Sundiata

These ones are indeed Villanovan/Etruscan crested helmets (bronze age). The rest are Celtic though, except for the other crested Urnfield Culture helmet, which is also Bronze Age (pre-Celtic). This one looks a bit like an awkward mix between the Coolus and the Roman Imperial Gallic Helmet. For it to look like the classic Coolus with cheek guards, it should look more like this:

The 4 helmets on the left row of B is the "Celtic Montefortino Helmet" (later also used by the Romans). The 4 helmets on the right row of B is the "Coolus Helmet" (later also used by the Romans) C looks like the Ciumesti helmet, without the raven crest, essentially a ceremonial variation of the Montefortino type Conical helmets seem to be known as the Marne type and the Berru type I'd take another look at the exact shape of the Berru type: The darker helmet on the far right looks like a Bronze Age Villanovan or Urnfield culture helmet (crested helmet/kamhelm). Don't know if you've ever seen these beautiful ceremonial types before:

In my opinion it would be nice to reserve the Sutton Hoo helmet for one of the heroes? Your helmet looks cool, but I think it's missing some detail. Looks pretty epic on this guy:

Lovely matchup! The most epic one possible for that period... The age old question... Rome vs China!

Jomon goes up to 300 BC, so it's still within the right period for references, but yeah, they're culture starts very early Indeed... But it does make them more comparable to the Zapotecs and other potential future pre-colombian civs in many regards, which is interesting (no real navy, no cavalry, no iron). Personally I'm fine with the Kofun/Asuka/Yamato period, but it would be nice to use Jomon and Yayoi references for village and town phase, and "evolve" into Kofun Japan in city phase...

@Lion.Kanzen Nice refs! But that's a lot of Kofun/Asuka/Yamato period stuff, which belongs more in the Millennium AD period. To stay in-line with the timeframe of the vanilla game, we should focus on Jomon and Yayoi period Japan. Unless we're taking a different direction here?

Yeah, 0AD's tutorial is a HUGE step forward in my opinion, kudos to everyone that worked on it! It can, has, should and probably will be updated with every new alpha, so that's very positive. An entire tutorial campaign would be epic indeed. Maybe when campaigns start being a thing... Some optional in-game advice would nice too for beginners. When you build a structure for the first time, recruit a unit for the first time, attack or get attacked for the first time, more explicit (perhaps smaller) unit information dialog-boxes could automatically pop-up, pausing the game, explaining the what, where and how's of it all (only for SP of course).

Indeed, balance isn't the biggest issue here, but the fact that most new players just don't know certain things that are important to understand the game, and there isn't really an easy way of learning them without searching through the (very large) forum or straight up asking more experienced players. That in itself puts off a lot of people because they get frustrated from not understanding what they're doing wrong. Ideally those awesome new information dialog boxes could also provide more explicit information, as opposed to just stats (not everyone is a numbers person), such as "swordsmen counter rams, ..." in the swordsmen info, and "rams are countered by..." in the ram-dialog. The other issue is that certain aspects of the game just aren't intuitive enough. Anybody that has never played 0AD would naturally expect any melee infantry unit to be able to take out siege-equipment (sure, one may be a bit better than the other, but not a huge difference), and ranged units are expected to struggle with covered siege like rams and siege towers, but could take out uncovered artillery like bolt shooters or catapults.

For fishing vessels I was thinking something like the coracle, basically a simple/primitive pre-historic usually round(ish) vessel made of branches over spun with animal skin (sometimes waterproofed wicker), once common from Neolithic Britain to the modern day native Americans, including seeing use in Central Asia, including Mongolia. I can't find anything specifically on Xiongnu river transport, but a number of nice rivers full of juicy fish traverse their territory... For transport/trade, they could have a raft. Simple wooden frame supported by inflated animal skins. Coracles and other animal skin-vesels from around the world:

Marauding rams is a problem. A ton of people have complained about this, both on the forum and in many online games I've played. What counters them is not intuitive. Neither is it intuitive that siege towers should be captured, instead of just destroyed. Siege should be attacked by default, not captured. Can we just agree on this please? Siege should always be slower than the slowest infantry units. Can we please agree on this as well?? So, apparently this isn't a democracy (okay...), but if you keep ignoring recurring complaints and only changing the game to benefit an absolutely tiny fraction of the player base, the general public is going to loose interest.

