ChronA

For what it is (an unfinished open source RTS), the truth is 0 A.D. is probably doing fine, or even above expectation, in terms of user numbers and engagement. I think the concern is that, given its stand-out qualities within that cohort, such as its unusual graphical polish, why isn't it more of a positive outlier than it is? Why isn't it pulling in an Age of Empires 2 sized player base for example? To answer that, I don't think you can wiggle around the reality that 0 A.D. has been in development for 15 years and is still being labeled as in the alpha phase. The implication is that, after all that time, even the developers don't think the product is fit for purpose yet. And it's not entirely wrong. The game is still lacking expected narrative content, a certain amount of gameplay polish, some quality of life features, and performance. This presents a marketing and growth catch 22. To make development progress you need an engaged user base, but to get more uses you need positive marketing presence, and to get positive marketing presence you really need development progress. You could slap the title beta 1 on the product tomorrow, but that might not help very much. People would rightly ask what has changed. It doesn't address the underlying concern that I think everyone who is aware but skeptical about 0 A.D. harbors: progress towards an actually finished product is glacial. I think this will always make it hard to garner sympathetic press coverage. The only way to change this dynamic is to deliver some major progress on these missing features, or to pivot the project to chasing a more obtainable set of ambitions and ask the public to reevaluate the project using that revised value proposition.

Yes, mass hysteria is the proper label to apply to witch hunts, and this is quite transparently a witch hunt at this point. The fact that it has been going on for so long and the words you guys are using give it away. And before you go objecting that this can't be a witch hunt because the smurfing and anti-sociality problems are real, keep in mind that whether a movement has become a witch hunt has nothing to do with whether the thing being hunted is real. What makes it a witch hunt is the emergence of an organized witch hunting industry, parallel to the normal regulatory apparatus, and the use of the hunt primarily to settle personal grudges rather than to enforce a consistent set of rules. Just look at this thread and you will see ample evidence for both these criteria. I'm not trying to argue that the grievances posted on this thread are illegitimate. It is not okay to misrepresent one's skill level to skew a friendly competition in one's favor, and it's not okay to conceal one's identity to harass other players. All of that is incredibly toxic and immature, and you are right to try to purge it from your community. However the remedy you guys are trying to administer seems much worse than the disease, if only because it appears quite ineffective at actually treating the disease, while spreading massive amounts of general toxicity and paranoia. Based on the persistence of accusations, it doesn't seem like these public name and shame campaigns are very effective in driving off the miscreants. Rather it just encourages them to get more aggressive with their alt accounts. In the absence of a truly effective remedy, it seems to me like restraint, humility, and self-awareness are a better option than what you are doing now.

In Salem Massachusetts there was a rule against witchcraft, but it was difficult to enforce without "the village" helping the witch hunters enforce it. If the only tool you guys have to combat this supposed scourge is to embrace mass hysteria then it seems to me the entire enterprise is doomed before it even begins. So once again, if this is truly such a massive problem, I urge you to consider instituting the only system that has a hope of combating it: a robust social reputation system with carefully tuned incentives. If people are constantly smurfing it's because it gives them all the advantages of having an established account, plus some additional sweetener (whether that is an easier time finding easy opponents to stomp, or not having to behave themselves). So what you have is a massive, non-repeating prisoner's dilemma, where the the optimal strategy is always defect and then put on a disguise for the next round. If you get to the point where most people are engaging this way, eventually even policing will become impossible since it will not be in most agents' self interests to cooperate honestly with enforcers. To fix this you need a system where newcomers and drifters are treated with suspicion. They do not get access to the most appealing advantages of the system until they establish positive reputations for themselves. Of course then that creates the problem of how do you grow the community is newcomers are prevented form engaging with it? The one I would suggest is gamifying mentorship. Have established users reach a reputation cap that they can only surpass by finding and cultivating new community members who also maintain good reputations. This how everyone from frontier communities to city states resolved this problem all throughout history. Strangers are treated with due suspicion, but for established actors who take a calculated risk on partnering with newcomers there are favorable incentives to engage with undeserved prospective partners. (Like if you are the only one willing to buy a strange trapper's furs, you get to set the price.) Of course, with 0AD it might be tricky because the only thing of value to anyone is engagement, and there is not much of a natural economy for it. Thus you need an artificial system of rules that provides the right incentives to all parties.

