bigger gameplay issues that 0 A.D. has, in my opinion, is that booming = turtling. It means that every game is a complete boomfest to the lategame with little to no aggression after the occasional early rush. The problem stems from citizen soldiers and the fact that they are the best economic and military unit available at the same time. The solution I've got is to increase the gather rate of female citizens to be equal or greater than that of citizen soldiers. This should offer a dilemma between picking a safe approach with citizen soldiers or taking it risky with a women boom to have better economy. Similar in lategame, do you opt to have all women on economy to be able to field a larger army or have soldiers on economy and be safer from raids, or do a mix of units?

The biggest advantage of the elephant is being able to reach resources you otherwise couldn't and keep efficiency constantly high. Skip out on a farmstead when hunting, take neutral berries or metal. In these tests you limit yourself from using any of the elephants strengths. The big advantage of the Mauryans is their early boom plays into great early late game. Removing the pop bonus and having it be unique to Persians is a better solution than messing with a unique gameplay quirk of the Mauryas.

That can considerably backfire by having a players food disappear at a time where unit production is crucial. It can be compared to auto farm reseed from AoE2, which is only used in the late-game by high level players as it can eat up wood right when it's required for important buildings, siege.

Have no problem with this being in the base game as it's nice for casual players, but for those who want to play competitively it is significantly worse than manual training.

The positive aura bonus thing, which provides a build speed boost will only work to make setting up farms and houses around the CC faster. I don't really see a reason to use some convoluted bonuses or debuffs to keep the player from farming near the CC. If you want players to farm in more exposed areas simply reduce the amount of farmers per field and appropriately reduce field cost.

Dancing was mostly done by abusing patrolling or with high hp units. Obviously you could still dance with any unit but that wasn't too frequently seen. Patrol dancing is now impossible due to set wait times, so what could be tried is having citizen soldiers with none to very little rotation times, then champions, heroes, siege, elephants with current rotation times. Basically rely on the much more frequent use of melee units to hide the issue. In regards to the phase up bonus helping cavalry, it could be just a set amount of hp, say +10hp for all citizen units. Alternatively, infantry and cavalry can just have different bonus values, say 10% for cavalry vs 20% for infantry.

In regards to turtling being the meta, I'd say it comes down to rotation times and reduced cavalry move speed. The rotation times severely slowed down wood gather rates while farming is mostly unaffected. This means that players are more incentivized to train more early soldiers and less women as they aren't as efficient in wood gathering and fewer are needed for farming. With slower cavalry move speed that plays into woodlines being near impossible to raid and farms being very hard to raid, due to there being less farmers and thus them being able to hide in the CC and other buildings. Additionally, rotation times hurt the attacker more than the defender. Engagements always happen in points of interest. For the early game that would be near woodlines. As a defending player I fight as far to the back as I can and with all my units grouped. The attacker though has to have his back units slowly traverse through the forest or around my buildings, while I can have all my soldiers fighting. Oh, and I just remembered that another thing playing into towers and other defensive buildings seeming much stronger, is that units no longer gain a hp bonus from phasing up. If I recall correctly it was +20% per phase so that means units currently have about one third less hp in the City phase.

I was initially thinking about having two technologies in Town phase, but I don't think it'd be bad to experiment with it being in the Village phase. Maybe with a cost reduction to 150W to make it more accessible. Splitting attack upgrades by infantry and cavalry could be a way to go about it. I feel like specific unit upgrades shouldn't be in the blacksmith but in the Barrack or such buildings.

Currently blacksmith technologies, the vast majority of time, are still only researched a while into Phase 3. They’re just too expensive for what they provide and without any bonuses for phasing up or specific unit upgrades, like in AoE2, phase 2 is generally just a step on the way to p3. Place the 4 buildings, maybe get eco upgrades and go up. Making blacksmith upgrades more accessible will help encourage aggression in phase 2. In addition, I believe there should be a 3rd level of upgrades for the blacksmith, especially if we stick with just 4 different upgrade types. Also, I like that upgrade costs for ranged and melee are differed by food, wood costs and I will stick to that. To keep it simpler I’ll also retain both armor upgrades having same total resource cost and both attack upgrades having same total resource cost. Attack Currently: 600F/W + 400M then 900F/W + 600M Attack Proposed: 150F/W then 200F/W + 100M then 400F/W + 250M Armor Currently: 400F/W + 400M then 600F/W + 600M Armor Proposed: 100F/W then 200F/W + 50M then 500F/W + 300M I think the last armor upgrade providing +2 armor instead of +1 would be good too (I based the cost on that being the case), as the armor upgrades scale worse and it would also help keep the kill times from becoming too low.

Agree with this. Don't think this one is necessary with spearmen getting an attack bonus vs elephants. Can maybe reduce their armor values by 1 as they now get affected by blacksmith armor upgrades. So initially they'll have less armor than in a23 but after upgrades they'll have more. This would require a very hefty increase in food cost then. I wouldn't fight against a small nerf. I agree with a nerf on archers. For infantry damage or accuracy, or a bit of both and for cav archers accuracy. Yes, early cavalry are much too weak now and pretty much are only useful for trying to harass berries. Yes, a return to the old values or something similar is necessary. I was happy to experiment with the changes, but upon figuring out the meta more it's just simply a step back. I guess it also depends on how you define spam. In a23 making 1 barrack for a faster uptime or 2 for a stronger eco approach was the norm. Now the meta, atleast in my experience, is to plop down 2/3 barracks in p1 and spam from there as resources come in quicker than they can be spent otherwise. For me that fits as an increase in unit spam. On a tangent, I suppose another reason for doing more barracks is that the 2nd level economy techs have become more expensive for less gain and it's more efficient to just spam out units in p1 and skip straight to p3, while getting the techs on the way up. Not getting the phase up hp bonuses also makes it super risky to phase up early now. In higher level games it was something that was already being punished, especially by @borg-and @Feldfeld , and with those bonuses gone it becomes super dangerous for no real gain.

