Desophaeus

All of this talk about campaigns and their need for more factions, you guys are forgetting about the map settings. Campaigns doesn't require the devs team inserting an additional faction. It's plausible that a map could have a pre-existing Greek faction tweaked to suit the specific scenario for a battle, and then another instance of the same Greek tweaked in a different way to reflect on the differing city-states for a different player/AI slot to occupy. Adding Thebans wouldn't help the mix of factions we have now.

I suppose I do sound harsh in my rebuttal to your remark. It seems to be an unnecessary sidetrack into spilting hairs, so I brought up an extreme example to reflect on your logic as a comparable reasoning. As for Zeta's comment... But that was before the team was maxed out on number of factions and they were looking to diversify them somehow in whatever methodology, right? At that time, it was ideal to separate the Greeks to allow them to diverge into distinctive factions because there was sufficient spacing left on the shelf at that time, from the sound of it. I would say that has changed now when the team says, more or less, "No, we are not open to further suggestions, we're full on factions as it is." It cuts out the opportunity to improve upon the overall diversity. That's quite a different situation from when the Greeks were a singular faction or when the Celts weren't spilt into Britons and Gauls. Honestly, the Ptolemies, Athenians, and Seleucids are rather poor excuses for factions. Short of a drastic rework, it seems awkward to try to improve those Greeks without making them too similar to the rest of the factions in 0 AD. There has to be something radically different from the typical Hellenistic setup available to meet the need to diversify those supplemental factions without weakening them or muddle their distinctiveness, I don't know. At least Ptolemies and Seleucids do have their own signature identity while Athenians are there simply because they were famous but sitting there pretty useless in the game with walls and boats. It feels like a crying shame to waste five slots on the Greeks but not bothering with truly unique factions such as Chinese (which probably was a horse beaten to death, reincarnated and beaten to death one time too many in this forum) or even Aztecs/Mayans some sort of Mesoamericans that likes to capture enemy workers/warriors to sacrifice for their gods (perhaps a strong combat bonus energizing the hunters or a bonus to the whole civilization?) Between posts, I looked at the factions, I remember now that we do have Carthage which is more or less later-era Phoenicians anyhow. I think that Phoenician idea is already filled out fine by them. *facepalm at myself*

*sigh* Spilting hairs now? It applies. Here's an extreme case of where the inverse actually has more practical application than the orignal statement would have: Have you heard of a VHS tape? Seen one? Held one in your hands? It's obsolete, and it died a very ugly death. Very few people refused to switch to DVDs in favour of keeping to VHS granted, we could keep both. But the question is, is it a good idea? Not anymore. A dual DVD/VHS is less optimal than a pure DVD player. It doesn't even sell that well as a product. And who wants to hold 500 VHS tapes and 800 DVDs when one could hold 2,300 DVDs on the same amount of shelving instead? A person with a quite different set of priorities. That personal choice is perfectly fine to exercise, but we're discussing a product to "sell". I don't like to see a product with so much potential to end up being mediocre and forgettable just because a diehard minor fanbase refused to give up something in exchange for a better diverse cast to pick from. If it's solely an indie game that you're not planning to distribute more than 25 copies for a circle of friends to enjoy. It's not necessarily a waste of such potential because it never had much to start with as an objective in the first place. "I would say it's more like a café keeping a type of cookie on the menu, even if it's similar to other cookies, and even though shelf space etc limits the number of different types of cookies. Is it a good idea or a bad idea? I'd say it depends on whether or not enough people like having access to that type of cookie. And the same applies to the factions in the game, do enough people like to have that variety in the Hellenistic factions? And is it possible for them to be different enough to make them interesting to play?" @feneur, I concede to your point. Your analogy of a cafe with cookies and its corresponding analysis is absolutely spot-on! I felt that the mild diversity of the Greeks were a waste that could have gone to adding something Chinese with radically different characteristics, strengths, weaknesses. Or even a Viking faction that would serve better than Athenians as a naval-based faction with strong harassment ability. (Although, off the top of my head, I would say Phoenicians would be a more suited civilization in fitting the time period while the Norse/Danish should be set aside for the sequel instead). The Greeks could serve as the "chimera" factions with multiple pathways. Wouldn't that serve as an interesting faction to consider? (Probably hellish to balance out in the gameplay, I'm afraid), but do you see why I feel like this question of whether to uphaul the factions or not should be answered with an yes?

The inverse applies as well: to keep something just because one doesn't want to add something doesn't seems like a good way to go. It's like holding onto a cookie inside a jar and not willing to let it go even though the hand is having a hard time getting out the jar's opening. I am aware of two problems that a developer typically will face during a project's lifetime. Feature creep and lock-in. Eliminating extraneous features during the development process is essential to avoid feature creep which could easily spell doom for a product to fail becoming something above mediocre. Lock-in is the inverse danger of being inflexible with an old feature that tends to plague people who are successful in avoiding feature creep. If someone says that it's possible for the two to hit a developer in the same project, I agree with the possibility. I however view one side as being too inflexible and other as being too flexible for the sake of the project's quality output. So I consider them as being the relative opposites to each other. Those two problems are twin sides of the same coin in the sense of dealing with a feature.