I fall in favor of the less-units side of this debate, but I will concede that this is probably true. But, what would be even more useful, is knowing why larger unit counts appeal to prospective players in spite of the performance tradeoffs. Is it because larger fights take longer to resolve, which means players have more time to re-deploy their forces and rectify the trajectory of bad engagements without needing a million apm? Is it the gambler's thrill of committing all the fruits of 20-30 minutes of investment in city building and logistics into a single potentially game ending clash? Is it the visual spectacle of hundreds of units smashing against each other? (This last seems unlikely to me, since units continue to pack so densely that individuals smear together into an undifferentiated blob.) If we had an answer to that question, maybe there would be a way to improve performance without degrading the special appeal of 0ad's ambitious scale in the minds of its playerbase.

I'm morbidly fascinated by this dust up because of the contrast to another open source RTS project: Zero-K. In the competitive scene for Zero-K, I believe that the consensus rules say that everything about how you control the game is fair game for modification. You can use you own custom GUI and endlessly elaborate control bindings, with all sorts of automation to facilitate optimal macro and micro. I think they even let players customize the AI scripts used by units and buildings for things like target prioritization and fight moving. The philosophy is that if you have the coding skill to automate any task that other players do manually and remain competitive, you deserve to reap the benefits. I'm sure in practice there would have to be limits to this approach. Entering a full AI with 10,000 APM multitasking to play for you in a tournament wouldn't fly I imagine, but I doubt they would bat an eye at any of the features in ProGUI. It just goes to show that while a line must be drawn, where it is drawn seems kind of arbitrary. ...Or maybe not so arbitrary. GoogleFrog, Zero-K's main dev, has a series of essays ("Cold Takes") about the design of the game that I think are quite illuminating (and well worth reading). It shows that Zero-K is a game with a very clear vision of itself. It's confident that its appeal lies in the challenge of solving its fiendishly elaborate system of unit interactions, encapsulated in the unit stats and simulation systems. Everything else is treated as peripheral and left up to the whims of the players. I think fights like the debate over ProGUI in Zero-AD are a symptom of a project that does not have confidence in its own systems and faction design. That's why some players are so invested in turning fighting the UI into a competition. When the strategy space is flat and homogeneous, execution is the only way for players to differentiate themselves.

Somewhere I heard this advice and it has served me well: if a unit is initially OP, reduce one of its combat stats by half. If the unit is UP, double one of its combat stats. Keep doing this until the relationship flips, thereby bounding the balanced range for the statistic. Then start splitting differences until you converge on a balanced value. The real big brain moment is realizing that this is is not just a good algorithm for converging on acceptable parameter ranges. It's actually easier to create stable Nash equilibria using strong dominance relationships, such as you get by sticking to powers of two stat-adjustments. The resulting strong counters will be much more stable against perturbations than a delicately fine-tuned dominance web. I know 0 AD aspires to be a "soft counter" based experience, but I really think you guys will paradoxically make a lot more headway if you learn to be less cautious with your stat adjustments. When every piece of your balance web is fine tuned, adjusting any part is almost inevitably going to break other parts, creating obscure new problems as fast as you solve them. You end up needing to add compensatory adjustments across every node of the web, which in turn all cause their own adjustments that must be correctly compensated... it's an endless quagmire: TL:DR - Try doubling the DPS of all boats. See how much that helps the UP-ness of naval units vs land ones. Then you will probably need to buff the HP of ram ships, since melee units benefit less from DPS changes than ranged ones. But after that you might be in the ball-park of the situation you want.

In real life, sling stones fly significantly faster than arrows. Realism is important. Also, past experience has shown that changing units movement speed has massive economic side effects. Thus It is too chaotic to use for balance. A. A small amount of hack added to archer damage. This could represent the ability of arrows to more precisely target and cut into gaps in armor, due to the static release of bows, versus the more chaotic dynamic launching methods of the other projectiles. More experienced or well equipped opponents would be able to cover these vulnerabilities, hence units with hack armor negating the advantage. (Contrast with slings, which defeat armor coverage directly using blunt kinetic impact, modeled by crush.) B. Buffed archer accuracy, and maybe a small nerf to sling and javelin accuracy, so that slings and javelins will have some noticeable damage fall off at their maximum range. This could represent the superior willingness of archers to shoot to kill targets of opportunity, rather than just to suppress. Bows and arrows are expensive weapons systems compared to slings or javelins, thus bows are more likely to be wielded by committed combatants who are highly invested in victory. C. A small amount of extra health, to represent greater willingness to stand and fight, for the same reasons.

