faction02

In previous alpha, I used to set rally points for cavalry units exiting stables for efficient hunting as shown below. The cavalry would go behind the deer and chase it in direction of the cc/farmstead, collect the food before moving to the next deer. A big advantage of this is that the order would be given to all cavalry units produced by the building as long as I didn't change the rally point, leaving me time to focus on other actions on the meantime. I could add scouting through rally point after the hunting and many other actions without any issues. In this alpha, if I try to do this, the cavalry units will simply move through all rally points, ignoring the deers. If apply the same principle for other tasks, like for example setting rally points on each berries then a tree next to my cc, all women produced, as long as the rally points remain, will collect berries before moving to wood when the berries are over. The only case where it doesn't work seem to be for hunting. I tried to apply it on chicken next to the cc, so there wouldn't be issue with vision. All chicken get ignored until the cavalry reach the last rally point. If the last rally point is a chicken, then the cavalry start hunting, but if it is not a chicken then the cavalry unit won't hunt. So it doesn't seem to be about the chicken exact location when the cavalry reach the rally point. I would guess that hunting can't be set as an intermediate rally point anymore. Is that correct? Any reason for this change ?

I would guess you used to play Macedonians a lot too but mercenary skirm cav cost 25 metal back in a23.

Outside of balancing the strength of mercenaries, I don't get how their prices are determined to start with. Mercenaries benefit from a discount on their cost that do not seem to be justified: - for slingers or swordmen, the wood cost is substituted for mineral at a 1-to-1 rate, all infantry CS costs 100 resources whereas their mercenary equivalent costs only 60. The argument that "mercenaries cost metal which is harder to get" doesn't seem to be a good argument from that perspective. For almost the same price, you can get 2 CS slingers (100 food, 40 wood, 60mineral) or 1 women + 1 CS + 1 mercenary infantry (100 food, 50 wood, 60 mineral); - on the non-economic role of mercenaries, any additional cavalry units trained in phase2 has no economic role in practice since coral are already setup and hunt is usually gone. So no clue why mercenary cavalry (80 metal) should be that cheap relative to their citizen (100food+50wood/40wood&10metal) equivalent. Mercenary cavalry are stronger, faster to train, and the embassy is even cheaper than the stable. In late game, many of the CS infantry trained won't ever collect resources neither, so this specificity would stop being relevant for infantry too; - with current metal setup on the map, the argument that "metal is scarce" doesn't seem to be very strong argument neither. I won't talk about low wood maps, where you can consider instant resign against a mercenary civilization with the advantage that a 100% metal cost gives; - if we compare the current early rush mercenary build to the fanatic one, fanatics need about twice the training time (20seconds) of mercenary cavalry (11 seconds), and they cost 80 food and 60 wood extra with respect to a mercenary cavalry. One fanatic costs 80food+60wood+80metal whereas 1 mercenary sword cav+1 CS skirmisher cav would cost 100 food+50 wood+80 metal (and the fanatic can't even build stuffs!!); - A cavalry swordman costs 100food, 40wood & 10 metal whereas the stronger mercenary equivalent costs only 80 metal. Anytime you can get 70 metal for less than 100food+40wood at the market, you have a substantial advantage. The first player to get a market can get his first 5 mercenary sword cavalries by simply selling 500 food for 400 metal... these 500 foods would only cover the food part of the cost of the 5 citizen sword cavalry.

I played a game against 7 AI Macedonians, after capturing 5-6 theatrons, the game was suddenly kind of over. My territory influence became so strong that I automatically captured the remaining half of the map without doing anything. Every buildings with no units (including more theatrons, cc and forts) were captured just through the gain in territory influence. Where it becomes really weird is that: - the bonus apply to all buildings, so even a tower has enough territory influence to capture many buildings around it (to give an idea, the aura range of a tower is only about 3/4 of the territory influence it provided with 7 theatrons). - it cancelled enemy territory: even for the enemy cc that weren't lost, they weren't able to provide any territory root since all map was part of my own territory. The AI were confused because there were no spot available to build anything on the map. +20% in itself is pretty small, but when the theatrons bonuses are cumulated ( *1.2 or +20% for each additionnal theatron?) they seem to snowball into something huge. 1 theatrons useless, many theatrons OP?

