chrstgtr

They kind of are, though. The original post talks about how 0AD produces units at a rate that is 3x to 4x times faster. If a 0AD game is made 3x-4x longer that could very easily result in games lasting hours. Additionally, there's a difference between game time and real time. 0AD has significant lag issues that often cause normal games that are 30m or less in game time to last more than an hour in real time. Those problems are not nearly as significant in AOE. Taken as a whole, a 3x-4x slower game that has lag issues could quickly result in games that last 3-4 hours (or more). I don't think anyone wants that. If someone really wants slower gameplay they can always change the game speed to .75x or something. Of course, this 3x-4x faster rate is a flawed perception because 0ad and other RTS have different metas, pop caps, and other factors.

The game is substantively different at different pop points. Defenses work better in low pop games. So low pop games allow for more raiding with stronger troops. So something like 10 champ cav can easily counterattack, wipe out an opposing players entire eco, and win a game because players can’t attack, defend, and eco all at once. That is undesirable for me. The raiding is all still possible at higher pop games, but it isn’t outcome determinative

I think this is needed. @ValihrAnt had a mod at one point that did this--it seemed to work well. Right now, there is basically no resource scarcity--players can build all the units they need with the resources within their own borders at every phase of the game. Players also don't have to skirmish over resources because they can gather the desired res in another part of their base. It's great that there are enough resources on the map to make all the units available (i.e., players can now make champs and mercs because metal is actually available), but there should be some resource scarcity. An easy way to introduce scarcity is to just force players to expand to access the wealth of resources on any given map. The current abundance of resources also means that players don't build second CCs because doing so mostly just expands where you can build instead of what you can gather. This takes out an offensive second CC strategy. It also takes away a strategic trade-off decision between building a second CC for long-term access to resources, which makes you weaker in the short term but stronger in the long term, and going for a quick p3 push, which makes you stronger in the short term but weaker in the long term. Making borders smaller will help with all this. It could also address some of @LetswaveaBook's complaints about how p2 is largely uneventful because p2 could become the phase where you build offensive CCs and skirmish over scarce border resources. I have no problems with the training speed and think its current stats are desirable.

Thanks! That could explain it. And your test seems like the right one. I don’t think healing should immediately cure fire/poison dmg (I.e. if you’re healing at a rate of 1 hp/s and fire/poison are doing dmg at a rate of -5hp/s then I think it should be a bet if -4 hp/s), but that’s a different topic.

I saw it happen in a TG earlier today (I joined late and don't have a replay). The player garrisoned their hero and the fire damage stopped accruing despite the hero having max flames on their icon moments before Edit: @vinmemay have the replay

A player can stop fire damage by garrisoning that unit. This does not seem right.

It would be nice if there was generic merc units for all CS unit types that could be trained by captured barracks. It would give a nice twist on capturing barracks. I don't think there would be any balancing. A lot (maybe all?) of the unit types already have merc art.

Probably also necessary.

Yeah, even then there is a similar problem with forts and towers. And k agree—there would need to be a rule where you’re only allowed to plant so much in a row or something like that

I never thought of it, but you're totally right. I think this is actually a reason against implementing this, though. If trees served as a wall that could only be penetrated by cutting them down then it would be impossible to ever destroy buildings. Imagine a fully garrisoned CC that is surrounded by a few layers of trees. The arrows from the CC would knock any wood choppers off task and therefore make it impossible to cut the trees down. Civs that rely on rams therefore would be unable to ever penetrate the tree wall.

Yeah, if that was the intention then I think something along the lines of your suggestion makes sense Edit: mace crossbows are currently quite unwieldy...Very effective when used well, but that is quite hard to do

They already function differently. They are more of a single shot killer with lower reload rate but quicker shot. Cross bows are a little under used right now because pikes are OP and merc cav is OP. Personally, I like the crossbow men and hope the a26 changes will make them more used. If the crossbow was conceptualized as a siege weapon then I think that mark was missed as they aren't good at crush and they're way inferior to bolts. I always thought they trained in the siege factory for some "differentiation" purpose, but I don't actually know.

Sounds nice. But integrating this into the vanilla game without a mod would be good too.

Read the convo--that 20K metric appears to be just the number of people with the game installed. There are also a ton of other considerations that the surface level data doesn't come close to considering. My whole point is that the "SP has more players" argument lacks evidence. I have never tried to make the inverse argument as it lacks evidence for the same reasons.

This was a feature in the old fgod mod. It was toggleable in the options. ------ Separate but related topic, it would be nice if replays were viewable from the MP lobby and if team total pop was viewable in observer mode. Both were features in fgod.