I'd like to applaud @real_tabasco_sauce for the moderation of this opinion, and endorse it as my own view. Ultimately the non-random systems seems like it will have better implications for gameplay. However its balance implications are so convoluted and far reaching that trying to implement it all at once into a larger incremental-rebalance mod is just going to scramble all the other balance goals. However, this idea of having an adjustable number or proportion of arrows, per actor, be non-random sounds very promising to me. I think it should be discussed further. I imagine the implementation would be tunable on a per-unit-class basis through unit templates. That might be your solution to the balance problems. You could walk the proportion up for each building, just until it starts to cause problems, and then wait until a compensatory adjustment can be found before going further, without ever breaking the overall balance (if it were done very cleverly). This would eventually let you transition entirely to non-random if you wanted, or find a happy middle where the gameplay objectives of non-random are achieved, but some random aiming is still present with its own beneficial effects on balance and presentation.

Here's an idea for buffing sentry and guard towers that I tried in one of my own modding experiments and found incredibly fun: give them an aura that slightly increases the movement speed of friendly units. This is meant to represent the policing and infrastructure functions that a small local garrison under arms can perform. They keep the roads clear, break up fights, and give directions, enhancing the efficiency of the local economy. The effect of this was to incentivize building out a network of sentry towers across your territory, and especially around work sites to speed up production. These naturally also became a defensive asset against raiders, especially if you strategically upgraded some to guard towers, but (at least in my experiments) the density of towers needed for efficient production was less than the density needed to fully protect against raids. But I still felt it shifted the approach to static defense away from the spoke and hub paradigm, where a CC or Fortress anchors the defenses and economy of a big chunk of territory. If you want a further layer of intrigue, one could also give static defense a farming and metal mining debuff aura, representing the graft of the sentries. (This should also apply to CCs or Fortresses.) It could even slow research and unit production. Then you have an interesting push and pull where you should intentionally leave some gaps in the tower network. Now, I would be remiss not to disclose that this was in the context of an experiment where I lowered the max pop to around 100 IIRC, along with other changes. I'm not sure the performance implications for a full sized game...

The fact that non random arrows broke the balance in the first place just shows that the rush-defense balance was over tuned and under-differentiated to begin with. AoE2 tower rush wars prove that OP static defenses can still work in a fun and dynamic early game. You just have to leave room for the meta evolve new rush variants that don't get completely shut down by it. Maybe provide some sort of early heavy-armor infantry, or maybe even reduce building attack range so raiders can work around the edges. Or you could meticulous rebalance the damage numbers along a new knife edge to preserve the current dynamic. It will be a lot of work, but you do seem determined to see it through. Note: that was why I was opposed previously to non-random arrows. It seemed like something that might burn you out for a feature no one else apparently wanted. But now @wowgetoffyourcellphone is asking for it for their mod, so I'm in.

I think chariots are just a weird weapons system to model in the simulation systems of 0AD, because unlike almost everything else in the game they are both extremely multi-role and (or arguably because) by the era the game takes place in their entire advantage seems to have been 100% psychological rather than kinetic. (With the possible exception of Britons vs Britons.) Do you need a heavy cavalry weapon that will smash through enemy formations with pure momentum? Chariots will do that. But horse riders will do it better, while also being more survivable and costing less. Do you need a mobile archery platform that will rain arrows on your enemies while keeping you out of reach of foes? Chariots will do that. But horse archers will do it better, while also being more survivable and costing less. What does a chariot do better than cavalry? Only that is shows you were both rich and crazy enough to show up to war in a chariot. That means you are probably an emperor or his immediate family: with an entire army, plus a lot of elite body guards personally tasked with backing him up. So whoever he decides to charge at and then makes the colossal mistake of standing their ground automatically earns the wrath of that entire apparatus. It's like the president of the USA taking Air Force One into a dog fight. The 747 is not a good choice if he intends to achieve a kinetic victory, but if the other guy is smart he will immediately surrender regardless. Am I wrong?