Rushing metal mines sounds indeed like a natural counter to mercenary rushes. There are however many potential side effects with this kind of change. What if in a teamgame, your mines spawn on the side where is your enemy (assuming you have no extra)? It would get quite easy to tower them and you would be at a strong disadvantage. I also wonder about how strong would be agressive cc/mc with theatron to completely deny mines, compatibility with iber walls, mountains(?) ... But I would agree that trying to get a working version of mainland with this feature in addition of keeping the current one could be a great addition to the game.

My suggestion wasn't aimed at balancing sword cav mercenary nor prevent massing of mercenary but rather an incentive to use more variety in the type of mercenary used. If the more mercenary gallic cavalry you make, the more expensive they become, and you apply the same to Iberian mercenary cavalry separately. Building your army of swordmen cavalry would be cheaper if you mix both types rather than use only one of them. Once you have build both embassy, you would also have the incentive to produce the infantry from each embassy since the first few infantry mercenary trained are strong for their cost. The ideal result would be an incentive to have a mix of both citizen and mercenaries but also some incentives to use infantry mercenary which feels less interesting in the current stage of the game. It sounds more natural to apply changes in training cost to mercenaries than to champions, it would reflect the idea that the more you try to use mercenary, the stepper their price become. Kind if a supply-demand on a labour market logic.

This sounds like a game feature which would limit the number of elephants trained in a game rather than the number of elephants used at the same time on a map, no? Just throwing an idea here, but would it make sense that the cost of mercenary increases with the number of mercenary trained but it would return slowly to its initial cost as time goes (if that's possible?)? Mercenary could be designed to be quite strong for their initial cost, but as their cost raise when more are trained, they would tend to get expensive for their strength. One should then wait for their cost to slowly reduce before training more mercenaries of that type. The interest of that feature is that it should encourage using all types of mercenaries/building all types of embassy rather than just cavalry which seems an issue currently.

If we take ptolemies food trickle, pyramid available in p1 or starting initial soldiers, they would all be different form of economic bonuses (if we can call them bonuses?) allowing to differentiate gameplay and strategies. The food trickle is inherent to the civilization and can't be lost. pyramids need to be built, the player would have to decide how to implement his economic bonus by deciding the position of his pyramid: food, wood... That bonus would be also at risk since the pyramid might be lost. A starting additional soldiers would also bring an economic boost, the player could decide whether he wants to apply it to any resources. The bonus resulting from that starting soldiers could be lost or even converted into an aggressive advantage. Differentiation of economic bonuses should allow for different strategies and allow for some uniqueness. If you want a particular civilization to have economic bonuses with respect to other civilization, we should also consider removing map unbalances in starting resources as part of the civilization design plan. I am not arguing that it is not possible, just that citizen soldiers will make balancing the different civilization with economic bonus only to a few civilization very difficult.

Catapults/bolts are specific units that do allow for some civilization to have some strategies that other do not have. As mentioned by Dizaka in one of his post, catapults/bolts can be countered by mobility (which can be played by any civilization but unfortunately not on every map). If while the enemy attacks your base with catapults you can at least engage in a base trade with your rams/elephants damaging faster the enemy base than what the enemy can do with catapults, then having civilization(s) with (better) catapults might be ok. The issue arise if the Roman can also turtle too easily. In that example, I would see Roman civilization specificity not countered by other civilization specificity but by a particular way to play the game available to every civilization. If you give a strong economic bonus in early game to a particular civilization (as it was the case in a23), citizen soldiers implies that this civilization is likely to play any strategy better than the other and it would dominate all the others with mass infantry in late game. I would rather see different economic bonus for each civilization kind of balancing each other out such that there is no big difference in late game. To come back to my previous example, an additional starting citizen soldiers for romans would be a form of differentiated economic bonus which would compensate them from not having the faster wood cutting bonus that you would give to Gauls. The different type of economic bonus would give incentives to play differently each civilization, but they wouldn't imply that you should play a civilization in the way it was design. I think the game should be balanced only on mainland, for other maps just put a warning sign that game might be unbalanced. It would be the responsibility of the players to ban some civilizations, play mirror civilization etc... if they really want to play balanced game on these maps. balancing civilization on all maps would simply kill any attempts for differentiation. I strongly agree there, there are many ways to balance the game and every suggestions made might be the best for a particular vision of how the game should be played. Some people might want to cook a pizza, others might want to cook a pie, if we don't agree on what we are cooking, it is not possible to know if we need sugar...

