Boudica

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.

Hello, perhaps the problem could be that currently only 1-vs.-1 matches can affect the rating. However, the rating doesn't get adjusted if the game isn't marked as a rated one by the host before the start, or if any of the players leaves before the other player wins or resigns (that includes closing the host). You can tell that the rating got adjusted when you can see a rating adjustment message in the main game lobby after the end. It has been observed that many lower-level players quit the game instead of resigning, which can make your victories ignored, while your defeats can get counted. That makes your score lower than it should be. My advice is not to worry about it that much. If you get underrated and later win against a player with better rating, you'll get more points for that victory. If you actually improve at the game significantly, the score should calibrate itself quite fast. Of course, quitting a rated game still is against the rules. Justice is enforced in this regard by the mods if you can provide replays of such games. We are still only talking about 1-vs.-1 matches that aren't set to unrated in the beginning.

When you select the Trigger Maps filter, you'll find a few of this kind of special maps where something similar happens. They can be fun if you want to try something different, but read the description carefully before start. :-)

My idea was to weight not by a constant but rather a variable reflecting the value of the resource at the exact time of each event. This factor can be roughly based on the game time, but it could better be formed of the amount of the given resource available to the team at that moment, perhaps even considering the possibility of bartering. If we want to include tributes, we should probably also subtract the equivalent score at the receiving side to prevent easy score boosting between two players. I'd tune the constant factor in a way that the resources given to a player give the sending party a similar score to that that a player gets when killing a unit that could be made for those resources. It's hard to say the exact value because the other parts of the score should also be weighted variably.

That was an exhausting game. The team balance was changed just a few seconds before the start, but it turned out to be a good balance. I also liked that we had some less popular civilizations present. I considered taking Iberians for the team bonus, but it wouldn't help archer and slinger civs as much as the Roman bonus could. Anyway, the game was pretty much over for me after the initial coordinated raid with camelius. I'm glad that at least that part didn't fail. It's happened to me recently that a failed attempt at such coordination did more harm to ourselves than the enemy. But camelius is a good team player in this regard. The other strong part of Romans would be the P3 sieging, but I could barely even get to the City Phase until the game was over. Archers can be very good for defense against short-range units like skirmishers, and getting closer was risky and not really worth it. Feldfeld was right that our side was pretty much stalled when I spammed a network of up to 12 upgraded towers. Fortunately the other side was doing better, so I could be happy with that position. I've watched the whole commentary and I liked it. I think you guys covered all the important events that were happening. Setting the playback speed to 1.5x also allowed me to counter the lag that was present later in the game. Thanks for the event and I hope to see you next time.

We could probably extract the time of a resource share event from the replay file easily, but it could be more accurate to weight by the average economy strength or value of each resource at the given time. To get the whole context, it's probably better to just run the replay with some event hooks that update the score. This approach also allows weighting kills, which aren't explicitly written in the replay data. You already know who can do that kind of thing. Let's ping @ffffffff to see if he's interested.

Hello, I only noticed this thread now, so I'll put my two cents in. The system you introduced is probably not far from the best you can get, but that's partly because it's really hard to create a fair system. Giving a whole point for a win is a good way to discourage selfish playing. I'm a bit afraid that some of the other factors could be misused. When you now count in the resources shared, it's very important to weight the importance of the share at each time such event occurred. 100 of wood in the first minute can easily mean more than 1000 wood at minute 10 when the average player's economy is stronger and gathering is much faster thanks to upgrades. Also remember that at the resign time, fgod mod shares all the resources you have with whoever is left. Imagine that two allies resign just before you and now half of their resources also get counted as those that you shared with the last remaining ally. The same sure holds for the kill count and the kill / death ratio. Getting someone's ten women early in the game can decide the whole game, while a few minutes later players would even want to delete their women just to make more space for soldiers. Anyway, I know that it's hard to adjust for these factors. They could perhaps be implemented into the military score the game shows, which would make things much easier. Currently the system favors economy focus to raiding early in the game, dumping useless resources to allies later, and the player gets penalized for making tank units while their ally gets all the kills in a fight. You could notice the last thing in the game of yesterday when borg had like 60 spearmen taking damage for fpre's slingers.

