ValihrAnt
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Posts posted by ValihrAnt
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- if you remember what I've being writing in this forum lately, it will come to no surprise, but I'm not a fan of differentiating ranged speed again: archers feel goofy and slow, and archer rush is much weaker and slower. Having played half a game (crash? ddos?) as ptole bordering to maurya, I can assure archers are still strong defensively, slowing them down affects their offensive potential more than their defensive one (I played persia the previous match, and I had to move my soldiers very little, still dealing much damage)
- turning times feel fine. In a game were archers shoot one arrow per second, and foot soldiers cover the distance of a bow shot in just some seconds, it doesn't feel unrealistic or unnatural to have people turning around in almost no time.
Not differentiating ranged unit speeds but lowering rotation times will make archers absurdly strong. Same thing as camels archers were in a23. It is impossible to balance units in such a way that they're equal economically (which was the goal of making all move speeds equal) and militarily.
The goal of lowering archer move speed wasn't to make them worse defensively but to make them counterable and not invulnerable to other ranged infantry. Yes, it does make archer rush weaker and it should. It should be possible for the defending player to punish the other for overextending by using skirmishers or slingers. The archer player still has the early edge, they simply need to now put in some thought in how they position their units to not be cut off when the other player masses enough units to fight back.
On 29/05/2021 at 12:33 PM, alre said:Also, skirmishers being faster, they can chase archers, but if archers are close enough to a defensive position (and they are, because they are slow and you don't want to expose them too much), archers still beat skirms easy, and can still kite them to some extent (if the map is dense enough, kiting is just as possible as without the mod).
Skirmishers weren't good fighters in a23, aren't now in a24, and still aren't with this mod.
If you only sit next to a defensive position you completely give up map control. It is an advantage that a lot of players don't know how to utilise. In regards to skirmisher strength, I really don't see why they're not good fighters. They don't get the early range advantage like the archers but when they make up the ground they're strong enough and with the movement speed difference they will now be able to punish if the archer player misjudges a fight. It won't be only archers that can punish the other player retreating.
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Oasis is a bad pick in my opinion. The map comes down to which team can sling a member to P2 faster for getting a quick warship out in the middle. After losing water it is impossible to fight back. Neareastern Badlands has the same kind of oasis in the middle but it has forests around the map. It'd be fine if they weren't so random, though, as it's quite likely for a player to spawn without any accessible forests. Syria has the same forest spawn issue. For Sahel Watering Holes I dislike the chokepointiness.
Some maps that are occasionally enough played on MP but aren't here: Ambush, Frontier.
Some maps that I personally like: Empire, Alpine Lakes, Latium, Ratumacos, Red Sea, Stronghold.
Kerala not being forced as Jungle biome would make that map much more frequently played.
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Buffing/nerfing or moving units around to different phases isn't the only way to incentivize aggression. Another way would be to make players actually think about map control. Currently, a new CC is something that you see very rarely. Reducing their territory influence will force players to think about expanding and give more importance to map control. Of course, reducing the cost of CCs would be needed in effect.
With all the ideas for offensive options there need to be more defensive options. Giving Military Colonies to every civ would be a positive too. They work as a defensive and offensive option. Secure a vulnerable or important part of your base, or establish a forward foothold if you're the attacker.
In general, I dislike forcing players to just pick between set options.
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2 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:8 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:
I disagree, going to P2 gives you absolutely no benefit if you plan to play aggressive. The eco techs are quite expensive and military techs are much too expensive. There's a reason you don't see players getting military upgrades in P2 and why the P2 eco techs frequently get left until after clicking P3.
I did list a number of solutions to this problem earlier in the thread. Pushing the Syssiton to Phase 2 is only one option, and the problem with economy and military technologies sounds like an entirely different problem. Having champions available at the start of the game would be an interesting difference that no other civilisation at least at the moment has, and it would be a shame if it were moved to a different phase just for that reason. That all said, I understand the basis behind your argument; honestly I'm just happy that Sparta can train Spartans earlier.
What I said there was referred to this statement:
Quotealways staying in Phase 1 is quite risky because you cannot back yourself up with siege, heroes and necessary technologies.
Simply, I believe that phase 2 currently provides too little benefit, but that's a different problem. I'm not against trying P1 champs either because it is an Alpha after all.
2 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:8 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:though moving cavalry champions and ranged champions would likely be a bit too much.
Again that is a fair concern, but there can be a difference in stats of a champion in the Town Phase that are immediately improved upon advancing to the City Phase.