While I would agree that 0ad would benefit from some balancing strategy, "playstyle" sounds like something hard to be anywhere close to balanced. If I look at that example, your description let me think that all Brit-Mace matchup would be about an early game in which Brit aggress Mace. In most case Brits should take a decisive advantage and if that wouldn't happen, Brit should simply resign before late game because they missed their shot and Macedonian superior siege and late game would allow them to take the advantage. I think my view is close to breakfastburrito, I would offer to each civilization similar option but allow players to decide how they want to play it. It is important that every civilization do not become too predictable. A system with at least a "threat strategy" (rushing) and a "punishing strategy" (booming/lategame play) would make more sense (Mid games strategy feels currently missing...). The gameplay could later be further differentiated by introducing potentially several threats, various definitions of what is early game/late game for each civilization etc... Rushing/booming/harassing should be decent strategies for every civilization, but it would be nice if each civilization is able to do it differently. Defining a rush specific to a civilization would consist in combining civilization bonus+starting units+ starting building+available units/technology to allow for that rush to be specific. For example: Romans have faster training of soldiers, giving them a barrack that cost only stones, the availability of swordmen p1 which allow to use starting resources for faster soldiers production and maybe one additional starting units could allow that civilization to go for early infantry rush. A Roman player would decide whether he wants to go for that infantry rush, if we wants to add a few spear cavalries to implement a more complex version, or if he prefers booming and plays something specific to Romans in late game. The enemy would have to decide whether he prepares to defend the Roman infantry rush, goes for a rush specific to his civilization or boom to play a later game strategy specific to his civilization but about equally valid as a lategame strategy.

Nice, worth looking what others think about it. Not sure if I explained well my intuition. My issue with ships is that the arrows are spread over all ships in range instead of having them used to kill one units after the other as it is the case for other units type. The first arrow goes to the first ships, the second arrow to another ships etc...( vs all arrows goes to one ship until it dies as it would be the case for another unit type). If I can put my 10 ships in the same spot, I can make sure the enemy ships will spread the arrows on the 10 of them and if I have more ships, I also have more units to split the arrows while I would at the same time fire more arrows on the enemy. When my ships do not overlap, ships in the back will usually be out of range. They will therefore not be targeted nor fire at the enemy ships. If I do a quick drawing of ships range with each color standing for a different player: - ship B only targets the enemy ship F; - ship C will spread one third of his arrows on each ship D, E and F; - ships D and E will fire only at ship C; - ship F will fire at ship C and ship B, both receiving half of the dps; If ships do not move, ships C will be the first one to die since it receive all arrows from D and E and half of the arrows from ship F. Ship F will be the second one to die since it receives all arrows from ship B and one third of the arrow from ship C. Both player loose one ship. With overlapping ships: - B and C send one third of their arrows on each enemy ship; - D, E and F send half of their arrows on each enemy ship; In this case, I would expect the blue player to loose 0 ship while the red player loose everything. Since repairing is free, the blue player may never loose a ship if he is active in repairing them and there is no possibility to ever come back. The initial number advantage can be cumulated over time.

I haven't tested much the feature yet, but it seems problematic for ships. Since ships do not target a particular units but spread their arrows on all the targets, overlapping units is quite problematic. If we think about 9 ships perfectly overlapping each other fighting 10 identical ships perfectly overlapping each other, the 9 ships would all die while the 10 ships would all be damaged but survive. Of course, in practice, ships do not overlap perfectly but this is just to illustrate the issue. I was wondering whether the pathfinding problematic should be split into 2 parts: ground pathfinding and naval pathfinding? The two problems are quite different I would guess since on water, there is usually fewer units and less obstacles. On games like Starcraft2, flying units overlap each other while ground units do not so I was wondering if something like this could make sense for 0ad and potentially help to get an easy/temporary fix at least.

