faction02

This is a very nice feature. What is exactly "performance over time"? It takes values that varies substantially from negative to very high values and currently, it seem very hard to see how "Rating evolution" is actually moving. Maybe making some tiny adjustment (using different scale or units of measurement, when generating the graph creating an option such that not everything is added ...) to get the different information on the graph more easy to read could be good?

Maybe reintroducing sieges capture would fit with some of the ideas here. For example if sieges can't move without units inside, stealing ungarded sieges could be a fun part of the game (not sure why it was removed in the first place).

I like the use of color for the table.

Blaspheme !

or simply a good amount of lag or a pause, then it only requieres a bad internet connection, someone else dropping or a bad excuse. That's where the design flaw is.

Citizen-Soldiers makes many of the existing features of other games not suited for 0ad. Sieges needs to be able to destroy buildings relatively fast. Whereas in other game keeping some military units idle to protect your sieges is perfectly fine, in 0ad, it has an opportunity cost since every idle citizen-soldiers could instead be collecting resources. For the same reason, having sieges units being effective is quite important in 0ad. A failed attacked in which siege units are all destroyed has a huge economic cost, citizen soldiers could have collected resources for a very long time instead of walking to the enemy, supporting the siege units, walking back to the base. Currently killing a civic center protected by 20 champions swordmen and a good micro using rams is close to impossible, sieges will die much faster than the champions.

In most game, skiritai are probably between not used (because Brasidas allows to make an army with high DPS, and thin meat shield) and around 40 units, very rarely more since they are not good for the economy. I think making skiritai less attractive will just make them not used at all since other strategies will just dominate any strategy featuring skiritai. A group of 10-15 units doing commandos mission seems to describe best the way naked fanatics are used in the game rather than the skiritais. There are two issues in my opinion with Sparta spear champions: - upgrading champions is rarely a viable strategy. Melee champions are not meant to be produced in large quantities, they will die before being massed or they won't be affordable anymore (Shield bearers have the same issue); - spear infantry champions are not cost efficient. If spear champions are designed as better to counter cavalry and to loose against sword infantry champions, then spear champions infantry has very little usage in the game. They are too slow to catch cavalries, too weak to fight swordsmen, too expensive to stand idle or be used as meatshield. All spear infantry champions or mercenaries are barely used at all in the game. Assuming that everyone with a long stick should be specialized at killing horses is a bad idea if we also aimed at having a low amount of these horses on the battlefield.

Currently, arrowships do pierce damages, cataships do crush damages. So one is effective against buildings and the other isn't. With your suggestion, it seems you would like to remove that difference. D4507 reduces the pierce damages of arrow-ships to the same level as the one of defensive buildings and add a multiplier against ships. Could you develop your argumentation about why having all ships dealing a moderate amount of damages to buildings would make the gameplay better? On the Quinqueremes/cataships' inaccuracy, the same issue was brought forward for catapults: Catapults dont work. I guess a similar fix should be made for both, D4511.

A difference of a23 stable for Persia is that they only costed 200 stones, and stones weren't needed for upgrades. So using Persia meant you could build at game start your stable and start massing your cavalry much earlier than any other civilization without delaying your eco.

What about adding as requirement that the outpost is garrisoned to get the ping?

Despite the footage below as evidence that a spear cavalry was the murderer, 0ad doesn't seem to acknowledge that it was guilty of that crime. The death is not entering into the statistic as unit killed nor generating any loot. metadata.jsoncommands.txt

Substitute the dots with almost any of the current balancing issues, you will get a valid comment. I also think that the issue is not whether catapults make too little or too much damages but rather what's the point of making catapults when you can make rams. Since not every civilization has access to the same sieges (and especially catapults), all sieges need to be able to achieve about the same results or balance between civilizations with different type of sieges will be broken. For example, balance can't be made such that it is expected that catapults are necessary to break a turtling player or a player without access to catapults will have no answer in that scenario. Similarly, since not all civilization have access to archers, making archers a natural counter to catapults does not make much sense. Some civilizations will be better equipped than others to deal with catapults. As a way to differentiate catapults from other sieges, a23 chose the path to allow catapults to do something that other civilizations could do anyway with other units, although differently, kill units through splash damages. Similarly, to make sure that most civilizations could deal with catapults and not just those with archers, the choice to have very high pierce/low hack armor made sense since melee/sieges would be their natural counter. The current design of catapults might be more realistic than a23, but it is way less interesting from a gameplay perspective.