Yeah, that kind of solution can also be tried.
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I don't mind giving some civs more citizen soldier options, but keep in mind that civs having weaknesses is also a good thing.
Pushing champions to phase 2 is something that should be experimented with, though moving cavalry champions and ranged champions would likely be a bit too much. Phase 2 siege can be interesting but I don't think it should ever be more than rams.
QuotePoint 2: Spartan gets Syssition in Phase 1.
Explanation: Military was the main part of Spartan life no matter what phase they were in, so they deserve early access to this in light of their training of boys from young age. Having access to champions in phase 1 is a strength, but it certainly is not overpowered because they are expensive. No phase 1 player can afford to spam them and always staying in Phase 1 is quite risky because you cannot back yourself up with siege, heroes and necessary technologies.
I disagree, going to P2 gives you absolutely no benefit if you plan to play aggressive. The eco techs are quite expensive and military techs are much too expensive. There's a reason you don't see players getting military upgrades in P2 and why the P2 eco techs frequently get left until after clicking P3.
For Athen P2 champs, there is this patch: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3930
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12 minutes ago, Freagarach said:
I know, but probably to the point that they're not noticable anymore (since that is kind of the request). I've been playing with a lot of different values when this feature was introduced (and when critique came during the dev-cycle) and for me the current ones are really a minimum.
The rotation times become quite noticeable on 90+ degree turns. The units walk speed also plays a role so with swordsmen it's much more noticeable than skirmishers. I guess it is mostly a difference of viewpoint.
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19 minutes ago, Freagarach said:
Please do note that for casual players (the few I know of) the rotation times really add some immersion.
Rotation times aren't removed, they're still there and are simply reduced.
8 hours ago, alre said:9 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:I feel like that's already the case for us. There are rare strategies that start with instant military and many of the rushes are at the enemies base quite quickly.
That's because in 0 ad age 2 is not very useful, and that's another problem still.
I'm not sure I get your point. The early rushes aren't a thing only because P2 options are more limited in this release. In a23 I used to play cavalry rush into Athenian P2 champions which were the most expensive unit available then and it was a valid approach that could win against top players like borg. With P2 having more options the early P1 rushes won't go anywhere.
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19 minutes ago, wraitii said:
TBH I think we went a bit too far on A23 with regards to anti-dancing. But I also don't think microing against javelineers or archers is a particularly good gameplay mechanic.
That being said, a simpler variant of Hyperion's idea would be randomly changing to target other units close by. That might be enough to make hero-dancing less interesting.Move-attack micro wasn't a thing even in a23 when there was instant unit movement. Fights in 0 A.D. come down mostly to positioning.
In my changes I only adjust the rotation times of citizen soldiers. Heroes and champions with their current rotation times are completely useless at trying to dance, that's been wiped out.
42 minutes ago, wraitii said:Edit -> Somewhat on topic, but I'm wondering if 0 A.D. standard starts shouldn't have _more_ units/buildings, kind of like the AOE2DE "Empire wars" mode. Since we're fast-paced anyways, maybe we should just cut the crap entirely.
I feel like that's already the case for us. There are rare strategies that start with instant military and many of the rushes are at the enemies base quite quickly.
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14 minutes ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:
There is a reason; I clearly articulated that, but I will admit that it is not a solution I particularly care for. The point is that if we wish to reduce spam, decreasing training times is not the solution. Other options include increasing the cost of the barracks and/or increasing the training times at the barracks. Again, these would not address the fundamental issue (at least in my opinion) that I did point out.
I articulated myself badly there. What I mean is that in my opinion there's no good reason to limit the amount of barracks or really any building for that matter. I believe that spam is something that should be part of the game and used as part of a strategy if the player deems it the correct approach. Say one player tries to rush up to the City phase with low investment in military, the other player recognizes that and spams out military to try and overwhelm the other.
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9 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:
The reason that the spam exists is attached to the fact that barracks can carry out virtually an identically economic role as they can to a military one. If units trained at a barracks started at an advanced rank or had a gather rate penalty, both of these would make the barracks a risky investment to commit to early on from an economic standpoint.
Yeah, that is the unavoidable side effect of citizen soldiers. Though, I really don't see why them having a gather rate debuff would make the barracks a risky investment. Where else are you going to put the resources? If they're trained at an advanced rank that would hurt early aggression too as units trained from the CC would have to face off against some units that are a rank higher and thus stronger.