I believe there is consensus on this.

Of course. But you know me... I always like to dream big Me dreaming some more: Another thing is that a lot of the micromanagement is tied up in the "economy". Tasking individual units to do this and that. Especially with regard to tree cutting and tasking and often re-tasking a specific number of women to specific fields, and even construction. I have a radical idea that I've always kind of wanted to see in 0AD that would focus the micro on battle, and economy would be more of a macro thing. I've suggested it before in some capacity, and will probably trie to work the idea out a little further in the future, to be able to explain it well enough (not that its so difficult to understand, I just need to find the right wording). Anyway here's an early draft: The economy and civilian aspects of 0AD feel very stale. Mind you this is not unique to 0AD, but a problem of Classic RTS games in general. They never truly feel immersive, where other similar gaming genres have achieved an incredible feelings of immersion, especially city/town builders and economy or civilization management games, but those games always lack in combat. One of the problems in Classic RTS is that economy and civilian life feels very unrealistic, almost dead. For example having to tell individuals (civilians) what to do all the time. If not, they just stand there... 0AD is not a simulator, and probably never will be, and that's fine... But it doesn't mean we can't attempt to "simulate" certain aspects of the game, especially with regard to economy (and even construction). Basically what I'm getting at is higher level of automation for the sake of a more realistic economy and civilian life. In many building/strategy games, you simply have a (pop-up) panel with all your building options... Want to build something? Just click the the icon of what you want to build, place it, and done. Available workers will now autonomously go to the site and start construction. Building many things at once and can't wait for a particular structure to finish? Prioritize the building project(s) you deem most important (perhaps with levels of priority for maximum control). Or build more construction guilds to increase the amount of builders available. There is a civilian population (men, women, children), which could grow dynamically based on how many houses and necessary resources you have available (mainly food, but availability of other products could influence population growth/stratification as well), supplemented by immigration. This civilian population could be "simulated", controlled by an AI. You decide what to build, and where to build it, and the AI automatically assigns builders, and after its construction is complete, the AI assigns available workers, who become part of a running animation in the structure they work in (sometimes no more than entering and "turning on the light", or having some smoke coming from a chimney). The amount of available workers is determined by your civilian population minus employed people. Its from this same surplus of civilians that you recruit fighters (who would still be controlled manually, and could still be tasked to build fortifications/infrastructure or clear forests manually, like before, but not mine or farm, or build civilian structures). With this kind of system, civilian and economic aspects of the game could be greatly expanded and diversified, while removing unnecessary/unpleasant micro. You could even have simple production chains, which are always awesome in games like this. Managing brainless individuals is replaced with managing a living economy, with automated individuals going about their daily tasks. Finite resources become "semi-infinate", and the output of economic structures is determined by the amount of workers, tech, radius, level... Not by how smoothly individuals may or may not pass obstruction boxes. You'd have an income and an expenditure, determined by a host of easy to understand/intuitive factors, easily managed and adjusted with an economic pop-up pannel, with all the info you need to know and the option to adjust/finetune things to your liking. Apart from the construction and economy pop-up panels, you'd have a third military pop-up panel as well, for everything relating to military (formations, battalion/army setup, recruitment, overview of all units/battalions/armies, military tech). Forests regenerate over time, wood being harvested through lumber camps (sustainable slow income). Tasking your army to clear a forest will clear it for good (unsustainable, rapid income). Metal(s) are typically mined from realistic looking mines, usually in a hill/mountain-side away from your original CC (continuous income). Smaller alluvial deposits could offer one time metal income, much like it is now, not too far from your original CC, but not too close either. Stone comes from realistic looking stone quarries (same story as metals). We could have things like brick makers, as bricks were the primary construction material for most civs in-game. Various civilian and administrative structures specific per civ, could increase things like population growth, motivation for workers (increased outputs), or generate glory that makes your soldiers fight harder. I'm thinking about things like taverns, markets (with which civilians interact), shrines, statues, bath-houses, courthouses, and many other potential civ-specific structures. You wouldn't just be developing the economy and military of your chosen civilization, but also its culture. Basically, what I'd love to see is 0AD in its current state, with a rich blend of civilization management games like the classic Caesar and Pharaoh, and the modern Anno series, Banished and Life is Feudal: Forest Village, mixed in with combat simulator elements similar to the Total War series. None of these simulation aspects should be as complex or difficult to understand as they are in dedicated management games, they should be more simple/arcade-like, so you can focus most attention on building, recruiting and fighting, with a semi-autonomous, living economy in the background. I know, I'm insane, but that's what a lot of people are really waiting for, and 0AD/pyrogenesis seems like a platform that has the potential to evolve in this direction. Economy wise, I'm thinking of something similar, but more simplified/arcady than than Banished and Life is Feudal: Forest Village: Even a game called Ostriv is doing some interesting things with regard to production chains and economy managment:

