Boudica

I initially decided to write this all up because I was looking for a smaller issue I could work on myself. But I guess some things need to be fixed in the development process first before I could contribute anything? When I first worked on something here, elexis helped me with everything I need. I heard him say that he'd like to invest a lot of his time into the development again. But guess what? He's been incredibly frustrated with the situation that has been around here recently. I don't even know who I'm talking to now. I just wanted to show that there are now more people that want to invest their time to make the game better but they can't. And I had the feeling that there is a lot of useless ego involved in this. Could you just put the ego behind in the name of making the game better? I'd personally be glad if elexis got more power in what gets into the game and if we listen to him more. He has incredible knowledge about the code and he puts great effort into making his contributions the best they can get. People from the player community would probably vote for elexis to become the next project leader. Or I sure would. Please unfrustrate elexis for me and let us work together.

Hello, I've been thinking about why the catapult behavior makes people mad and what could be done about it. I think there is a thing that could be considered a bug, which is probably easy to fix. Another thing is the UI design for siege packing itself. I've discussed a few times how I'd expect it to work differently but I haven't written it down and I'm not sure if there is any issue for it. So where do we start? To me the ability to cancel packing or unpacking instantly doesn't make sense. The idea is that the packing process takes time. How is it possible to go from a 99% packed catapult to an unpacked one instantly, while from a 100% unpacked it takes a few seconds? So what follows is simple. We only need two icons: one for getting the catapult to a packed state and another for getting it to the unpacked state. If the packing process is in progress, the process just changes the direction as appropriate (0% is packed, 100% unpacked). If all catapults in the selection are in the same state, the icon can be grayed out. OK, so that was mostly for the UI design. But what is the single thing that makes people lose catapults and rage quit a game? It's the automatic unpacking and the weird behavior when trying to move the catapult. When enemy units get in the range, the catapult starts unpacking. That sounds about right. Except that at this point that process can't really be cancelled by the cancel icon as it just starts all over again instantly (there are still targets in range, right?). You first have to change the unit stance to passive, otherwise the cancel icon is just for frustration. Then you order the catapult to move and what happens? It continues to unpack, just so that it could start packing up again for moving. I think that the solution to the other problem is simple. I intentionally started with the idea to remove the cancel icon entirely because then we don't have to discuss what should it do in this case. If the cancel still is a thing, ordering the catapult to move sure should automatically cancel the ongoing unpacking because it's the fastest way that gets the thing done. With my first idea implemented, moving the catapult would mean ordering it to change to a packed state (as explained) with the move command chained. This eliminates people clicking on the cancel icon because they wanted the exact opposite of making the catapult unpack. To sum up, I think this is a small bug of not stopping the unpack process automatically when ordering a catapult to move. There is a third note to this discussion. I'd suggest to remove automatic unpacking entirely. If you want to have catapults ready to move, you can have that. If you have moved them to a position for attack, you decide to unpack them. I think it happens very often that the unpacking starts when you don't want it. Even with my first idea implemented, if you ordered the catapult to pack, it could start unpacking automatically just after that. I imagine that handling the siege weapons would be much more pleasant if they just simply didn't unpack by themselves at all.

That automatic resign isn't feasible. Perhaps if it was, it could be used for any rated game and there wouldn't be quitter issues. But having the rank temporarily replaced with a warning is probably something most players would want to avoid. And it's a new idea in this field as far as I know.

That kind of humiliation from having QUITTER shouting right in your nickname sounds like a fun idea to me. It would probably go like this:

Right, the title is a bit BuzzFeed-like. I actually played too but only in sandbox mode, mainly as a moral support. You see that even the hated civilizations can be played well. 2019-06-17_ValihrAnt-1vs2.zip

Oh hi and – thank you! I see it took a longer time to come up with a system that put me on the first place. I don't really know what the method is, I just really hope it's not alphabetical. Well, actually, I think I understand what you've done there. Thanks for putting the extra time into the evaluation because it helped make the whole event even more interesting. I've heard many people say they watch or enjoy these games (and not just the players that liked to see themselves on TV). Not every tournament series so far caught on that well, so we can't but congratulate you on your work. Having said that, I'm somewhat glad I can take a break this weekend.

Welcome to the forums! I'm glad to hear you like the game. I think a lot of us have a similar story about their way to 0 A.D. The game is still in alpha, but that currently mostly means you can get a new and slightly different version from time to time. There are quite a few structure or unit models that haven't been made available in the vanilla version, but there are now several good mods that make use of them. Vanilla is more conservative with a goal to keep the game relatively balanced and playable. There are still some more technical issues that are slowly getting worked on, the worst of which is currently the lag that appears when there are many concentrated units. Anyway, these issues don't really make the game any less addictive. As someone who has spent thousands of hours playing, I can be trusted on that one. GL, HF!

I'm not an expert, but doesn't the game tell you that the password you should type is "incorrect"? Remember to always read the messages carefully. You are welcome.

Unban camelius, please. Can't you see he has withdrawal symptoms? No games, no eaes.

Nice game, thanks for uploading. You committed a lot to that early raid. The middle player has a hard role in a 3-vs.-3 game, and kristian seemed to always be where he was needed. On the other hand, there was a showcase of an absolute lack of game sense by the Dancing Queen, who mostly only danced his team to the ultimate defeat.