I'd also like to hear some thoughts on altering or removing the passive stance. The main problem is with units doing the weird run and thus avoiding shots and baiting the attacking units after them. Most noticable on healers and women with the loom upgrade as units will run straight into the enemy army to try and chase them. Then there's also players who put the hero on passive stance and position the hero in front of their army as an easy alternative to dancing. Edit. Also with melee units becoming more usable and necessary, dancing should be far more difficult.

Some issues and stuff: 1) Spectators are able to rejoin a game even if late observer joins are disabled. Basically, an observer who was kicked from a match can rejoin despite him theoretically not being allowed to by the setting. I didn't test if an observer who simply left a match is able to rejoin despite late joins being disabled. 2) On normal buildings you can set the garrison point to inside of the building, so the trained units are instantly garrisoned. This is not possible on warships, which means that Persian and Athenian ships which train units must find a shoreline for the units to spawn and then manually garrison them. 3) I'm not currently a big fan of the outpost changes. The garrisoned unit being vulnerable feels weird and with how little vision bonus the outpost provides it's better to just patrol the unit. If this is kept the vision bonus should be increased from 20 to atleast 40+, though I'd rather go back to how the outposts used to work and maybe make them a slight bit weaker hp wise. 4) Unit rotation times have an unintended consequence that reduces incentive for early aggression. So, while food gather rates remain about the same wood gather rate is considerably slowed down, which leads to players creating far fewer farms and also requiring fewer units gathering extra berries. That makes it much more difficult to find value in an early rush as the woodline will be more reinforced and the smaller food economy is easier to protect with the Civic center or house garrisoning. (Not sure what's the best way to go about this one) Also some things I think are important to become part of the base game in A25. 1) Building creation and selection hotkeys. The groundwork has already been done with the hotkey editor and these are probably the most important hotkeys for any RTS game to have. 2) Specific unit training hotkeys. Currently which unit you train with the hotkeys is tied to their order in the selected buildings. It'd be great if we were able to set a specific hotkey to each unit. So a citizen skirmisher will always be trained with the same hotkey no matter whether he is first in the selection or last. That's about all that came to my head at this moment.

Yeah, that's the case. I was on SVN and badosu through GitHub. Thanks for your time, we'll know to check for that in the future

oos_dump.txt oos_dump.dat

I tested it and it makes it impossible to dance. At least I didn't manage to find a way to play it in the short time I messed with it. The one problem with this is that it does make unit movement feel very clunky. Maybe it can be fiddled with to make it nicer though currently, gameplay wise, experimenting with units having aimbot could feel a lot smoother, but that's just me.

May gods (banned: Ptol and rome) vs animal farm (banned: ptol and iber) May gods vs Animal farm.zip

eae em vs Goats EDIT: banned civs from both sides: Ptol and brit eae em vs Goats.zip

New version. Changes include: Removed Promotion animations Spear cavalry: 6H + 5P / 2s to 4H + 3P / 1.25s, champ and hero spear cav adjusted in same manner. Rams: 0.9 speed to 0.8 and can't attack organic units + fields anymore Allow building Kushite merc camps in neutral territory Mostly made this to play around with some proposed changes in multiplayer more easily. BalanceTestModV7.zip

ValihrAnt vs Feldfeld Very nice and fun matches. We also both streamed the matches, so if you want you can watch the vods. My pov (with commentary): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/595518040?t=0h1m9s Feld pov (no commentary): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/595515841?t=0h5m8s Draft: Ant bans Gauls, Feld bans Ptol. Ant picks Brits, Romans and Athenians, Feld picks Brits, Athenians and Spartans. Score: PPL Vali vs Feld.zip

ValihrAnt vs dakeyras Bans: Ptolemies & Britons I'll also upload the replays for the past games which I had sent directly to Stockfish initially. PPL Vali vs dakeyras.zip PPL Vali vs Taylor Games.zip PPL Vali vs H.Herly.zip

It might be obvious to you or me, but some others could be unsure what to pick. It's better to mention these things instead of assuming that everyone will just know what settings are correct. The norm in drafting is that an already taken civ can't be taken by the other player. This deviates from that so, again, I think it should be made more clear.

@Stockfish Here you've uploaded an old version of the balanced-maps mod, which doesn't even contain the map ''Cross''. Also detailing on what settings (Population size, starting resources etc.) the maps should be played would be very helpful in avoiding confusion. It would be very helpful to mention that you allow both players to also pick the same civs. Additionally including how the drafting and banning is done below this line will make it much easier for players to know how the drafting is done, as otherwise it can be easily unnoticed in the poster. I understand removing jungle but why savanna? So you will upload all the replays to the first post?

Ant is signing up too.