Boudica

I think that @elexis had a patch to increase the player count limit. One of the problems is that (some of) the map generating scripts aren't designed to work with more than eight players.

Welcome to the forums! Don't worry, more people have complained about single player difficulty for beginners. On the other hand, experienced players often complain about how easy the bot is to defeat (or even more of them and at higher difficulty settings). So perhaps it can be just that the game isn't the easiest to learn. Anyway, there are some articles with useful hints for beginners. I could recommend reading The road to expert (see topic below). Other than that, watching experienced players play in observer mode can give you a great idea of what (not) to do. You can even find interesting game replay files here on the forums, so you can watch them whenever you decide. Enjoy the choice. I think I won't go into any specific gameplay details here because everything has probably been written elsewhere already.

So if the game took place yesterday, you'd look for a folder with a name like: 2019--23_0001 Jokes aside, there probably aren't some special tricks to beat multiple lower level players. You probably just want to grow fast and attack early with rams. For an experienced player, beating five noobs is often easier than beating just two medium players. Anyway, Feldfeld has posted a few games like that, so you might be interested to check how he does it:

Nice map! I'd just ensure that the Alps are passable by elephants, otherwise @Hannibal_Barca probably wouldn't want to play.

It probably was an abuse. Elexis wouldn't have banned you for no reason.

This new name really fits you though.

So that would confirm my hypothesis. Fortunately, this doesn't really happen that often.

But the red houses don't seem to be connected to the black territory in the first screenshot. Hypothesis: The houses are actually connected, but it's not visualized like that. I think so.

If I recall correctly, I've seen someone with a name like this in the lobby. That's a bit fishy considering you get an error whenever you try to log in. How could that be? Perhaps my memory just fails me now. Perhaps @user1 or @Hannibal_Barca could tell you more about the problem.

Is that second screenshot really an answer? The houses probably should start converting only after the blue CC is finished because they get cut off at that point.

So maybe consider not using multiple accounts then?

Plot twist: The rating doesn't stabilize.

I think I should share my useful life hack with you. When you have a feeling that the game takes too much of your time, all you need is use the magic Alt + F4 shortcut.1 It gets you out of there instantly and you are now free to do whatever you want with your time. There is no need for the devs to manage your free time for you. Isn't that great? As a bonus, when everyone takes care of themselves and their kids, developers will have more capacity to add new features into the game, so everyone can profit from that. 1) Does not apply to rated games.

We should unban JC soon, otherwise he's gonna keep coming up with more half-baked ideas like this instead of playing.

Welcome to the forums! Using cheat codes is only possible if they are enabled before the game starts. In that case, the game shows a warning next to the I'm ready button and the match is automatically set to an unrated one. Using cheat codes in a cheat-enabled game is not against the rules because that's what the players agree to play when they hit the ready button. I recommend either asking the host to disable the cheat settings, or making some planes by typing how do you turn this on? in the chat window after the game starts. Enjoy the choice!

It's possible that your mobile connection provider doesn't support connecting to STUN-enabled hosts. Not much can be done about that, except finding someone who has their ports forwarded and hosts without STUN.

Let's also add that you got your points when playing against other players. That makes me think there could be a problem with AstroCoral's rating update message not getting delivered. What could that be caused by?

Did you mean to say "you never stop making me laugh"?

Hello! There used to be some memory leak errors, even though I think it's improved since quite a bit. I don't think so much memory is really needed by the game. As a quick fix, I'd recommend restarting the game after any long game, which releases the possibly leaked memory. Perhaps a question to ask would be which map you were playing on? What was the population cap? I'd avoid huge map sizes and unlimited population cap games.

It's already almost a week, but Emperior hasn't got over his defeat and it has come to him spreading some false accusations about my supposed cheating. Today he compared me to JC and that was the time when I decided to take actions. So here we are, let's put the replay here for everyone to judge. We picked a less played civilizations, so this probably could be a nice game to watch on its own. Teams: r4pt0r, Boudica, PhyZic vs. Emperior, Unknown_Player, darkcity The encounter we were talking about happened at 30:00. I had 50 archers, 6 elephants and 5 pikemen. Emperior tried to counter my army with 35 spearmen, 16 pikemen and 12 skirmishers. You probably already noticed that his army balance was sub-optimal with below 20% of ranged units. The funnier part is that my archers got all attack upgrades, which made each of them deal twice the DPS compared to the spearmen Emperior's army mainly consisted of. I concentrated my army so that my elephant's don't get cut off and die to skirmishers. Emperior proceeded to attack my elephants and pikemen, which were on the front, so they served their tanking role perfectly. Emperior's army was cut to pieces as expected and that was all there was to it. The weird thing followed when Emperior accused me of dancing with the elephants. There wasn't really much commanding of those elephants from my side as the fight was basically a no-brainer victory. All of the elephants lost quite a lot of health but it would be expected for them to take some time before dying to spearmen. Some of the elephants were walking part of the time but there was barely any chasing noticeable. So this is it. Emperior could be heard he can't be bothered to make a GIF of the situation to prove my cheating, so I took the time and made a GIF of all the elephant dancing I could see in that game: 2019-06-22_ElephantDance.zip

We must say that realism isn't really the top priority; playability and enjoyability are. Rams attacking units aren't any less realistic than elephants attacking buildings for example, but we have it this way so that civilizations known to use war elephants don't also need to have rams available, which would make them unfairly more versatile. Anyway, this one thing regarding rams has been changed in borg's mod.