Well, to be technically correct, there actually are girls in 0 A.D. Only they cost 50 Food each.

Rauls's bad connection spoiled your photo.

That might be the your best contribution so far. Sorry, but someone had to say this. Barking random balance suggestions out at us without any robust reasoning isn't but belittling the work of the developers. As if everything is as easy as just fixing one value, and what is taking us so long? Then when people prove you wrong, you just come up with different, equally bad suggestion. If you really want to help the balance get better, I'd suggest helping borg test his mod. He's more experienced with this and he's put like 1000 times more of his time to make it all click. Let's help him get the changes into the next release.

Great commentary as always! I know, the balancing is harder when the level of some players differs between games, but perhaps it's better to let someone experienced that isn't playing make the teams. I was all for what Feldfeld suggested, even though I don't think it would have made much difference. I don't think that the balance complaints after the game were very legitimate. Partly because the complainers agreed before the game, partly because many things could have been better by our team: We talked about making some early warships, but no one made any until borg had killed our fishing ships. Hannibal managed to save it by his naval skills. Half of our team didn't really make any economy upgrades (and let's not include my baskets here, I had great food income and I wanted that wood for camels). The big push at darkcity's side wasn't very early and we wasted time on the hard defenses, while darkcity even managed to get a fortress up. It wasn't really my plan to attack from the south without any siege weapons. Anyway, it was a good game overall. I liked the map selection because anything is better than playing Mainland all the time. And yeah, I'm just saying all of this to finish it in a positive tone.

I'm not taking it. There aren't any girls playing 0 A.D.

I already talked about the resign time resource exchange problem above, @ffffffff. There shouldn't even be a need to address that case specifically with good weighting. As a simplified example, imagine just counting the area below the resources-sent curve in the graph. Increasing the total near the end wouldn't affect the score because the game ends at that moment. I think that when it's a team game, the score should stop counting when the first player of the losing team resigns. That could help eliminate score-hunting style of playing. I've been working on that idea a bit more, but maybe we should do it properly and improve the system that is present in the game instead. There are some parts I don't know how to address yet. When someone is rushed, they take damage for their team, but it's currently not reflected. Such player might seem to play worse but it could be the exact opposite (they get rushed because they are good). I still think that the system used in this thread is pretty decent. It could eventually be replaced with something that is much more complex (rather than fine-tuning), but that new system is going to take more time to make. For now, I'd just suggest to sort by the average rating (as someone already said), because it makes me appear better.

There isn't even a need to rush into the town phase. Other than that, yeah.

Based on the fact that it resulted in a rage quit, I expected this to be a game worth watching. I wasn't disappointed.

I'm glad to hear that you liked my lighthouse, Alistair.

You said it correctly. It might be a good suggestion to include some more info about the system. Not sure if there is a good place for it directly in the game manual.

My bullshit detector could report a false positive on that arrow hand-catching thing. It's just impressive.

Aiming specifically for the eyes, that's brutal. Sorry for going off topic. We should move this elsewhere.

Cleopatra is a bit overpowered and the animation looks unrealistic, but on an unrelated note, as far as I know, it was very real for professional archers to shoot several times per second. I remember seeing a documentary where a professional could hit three moving discs thrown at once in different directions. We are affected by pseudo-historic movies, but it was pretty impressive what ancient soldiers could do. Of course, they would usually hold (and sometimes also shoot) multiple arrows at once for a fast repeat time. </offtopic>

@ffffffff, you are still thinking in terms of weighting the total, but you'll never get a fair system with this approach. Please consider my idea and tell me what you think. I might try to look into it myself if you're not interested.

1) I've checked your stats and they don't really look that bad. You have about 50 % win ratio. In my opinion, as few as two games won could get you above the initial rating. I wouldn't switch for another account, not exactly because it's not allowed, but mostly because you now have a history of games won and lost, so people can check that you aren't a smurf or someone that just installed the game. There aren't so many people playing regularly, so it's even more important whether your name sound familiar or not. 2) Well, the regulars don't keep getting worse over time. :-) 3) You never know for sure. There are even some low-level players with high score. It's easy to achieve when you only play rated games against players you know you can beat easily (and especially if they are overrated). The rating serves as an indicator but it's not absolutely reliable. 4) I agree that communicating the host's intentions is really something we should work on. Often people get unassigned without any explanation. It wouldn't be hard to tell in the host name that the game is intended for higher-level players. On the other hand, I wouldn't say it's bad not to include newbies in all the games. I've seen way too many games getting spoiled by unskilled players that just want the game to start fast and then quit the host a few minutes later without any explanation. I wouldn't come join the training of Real Madrid CF and then be all surprised why they don't let me play with them, like come on, guys, it's just a game, right. I can totally play football too. Even though there are no real pros in this game, with all these leagues it's started getting more serious and more sports-like, so I see some resemblance. 5) The host name alone allows for more text than most stable hosts are willing to enter already. :-) 6) I don't know about any specific documentation of 0 A.D. rating system. Anyway, I know it's just a customized version of the Elo rating system, which is used for chess games. The important things to know include that only the current rating of both the players and the binary game result is used to determine the rating adjustment. The bigger the difference in the rating, the more points you can get if you win "against expectations", and the less you lose if you lose. The exact course of the game or factors like the number of total games played aren't considered.