Boudica

The reason why the stats are relevant in our case is that we are regarded the same for the sake of balancing.1 There have been games where you were on a slightly better or slightly worse team, but you've only been winning games where the rest of your team was significantly stronger. The numbers were so significant (only around 20% win rate for you) that it made me start regarding you as less skilled and accept balances that would otherwise be wrong. This produced a few victories that made claims about your superiority even more laughable. The top three players might really often get a team that requires them to do wonders, but we all know that this is not really your case. What remains is trying to blame it on the civilizations. I know you're often playing Sparta to have this excuse at hand, but it's not very relevant for the comparison because I'm most often taking Random anyway, so I didn't have a better civilization in most of the games. 1) The only reason someone asks to switch you and me is that they don't want to play with you. It's never happened for the sake of balancing.

These are some nice suggestion. It might be a good idea to check how the behavior has changed in the SVN version of the game though. The current alpha is already two years old and many changes have been made since.

Hello there... I am not sure if it's possible for the host to selectively start ignoring your commands without causing an OOS error. But the part where you describe not being able to type any text in the chat window suggests that it was a bug in your instance of the game. I don't know the internals much and I've never encountered this myself, but we'll know that it's not something new when it happens to someone else. One question: Aren't you by any chance playing on Mac OS? There have been some problems with that version of the game. It might help to restart the game before matches, I think that works for some people.

Hi there, I think that an easy approach could be to add your hosting e-mail account to a desktop e-mail client (Thunderbird or similar). If you haven't done this yet, check what your hosting provider says about the IMAP or POP3 access. From there you can easily select the e-mails and save them to your hard drive (just Save as or whatever your e-mail client supports). If you use Gmail, there is a feature that lets you add you another e-mail account, and Gmail then acts similarly to a desktop email client. I'd have to check, but I think that Gmail then allows you to also transfer all the past e-mails to your Gmail account.

I've checked some of the replays from recent months and you just don't win when you face me directly. Do you always have a bad civilization? Less food? Bad allies? Or what is the reason why it doesn't count this time? The only thing that I said about the presented rating in respect to you was that I don't consider you a better defender than borg or Feldfeld. If you have any idea why that should be right or wrong, feel free to elaborate. If you don't, could it be that you are the one who can't handle that he's just got a lower total rating from an independent player?

You are right, you respecting anyone is never gonna happen.

It's important to define your team roles well at the start of a match:

Ok, maybe I can start with one to set the bar low enough:

Great thread, I like puns! Sometimes it surprises me how I can still come up with something new after many years. I'm not saying they are all good puns, but I'm saying them anyway. Not only because the taste differs from one player to another, but also because you can laugh at how unfunny a line is. And it creates a great contrast to let the good puns shine. Sometimes I even take screenshots to get a permanent record of how (un)funny I was. Too bad that I'm too lazy to go through all of it and pick something to post here.

