chrstgtr

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.

Agree. I would just want to make sure that the capture resistance is high enough that rams aren't easily captured. It's silly that a ram can resist 100 skirms when no other enemy units are around. But I wouldn't want to make rams so vulnerable that a group of skirms under fire from enemy units can capture an advancing ram. It would really nerf rams.

Sounds good to me. I would make the speed, attack, and/or attack speed increase as an exponential function of number of units garrisoned. But this works too. (My only objection was making them useless unless garrisoned) I think it was mentioned somewhere in the thread, but I would also reintroduce capturing siege. That may be for a different topic, though

I’m unmoved. Everything you said (with the exception of siege costing 0 pop), can be achieved with the alternative that @real_tabasco_sauce and I provided where siege basically remains the same but extra strength/speed is conferred upon garrisoning. Making units that are inherently useless unless you engage in micro sounds annoying and not fun. Some things you mentioned, like popping out of garrisoned siege, is already possible with zero changes and it only hasn’t happened yet because you haven’t tried to do it Your general point about SP vs. MP also makes no sense. No one complained about balance. People just said it sounds annoying and pointed out how it could be. In fact, this was suggested by someone who plays MP. Lastly, the notion that SP preferences should prevail because there are “more” SPs is baseless. Yeah, there have been like 10M downloads of 0AD. And yeah, you only see 1K of those online regularly. That doesn’t mean that there are 9.999M SPs. The number of SPs is almost certainly no where to close to that. The only people that you know actually play SP are those that you see post online. For all you know, save for the couple dozen SPs that post on the forums regularly, the game has uninstalled by 9.999M people

I don’t know. That sounds a whole lot like the current system except that siege will discharge units when destroyed. It seems like it would make more sense to just keep it was the way it is and allow for bonus damage/speed if units are garrisoned. I think siege should be capture-able, but that seems to be a different topic.

Speaking as someone who does way more micro than average…this would annoy me. Have fun microing this when you make 3 rams mid battle, have to micro the exact number of units (away from the fight) to stand idle next to the siege factory (which will make your idle hot key way less useful), click your view away from the battle to see if the rams finished producing, click back to the battle because you looked too soon, click back away to the battle to see if the rams are ready, garrison the perfect number of units into 3 separate rams (no shift clicking because then you might over garrison and leave one or more rams immobile), manually direct the rams to wherever you want them to go (because rally points will no longer work for siege), click back to battle to see that half your army followed a retreating unit and now you’re dead. This is also be one of the very few instances where micro is forced and it is forced away from the action. There are a ton of hot key/group control features that exist or are request just so that you don’t have to needlessly click/view away from the center of action. Giving an extra boost to siege with garrisoned units makes sense. Making siege useless without garrisoning sounds terribly frustrating

Anything that requires siege to be garrisoned sounds incredibly annoying...It's micro that a lot of know we should do now but don't because it's a pain and clunky

Maybe--I'd have to do the math to see. The metal trickle idea came up somewhere else recently. I'm not a fan. Metal is tricky because the res isn't very helpful in early game and is only helpful late game in large amounts. An injection of metal in the middle game, though, can provide a strong one-time eco tech boost that can push a player pretty far ahead. So the bonus is either a very good one-time boost because it allows you to get the p2 eco techs immediately after phasing OR it provides too little metal in late game (or too much of a useless resource in early game). I think a more direct and balanced way to provide a metal bonus would be to provide a discount of something like a 10% metal discount on techs (and/or soldiers).

The Mechanical Innovation sounds good. Standardized Currency seems very weak.

Those buildings can be lost which would expose them. But yes, that is why I originally envisioned it all occurring outside of structures.

It makes them vulnerable. If you lose the building while units are being trained then you just lost the building (and whatever time) and the res for the citizens is refunded. If you lose the men then you lose the resources too. The point is to create a cheap, but risky, alternative way to make champs.

My point is that if you want something unique then it should be unique and not a copy of what already exists. What you're proposing is derivative of what already exists--it's basically the same thing but easier and for a bigger benefit. Make it unique.

We basically already have that with garrisoning CS hoplites to rank up. If a unit is garrisoning or whatever to rank up then nothing else matters. No one does it. There's also basically no downside of doing that because it is the same cost as CS with all the upside. Defenseless sounds much more interesting to me

Maybe instead of garrison it is an aura outside like a temple so that the unit is vulnerable. Could also have a garrison option that is safer, but slower. We probably also have them train with one another (like with healers) so that they don’t need to be right next to a building. (This probably lends itself to some cool wresting art animations)

My two cents and some suggestions for improvement: Sounds like fun I like this a lot too. Very unique and helpful. I'm not a fan of getting rid of things that work and this seems like a change just for change's sake. I don't see anything wrong with the current bonus, which is very useful but not OP. The gold proposal also sounds very difficult to make useful without being OP. If the trickle is high enough to eliminate a need to gather metal for p2 techs then the bonus will probably be OP. If the bonus isn't strong enough to do that then it will provide almost no benefit. If you want to include some gold proposal then providing some gold discount for techs seems much easier to balance and more useful. Not a fan of deviating from standard stats for common units. It makes the game more difficult to learn and harder to balance. If so desired, I would introduce differences in the form of techs like "grain gather +20%; attack -10%" This seems really difficult to balance. Making them free seems it could make them very easy to spam and OP (i.e., build three extra houses at very start and train 30 Spartiates so that at min 6 you have an unbeatable army--enemies also can't do anything to stop this type of spam bc it just requires time, which no rush can stop). If the training is super slow then I don't think anyone will bother to train them because they will take up too much pop space without providing any benefit. My suggestion is that we create an alternate way to make spartiates. All history texts tell us that Spartan citizens used to train all the time to becomes spartiates. Why don't we create a male citizen that does nothing but can train himself into a spartiate. This way the male citizen just takes up space and resources (I would set cost to 50 food) while being vulnerable to attack. This would provide a new, unique, and cheap way to get champs. But this also avoids the "too easy to mass" problem because they will be super vulnerable while "training" out in the open and the loss would costly.

Eco Techs. Military techs. Heroes. Siege. Other p2 buildings like temples and markets. Basically every reason why you go p3 now. Most players don’t win now because they got p3 champs. All those current ways to win will still be possible

Sounds like fun

I think we’ve seen people claim all three in this one discussion. That suggests either there are a lot of charlatans or people just don’t know

It's pretty clear no one really knows...it's just one person guessing versus another. Even so, all the civs have such deep histories that you can justify almost anything with some historical context. At some point, this is just a game that we all play to have fun. Absent any glaring historical inaccuracies, gameplay should be taken into consideration.