ChronA

Source? Tree derived fruits and nuts like olives, figs, and acorns were staples of the diet in various times and places. Medieval Europeans and even the neolithic native-peoples of the Americas are well documented to have practiced managed forestry to cultivate and harvest lumber, firewood, and hunting lands. It would be pretty weird if none of these people ever realized that putting tree seed in ground makes new tree grow, and took "commercial" advantage of that fact.

True, but a savvy balance designer could counteract this tendency by increasing friction of war (https://www.army.mil/article/185864/fog_friction_and_logistics). The best examples I've found of this being done successfully in the RTS space are in Starcraft Brood War and in Supreme Commander (and other TA-a-likes). In both of these games the normal re-max time is 2-3 times longer than the typical main base to main base rush distance. That would normally mean that whoever gains a decisive local advantage, namely by one-sidedly destroying the enemy's army, ought to snowball very quickly into a total victory. Just walk your surviving army and reinforcements over to the enemy base and win every subsequent engagement by virtue of Lanchester's square law. The reason this doesn't work in the above games (compared to some other games of note) is that fighting a series of (even individually advantageous) battles disconnect from resupply infrastructure exposes the player to an exponentially compounding risk of cascading homeostasis failures. The reasons for that are specific to each game, although there are some common factors: namely imperfect pathfinding and unit level target acquisition, strong counters, glass cannon units, strong static defense, and a heavy dependence on exhaustible meat shield units for composition effectiveness. For Brood War, add also the stringent limits on unit selection and control making perfect micro impossible, economic micromanagement demands, and the indispensability of vulnerable and exhaustible spell casters (i.e. High Templars, Arbiters, Defilers, and Science Vessels). For Sup Com there's the slow movement speed of units (and projectiles) compared to typical engagement distance making it hard to extract units from danger once they fall into it, and the asymmetric ability of the defender to salvage resources from battlefields. The end result in both games is that any blitzkrieg-style, decisive attack will almost always get bogged down and picked apart before it can cause game ending damage. Consequently the normal path to victory becomes a sustained campaign of incremental pushes, flanking maneuvers, and raids, rather than one big game ending battle. Could 0 AD do something like this. Maybe. Static defense could be buffed. Heroes and other support-or attack-role aura sources could be more effective. The role-differentiation and indispensability of melee infantry infantry as tanks, and cavalry as assassins could be boosted. Defensive building auras could play a bigger role. Time to kill could be lowered. Etc. The trick would be balancing it against the rest of the game design. Raids need something valuable (but not indespensible) to raid in order to prevent the game turning into a lane pushing tug of war. Game feel needs to be preserved. It could be a very big project.

This is very promising. While (understandably) this does not go as far as some proposals, it does open up a new, more streamlined pathway for balance provocateurs to submit modifications to the game and then test the effects of those modifications without jumping through loads of technical hoops. I tend to have more confidence in technological measures that change the facts on the ground pertaining to a problem, over "community initiatives" that call on individuals to adopt a new paradigm without addressing any of the incentives that produced the situation in the first place; and this solution does a bit of that. So... merci and bravo! Whether this will be enough to break some of the gridlock in 0AD's balance development I cannot venture to predict. Probably it will not fix all the problems in one go, but so long as the community maintains realistic expectations, the contributors remain committed to an incremental campaign of periodic improvements, and the main developers are open and supportive to increasing integration with the main mod and other balance-adjacent endeavors in the future, I cannot see this being entirely fruitless. As to the poll questions: would this be enough to get a vocal complainer like me to get off the benches and contribute some skin to the game? I think the answer is yes. This answers many of my objections about barriers to working on balance improvements. I've got some stuff going on right now that would make taking on another project hard, but once that is done I would be open to contribute, insofar as I am competent to. I agree with Lion that discussions must be had about the intended scope of this project. Is this to be focused on minor adjustments to specific balance issues, or will it be open to more radical reimagining of established unit roles and gameplay conventions? (Someone working on fine tuning archer balance is going to be pretty angry if someone else comes along and completely resets the balance relationship between melee and ranged a week later.) Best to have a plan, and maybe (gasp) a design document.

Or collision circles really need to be increased... and if that requires reducing unit counts so the engine will remain performant then so be it. What is the point of having 800 units on screen if you cannot clearly see a single one of them because they all congeal into a single undifferentiable blob of human neutronium?

For that they really need a unique role of their own to fill, separate from skirmishers and slingers. Right now all range infantry are just DPS sources. One of the three types is always going to be better at that than the others unless you make all their stats exactly identical. If they had different roles though, like if archers had bonus damage vs cavalry (there is some historical precedent for this) and skirmishers had extra hack armor on account of carrying a shield everywhere, and melee were actually viable DPS dealers and not just meat armor, you would no longer be comparing the two directly to each other because they no longer would be directly competing. Of course that would require actually designing the game around functioning counter cycles rather than pop-history.

You've got me there. I agree.