Not sure that a tech for sieges could work well for palisades spam. Even if they one shot a palisades, they are slow to move and it would still takes a lot of time to destroy the palisades if they are in large number. I would prefer having units able to do that task to prevent palisades layers/spam.

As a basic principle, I think it would be good if basic defenses used in P1 looses efficiency as the game progresses. In a23, increase in units HP when phasing up helped to fulfill this purpose. All units were buffed with the change in phases but towers weren't, so they be less effective at killing units. I agree. For palisades, the application of this principle I mentioned was, and still is missing. Palisades are often misused currently since they shouldn't be useful to block sieges but mostly be useful in early game. The idea of a tech available in p2/p3 to allow fast destruction of palisades seems good. A tech that could allow units to destroy extremely fast palisades in late game would work well, especially against palisades spam. So if someone used palisades in early game, he has to replace them by walls to have defenses in late game. Walls are barely used currently. Some players build palisades around them to solve that problem. In a24 (slower training time of units, no hp increase when phasing up), there is a very weak timing in multiplayers (smaller distance to the enemy) when you transition from P1 to P2. You spent a lot of resources and lose some training time from your cc to phase up so a player P1 is often stronger than a player that just reached P2. I have tried a few all-in with 4 to 6 barracks while P1 when the enemy reached P2, they seem currently quite strong. You start fighting with a population lead and usually, the enemy is unable to replace units dying fast enough even if he receives extra resources because he will lack production buildings. If on top of that you remove towers usage when they are upgraded, this weakness is even reinforced. I might limit cc's additional arrows to 10 maximum instead of 20 but keep a garrison capacity of 20. This would not change much the cc's role in early game but it would reduce its defensive usage in late game.

Thanks for organizing everything. How can I help?

The 300/300/300/300 starting resources used to be quite useful to differentiate gameplay: - It allowed Britons to go for an early slingers rush. It was also enjoyed by beginners since they could get their first 10 soldiers faster for a safe start; - Ptolemies could go for faster boom thanks to stones available for the barrack which needed 200 stones and mercenary costing metal. During the a22 -"No cav" period, that was often used as a substitute for rush, you could send your woodcutters away for a relatively long time without slowing much your economy since Ptolemies could keep growing without much wood; - I heard about a time when going for swordmen attack in early game using the roman bonus of faster soldiers training time, the starting stones for faster barrack and the starting metal to finance part of the swordmen was a strategy; - In a23, the starting stones allowed Persia to get the stable costing 300 stones at game start. With some hunts available it was possible to reach pop 100 with 20 cavalry to harass without being slowing down with respect to a player booming without cavalry; - In a23, with some extra berries, Seleucids could have boom comparable to faster civilization since with 300 woods and their starting 300 stones, they could get 2 barracks; As a player, I like each of these specificities of the different civilization, and I would prefer to see more of them rather than less of them, even if they might be difficult to balance. That being said, I guess there must have been some discussions about starting resources in the past since I remember a mod adjusting starting resources for each civilization. I would guess because many of these strategies were seen as too strong. That makes sense since other civilizations do not have comparable strategies, and depending on how the question is interpreted, one might want to remove these strategies but he could also add some for the other civilizations and try to work on balancing them. I guess a number of people who enjoy 0ad for the uniqueness of each civilization would also enjoy this part to survive.

I remember reading this arguments here too and I am no expert in history nor elephants but this morning I came across that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxlmmtragFU I noticed that they choose to put archers on bigger elephants and "melee" elephants are smaller one for Seleucids. 0ad does the opposite for Maurya. Don't know if something there could make sense to insert some changes... On the topic of "elephant racism", I was wondering about the balance of the two types of elephants. Indian elephants feels pretty good compared to the other one especially because both takes 3 population space but one type has better stats. The Indian elephant is therefore more efficient in term of population space and quite good from this perspective. It is easier to move around 4 Indian elephants than 5 African elephants in the middle of buildings. But I am not entirely convinced that increasing the population space taken by the Indian elephants would be perfect... maybe 3.6666?

I tried to search for the original motivations behind the introduction of this, but it is probably too old to be easily found. I was guessing that it was introduced as a indirect way to force players to gather stones even if it is not realistic to think that you might need these resources to make these upgrades. I did like this feature of a23, although I wouldn't say that it shouldn't be touched. I also liked that a player might not be able to afford all upgrades in the game and he would be forced to choose which one are important depending on the situation. But this might be a personal preference...