Both the archery and crossbow training upgrades for the Han Chinese are available at the barrack rather than the forge as it is the case for other civilizations. Not sure which of the two options is the best, but I am guessing the difference was not made on purpose.

I don't think that using the Ptolemies as a benchmark for balance is a good idea considering that the civilization is currently too strong and often banned from team games. If you start from game start, at a rate of 1 metal per sec, by minute 10, that 4 x 600 metal = 2400 metal for the whole team. Give all that metal to a ptolemies player with 4 barracks, by minute 11 he will have 40 mercenary infantry. If you get the hero for cheap mercenaries + a iberian bonus, that would be even enough metal for 68 skirmishers mercenary. That bonus is likely to boost the strong civilization even further... I do not like using economic bonuses as team bonuses. If a team pick 4 economic bonuses when the other team has none, the game become very unbalanced with one team being way too fast relative to the other. If your opponent pick the civilizations with economic team bonuses, it forces you therefore to also pick the same civilization if you want to be able to compete. As a result, team games end up being about always picking the same civilizations with economic bonuses (or banning the op ones). The likely following step is to nerf economic team bonuses until they become barely significant so they can be stacked without being breaking the game. The Iberian bonus used to be -20%, it was nerfed to -10%, some people are still talking about nerfing it even further.

The aura on which the 10 damages per second are made is in fact extremely small with 8 meters radius. Even a pikeman attacking this hero can manage to be far enough to be unaffected. To kill a complete eco, the hero would have to stop 3 sec right next to each woman in some case, shoot an arrow on another one then move. He could kill a few women at once with his aura only if they are too close to each other like on a field for example. The damages to an economy would be probably the same as those done with about 6-8 cavalry units. Disaster are more likely to arise in the rare cases in which that hero can go next to a large group of enemy soldiers without being targetted (health draining ignore armor). That might be because the units are already targetting something hard to kill like the champions in Yekatarina's example.

Rather than a sound, a ping on the minimap (or both) might be better in case someone has several outposts.

They have no interest in botanic? There were some nice improvements in the art to make berries bushes and fishes spots more visible, even with low graphic settings. Berries bushes on Sudanian savanna are still a bit hard to find too. In many cases, the minimap remain probably the most effective way to proceed. Simply because berries can be hidden behind a forest or berries are barely visible on the explored map for example. This specific case is however quite interesting since it provide an example in which the minimap could fail. The extra green dots next to the civic center could be confused with the starting berries. Not sure if something new to help players find what they are searching for could be useful. I vaguely remember a post talking about having different icons around selected champions/CS, I am wondering if applying the same to trees would help. Then maybe defining a "select all berries" shortcut to highlight them ? P.S.: In SVN, these trees would be more likely hidden on the minimap by the big civic center icon. Mines icons can also hide important information too. Thanks for letting that feature as an option! (I am looking forward to see if the big icons can be exploited for sneaky attack ).

People rarely complain about chariots because Britons do not have Indibil to get cheap chariot. If not many people use chariots, there won't be many people to complain about them neither. Many complained about civilization loosing uniqueness in a24. Balancing firecavs to make them more like chariots is indeed a nerf but not something that will necessarily fix complaints. I would prefer having fire/poison damages used to get some unique gameplay than having them used as a "bonus" for champions (and for me, a23 firecavs concept was more interesting than the current one anyway). For future reference, you can already put me on the list of people complaining about it next alpha, just in case I forget to do it explicitly.

Maybe it could make sense to have some limit in the number of animals that a player can have for each corals or find a way to limits animals' impact on the game performance (sheeps bataillon to reproduce herd behaviour?). That's rarely an issue currently because corals aren't that much used, but I remember some games in which it was possible that to know that the enemy was using them just because of the extra lag generated.

