faction02

Notice that no palisades were (ab)used by this player !!!!!!!! This is clearly an invitation for the enemy to come and try to take the civic center down. To me this demonstrate a high sense of morality and ethic by this player who wanted to assess the strengh of the combination fort/civic center with the only aim to try to comment on balancing posts in the forum!

I made a quick test of your mod, thanks for taking time to think about the issue. A few remarks: - there is still the upgrade to increase the default number of arrows, so abusing tower concentration could be an issue. - I tried to think about early placement of fields, I have to admit that they would be tricky to defend effectively. I placed them around the initial farmstead that I used for berries in order to save early wood. I might have set them between my first woodline (ideally on the side of the map border so there is one less side to watch out for enemy) and the civic center since it has the advantage of providing a nice vision. Mines are still right next to the civic center, so I might also be tempted to have farms around mines. Soldiers would be very close to the fields and remain productive this way, an alternative approach might be to start farming with soldiers. - I noticed that the restrictions on the distance between fortress was still there but that there was no restriction on distance with respect to the civic center. I would guess that removing the defensive property of the civic center would increase the incentive to add military structure very close. With the aura that you have added, the civic center might be even easier to protect since it would also work in late game. I have tried to illustrate what my city might look like after 15-20 minutes as an illustration of what the changes might imply (though I probably built too many forts to be a very good example). About the issue with respect to defensive structure, I have tried to illustrate what I meant with my defensive city example above. Sieging a city is costly: if an attacker has to destroy all buildings preventing him from moving forward with sieges, there is an opportunity cost in terms of economy he cannot produce with the citizen soldiers protecting the sieges. If sieges are not protected they would be sniped for free. I added a "palisades net" here, since it is cheaper than a regular palisades wall but quite effective at slowing down sieges. I could also add a few palisades pillar and more layers there to increase the density of cheap stuffs to be destroyed before the enemy can reach my valuable buildings. I let you imagine how annoying it is to destroy something like this and how much worse it can become if the city is protected with archers/slingers, and you don't have any with your civilization. About the choices you made for your mod: - Removing the distance limit between towers: You could concentrate too many towers in one spot, with a wall in front and the upgrade for an additional arrow they would probably be abused. You could build squares of 9 turrets with a wall around to act as a mini-fort which doesn't need to garrison soldiers inside. There is also some maps with narrow passages where stacking towers on top of one another would be too strong probably. The current solution is not perfect but probably better the suggested alternative of completely removing the distance limit. - Removing the storehouse capacity of the civic center: What if your storehouse get captured by the enemy and you have no wood available to build a new one? There would be an incentive to fight to the death to protect a storehouse, probably outside of the aura of the civic center. The potential usage of the civic center as a storehouse and the struggler trees prevent from having this undesirable effect. For food, it might make sense but in general, I think I would prefer an incentive system. A system of fertile land like the one from Delenta Est could makes sense. We could also imagine alternative system that might not require to modify all maps like for example a small malus for farming if the farm is too close to a building which is not a farmstead (because it creates the shadow or poor land quality... ). You could then choose a safe build with farms next to the civic center or choose the one providing a better economy with farms in the most productive area. - Ungarrisoned arrow count is reduced to 0: I don't see an obvious issue to apply this for tower but I don't know what was the original motivation to introduce it in the first place. - The civic center ability to shoot arrows has been removed and replaced by an aura, that increases the attack and armor of soldiers close to it: I think this might be problematic since it could create an incentive in late game to fight right next to a civic center (the initial cc or a forward one). The second potential issue I can think off relates to differences in range from different units. As you mentioned, the civic center defensive capacity is very important in early game and if you have weaker units you might not be able to survive the first few minutes of game. I would put a red flag toward removing it completely since it could change dramatically the early game balance. Some civilization can use their starting stones to get very early slingers, maurya elephants worker make early hunting highly effective and offer plenty of potential for deadly rushes. Other civilization won't be able to compete with this type of advantages (especially in team games for which the distance between players is quite small). Finally, just a bit of food for thoughts since a forum is the right place to farm ideas. I really like Changeset 24971 – Wildfire Games, which introduces smoke at the armory when it is researching upgrades. The changes is great since it has a strategic interest for competitive player, and it is probably a tiny step in the direction your are aiming at. I usually put my forges in front line to protect more valuable buildings (they slow down the enemy, have no value once upgrades are done....). The animation change might give me the incentive to hide it from the enemy sight since if he sees smoke during an assault, the building could be targeted. Teleportation through buildings probably doesn't give any incentive to leave space for movement between buildings (if I remember correctly, in previous alpha units would always exit on the same side, so teleportation could go only in one direction). If that wasn't possible, I would probaly leave much more space between buildings which could help having city which have a more realistic look. I don't know if something like this would be desirable but at least I know it is feasible and might help to reach your aim. As mentioned in the other post, working through incentives would be better but in some cases it might be difficult to do... For example, it would be nice to prevent palisades spam somehow, something close to a minimum distance rules could make sense there too (though I imagine it would create issues when it is not in a straight line). I don't think that stacking palisades is desirable in any way so maybe there, why not working with some hard limit.