This makes sense but then come the question associated with slingers. It makes the question more complicated since Athens or Ptolemies often run out of stones if the game last too long. Maybe going in the direction suggested by chrstgtr, it could be possible to use civilization differentiation and some specific buildings to make some adjustments. D3680 in the list if I copied it correctly this time... I do like the question of the role of the fortress too but I don't have any interesting idea on this specific topic.

Thanks for reading it all. nani did a great job at summarizing the key idea. I have only describe what I see as a problem because it is a complex problem with many possible solutions and no easy way to say which one is better. Roughly, stone is the main resource for defense (towers/forts...), metal the main resource needed for attack (military upgrades, elephants, rams...) Many balance changes have increase this separation between stone and metal. Too much stones => Lack of metal

I agree there too, I mentioned that I am not sure I wanted to see them used more simply because I am not sure they fit this thread. Wonders aren't really used frequently simply because if you can win with it, you might have won without it in most cases. This part refers more to the thread mentioned by maroder. I don't think changing the function of the wonders should make it more used by itself. I also agree that currently they are useful as tiebreaker. I would add there that they should make sense as an instrument to punish turtling. If you notice that the enemy invest a lot of resources into defenses, then making a wonder should make sense as a strategy to punish someone sitting back. If there wasn't the issue with slingers civilization, I would have suggested to rise the importance of stone in their cost from that perspective to force a decision between getting multiple fort/towers and building a wonder.

A number of changes in a24 have contributed to alter significantly the status of stone within the game. While in a23 it was an important resources for all civilizations, in a24, some civilizations might simply buy their way out of stone collection. The role of stone is a complex question since it relates to many balance changes. Starting with some extreme example to illustrate the question: Mauryas can go to P3 and get all military upgrades except will-to-fight for only 750 stones. The player might decide then to add some optional 200 for a palace, 300 for a temple or 200 for an elephant stable or skip them all and go for a fast push with rams instead. Gauls might even need less stones since outside of will-to-fight and defensive structures, only slingers might be useful to spend stones. As a reference point, upgrading stones gathering rates costs currently: 200Wood+100metal / 400Wood+200 metal / 600Wood+300metal. Simply using the resources you would have used to upgrade stones gathering rates to buy stones seems therefore like a good strategy, since it could be sufficient to cover stones needs and avoid the time spent on gathering the resource. Changes that have contributed to reduce stone needs between a23 and a24: - The last wood/metal/stone upgrades stone cost was replaced by a metal cost (150 stones for each) - Stone cost has been removed from military upgrades (1000 stones in total for both melee and range infantry upgrades) - Fortress cost went from 1000 stones to 600 stones and most civilization required a fortress to get their hero/sieges in a23 - Barrack stone cost is set to a standard value of 100 for most civilization instead of 150 or 200 for some civilization Tickets that would affect the current issue: - D307: cheaper economic cost of technologies : 200wood+100metal / 300wood+150metal / 400wood+200 metal - D3680: Remove stone cost from will-to-fight I see 3 critical points for the role of stones: - Limited supply of stones: For some civilization, stone is a rare resource with a limited supply (Ptolemies, Athens…) while for other civilization it doesn’t have more value than wood. Removing stones usages benefits to civilizations with citizen-soldiers with stone cost. The problem of missing stones for these civilizations was however eased by switching to a system in which military upgrades applies to both infantry and cavalry. It allowed for an easier transition from slingers to cavalry/camels (even if it still requires stones to build stables); - Reinforce(create?) a negative correlation between the value of stones and the value of metal: With the change in fortress cost, the reduction of stones alternative usages also reduces significantly the cost of turtling. With too much stones available, there is no limiting factors to the production of fortress and towers. As a consequence of the multiplication of defensive buildings, it also increases the need for metal to build sieges leaving less available to play champions or mercenaries. In a24, it is frequent to see players using about twice more sieges; - Excess stone availability gives an advantage to civilization with range advantages: Since not all civilization have long range units (archers, catapults, bolts…), too much turtling makes some civilization really unpleasant to play in late game. Attacking a players with multiples fortresses/towers and archers that can shoot and retreat as needed to kill the enemy is far from being pleasant when a civilization has a range disadvantage. In a23, the value of stones in team games was usually correlated to the value of metal up until relatively late into the game. Stones would be always gathered and either used or sold for metal at a relatively good price. In a24, its value starts falling relatively fast once p3 timing is passed. In a23, the lack of stones had the advantage of being limiting factor to the spam of the best unit in the game. In a24, the overproduction of stones is extremely unpleasant since it raises new questions such as how to balance towers/fortress. Through my description of this problem, I would like to question indirectly some of the arguments that are motivating changes. For example, if you interpret the lack of metal within the game as being the result of expensive upgrades among others, the current values of D307 can make sense. If instead you interpret the excess supply of stones and too many defensive structures as an important factor behind the lack of metal, then D307 might in fact make the problem worst since instead of buying stones through the market or simply skipping stones gathering upgrades, it might makes sense to gather them and build 5/6 fortresses to force the enemy to waste metal on sieges. Comments on my description of the question?