WFG once tried raising money and it was a disaster. Does that make raising money a bad idea? Or could that be that the process was just poorly managed? If so, how about trying to find someone more competent at raising money for the game before dismissing the idea entirely? You wouldn't dismiss the idea of improving the pathfinder based on the fact that last time someone tried he wasn't very successful. I can see WFG inviting new artists and programmers to join the team all the time, so perhaps it's time to start looking for good fundraising managers too. I've seen the fundraising question being dismissed many times. I've never seen the specific reasons for it. No one disagrees with the statement that WFG needs good programmers. And I guarantee that you can get good programmers if you pay them well. We should really stop asking if WFG needs money and we should instead discuss how to get them. It could help if someone can describe the problems with the previous fundraising. That could put us on the right track with the discussion.

That was a great presentation, well structured and covering all the important aspects in a short time. Proofs were shown that the game is easily moddable. I can't see how showing source code would make it any better. I don't agree with any of the negative criticism, to me it was just a great job.

On many scenario maps, the player starts with extra buildings. When you mentioned Gauls, try selecting the Scenario map type and find the map Arcadia. Gauls get a longhouse at the start. Similarly with the map Azure Coast.

Using WinRAR probably.

I overall liked the gameplay, it just seemed that the small group of elite rank skirmishers healed by elite rank healers became OP. What are are skirmishers supposed to be countered by? Maybe spear cavalry could have a bonus against them? Healing now seems to be more useful, but perhaps it might be too strong now too. Ranged units no longer deal super high amount of damage, so when a healer can get to 16 HP a second, it's really powerful.

Welcome to the forums! The AI is currently mostly useful for new players to learn the basics of the game. One of those things is that sometimes your allies will do dumb things and not react even when you tell them. This looks like you got the important lesson here, so perhaps it's time to join the multiplayer lobby now. Seriously though, it's possible that the AI is improved not to do stupid things like that, but it could help a lot if you could locate and attach the replay files of such games with a description of what happened and when. Please try looking for specific commands.txt and metadata.json files in the replays subdirectory somewhere in the 0 A.D. data directory and attach them with a description when encounter a problem like that.

I've checked that we played on the same team just twice and we lost both of the games. Not sure if this is a good time to leave. I don't know what I should comment about the incident. I understand why you didn't like it. I don't agree with people misusing their technical knowledge of the game like that, especially when they think they are somewhat smart for doing so. Anyway, it might be good to realize that the internet is not really that anonymous as we might like. People can find information about you regardless of whether they share it or not. I'm sure that elexis wouldn't have shared this information unless it was something easily looked up by others. Technically anyone you connect to sees an address. They can look up a geographical location for that address but that might not necessarily even match where you are located physically. Other than not being necessarily accurate, how specific is that piece of information? We could probably assume that you are a human from the planet Earth to begin with. But we can target you much more accurately just by noticing that you have an internet access and can speak good English. Revealing your country can reduce the possibilities to a few million people, but that's still many more that anyone of us can even meet during their life. I think that starting this thread was a good idea to help target the issue of privacy. I'd probably reconsider giving up on the game completely if that is a reason for you to do so. Anyway, I'll leave that up to you. Thanks for the games we played together.

Or just accuse the enemy of being sexist for only targeting women. That should work with today's society.

There was an A23 alpha re-release a few weeks ago, so there are now A23a and A23b versions, which connect to a different lobby each. I know that it took some time for the Linux packages to get updated, so some users didn't see the updated versions in their repositories. Not sure about now.

Rating doesn't get affected if a player leaves the lobby during the game. Could that be the case? Anyway, you should probably post the replays and ask @user1 to look into the issue. Or just ask the player directly to give you the points if you both agree you should have received them.

Thanks for uploading. I'm adding my commentary as a spoiler:

Please locate the replay file files (subdirectory with commands.txt and metadata.json files) and attach them because a proof is usually required. @user1 usually handles these issues, so he'll check if your request is legit and ask Dumbledor to give you your points.

If nothing has changed, it's usually easier for moderators to delete your account, so that you can re-create it. I wouldn't recommend creating another account because that could get you banned. Let me tag @user1, but perhaps there is someone else specialized in these issues. By the way, if you find your user.cfg file, there should be a lobby.password entry, which probably contains your password hash and makes your password pre-entered when available.

Hi, have you tried enabling STUN while opening the host from the lobby? If your ports are correctly forwarded, this shouldn't be needed, but it could help otherwise. I had problems with port forwarding because my internet provider doesn't forward ports unless you pay some extra. On the other hand, some people have problems connecting to STUN-enabled hosts due to some security restrictions. If you are on the same network, connecting directly to the host's local IP address should work even more reliably. There could perhaps be problems with firewall settings, but the problem typically is that people enter the wrong address. Maybe try sharing more details about what you're entering. I hope we can get it to work.