You might also deduce from the reaction of the unit in which direction is the attacker. Since most units with low line of sight (women, traders, fishing ship, priest) will flee in the opposite direction from the attacker by default. It might help for navigating dogs in the enemy territory. I wonder if this should be enabled for buildings, especially palisades/fields, which don't really have vision in the first place. I see most comments about units but not so many about structures...

Unfortunately, I would say RIP catapults, you will not be needed in a24. Mass archers are doing a good job at countering you (especially if they are not supported by archers). Yes, I was mostly talking about late game turtling indeed, I have nothing against early game turtling as you define it. I should have been more clear about the definition of the problem. I am currently watching a nice game illustrating the problem (I missed the money shoot, the red rams just destroyed a cc next to the fort at the front that was built next to it and lot of fpre palisades art was already destroyed ). If I try to schematize the gameplay I have observed in this example: Step 1: choose a civilization with archers tradition for op range Step2: build towers/fort + anything that will prevent sieges from moving forward (palisades are great since you can put many layers in a tiny space). Step3: wait for the enemy, he will need about 6 sieges to do something with his push* (meaning that he has 18 soldiers less on eco or fighting).Your soldiers should be able to handle easily the enemy army with the help of towers/forts. Once this is done, you can take care of the sieges that might have only be finishing to destroy the fifth layers of palisades if you have done a good job with your palisades. I can also spoil the end of this particular game for you but I assume you can easily guess . The minimum distance trick would only have move the fort at the front somewhere else since it was next to a cc, and the one at the upper right. I would therefore admit that it doesn't really address the main issues that are illustrated in this screenshot. *I would guess 6 is a good average observation. You need to make quite a lot of damage to destroy the enemy defenses fast and since you need to mobilize your army to protect the sieges the opportunity cost of making a slow push is high. 6 rams or elephants allow to destroy palisades layers faster and spread them toward the many towers that you have to destroy while also allowing you to loose a few if needed.

I won't disagree with you on this particular point. However, computer performances are telling you that you have to limit the maximum population in a game!! If you first reach the maximum population and start investing resources into turtling, then turtling doesn't really have an economic cost. Waiting for resources exhaustion is far from fun for me, I could make tea the first 2 minutes but then what should I do??? Turtling is a bit too effective in 0ad: you can repair buildings for free, with trade, resources might be infinite and there is only a fixed cost to defensive structure. I would find defensive buildings less problematic if they were taking some population space for example. If 1 tower takes 1 population space (corresponding to the default arrow of that tower), then you might think twice about the number of towers you want to add to your unconquerable city since you will have 1 less citizen worker on your economy. This would be a bit different than what is suggesting @Radiotraining since the penalty cost would mostly affect a player that has reached his population limit and refuse to engage in a fight rather than a player actually defending his base. We probably all agree with your ideal of having incentives rather than rules. The minimum distance restrictions is for me more like a temporary fix to make the overall balancing of the game a much easier problem rather than a perfect solution. It seems really difficult to design a good mechanics to discourage too much turtling without making balancing other part of the game really difficult. P.S. if you enjoy building unconquerable city, you should try playing games with a population limit of 50. Defensive buildings become much more effective

I only meant a small one, very small one..... such that people don't put their fortress just right next to the cc.

I think the hp bonus was a good tool to depreciate the value of towers/civic centers. A phase 1 tower would loose effectiveness in killing enemy units in the late game if it was not upgraded or replaced by a fort. This mechanics made a lot of sense to me. It probably also contributed to reduce the advantage of archers. If units have more hp, they might cover more distance before being killed by units with a range advantage. Changing unit speed might be a way to address the issue, but I also remember people worrying about the economic impact that a change like this might have. Thanks a lot for the mod, this can finally be carefully tested. Turtling is also encouraged by the fact that archers are a good counter to catapults/bolts. These sieges can now be easily sniped from archers standing next to defensive buildings. Skirmishers civilization are now at a huge disadvantage in their usage of catapults/bolts. The capture/low vulnerability to arrow choice of a 23 made much more sense than the current one to me. Roman catapults could effectively destroy buildings or at least force the defender to send melee outside the range of defensive buildings. I would also introduce a minimum distance between forts and civic centers since when the two buildings are next to each other they because very difficult to take down.