You made me think about the categories more. Let's take the boom category. To me, it's so closely related to defense, IQ and also attack (so subsequently also multitasking). I've never understood when players congratulate others on how many women they could spam by minute XY. It probably also can be learned and optimized pretty easily just by following a fixed build order based on the starting position. I only take this kind of boom as a soft skill, which is mostly only good for troll games. On the other hand, the top three players are known to do a safe boom, where they can continue to grow well even when rushed at any point (but they still grow fast if they aren't). Does this skill still count as a booming skill, or a defending one? Or perhaps the IQ? Consider that very often the best defense is attack. I rarely find myself just doing the boom because when you compare some early game vs. none, the one side that does the early game usually wins. Knowing how cheeky you can afford to be when booming probably fits better in the IQ part. I appreciate that sarcoma took the time to do the rating. I believe that it's hard to do and he did fairly well (considering that I don't even ever remember seeing him online). I definitely would have to rate borg and Feldfeld higher regarding the defense. I remember several games when they were attacked while having no soldiers and still barely took any damage. When you rate DoctorOrgans higher then them, you must probably have those team games in mind where he's the last remaining player of the team, who "forgot to resign" and "wow, he's defending so well". Honestly, doing this kind of "defense" would only make me lower the player's IQ rating because you can't compare your results with other team members after you let them down to the point of resignation (which is all what this behavior is about; unless you are PhyZic who now has OP cavalry going to destroy all, but that's not the case). When we were talking about defense, fpre sure has to be sad to be left out of this. He'd have to get a 10 on your 9-based scale. I realize that I really have specific games and situations in mind when I think about the rating, so I wonder which situations you had in mind. There has been a game recently when fpre got rushed hard early, yet he never fell. If I had to compare with DoctorOrgans (one of the top 3 defenders based on sarcoma's rating), no supporting situation comes to mind. There was a recent game when we both had to hold two enemies, yet he couldn't slow them down and blamed his allies for this. There have been many games when he never even gets to get a fortress up and gets steamrolled in the first big attack. I can't even remember when he could hold a double-rush fairly well. This just isn't how I imagine a defensive player. Of course, I won't deny I'm gonna get offended for the low IQ score you gave me, but I respect this opinion because I don't even know what you saw. Just in the replays that have been posted here, I think that I've shown the ability to successfully play a variety of less usual strategies when appropriate. I've done early ram attacks at minute 10, various champion raids getting me to 50 K/D, P2 towering, early warships, or just getting a super strong eco and boosting all allies to victory. And of course, cooperated raids with whoever is into that thing. Those games often ended so fast that it's easy to forget about them when doing the rating. OK, let's do it like this. Instead of posting my own rating, I'll just argue with anyone who posts one. Sounds like more fun to me.

This reminds me of the thread where we voted for the best team player, the most overrated player etc. I don't want to be so negative about this, but I don't believe the ratings might be of any high value because: Medium players get affected a lot by the displayed ELO rating, and when they do the rating, a high-ELO player will get high-rated in all the categories (in other words, the winner takes it all). I realized this when people voted one of the best players as the best team player. If you take away the booming, multitasking and micro skill difference, there would be many more players that could win the category. Think players like Issh, who know about the team play. Typical players don't even remember how good others play. I realized this when I hid my rating in the game and some people I've been playing with for years started asking what my rating is. Hard to believe. You have to understand the game well to judge the gameplay well. But the good players already know other good players, so they might not consider it useful to rate them. I'm now thinking, Stockfish, if this isn't about your teaching experience that you have this ambition to rate (grade) players like this.

Hi, I think it's just the Elo rating system with a minor customization.

Organic units can't be captured. You can only lure an elephant by attacking it with a ranged unit, which makes the elephant to follow it to wherever you want. Then you can kill the elephant with other units, provided that you keep the luring unit in a safe distance.

You might better notice the flaws with this strategy when you play against good human players.

Hello there! A badly planned expansion can really cost you the game. In biomes with lower tree count, you'll be forced to to expand for wood. Specific civs also depend a lot on metal (Ptolemies) or stone (Athens). It is very often enough to have one extra mine of those, so if you do, and if wood isn't the issue either, it might work well to only expand later (and attack the enemy expansion first). If you play with the AI, trading is a good alternative. In games against real players, it's harder to keep trade protected though. You might not have enough time for the investment to return either. One other thing to consider is what kind of expansion you go for. If the goal is to acquire extra resources, then you're playing the long game. You should probably play it more defensively after that because time is your friend in that case. You can also make a more aggressive expansion, which lets you disable some of the enemy resources with towers, and it can give you a good starting point for an attack. This can work well when the enemy thinks he doesn't need extra resources, but you make them need some. Losing the only CC you have makes your buildings convert to Gaia, which makes all your eco stop for a long time. Also it possibly allows the enemy to steal all your buildings, which makes you almost certainly lose. One reason for the expansion might be to provide a nearby backup CC if your main one becomes endangered.

Oh, look who is commenting? It's Boudica herself, the best performing heroine to have in your champion army. I'm sorry, but it kind of offends me how you imply that it's a good thing to "reduce the impact of early cavalry rushes". First of all, many types of rushes have already been made less powerful in the recent alphas. Not so long ago, cavalry used to be cheaper, stronger, tougher, faster and more accurate. If you want to be an eco bot playing the same 20 minute start every game, there Sandbox Petra AI is still there to serve you (funny enough, the AI is a female too).