I wouldn't mind if some heroes were very weak, some others very strong. I don't think there is a need to balance "heroes" between civilization. I would care more about the balance of heroes within each civilization than between different civilization. As long as the civilizations are more or less balanced, weaker heroes might be balanced by stronger technologies for example. There is really an issue only if a hero is never used and the game is probably better if when you get a civilization, you do not always choose the same hero because it is definitively better than the 2 others but you adjust your choice depending on a particular strategy. Rebalancing Ptolemies with respect to other civilization might be done through heroes, but it can also be done with some other elements even if heroes are one of the reason why Ptolemies are op.

The "Imperial court" + "Civil Engineering 1" + "Civil Engineering 2" means that a Han civic center can get up to 5940 hp with the possibility to shoot 43 arrows per 2 sec. Caros ability may be too strong in that context since it would be equivalent to 30 extra units garrisonned in that civic center (I never tried if several Caros could cumulate their ability). Caros create a big difference between having 1 building firing 40 arrows or 2 buildings firing 20 arrows each. The "imperial court" upgrade may result in making the balancing of defensive structure a bit too complicated (D4510). Maybe increasing the number of units that can be garrisonned by only 10 instead of 20 (and adjusting its cost accordingly) would be better for a first test of the feature?

From a balancing perspective, it would be probably easier to ask the question what has improved since a23 rather than what was better before and should be reversed. The previous Ptolemies system was indeed much more fun. The food trickle is about equivalent to having an additional woman on berries forever with a farmstead next to it I think. It took about 4-5 women if you splitted them for efficiency of house production. If the aim of this change is to remove part of the economic advantage, a 20-25% build time increase with respect to a23 may make sense but I am not sure how it would fit with all the other changes that have been made since then. a23 - Ptolemies a25 - Ptolemies a25 - Iberians

Most other civilization would have only 1 fortress, so a very limited production. Roman army camp can still allow for units production anywhere and skiritai, I would prefer to have them as something different than just a rank2 swordman.

Part of the issue with Ptolemies is that they have 2 eco bonus when some of the other civilization have none. There was probably a need to rethink all bonuses after deciding to apply team bonus to the civilization itself too. I think removing at least the farmstead from the bonus could be useful. When Ptolemies get extra berries/hunt, the low wood cost of their farmstead tend to accentuate too much the potential imbalance of the map. For the rest, it should fit the rethinking of all team/civ bonuses I think. I don't like the idea of just nerfing it too much because Ptolemies economy is too strong. Better replace it by something very different than mute the bonus up to the point where it become irrelevant.

Champions at the fortress is quite unlikely to make the fortress itself more interesting. If someone make a fortress, he will probably go fortress, (then hero), then will-to-fight, then champions, but usually people die around the time that someone get the will-to-fight tech. So it is likely to remove some champions from the game rather than increase the attractivity of the fortress. Sieges available at the fortress was important for the timing of the game, it was delaying the final push by some time and potentially giving more time for alternative p3 strategy (like producing champions at the fortress while the enemy is producing sieges at his fortress for example). Even if we delay the final push (by making arsenal/elephant stable harder to get for example), having most champions at the fortress seems still too restrictive. It would prevent champions to be massed. This is a problem for at least two reasons: - Champions upgrades/heroes (silver shield regiment and nisean warhorse) : if you can’t make many champions, upgrading or getting a hero for them is not attractive. - Melee infantry is not really useful if they are not massed. Getting few infantry swordmen won’t make much of a difference in an army of 100 units. They will die without anyone even remembering seeing them on the battlefield. I would have less concerns with the production of champions at the fortress if champions were more than just strong units (like the Trumpeter for example). If everything else remain unchanged, few melee infantry champions would feel very useless. For ranged or cavalry champions that would be more nuanced: ranged champions may survive thanks to melee protecting them and cavalry champions could be used for raiding mission and escape before being killed. Both may still be massed and used even if they are slow to produced, but it might end up being frustrating to never be able to really play a champion strategy. I would prefer some other way to make the fortress more useful than sending most champions there. Maybe a fortress could be a place to trained rank2 soldiers on top of its current function ?