Thanks a lot for your answer and your work. I was trying to guess what other non-intuitive units behavior these developments could help. The larger search ranges should help with the issue below I am guessing ? I have noticed that units often get stucked because of miners and storehouses. The units do not seem to account that the miners are blocking their way somehow.In the simple case below, the camel keeps searching for a path so increasing the search range would probably solve the issue, but I remember some cases involving larger numbers of unitswhere none of those units were moving anymore. Is it where the Unit Pushing might solve the issue?

I remember chrstgtr mentionning that he had more frequently units stuck at buildings corner in a24 in one of his post. I was wondering if the issue is now well understood ? @Angen @wraitii I can't repeat the issue on demand because I can't figure out what's happening exactly but I played recently a game with several sieges exiting from the same arsenal and taking a "similar" path before getting stuck at the corner of the same barrack. Because of the repetitions of the experiment with some variations, I thought the replay might be helpful to understand the issue. It starts with one ram stuck (min37), then a catapult stuck (min40), then again another ram stuck(min46) but in the meantime, many other sieges have managed to take a similar path without getting stuck (I am guessing because they are taking slightly different path/because they are smaller). Thanks! 0 A.D. 2021-03-19 20-11-57.mp4 metadata.json commands.txt

ffm visibility mod. At least, I remember ffm chatting about implementing something like this while watching a game, I haven't checked if it has been implemented.

I think ffm had also implemented something to reduce notifications with his mod to help. Instead of having two times '1 Mauritanian Archer ready.", replacing it by only one "2 Mauritanian Archers ready". Maybe he had also some other idea how to reduce the overload of message when the function is on.

I was wondering if it could be nice to have something like an "ambush site". The idea is to have a building serving only to hide units from the enemy in a specific spot. The ambush site could be used to ambush faster units, valuable units or units with better range. It would be an alternative way to defend against camels or spear cavalry rushes for example. It would provide you with some vision when soldiers are inside. Even after being spotted, the ambush site could provide some passive defense since the enemy would not know whether some units are inside and getting close would be therefore risky in any case. In latter game, it might be used to ambush valuable units such as sieges. You might also use it to hide some skirmishers from the enemy chasing them. I have in mind something like a small building which looks like a bunch of trees (don't know if that's feasible). It should be cheap, fast to build, could be built on any territory. For the ambush to make sense, the building should not be visible on the minimap. It should be small enough such that the enemy don't spot it by moving the cursor around too easily( maybe the size of an iberian house). I think however that it should look like a bunch of trees to allow to formulate guesses about potential ambushes and catch the idea that units are "hidding behind trees" (if you spot a bunch of trees next to your additional berries, you should be worried or if you see some soldiers disappear somewhere, you could guess they hide in those trees). The building should be available in P1 and easy to destroy too after you spot it. I remember a post mentioning that guerilla technics were specific to Britons, I think it could be a fun addition to that civilization (especially if dogs could be hidden there since they have no economic utility). Would something like this be feasible? Does that sounds nice? Thanks for your feedback!

0 A.D. 2021-03-13 10-40-04.mp4

metadata.jsoncommands.txt Around minutes 19 and 30 seconds, I have the impression that some units from the purple player try to go through the door of a palisades that belong to the enemy, the orange player. As a result, many units struggle to find their way around the palisades with some units starting to break dance. I am wondering if something there might be wrong and corrected ? Thanks!

If feasible, fixing this could be very interesting. Overkill is another issue with units control. I haven't noticed abuse of it but I suspect it has important impact in late game. Dancing becomes annoying when: (the number of actions needed from the "spectator" in response to dance)/(number of actions performed by the "dancer" to counter the action) becomes "large" or if the actions from the spectator are inefficient. Examples: - hero dance is very annoying since it requires microing a whole army; - automatic dance is very annoying too since one action will usually required many actions by the spectator; - 1 unit versus 1 unit seems ok since the micro would be balanced; - cavalry speed & inaccuracy of archers made rush defense against cavalry in a23 sometimes very inefficient. In early game, even with 10 archers, a group of cavalry could run around the enemy relatively safely