Notice that there are basically no ranged units in the list. Ranged units typically only deal pierce attack, which is completely useless against rams. I've often seen people trying to destroy rams with a bunch of archers and that's when they start to complain. You'll usually have access to either citizen-soldier sword infantry (Romans, Iberians, Kushites), cavalry (Celts, Athens, Persia), or both (Mauryans), so it's a good idea to have some of those prepared when you expect a ram attack. There are some civilizations that either need a special Town Phase building for swordsmen (military colony for Ptolemies, mercenary barracks for Carthage), or you might need to get to the City Phase first for better ram counters (Macedonians only have cavalry spearmen as a usable ram counter in the Town Phase, which can make it harder for them to defend against rams). Once you get to the City Phase, you can make stronger counters. Rams are perfect as long as they aren't destroyed first by the enemy rams. An elephant wins a direct fight against a ram but it can't be garrisoned in a fortress for a surprise ungarrison (and yeah, we are only talking about the melee elephant, not the elephant archer, which is as useless as other ranged units). Champion swordsmen and spearmen are very good but slow to train and expensive. A hero swordsmen can one-handedly become deadly to several rams. If you had the possibility and time to make catapults, they can destroy rams too, but only if you have more of them and if they can finish the job before the ram gets to them. If you failed to prepare a strong ram counter, there are still several backup options. Spearmen are somewhat usable but significantly worse than swordsmen. Women can destroy one or two unprotected rams quite efficiently (better than pikemen), but they die fast if there are any enemy soldiers near. Slingers are one of the few ranged units that are usable too (they deal a small amount of crush damage), but only if you have a lot of them.

Thanks for the summary. I'll just add to some of the points: This currently only happens for those forced orders but still it perhaps shouldn't. I'm not really sure if this depends on the stance but I don't think so. Soldiers behave in the same way in that when you make them attack a certain unit, they will do so and even follow it as necessary. We should discuss if the catapult should start moving if the selected target wasn't in its range at the beginning. Otherwise such an action would result in a no-op and the attack cursor better be grayed out for targets out of range. Regular units can't be easily told what target type to pick either, so perhaps it is a broader issue. For units, we have the attack move (with possible modifiers), but using an attack move doesn't sound right for catapults that aren't supposed to move while attacking. The item that is possibly missing: Ordering a catapult to move while it's unpacking doesn't cancel the unpacking process and waits for it to complete. This seemed to be addressed in one of the existing tickets. EDIT: Oh yeah, and regarding the instant cancellation, I understand that it's how it works in AoE but we don't take that as a relevant argument for it, right? I'd look at what looks more realistic here unless there are good reasons not to. I've even considered a similar thing regarding buildings several times (going slightly off topic now). An important part of the game currently is deleting some buildings before they get captured to 50%. But isn't that a weird thing to have in the game? It comes to mind that the destruction of own buildings might require workers to be assigned to the job. Similar to construction but faster and actually very close to attacking that building. This is actually quite a different issue but it's similar in the way that something is instant and it might better not.

Yeah, I know my initial post is quite long (and I tried to make it as short as possible). But let my quote myself: So I didn't suggest to let the catapult finish its current action instead of cancelling. I even later mark that as weird behavior that happens when you try to move an unpacking catapult. My idea was that if you start unpacking and get to i.e. 75% progress, then you can get to 0% in the same time by ordering the catapult to pack. You mostly only say which state you want the weapon to be in and it gets there smoothly from whatever state it is in. So neither jumping from 75% to 0% instantly (as cancelling does), neither going further up to 100% and only then going back to 0% (because there is no reason to).

Thanks for the replies. So it seems we can agree on some of the points. And the bugs seem to be known, we just might to check on the existing tickets. Thanks for mentioning the unit following problem. I suppose it would be taken care of by omitting the automatic packing and unpacking (while an explicit move or attack command can still have a starting implied packing or unpacking prerequisite). Not sure how to handle the case when you try to attack a target that is out of range though. I guess it shouldn't then be possible to do this to maintain consistency. If the catapult moves automatically to have the target in range, why shouldn't it start moving again if a unit goes out of the range later? I'm not sure what your reasons are to keep the cancel command in place. What do you think about the logical problem of unpacking an almost packed catapult instantly by just cancelling? How to handle the case when there are multiple catapults with different states in the selection? I don't know if I should use the unpack icon or the cancel packing icon. I see several problems with the cancel icon and I don't really see an advantage of it. @Stan`, I guess standground is the default, perhaps you meant passive instead? I'd just think that the various stances probably don't make much sense for catapults anyway. Maybe there should be one when the catapult just doesn't pick targets by itself (passive) and then the default (standground). That reminds me of another issue I forgot to mention. I don't know how the attack-move commands work for catapults but it could be useful to tell the catapults to target units in their range. Perhaps this also is solved by targeting areas. Catapults are especially powerful against units but the problem is that it's hard to make them attack units only when there are buildings near.