9 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:I have pointed out before and can make the same point again; 0 A.D. has extremely fast training times for their units compared to games such as Age of Empires 2 or Starcraft II, the latter of which is already considered a quick-paced game.
I can't speak for SC2 but keep in mind that AoE2 is played at 1.7 speed. Best comparison in AoE2 to the current boominess of 0 A.D. would be an Arena or Black Forest game as those are most generally boomfests and the lategame action starts a bit before or on minute 30, 30/1.7=17.5 minutes real life. Compared to 0 A.D. where the big late game figts break out a bit before or on min 15. I don't think the pace difference is that big especially if we consider how slow the Dark Age in Aoe2 is.
9 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:If we want to reduce the spam without changing the economic functions of the barracks, simply having a cap of 1 barracks during the village phase would do the job; it would have other effects undoubtedly, but it would "fix" it.
8 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:The point is that unit spam during the Village Phase is a thing, and merely increasing training time has not stopped it. I would go for a different approach (like the change to the barracks mentioned).
There's no reason to cap barracks. The best solution is to offer military options and have players slow themselves and others by utilising them. Of course easier said than done, but that's what I believe is the best approach to be worked towards to over time. Players trying to remain in P1 and hold on just by sheer numbers is an approach that should be atleast semi viable in my opinion. Keep in mind that it gets hard to reach resources if you stay in P1 for long.
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Played 2 3v3 matches with the mod. Here are the games. Would be nice to get some 4v4s with more people before I start making patches for these changes and make sure there's wider support for them.
Edit: removed the files as there's a new version and the replays are now outdated
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Upon having thought about this more, I think the better way to solve this problem is to offer more military options in P2. Things like the now gone Athenian P2 champs or the Spartan Skiritai, or the now very weak Gaul Naked fanatics. In combination with more accessible military upgrades it should combine to make aggression in P2 more viable and reward good scouting, but obviously would require a lot of effort and change to get there.
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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.
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3 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:
In most of the TGs I have played most players start to push around minute 15, when they have siege and full pop. I wouldn't call that turtling.
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.
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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?
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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.
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5 minutes ago, Nescio said:
It would make using the corrals to raise animals to butcher for food considerably easier.
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.
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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.
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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.
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@ValihrAnt the rotation times indeed slow down economy, but since they were implemented to prevent dancing (something that had many complaints), I'm not sure how to best compensate for this. I think it's a great idea to try lowering rotation times though and testing it out.
Higher cavalry move speed was not something that I considered though so I'll definitely try it out. Thanks!
I also liked the hp bonus per phase up, but it admittedly came with the issue of buffing cavalry too much. Since cavalry had a higher base hp, the bonus affected them more than infantry, which resulted in some abusive cavalry strategies. I'm not too sure how to deal with this. Perhaps further reducing tower damage?
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.
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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.
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What about taking a page from Aoe2 and giving rams and maybe catapults splash damage against buildings too? So against single buildings the damage is the same but against buildings built right on top of eachother, like pallisades, the siege weapons would be much more effective. I really don't like the idea of putting limits on walls and such buildings
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12 minutes ago, Nescio said:
Village phase requirement?
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.
QuoteThat depends on what others want. I myself generally prefer smaller, cheaper technologies, e.g. we could consider splitting ranged attack into one for archers and another for javelineers. Perhaps something for a future patch
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.
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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.
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A25 Feedbacks from testing
in Game Development & Technical Discussion
Posted · Edited by ValihrAnt
Didn't realise I had a mod still enabled by default.
On the Alpine biome stone spawns are scuffed. 10k or 15k of stone spawning in the same spot. I suppose the 1k mines were replaced with 5k mines but the generation wasn't changed.
For Mainland the Eurasian Steppe biome is the only without its own preview picture and instead shares one with the Temperate biome.
The Nubia biome has some superbly unfair wood spawns (on Mainland atleast). The Acacia canopies look very nice but make it nigh impossible to tell how many trees there are near them.
The India biome description advertises tigers that aren't spawned.
This is probably more for the next release but would it be possible to select which biomes you want the game to choose between. The India biome is very resource intensive and thus will be avoided for TGs and maps with scarce resources are also generally disliked, leading to a lot of hosts just sticking to 1 picked biome entirely. Would mean that the disliked biomes don't make Alpine into the default biome for a lot of hosts.
It's about the same as it was A23. Going for a very fast P3 slightly easier but riskier as towers don't count for the required buildings. The high metal costs for eco techs slow things down slightly for people being eco focused.