But that would change dramatically if battalions were eventually implemented for military units. I really wouldn't mind commanding several battalions of 100 units each I know this isn't Total War, but it would be really epic, to increase the scale of battles and simultaneously decrease unit-micro. If performance improvements allow it, of course.

Caesar spent years campaigning all over Gaul (about 8 years, I think), as opposed to spending probably no more than 6 months in Britain (both campaigns combined), barely going inland at all. His descriptions of Britain including the specifics about the war are far less expansive and detailed. If anything, he says that there is little difference between the British Celts on the coast and the Gallic Celts (except for chariots for example). And a logical fallacy. I wasn't arguing that Britains used the bow because Carthaginians, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Mauryans or Romans, used the bow. I was arguing that they used the bow because their immediate predecessors (yes, partly ancestors), used them, as well as their culturally very similar contemporary neighbors, the Gallic Celts. Yes, of course, but expecting tangible evidence in the form of organic remains from more than 2000 years ago, or written records from a pre-literate society is kind of silly, isn't it? Interpretation of circumstantial evidence becomes necessary in this scenario, and I believe that a "lack of archery among British Celts" is the wrong interpretation. Archery being present, but probably not playing a big role in warfare seems like a much more tenable and nuanced position, than a lack of archery altogether.

But I'm not arguing anymore for them to have recruitable archers (that was only in my first post on this topic). I'm just saying there's no reason to believe they fell out of use at any time. Bows were predominantly made of wood... There are no remains of 2000+ year old bows in Britain apart from the Neolithic ones in the peat bog, which were only preserved because of the peat. The British isles were pre-literate before the Romans. There are no British written records that I'm aware of... That makes no sense whatsoever... Just to entertain you: if there was evidence for the use of quinqueremes and war elephants in Mesolithic and Neolithic Britain (which there obviously isn't), then you could argue that they may have used them in the bronze age, but seriously, what kind of comparison is that? Comparing a simple and ancient bow (which was definitely in use in Neolithic Britain) to the incredibly complicated quinquereme or war elephants (which definitely didn't exist in Neolithic Britain)...