Thanks for these tests and the explanations. Some players have tried similar tests too. The results from this type of test are interesting, but I find it hard to build robust conclusions out of them. For example, if you change the starting position of archers (archers concentrated in one spot or archers surrounding the enemy), results can change significantly. The power of archers also comes a lot from microing them (hit, spread and escape). Obstacles plays an important role too (buildings through which you can teleport, forests, palisades/wall...). Balancing the range advantage of archers is quite difficult. If melee units can provide a reasonable counter, nothing prevent a player with archers to make melee units too. And since cavalry units do not play the same economic role as infantry, I would guess the most relevant test would be slingers versus archers and slingers versus skirmishers which are the units with similar role in game. The corresponding numbers found seems off by a large margin to me. Archers are now also a decent counter to both catapults and bolts if they are not well protected too. Skirmishers/melees do a terrible job at protecting sieges against archers. It is now hard to use catapults to destroy a fort protected by archers. Unbalance between civilization with or without archers get worse since mauryans and persians can get archery tradition on top of other upgrades and benefits from population cap advantage which make it easy to outnumber the enemy. I do not mean that balancing this would be easy since the current balance is the result of aggregating many other changes (units speed, rotation speed, no hp increase with phases...). I would like to emphasize that the problem is not to be minimized

I usually simply copy the two lines from the old file to the new user.cfg file, I don't use the hash directly when logging to the lobby. I have done this many times with windows when I try to clean out all changes related to mod, it works. I had to fix some additional TLS errors too when I tried this after changing computer, but that would just require an additional step. Maybe if you can remember passwords, it might be just easier for you to ask you a new one.

This is a great feature. Having corpses is interesting from a gameplay perspective, it can give useful indirect information especially in early game. If I can only choose between "On/Off", I would probably choose "On" all the time, therefore being possibly biased toward higher values than if I can choose an intermediate values myself. It would make more sense for me to have "Low/Normal" or "Off/Low/Normal" if I can't choose intermediate values myself. On a related note, performance issues are not just a question of hardware, but also of game settings (1vs1 vs 4vs4, early game vs late game...). From a user perspective, it could be nice to make it relatively easy to switch between "low settings" and "high settings" not just for the number of corpses but for all options simultaneously. This could be helpful: - for new players that might not know for example that the number of corpses can affect the performance of their game ; - for ValihrAnt who seems to change graphic settings every time he is casting ; - for me (and maybe others), who don't like adjusting their settings to the variations in fps if the game is not paused and therefore ends up having their game in low settings by default

Nice! I have tried to generate some actions that I thought could also be interpreted as "clicking outside the map" before queueing other actions afterward but I am indeed going nowhere with that. Thanks for your answer

If you shift-click a path leading a unit to go outside the map (in the black area) as you might do when you explore around your territory, the unit will stop at the border for a while, wait a bit, before moving to the following rally point. Is it possible that the same mechanics apply in different cases which could explain why units might seem to not listen whereas they are simply "waiting"?

I tested it, it seems to work very well. Great job!

I have seen some spears set to passive before being sent to the battlefield in a24... Passive can help save melee heroes that can be trained only once. I would guess that for an average player who have all his units in the same control group, having some form of security for his hero would be great. About healers, I am not sure what is the best solution since it is has negative effects for both the owner of the healers that need to regroup them all the time with the rest of his army and the attackers who need to regroup his soldiers chasing them. Just thinking out loud, maybe removing the running part of the flee sequence for military units (and healer?) could reduce the issue and prevent the abuse. Just giving my own view: I like that it is currently possible to fight with women. If 20 women are far from safety it seems desirable that they can fight one spear cavalry. Changing stance makes it easier to try to surround the cavalry. I only need to micro each women to their position around the cavalry, no need to click on it on top of it. I have also changed the stance of women to target several unprotected rams. They would attack the one closer to them before moving to the next one. This would be an important change to the overall gameplay since civic center and women would be much more vulnerable than they are now. Without testing it extensively, I am not sure if I would like it.

I didn't think I could customize it so easily. It works, thanks. If I wanted to customize further my hotkeys, is there a file where I could find all possible class ? For example, I don't see mercenary or champions in the current list. AutOPciv !!!

Currently they are grouped with other units. Possibly a hotkey for Cavalry+Dog might be even better, that would be the closest thing to a "select all army, but don't touch my soldiers on eco" hotkey

Hello, I am starting this post because I have been wondering whether some of the art changes could integrate a "practical" perspective when possible. For example, berries, fishes or chicken might be difficult to see, especially if the resolution has been lowered and I have been wondering how this could be improved. ffm is doing a great job with his mod to try to address this issue but it is a very "practical" approach aimed at improving gameplay. I was wondering if we could find a middle ground between pink or chameleon chicken. My suggestion here would be to try to make future art changes, when possible, having this practical issue in mind. For example, I was thinking that if we had a few white birds fishing, they might be easier to spot. Maybe similar "tricks" could be used for berries and the chickens (I have no clue what is feasible). For example, changing the soil to increase contrast or adding an indirect indicator of their location. Of course, this might not be always possible or easy. I have no idea how to apply this suggestion to apple trees without creating something weird for example. But I think it would be great to integrate this aspect when possible. Thanks for the many eye candies added to a24!