chrstgtr

Jungle biome is a bit too heavy on trees. It makes it difficult to just place all buildings for a fully developed city. Otherwise, I’m happy with the current biomes. Edit: If you want that look, an easy fix would be to make trees less wood, so that they are cut quicker

Read OP post--it explicitly attributed the problem to int'l trade bonus. @Gurken Khan Here: There is a market somewhere on the map. Why should it matter if I own the market or my ally owns the market if the benefit is tied to distance. Put another way, if an American company is importing a natural resource from a country in Africa why should the amount extracted increase if the extractor is American or African? The amount extracted is the same. The only thing is how is the benefit split up. If the American company has to pay the African country then obviously the amount of income will be less.

Read OP post.

But why give a bonus? It is already beneficial to trade over long distances. Just split the fixed amt of res. The abstraction causes a problem, and the abstraction itself doesn't really make sense. So why keep it?

There is no need for an abstraction. Trading from far away places is beneficial. Usually trading with a far away place means international, but not necessarily. Given a fixed distance, trading amongst yourself should be more beneficial than trading with someone else bc then you don't have to share the fixed trade. Trading between different countries over a certain distance doesn't magically make it more profitable than trading over that same distance amongst yourself.

Trade only generate so much income--the amount of food/wood/stone/metal that was actually being carried by traders from one location to another. If you are trading with a seperate party instead of one of your own colonies then the income is being shared with the other party. Thus, the total income you capture is less. For example, let's say Rome traded 100 metal with Carth. Carth would would some portion of that metal in order to facilitate the trade. If, however, Rome captured Carth or built a Roman colony right next to Carth where they could access the metal then Rome wouldn't have to share the trade income and could keep it all to themselves. The "domestically available" bit isn't relevant because income is determined by distance (i.e., where the market is). The international bonus is on top of whatever trade income the route would naturally give, which just doesn't make sense. In other words, trading with a specific trading market shouldn't magically create additional trade income just because it is owned by someone else. If anything, that someone else would want a portion of the trade income bc they are facilitating the trade as a middleman.

You can still have a lot of units while having 0 pop cap/production capabilities.

Could also just get rid of international bonus. It doesn't really make sense--why should overall trade income increase when there is a middle man? It makes more sense that long distance trade would be most profitable when a player vertically integrates (i.e., when they build a CC far away and build a trade post there).

Bigger issue would be houses/pop cap. I think I have seen it only happen a few times before, and in those games the player was unable to help their teammates in any way except for a relatively large force of leveled up healers. Because all players at this point were unable to sustain large armies keeping men alive was very important, which made 20ish leveled up healers very potent. Edit: My point is: a player shouldn't be defeated when they can still be helpful to a team The only benefit to not requiring healers to be killed (or for that matter any other unit) is that it makes it easier for players to "officially" win when it is already obvious who has already won.

I've seen games where a player is essentially dead but for 10-20 level-3 priests that greatly helps the "dead" players' allies. This typically occurs in long games where players run out of wood, but food remains plentiful. But to your point, it is very rare.

Should probably change--if a player has a lot of priests those could be very helpful in certain TGs.

Agreed...formation dancing (changing formations quickly) has needed work for awhile...with that said, I won't believe the posted comment until I see it executed against a good player.

I’m not familiar with the bug so feel free to ignore...but isn’t it caused formations with units running to get into place? It seems like making units only move at their walk speed would fix that. Players in previous alphas used to use formations to dance anyways.

Archer damage wasn't changed. The accuracy wasn't nerfed much either. Archers were vulnerable in a24 but other factors like slow train times, slow movement speed, and op defensive structures made archers seem better than they actually were in open fights. Archers will win in lots of range only fights, but if melee ever gets to them they will be shredded. The key will be making diverse armies to take adv of higher dps range units while still being able to use melee to cut through range units' weak armour. I agree. These should be at least (partially) coming back in a26.

Already have other plans, otherwise I would've been interested. Have fun.

Some alphas are good. Some are less good. I don’t think anyone responsible for the less good alphas thought they were putting out a bad product. Also while a24 may have been heavily influenced by individual MPs, the changes largely did not address things that the MP community thought were problems. When those “problems” were “fixed” unintended side effects were introduced. to be honest, I don’t think there is or should be a dichotomy between SP and MP. Their priorities are just different with MP just wanting something balanced and SP tending to just want something that looks and feels great with cool features. Those two aren’t sets of preferences mutually exclusive. Mods are notoriously difficult to get people to adopt. When you need to get 8 people to simultaneously adopt one then it becomes basically impossible. This is why SPs tend to play with more mods than MPs.

Yes. The takeaway is both can coexist and neither should be ignored. The best way to serve both is create an engaging game. When that is done both will stick around

Sure. But in all likelihood it also means they aren't playing SP either. We should not equate downloads with plays. Pointing to total downloads is a bad way to show interest in game, especially when half the observable players aren't sticking around and a large portion of old players have mostly left the game. In fact, the lobby has lately been filled with lots of transient players that come and quickly leave. This is indicative of the fact that lots of people are downloading and trying the game (as the large number of downloads shows). But it also indicates that players aren't playing the game for very long for whatever reason. We should not believe the popularity of MP has suddenly decreased when the only change has been a new alpha. In my opinion, this indicates that there is a problem with the current alpha. Of course, but we also sholdn't cater a game to a group of people that we don't even know exist outside of a couple dozen that are active on the forum. Both can be served.

This. No reason not to let the next week or two play out and release the next alpha. The we start anew with an actually understanding of how the current RC looks. Delaying now just sets us up for this exact conversation again in 3 months. Meanwhile, a delay would also ensure that an unpopular alpha that has already resulted in the loss of several players unnecessarily remains around for even longer.

Regardless of whether you agree with the particular context, there is clearly a problem when the "historian," who consistently advocates total fidelity between gameplay and history, says one unit should "beat virtually everything." If you care at all about gameplay or balance considerations then gameplay has to take the front seat because history is determinative--we already know who wins in Rome vs. Gauls, Athens vs. Sparta, etc. 0 AD is a game, not a simulation.

And the reason why historical realism should take a backseat to gameplay considerations.

Makes sense. It’s just the first one I really paid any attention to development, so I was curious how it worked. Better to come off the block clean than to stumble and risk immediate backlash

I’m just curious how this works. At what point do we give up on fixing a bug for a specific release? Like I see a RB from 4 months ago that still hasn’t been fixed. At some point does the programming team just say “next release”?

Or just make them bribable much like the way spies work now. It seems more realistic and less Ptolemaic (the astronomer, not the civ). ————— we could also introduce a new type of offensive priest that converts units.

It was removed in a24. You used to be able to capture bolts/cata. It was a nice feature that I miss. Many people have discussed the desire to capture ele, and I believe it is widely supported. Not sure why it isn’t allowed. I hadn’t thought of it before, but making mercs bribable is a cool idea. It would need to be costly to avoid making it OP. I don’t like Gaia troops ever being on maps—I prefer to play with people