Boudica

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.

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.