@real_tabasco_sauce Forgive me for butting in, but as a third party I do feel @chrstgtr has made their case in this dispute better than you have. Both parties seem to agree that the rush vs turtle balance hinges upon static defense doing a very limited amount of damage. It's basically supposed to act as a timer for how long you can derp around in enemy territory, rather than being a decisive source of attrition against enemies who happen to stray too close to an emplacement. The building AI change has disrupted this balance by concentrating the damage emplacements deal, which was previously spread out, such that now it can cause real, lasting attrition. You want to adjust down the damage stats of static defense to restore the balance, which is fair. Except, won't that in itself defeat the original purpose of the building AI change entirely? Static defense still won't have the ability to generate real, lasting attrition, because that is what the whole thing is balanced around. The net effect on the tactical dynamics of static defense will end up being completely negligible, and all that you will have accomplished is to waste your own time and energy on a largely cosmetic adjustment to the simulation. That's the argument I think @chrstgtr is trying to make, and to me it seems well reasoned. Now, maybe you have some bigger plan in mind for this. Maybe this will enable smaller, multi-tasked raids to be more viable, if now large incursions will be subject to the same concentrated fire that currently dissuades small ones. But you have not made that argument recently. Instead you are leaning on the premise that concentrating static defense damage is an intrinsic good, but the mere fact that you guys are having this discussion pokes a pretty big hole in that idea.

Balance-wise there might be an argument that the one-sided victory for the modded pikeman is bad, but speaking from a perspective of historical authenticity and the impression given by the in-game art, I think the modded outcome is an improvement. The rank 3 pikeman is depicted as a heavy-infantryman kitted in full body armor. He should be virtually impervious to all light projectiles of the period, which would include the rider's javelins. Otherwise why wear all that heavy and expensive gear? And the opponent he is facing, even at the elite rank is still just a light cavalryman. His role is supposed to be to scout, to raid, and to lure the pikeman out of position so that allied heavy infantry of heavy cavalry could mop him up. In this time period he wouldn't be expected to inflict massed casualties against heavy infantry. Even in a rout, his job was really just to pick off a few unlucky individuals to keep the enemy in a state of fear and prevent their re-cohering. If they were lucky they might trigger a crowd disaster or chase the enemy into a river, where they would drown, but that was the exception. There was a period in history where ranged light cavalry could inflict mass casualties against heavy infantry like you're expecting. It was in the era of pike and shot, when cavalry started carrying pistols and carbines. This was one of the development that ended the era of armored melee infantry.

If you guys really want to go down this road, at some point it is going to be less work to institute a formalized reputation system for ranked players instead of attempting this futile anti-cheat arms race. As has been demonstrated, there is no complete consensus for what is or isn't fair play. The distinction between simulation, UI, and hardware is fuzzy. And even if you have two people with the exact same code and devices you will still have to deal with antisocial behavior that most people would understand as cheating: smurfing and unsportsmanlike conduct. If you ask to play a no-rush-20 and your opponent rushes you, isn't that cheating? If you are playing a team game and one of your team mates deletes a shared wall and defects to the other team 40 minutes in, isn't that cheating? I think the best way to handle this is to make tools that encourage players to build personalized trust graphs for matchmaking. Let them mark people who they have good relationships with, and those who they do not trust, and then preferentially match with players within their cluster of extended positive connects. It could even go beyond matchmaking to auto-muting anyone in lobby chat who is is not on sufficiently positive terms with your trusted group, and all of it adjustable according to individual preferences.

Clearing fortified buildings of defenders is specifically one of the situations where elite, specialist units disproportionately excel. When police need to storm a building they don't send in whoever happened to show up for work that day. They send in the SWAT team. They are the ones with the special knowledge and team cohesion you need. In ancient times the gear was different but the dynamic was still pretty similar I think. So in terms of game design it might be an iffy choice to give champions a capture bonus, but it does seem very authentic to history, at least conceptually. Maybe an extra caveat to that is ancient armies aren't structured like RTS armies, so how reasonable all this seems depends on how you imagine units in the game are abstracting features of ancient warfare. In ancient times looting was a major part of military logistics and economics. So while storming actions would have been entrusted to specialists, it is also true that almost every company of war fighters would have had some of these specialists mixed in with the normal troops. The troops themselves would have made sure of that, even if it meant hiring extra fighters out of their own pockets. In that sense it is probably true that an "army of champions" should not be substantially better at capturing than a normal army of citizen soldiers.