Roman siege walls were more useful when the army camp could make sieges and catapults wouldn't die to archers. I am not sure I would like to see wonders being frequently used in general. Once a player manage to get his wonder, the game is often over if he has time to use it. But I would agree that changing the repartition of the cost between how much is spent on the building and how much is spent on the tech makes sense. Civilization that have advantage on technology cost or research time might benefits a bit too much of their bonus there.

I love the idea but I (and I think a few other players, chrstgtr in the topic below) dislike the flee mechanics in general. I think the part we dislike about it might be a problem here too. Having units running when they flee and other chasing them instead of fighting is problematic in battles. It is common to have a player setting his hero in passive to trigger the chasing mechanic in the enemy army. It can put you at a strong disadvantage. To abuse this feature, I would send my melee cavalry to attack your elephants and therefore force your ranged infantry to chase my melee cavalry instead of killing my ranged infantry. I would suggest testing some large battle with it, I would expect the result to be chaotic (I tried to make a video while testing it to show you what I mean but I messed up the installation. I might try again when I have more time). While this might looks like a real battle from a gameplay perspective, it might become quite messy. It will be great to try it. Keep up with the great job and the nice ideas !

The higher gathering rate of cavalry is one of the reasons that cavalry rushes are interesting in early game. It allows to increase food faster and to pay for the more important food cost of these units. Removing/reducing the differences would remove the incentive to make any cavalry units in early game since as it was mentioned, hunt is a finite resource and once hunt is over, cavalry have no economic role. Assuming that all players have the same amount of hunt, if my enemy see me making cavalry and produce citizen soldiers, I would be behind by a large amount since I would have made units which are more expensive, need more time to be trained and will be useless for my economy later on in the game. Scouting will be highly rewarding since it will remove most incentives to rush with cavalry. For me, this is a solution that might create more new problems than it solves exiting one. I think this guide provides a relatively good idea about the importance of scouting and what a typical early game should look like. I guess once you have scouted the enemy, a greedy player might simply stop producing cavalry earlier if he thinks he is safe. Putting the cavalry on chicken in early game also makes sense since as illustrated in this guide, you might have quite a lot of other actions to do in the first few seconds of the game anyway (I guess that this could be a reason to have chicken in addition to the berries in the first place). I think it might have made more sense to start this topic with this part (if this is the final purpose), it would avoid the talk to focus too much on the suggestion made. While the idea of scout/hunters that have been made on the forum are interesting in themselves, I don't think they would solve this particular problem. How would Sparta fight archers cavalry/camels without having cavalry ? What about nerfing Sparta cavalry in late game rather than in early game? Gauls have better sword cavalry currently, so worse spear cavalry for Sparta? I might also have less issue if the nerf was set on stables rather than on the cavalry itself if the aim is to have Sparta producing few cavalry. Producing a few cavalry through the civic center would work as it is the case now, but you wouldn't be able to mass a lot of them since stable would be more complicated to get. If the aim of the post is to brainstorm to improve historical accuracy, it might also be helpful to define "poor cavalry". If Sparta had poor cavalry because they simply didn't think it was useful, then the restriction on stable construction time could make sense for me (I might even consider the idea removing them)