See other thread. tl;dr - no one knows how long or how many people play, but the number is probably much lower than 20K total players at any one time, especially if you define players to mean people who aren't just trying out the game

This really seems like something to put in the tutorial (if it is not already).

Thanks, that is helpful @hyperion Different data sources would help explain it. That would also require there be limited crossover. I don't know about enough the data sources to know. You're right. I'm half colorblind. The different data sources also helps explain this. It would be interesting to this graph over a longer period of time. There is a spike. But then it plateaus. That doesn't quite make sense unless you assume there is basically zero player retention. In this scenario, players would download the game play for like a month before uninstalling and the total number of ~18K active players only stay constant because of a steady steam of ~25K downloads. That would also mean that 18K from Canonical, which is active weekly players, and the 22K from WFG, which is all active from this year, are only close to one another because of coincidence. I guess the extremely low retention could make sense because in MP isn't fully established and in SP there isn't a campaign mode and the AI is very predictable, which makes makes the game very repetitive once you learn the basics after a few weeks.

Something in the data doesn't make sense. The daily reports also suggest that those weekly numbers are inaccurate. The daily reports purportedly show that there are 1K reports from 23b every day. But the weekly active report shows that there are only about 100. Those numbers don't make sense next to each other. The weekly reports also don't show a COVID spike, which anecdotally doesn't make sense, and doesn't reflect the massive download spike that occurred at the same time For example, there were 50K downloads in April 2020 which is double current downloads. You would expect there to be a massive spike in the weekly reports. We see the sharp increase but then it plateaus at a slightly lower rate. That doesn't make sense when downloads are half what they were. The weekly reports should either steadily increase at a lower than previous rate or there should be a massive drop in reports because of uninstalls.

A bit. I still think it would be annoying micro to do the garrisoning But I think that is a feature that would be nice civ feature. Can it be implemented now? Perhaps that would be a good civ bonus. @wowgetoffyourcellphone, seems like something that goes well with the theme of the last mace team bonus

I was. I think the revision was still in progress, though.

Can you help me read this data? What does the 18,593 number represent? Weekly unique user reports for 6/10/22? The other report you linked shows that there are 22K unique reports for 1/1/22 to 5/24/22. And over that same period there have been like 100K downloads. Does that mean that there were just 3.5K unique reports for all the other weeks of the year? That implies that 90% of YTD downloads translate into active weekly users, which implies there are more than 90K active users out there who downloaded the game this year. That would make its active player base as large as 1/4 of all AOEIV sales. Given the lack of observable users elsewhere (social media, forums, MP lobby, etc.), that simply doesn't seem possible. Does the game send reports even if the player is not actively playing the game? In other words, are there phantom reports coming from non-users who still have it installed on their computers?

If you do provide loot to partially constructed buildings then partially constructed buildings should be destroyed at the same rate as already constructed buildings. Currently, partially constructed buildings get destroyed much faster than already constructed buildings. Or you can provide some lower loot rate because it is so easy to destroy partially constructed buildings. I am personally in favor of the later option and not changing the ease with which partially constructed buildings are destoryed.

I actually did mean exponential. Something like x^1.25 makes sense to me. More garrisoned men means less men outside to protect the siege, which makes the siege more vulnerable. More garrisoned men also makes men outside of siege more vulnerable to arrows pounding down from a CC, fort, or tower (Imagine attacking a fort with 50 men and 3 rams. Imagine how much quicker 20 men would die under fort arrows than 50 men would die--garrisoned men means damage is more concentrated). In short, garrisoning, more often than not, is riskier than not garrisoning. Exponential would provide an increasing benefit for taking on more risk. Logarithmic or linear would be fine too, of course. These are just minor details.

0AD has had millions of downloads. AOE had only 3M sales. Do you really think 0AD is as popular as AOE? Downloads clearly do not tell us how many actual users there are. New people/downloads doesn't equal actual users. Should a game be designed for the person who plays it three times? Should we really debate the merits of p3 siege for all the users who experiment with the game for 10 minutes and never get past p1? Of course not. There is no true way to measure the number of active SP users and we don't know how many active SP users play the game for a meaningful amount of time. Pretending otherwise is misleading. Even if there was a secret trove of SP users, how can you say they resemble the couple dozen of forum posters here? This metric is also misleading. You have no idea how many people actually play those mods. It could be people who download the mod thinking it is the entire game and then get frustrated and uninstall the game before ever playing. It could be people that download the mod right immediately after downloading the game and then uninstall the game five minutes later. It could be regular users that are reinstalling the mod, which is something I know I have done. We simply don't know what these downloads are and whether they translate into any actual plays ------------- None of your substantive statements merit a response in the context of the current proposal.