Boudica

Thanks for letting us know about the experience, but don't forget to reinstall soon, otherwise it will count as a win for the hard bot. Oh wait! Did I get that right that it made you angry that the hard bot was... hard? It seems funny that you made it a lot about "the gullible people", but I'd see the requirement for non-challenging gameplay as a similar issue to focusing too much on the flashy visuals you mentioned. They are the reason why many of the big titles aren't even fun to play anymore. Because that's what people want. To look at pretty pictures and have their ego stroked for absolutely nothing. Wouldn't you also prefer to have a payment option to skip to the "fun part" in the game? Right, those gullible people. Why are they all like that?

How hi are you? I wish you luck for the 0 AC challenge! This summer doesn't seem to be extremely hot, so I believe it's doable.

I can imagine that it's a fun lifestyle. I used to know a few ballroom dances, but those are usually only done on special occasions like weddings here. And last time I danced at one, it got me into a minor fight with my wife. It could be something about me touching another woman that she didn't like. We'll never know! So anyway, perhaps I already am beyond the end, where I just don't dance anymore.

Great job, @guerringuerrin. I missed one of the missing words on the second line, which is the first part of the three-word name that you already found. The remaining letters (left to right, top to bottom) give the secret message. Regarding the smurfs: The puzzle wasn't intended to endorse making alt accounts. Anyway, it just seems comical for someone to have so many of those that you can make a crossword out of them. I believe that the names mostly had been reported in the past. Not sure if they can be logged into, but they still can be found, so it seems that no action has been taken on them. I can remember what felt like a one-off event during which some people were made to use their original account, but that was a long time ago and it might seem like a waste of time reporting the same few guys who can be seen with a new account every month.

Thanks for giving it a try. You got most of them! Most of the ones used here anyway, otherwise we'd need a bigger grid.

Now for something a little more difficult. If you cross out words that are (parts of) JC's smurf account names, you'll get his life philosophy.

That's a good thing that you improved the cryptographic security. GG to anyone who thought about brute-forcing it.

Great! Wouldn't it be fun if the lobby rating reflected your knowledge of 0 A.D. lore based on quizzes like this one? Maybe that would be more useful for balancing. The solution is: Anyway, still wondering who the Romanian player is.

Let's wrap it up with a classic for now.

It's getting danker.

No names have been mentioned.

Thanks to the anonymous moderator for approving my previous post. I hope you'll like this one too.

I really appreciate that you guys took the time to verbally appreciate my memes. I'll now make a few more, with a progressively declining standard of quality.

At this point, I no more believe that the cheaters are trying to have a reasonable discussion. It's just like "What could I write that would be reminiscent of an argument to possibly let me keep doing what I'm already doing?". Half of this is just trying to shift or relativize the topic, or telling fair players to either cheat too or go play elsewhere. Then, when a counter-argument is taken apart and proven as flawed, they will just repeat it unchanged in a new thread. Tell a lie often enough, right. Or, maybe even put the lie right in your bio. That way it gets automatically repeated after anything you write. Smart. So I see @Seleucids say "STOCKFISH DOESN'T CHEAT", and that's a really bold statement to put in your bio because of how hard it is to prove. Meanwhile, there are people like me who just do have the proof in the form of replays, eyewitness testimony, screenshots of chats discussing the usage of the mods (what is meant here by cheating anyway). So what is it now? It's just acting dumb and trolling.

When the support for up to 15-player team games is added

It definitely was a nightmare... to the enemies who had to do "everything else", but they were lacking the wood for that anyway, while my allies could keep spamming warships and disrupting the trade, which was the only remaining source of wood. Sure, it wasn't easy to evaluate all the various factors and come to the conclusion that doing an efficient trade was indeed the best use of the scarce APM available. Those five clicks per minute completely sucked me into a "sea-based trade with land traders" vacuum, making me unable to focus on anything else but winning the game. I think it starts showing that there is now little variety of the hosted games. People just have their one mainland build and will run if a setting change requires them to do something different. Even considering that a strategy could mean something you do when it's the right time for that, rather than something you now just do every time, becomes hard.

The repeated mention of the word nightmare in reaction to a powerful idea that I shared with you has somewhat turned me into a sarcastic mode. Imagine having to click periodically in order to acquire required resources! What's next? Having to place a new house every time you reach the pop limit? Restarting unit production at the barracks every minute? Or! Imagine having to manually pack up your catapult in order to move it to the next strategic target every time. Almost sounds like they're requiring you to control what's happening in real time. We could as well give it a funny name to that effect, something like... IDK, a "real-time strategy".

So it turns out that the question Thales asked isn't a bad one at all. The most profitable way to trade on a naval map would indeed be using land traders that you manually put in and out of a ship. And I wouldn't really use a merchant ship for that. You'd want to use the bigger, faster and stronger warship. Athens used to have a hero boosting the speed of the ship he was in, so you'd definitely want that. Now, you need to be precise about how you handle the merchants for this to work. You want to set them up to trade between the docks (or markets), starting from the one that is reachable by them (on the same island), and when they start carrying resources, you put them in the ship. After moving the ship to the destination and dropping them off, you need to use the back to work command (this is the key part). Only that will ensure you won't lose the carried resources. I had tested this strategy previously, and in a low-resource naval environment, I can definitely imagine that this could work. One player could probably focus on just managing merchants and sling resources to allies.

When the "sh1t ally" from the previous game is now facing you and winning