@elexis, so you're telling me:

Ok, so why not indeed, for the sake of gameplay, give slingers and archers the same unit-roles, with the same damage in terms of stats. Slingers would just have a slightly higher range/lower accuracy and archers a slightly lower range/higher accuracy. I think that's intuitive enough, no? @Nescio It's not that I disagree with no archers for Iberians and Britons. I'm fine with slingers... I just disagree with overly absolute statements, and the idea that the bow disappeared from Iberia and Britain when their neighbors were using it and its use was widespread in the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It didn't just disappear in the Bronze Age. My theory is: The Neolithic bows were found in peat bogs if I recall correctly, which means they may have been offered (as the most advanced weapons of their time). During the bronze age, bronze weapons become a sign of status and wealth, and become preferred over the inferior bow for offerings, which is why there are no finds of bows from this period. The bows just decayed like everything else... Not all the inhabitants of the British isles were Celts though, so what "other" did in Neolithic times is definitely very relevant here, because there's no evidence that they simply disappeared, and they would have influenced the British Celts, which explains some of the differences between them and mainland Celts (like roundhouses)... "Near-total population replacement" (of the Mesolithic people) is not the same as total. There is always some form of continuity, even if its minimal, but this can sometimes have significant implications. Modern Europeans are at least partially descended from their Mesolithic and Neolithic forbearers, even if it's just percentages we're talking about.

"Hundreds Of Thousands At Playable FPS - Making Of The Black Masses P.1"

True... Well, yeah, of course, but how likely is it really that cave-people used archery, but their descendants somehow forgot it, only to be rediscovered/re-introduced after the Roman conquest, seems odd to me... Sure archery became less important in the face of swords and metal tipped spears, but I'll never be convinced it disappeared completely (not even from battle)... It is indeed incredibly difficult to find a decent reference. But even here we have Neolithic examples from Somerset, which do indeed seem to fall out of use in later times, and were then re-introduced... ?? I personally think they never disappeared... The very idea that they "disappeared" sounds silly to me, but without a reliable reference for archers among British Celts, I won't advocate for archers for the Britons. Either way, don't Britons and Iberians both have slingers, kind of negating the archery issue in their case? So no archers for Britons and Iberians, who have slingers, but archers for everybody else (even if they also have slingers, should just become available in different phases) ?

Sure, but regarding the civs we have in-game, I'd say all of them used archery. Iberians used archery in combat since the Mesolithic (oldest depictions of combat in Europe): Since the Britons depicted in-game are Celts, I don't see why they wouldn't use archers. Never recorded in high numbers in battle, but I believe present nonetheless...

Archers is another one of those units that every civ should have, without exception. Even Sparta could have Helot Archers, mentioned before by @Hannibal_Barca. Even Vercingetorix massed Celtic archers at Alesia... Some civs should just have better archers than others (perhaps only after specific town-phase upgrade for archery heavy civs), but it shouldn't make a huge difference in village phase i.m.o. I don't see the logic behind limiting historically accurate units in some civs... Yeah, I get it gameplay, but this is a good example of how its actually messing with the gameplay. Where it is historically accurate, civs should have acces to those units that can help mitigate some of their weaknesses.

@Alexandermb, here's the brown and black zebu, again, tested with the Sanga mesh so I hope its ok:

So maybe indeed make siege towers specialists at capturing (walls, towers, fortress), but not much more. Build workshop and train engineers to build siege equipment in the field. Engineers have poor defense and attack, but are used/required for building siege equipment. Engineers could carry a small cart with wood, which can be converted into siege towers or battering rams. Artillery should remain as it is. All siege moves even slower, so they can't maraud over the map. Spearman can take out siege as well as swordsmen. Ranged units remain mostly useless against siege (except for the xiongnu ram/uncovered log carried by men, which should go down relatively easily if unprotected by your men)

No, they should serve as inspiration for decorating the Xiongnu Kurgan (burial mounds, tumuli), which should be the wonder(s), and were often decorated with such stones. Thet're called deer stones, and they predate and postdate Xiongnu, who incorporated them in their own burial mounds: They are similar to the Kurgan Stelae, which decorated burial mounds from Ukraine to Siberia and Mongolia. Its a very wide spread practice found among the Scythians as well. It has a neolithic origin, but continued into the Medieval period in Mongolia...