Very well... if it goes down to this... let's do it. 1 & 2. Weak rebuttal. Get something legitimate to shove into your next post please. The onus is on you because I already explained what I consider as poor taste, but you have nothing substantial to counter that. Having 1,800 posts in your name doesn't mean anything to me. To make a counter-point, you need to use an actual point in response to my point. 3. You might want to reread my post in its fullness. Or better yet, reread the second quote you used from my post. The rationale the devs used for closing off suggestions for additional factions suggests that a certain upper limit of how many factions they would like to see in the game has been reached, and it will not be exceeded (presumably). To introduce a higher level of diversity without raising the limit would then require some of the current factions to be sacrificed. I had hoped that my oringial post would've been enough to make that point sufficiently clear. Your response made it obvious that I was sorely mistaken. 4a. Don't you think that having an overlap between the Greek civs (in both stats and appearances) would weaken the uniqueness, making it a bit silly to claim that the Greeks are different from each other just much as the non-Greeks? So to wit, the actual answer is that there IS a degree of lesser uniqueness among the Greeks as opposed to the rest of the factions. You can argue about the magnitude, but not the existence of the variance. The lesser uniqueness (or slightly lesser if you must insist) makes the Greeks a logical target to streamline into a smaller number of distinct factions in order to set aside enough room for a more unique faction from a different background to enter the game as a de jure official faction (not just a modded-in faction). 4b. If a mod adds even more factions while keeping the original ones, the uniqueness becomes even more blurry with or without paths, period. Your point is what? Mine is that sacrifices are necessary to optimize. 5. "Chill out?" Try making your rebuttals less inane and certainly less flat-out rejection "because I say so and I'm such an important member of this forum". It sounds that way to me and in truth, weak counters in a debate is insulting me. On a different footing, I don't mind someone disagreeing if he has a good proper case to make.

To be honest, adding Sucessors while having the 3 separate Greek factions and then announce that "we are not open to further additions" is poor taste. I would call it very poor taste especially when it's barely a large difference between those 5 factions altogether except for "which is more powerful or effective" etc, so forth... My point to the devs: I understand that it's not ideal to continually add more and yet more thereby overcomplicating the inevitable task of rebalancing all of the factions at some point. What should have been done was that the Greek-like factions should have been streamlined into one or two factions to make room for a better idea of diverse factions. The Gaul faction should have been removed from the game (since we have the superior Britons which could stand in for the Celts as a whole with some modifications). Edit: One way to maintain the minor variances among the Greeks/Sucessors... IIRC the Seleucids had an interesting choice in the barracks when I recently had tested out in a quick skirmish, but I remember something along the lines of picking either maintain their native military development or to adopt Roman reforms. It gave the player either a strong Inf/weak cav or vice versa. This would work out for the streamling quite well... when picking to play as the Greek (or more accurately the Hellenic/Hellenistic) the player would've a chance of picking from mutually exclusive options that would've worked as "go as Occidental or Oriental, etc... even Land or Naval". There can be some rationalization for making a mutually exclusive choice. The Celts would be easier to give two options to develop into Britons or Gauls, but it's possible to have 3 to 4 (or maybe 5 but doubtful) paths for the Hellenic/Hellenistic faction. I apologize if my idea seems to be not expressed well, but it's a more viable way of reflecting the diversity in the Ancient times.

What you choose to do in a game is up to you but facts are facts... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation As for cutting all of the trees in a war, hell yes... in history, armies did laid waste to an entire forest. Look it up in some various wars where mass tree cuttings were done. Reseeding don't happen overnight, it takes well more than 10 years to get a significant amount of tree growth to occur in nature IF the conditions are favorable. Sometimes it isn't, so the trees either takes even longer to grow up or don't grow back at all. Even if the conditions are great for growing, 10 year old trees are pretty slim and puny in comparison to the old growth. Also check out the secondary forest growth vs original forest growth. The biodiversity goes down HARD, with extremely limited number of species making a successful inroad back into the area while the rest doesn't come back. Let me guess, you haven't been to a place that is growing back after a large harvest of lumber occurred at a specified time in the past. I promise you... This aspect of trees disappearing in the RTS is very much realistic and does correspond with the history of real life AND does reflect the fact that trees and undergrowth do not simply spring back into existence automatically. Even forests that was specifically replanted might or might not flourish and takes a lot of seasons to get on track back to being an actual forest.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the maps set to an individually pre-determined limit? Like a certain map supports up to 2 players, and another map supports up to 3 players, so forth... Am I missing something? :/ (I'm used to StarCraft: Brood War, and its maps btw)

"Deforestation is not just accurate." Wrong, flat out wrong... it is actually historically very accurate. The Lebanese Cedar used to grow all over the Levant region (think Syria, Israel, etc between Turkey and Egypt). Now it's barely found in the wild because it was highly valued for its excellent wood quality and the region became the semi-desert that people today are more familiar with. It's not an isolation happenstance because it did happen in North Africa too, the area around the Atlas mountains were a more fertile land in Ancient times than today. Same for Italy, it used to be covered in forests but the Romans changed it. For England, the results of various invanders are pretty interesting. The Romans and the Anglo-Saxons favored different parts of England. One had favored the hilltops, left the lowlands alone, but the other favored the valleys and left the hilltops alone. The patchwork of forests and grasslands formed the famous Downlands on that island, and it was that way until the industrial revolution then of course everything went through yet a lot more changes. Anyway, in the Ancient times, deforestation was a common occurrence, and it led to soil erosion to the extent where ancient harbors keep filling up with silt in the water. The port cities were often clogged up and then abandoned for a location on the shoreline that now had moved further away from the land throughout decades of cyclical booms and busts. So the RTS games definitely got this one quite accurate as a people do need to establish a new location in order to continue harvesting lumber, stone or metal.

Simple solution: do a tournament style schedule for the players to go up against each other. There's no reason why multiple matches can't be played on a robust LAN at the same time. Like the guy (Stan) said... the lag would be incredibly high even on a LAN if there's so MANY people on one map and each computer would've been struggling to render each and every player's each and every unit and order. I agree with what Stan said to you again... Feel free to experiment, but I have a feeling that you will find the 8+ player matches to be subpar.