chrstgtr

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

To be clear, this is the way it worked in old alphas.

Should be able to just say get back to work for them to resume their routes with their res.

You can also do attack move (unit only). It is Control+Q

Reflections on water can look a little weird. As you can see below, part is water/waves and part is the reflection of the trees. It alternated between the two different looks, so the water looked like it was blinking with light

First replay (-03) crashed unexpectedly. Both players in game crashed. No obvious reason why. Second replay (-04) we got an out of synch error in the middle of the game for no apparent reason (it said I was OOS). We were able to continue with no obvious effects. 2021-06-16_0004.zip 2021-06-16_0003.zip

Agree2021-06-14_0008.zip, not a release blocker. I was able to reproduce the difference between stopping when walking to build a destroyed building and continuing to walk to a point where a targeted enemy that was already killed. Garrisoning is harder to replicated because AI doesn't garrison much but I saw it happen before and I just can't find the replay of it.

I noticed the stop in place if the targeted unit is killed no longer occurs in a25. But a similar stop occurs when a building's foundations are destroyed or if the targeted unit garrisions. Is this on purpose? It seems like the three should all be the same. To me, it also doesn't make sense why units would stop walking to an area where a building was planning if its foundations were destroyed beyond the commanded unit's LOS.

There have already been substantial changes to mainland that make it more fair (e.g., https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4148). Resources should be relatively plentiful. Note 100% "fair" is not necessarily more fun because it makes the game more predictable (i.e., if I know you have a lot of hunt then I am more likely to prepare for a cav rush). Completely balanced maps alsp take away some strategy of trying to get the "good" spot that has a cluster of desirable mines. I do agree, though, that it would be nice to have the current balanced maps mod as an official map for those who want it. And, as it has been said elsewhere (e.g., https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/42909-metal-shortages/?do=findComment&comment=434039), it would be nice to have a balanced map option that is fair from a team perspective but not necessarily predictable from an individual player perspective. N.B. Balmaps mod doesn't equalize wood.

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4148

My primary concern is that this will make Rome/Mace unable to fight off a camel rush because the chasing spear cav won't be able to do enough damage against fleeing camels. The gif suggests that this patch will be about a 50% nerf in that context. I don't think the patch will be too impactful in other fights. If you don't think that this will render spear cav unable to stop a camel rush then I am fine with the patch.

Comment from patch copied below. For balancing reasons, I prefer the left version, which I understand is the current SVN setup. Right looks like it will be a big nerf to melee cav in cav fights and allow units like archer cav to too easily escape. Also, if this bug was already present in a24 then the fact that we are just now learning about it indicates that it isn't a huge/common/frequent problem. I say just leave it for now and deal with it later. Then again, I don't play with sound, so I'm not a good judge of how problematic the lack of sound currently is. Edit: what would the balancing fix be? Make melee units faster? That seems like it might have unintended consequences against inf.

Yes, it is like a normal game download. It just takes awhile.

Hmmm. I discovered the problem from using rally points. But now that I think of it, could we get around this problem by having units rally to a spot close to the forest and then shift clicking them resource collect the forest? Not ideal. But It would be helpful to avoid orphaning large units of spawning units.

It is a problem because instead of having units walk to the forest where I have a storehouse units will spawn from the CC and walk to the tree that is closest to the CC, which may or may not be close at to other units, storehouses, etc. Instead they should walk to where I ordered them and then find a replacement tree. It appears this has already been fixed, though. https://code.wildfiregames.com/rP25776 This is already implemented. It shows shows idle units in the bottom left. You just have to pay attention and/or constantly press the period button to select idle units. You can use shift to give secondary orders too.

Just played 2.5 games with @ValihrAnt and I just want to say that this is going to be a really nice alpha. Amongst other things, I was really impressed by the art team's work and the the programing's team's improvements to pathfinder/pushing. Good job, all. One bug to note, if units' rally point is assigned to a res that isn't available then the units go to the closest available of the same type of res from where they currently are.