Trust me, it's better not to know. Actually, you could get a good estimate by going into the Replays menu section and summing the game durations of all games. This could be an interesting value to compute in a mod and show to the user. For a quick estimate, I'd just try to guess an average game length and multiply it by the replay file count. Anyway, due to lag, pausing and long setup time, the actual time could easily be twice as long.

I remember that some games were called in a way that suggested that it's an automated host. It's quite a long time ago though, and I thought it was mostly a joke with no real automation. Is there something I missed? We wouldn't even need someone to let his PC running to make this happen. A cloud instance running a hosting bot probably wouldn't be that expensive to run and it could be more reliable. I've considered making something like this, but it seems there would be a lot of work with the interface to allow setting all the parameters via the chat (so that the user is not required to install any special mods). There should probably be only one owner of the host, who would be able to set the map parameters and maybe allow others to only set their civilization. And it would be possible to pass on the ownership to a different player. The host should automatically close in certain situations to prevent blocking resources. And it should be possible for a player in the main lobby to ask the server to open a new host for him and make him the owner. This seems like quite a lot of work to make it work, but it would be a great help for people who can't host their own game. Or maybe also a good alternative for rated games because the host can't just close the host and claim it was a crash.

I regret to hear that... but I understand. I hope you're gonna check A24 when it's released. You must now have way too much time, don't you?

I've been thinking that it's been long since I uploaded a nice team replay. Today we played with my favorite player @SarahT and then this guy indio1515, whom I happen to remember from about five years ago when I was quite new to 0 A.D (five years newer anyway). I only saw him once or twice since then, and he didn't seem to forget how to play, so that makes the replay worth uploading. Let's not spoil more, here is your replay. Best served uncompressed and interpreted by the 0 A.D. program, but who am I to tell you what to do? This is a free game, so do as you like! Enjoy (if that's part of what you like, that is). 2020-11-17_Winter-Frontier.zip

Hi there, thanks for the suggestion. This problem has been discussed many times. The short answer is that the victory attribution rules can't be reasonably improved unless the rated games are hosted by a trusted 3rd-party server. Your suggestions imply that either the host or the client could forge the result because the rating server would only have information from either of those. If the current rules are reworked in the way you suggest, you could not only deny the enemy the points he deserved, but you could forge your own victory. The way it is now, we at least know that any of the points someone has come from someone else accepting their defeat (the exception is rating giveaway or using multiple accounts, but those are monitored). We could perhaps argue that quitting a rated game doesn't require any advanced knowledge or modifying the game, so it would perhaps make it harder for noobs, who mostly do this. The current preferred solution is to only play with honorable players, who resign when they should. I must say that this problem rarely occurs among advanced players. There is also a dedicated thread to resolve any disputes and report offenders though:

If I remember well, some of the teamwise values used to be computed wrong, but I'm not sure if that wasn't just the previous alpha. In this column, the value sure would make sense to compute. I'm just thinking if it wasn't better to make just a Military ratio and show the percentage with regards to the total points. Actually, isn't this column added by fgod only?

Not a big deal, @mysticjim, that just came in handy to make a joke. I believe that this game was a hard one to make commentary for because there was quite a lot of going on at times. I wouldn't even dare to try pronounce some of the names myself, so I guess did a pretty good job.

Quite a fun game here. @Dizaka is pretty OP even when not playing.

I didn't have this feeling that we didn't understand what you were saying, @m7600. Dizaka was also trying to explain why his comments can be off-putting, and I think that he did that in a pretty neutral way. Regarding my comment, I understand that it was too long to actually read. But I went quite into some of the details of this topic, even though I didn't name vinme specifically to make this more general and less personal. This could be viewed as another way to avoid giving harsh feedback. A TL;DR version of my previous post would be: You better think more about the future reader. Not everything is gold that crosses your mind. Think of the main points you are trying to make before you start writing. And of course, you'll have to keep shorter if you want anyone to actually read it.