Boudica

Garrisoned rams can be good for a sneak attack. Two unprotected rams are quite easy to destroy, so it can make the enemy send just a few units against them, which can turn out not to be enough when you ungarrison. If you expect the enemy to defend with women or infantry spearmen, skirmishers might be the best units to put inside. If the enemy has lancers or sword horses near, I'd go with spearmen instead. The trick is to ungarrison the rams at the very last moment because your units can block the way to the rams and, if you are lucky, the enemy units will try to go around them while getting killed. Slightly different use would be in bigger attacks where it can help you hide how big your attack is. Ranged units tend to be quite vulnerable to tower / fortress arrows, so it's perhaps favorable to keep them protected inside rams until you need them to fight. Just beware, from my experience, it's quite easy to forget about the units you put inside rams. Happy ramming. :-)

Can anyone please attach replays? Also it might be nice to have all the replays in the first post if that's not too much work.

You should be able to run the replays on the Alpha 22 version you installed on Windows regardless of which OS they come from. How do you try to run the replays? What messages do you get? I don't think there is an easy way to run both versions simultaneously.

I wouldn't want Wendy to feel alone in this, so I'll join his side partly with another example. I've seen a well known player getting muted after he started to complain about other player's behavior or some injustice that had happened in a game. He might or might not have used a bad word, but I wouldn't even notice because his outrage seemed to be rightful. The mute looked kind of funny, as if the moderator tried to protect the real offender. It felt like focusing on spelling mistakes while ignoring an important point. Other than that, I am sure that directly warning people that commit a lobby offence has a much better effect. I know that at least elexis or user1 often do exactly this. But I still agree that adding a mandatory reason will go a long way. In my opinion, the name of the authoring moderator should also be included. Why not? There should be a room for a complaint and the players should know who to address it to. As I mentioned before, some of the mutes could feel like a trolling behavior of the moderator and that is much harder to do with your name written next to it. Let's not argue about this one point: there are some moderators known to be trolls.

I'll attached the second game replay for you in exchange. 2018-06-06_borg-vs-Feldfeld.zip

Thanks, Romulo. There is never enough of these.

Yes, you are right. Switching an unusual mode on silently is quite a common way get an advantage. I don't agree with that, I'd just perhaps accept the consequences once I click the Ready button without checking properly. Setting victory conditions to an instant win after capturing a relic, or things like a long ceasefire, which allows you to boom without worrying about rushes, might be even easier ways to an possibly undeserved victory. I agree that you managed to do very well considering the disadvantage. However, it happens often that managing a big battle well does more than anything else. I think that you could have won the decisive battle (it wasn't really the first one, but the first and only important one) if you managed your army better, but you would also need a counter for rams, which is where Macedonians really are disadvantaged. You didn't yet have a fortress, so your options were using rams or women against rams. I think you could rightfully suggest that Macedonians should have a decent Town Phase counter to rams. Let's conclude that I might agree with your general point but not completely with the argumentation.

To me it seems that you are mostly irritated by having lost the game, and the points you mention have little to do with that. These are the reasons of your defeat: The opponent collected seven valuable treasures before you scouted the map. A single one of them was worth 600 food, which allowed for a faster start, and then a metal treasure allowed phasing up to the City Phase earlier. Even though you had more units when you were first attacked, you took a fight with a smaller group of soldiers. While it's true that the opponent also had more techs researched, this wasn't the main reason of him winning the battle. His other advantages were better army composition (using the hero as a tank, while your tank units were chasing rams), having captured a temple that kept healing his units while fighting and, last but not least, making use of the hero bonus for skirmishers. You had no ram counter prepared, so that your main base got destroyed and most of the economy stopped. I don't think that the match setting screen is to blame. The recent alpha made it rather easy to check the few important options, and I wouldn't consider it useful to restrict players from playing a rated match with the settings they want. While setting an official standard for rated duels (and highlighting the differences in the match setup screen) might be a good suggestion, I wouldn't hurry calling the current system stupid.

Thanks for uploading. Maybe playing another game against Rome would help to decide if swordsmen need buffing. I think they aren't supposed to counter spear cavalry, but neither do I think borg would play the same strategy replacing spearmen with swordsmen. Maybe it's not a coincidence Romans also have spear cavalry. :-)

I'll just leave a comment here to thank you for uploading games for me to watch. So many interesting replays sadly remain unuploaded, and I even tried offering rating points for anyone who posts a good replay. And the commentary was a fun read too. Wendy had quite a decent army of catapults, it would be a disaster for JC to take the big fight. I think building some more defenses to repel raids and then hitting his main base with most of the army could work. I could feel how the population cap was limiting. Nice game anyway. One g only please. But the gameplay was better than the spelling.

Thank you for bringing this topic up, mapkoc. What hasn't so far been mentioned (edit: until five seconds ago) is the reason why we could see these adjustments take place. Several players started placing bets on winners to make spectating more entertaining. When the game with bets ended, the losing party would resign another rated game instantly to give points to the winner of the bet. Even though the current ELO system is not designed for this purpose, we could still argue that the ability to guess the outcome of a game can tell a lot about how the player understands the game concepts, making the rating point adjustment more or less justified. To make this better, I've been thinking about a possibility to add a separate system of betting points, including a dialog to offer and accept bets in-game. It seems that a system like that could increase the game engagement for spectators greatly and bring a different level of fun into the game. A cooperation with the rating system would perhaps be required, so the implementation might not be trivial. However, I suggest that we discuss if we could make a betting point system work.

The first thing that came to my mind was that we must use this hype to bring relevant people to 0 A.D. Let's put together a quotes we can use: Several zoom levels? How about an infinity of them? Going to buy something you already have? Get something new for free.

There is a chance that hosting without having your ports forwarded will be possible since the next alpha release (https://code.wildfiregames.com/D364).

Out of curiosity, I've been searching for the largest replay files I have, and the winner happened to be a very close and tough battle on the Ngorongoro map, which took place on November 27, 2016. Map: Ngorongoro Starring: (JeanClaude, comandantelobo, Boudica, samba) vs (JorgeGijon, kabaka, maxticatrix, Grugnas) Summary: Grugnas expanded early in the central valley and then magically managed to hold the position against my sieging from the top. To me, it felt like a training in ballista packing / unpacking, where I tried and mostly failed to hide the siege engines before they got hacked down by the Skiritae. Anyway, it looked as if Grugnas was suiciding a lot of units to destroy one or two catapults while JeanClaude and samba kept slowly pushing on the enemy's main base, so the fight seemed to be going well for us. Not to spoil too much, let's just add that the game was finally decided by good trade and teamplay as is often the case. commands.txt

Map: Unknown U-shaped land Players: (bbleft, Emperior, nigel87, Boudica) vs (Grugnas, equlizer, caesar_salad, TurboBurger) Summary: A typical trading / rushing game, but the metal supplies finally didn't turn out to be critical for the victory. I'm uploading mostly to allow analyzing the game crash at the very end of the game. commands.txt