Correct. Likewise to remove resource gathering is <ResourceGatherer disable=""/>

I don't think archer are supposed to be able to fight or escape from a charging mob of javelineers, they are supposed to beat them by staying at standoff range with a meatshield or buildings protecting them from the enemy. If archers could also kite other ranged infantry that would once again turn them into a very hard counter to all infantry units, which does not seem in the spirit of 0 AD. Plus a speed change would boost their economic value and create chaos for civ balance (again).

- Persian women have a bow to defend themselves rather than the conventional dagger. Agree. I feel in general that civilians being melee instead of ranged in 0AD is a nonsensical Age-of-Empires-ism. Giving Persian women their civ's characteristic ranged weapon makes sense to me, and is unlikely to cause problems so long as their combat stats (i.e. the damage of their arrows and maybe their range) are not competitive-for-cost with proper CS archers. And they really should not be, because CS archers would be using proper war bows while civilians would only have hunting bows. - Archers are more accurate than other archers and advance in rank faster Slightly oppose. This is a good suggestion in concept, but as others have pointed out Archers are a recurrent problem unit for balance, and somewhere down the line someone will need to readjust them. Persians having a unique variant will make that person's life very slightly harder. That said, it might still be worth doing. This is one of the most "on-brand" buffs the Persians could get. - Decreases the attack of citizen spearmen considerably, but increases armor pierce. I think there is a much better way to do this: Step 1. Decrease the Persian CS spearman's cost to say 50 Food 30 Wood (because their wicker shields did not require high quality lumber) Step 2. Decrease their attack by 50% and reduce their hack armor from 5 to 3, but leave their HP and pierce armor unchanged Step 3. For eco balance, drop their resource gather rate by 20% to compensate for being able to have more of them. This would make the Persian spear line into a stronger pierce-tank role for cost as you suggested, but better fitting to the historical assessment that Persian infantry were inadequately armored compared to their Greek adversaries and compensated only by weight of numbers. It would also have some interesting late game implications. These spearmen would be slightly supply inefficient, so Persians would likely need to switch to champion Spearmen as they approached pop-cap. Persian CS infantry would also be much weaker to melee cavalry with this change. This might force them to compensate by focusing more on cavalry vs cavalry, which would be an interesting variation to the meta IMO. (It could also just make them completely non-viable vs cavalry, so be careful! That goes for your original variant too.) - All Persian cavalry are available in the CC, except champions. + All Persian CS cav are available in P1. I do not feel like I have a good grasp on the balance of factors for and against cavalry effectiveness in current 0AD, so I cannot predict how this would effect the meta. It seems like other people have concerns so I defer to them. Maybe just proceed with caution.

<Builder disable=""/> I think adding this to your Man At Arms unit's XML template file would do what you want.

Counter (counter) salt! Complaints that a project prioritizes graphics or performance or whatever other area of development over balance are not properly understood as criticisms of the people working on graphics or performance. They are criticisms of project managers for failing to onboard people to work on the problem area. The old fallacy that end users have no right to criticize creators... but let's ignore it and actually dig into that situation. About a year ago Stan chastised me for exactly this, and I thought "Hey they are right! Why complain when I could help fix things?" However as a I dug into what that would actually entail, I quickly realized that the time and effort that would be demanded of me to make a useful contribution were far beyond my current capacity. I'm not in any way a professional developer. (But even I know about GitHub at least.) Like Crynux said, you guys are using this arcane combination of outdated technologies to do your development; and it gatekeeps (irrespective of your intentions). It would have taken me days of very trying consultation with Stan to get up to speed. And then what after that? As has been noted time and again, the 0AD community is profoundly reactionary. What is some no-name noob actually going to accomplish? Spend hundreds or thousands of hours coding and advocating for changes that will be tried once and unceremoniously rejected? No. This is my contribution: to be a cranky wall of text that shines a spotlight on problems and options no one else is discussing, to lend support to minority perspectives and underserved users, and sometimes even to light fires when the forest is desperately in need of a proscribed burn. If I can nudge you or force you to make the hard choices, I will consider that a valuable contribution. So far I do not feel I have succeed, which is why I have no qualms about amping up the pressure of my rhetoric. Well, the truth is 0AD does compete with paid products in the hearts and minds of its community (yours included). We care about whether this project ultimately succeeds--whether it eventually attains a polished and feature complete form--because we are all dreaming of someday playing a good community-made ancient warfare RTS that actually respects history, instead of the dreck Microsoft spits out every year to earn a few more dollars. Is that so impossible? (And lest you forget, we are actually paying for the privilege... crowd funding it if you will, not in money but in time and attention. To many of us these are much dearer commodities than the mere $60 that AoE2:DE and all its DLC sell for on Steam.)

As opposed to receiving an endless stream of complaints about chronic imbalance and irhistoricity? Curious that graphical interoperability is viewed as a critical priority by the developer community, but game design is sanctimoniously ignored for going on half a decade. Let's not pretend that this is a minor crisis just because it has been playing out for slow motion over years and decades. It seems like there have been almost a dozen balance test or rework mods shared in the last two year, but only small, incremental improvements have made their way into EA. All the key complaints are unchanged: there is always one unit type after every patch that is markedly overpowered compared to the rest, the economy and tech buildup beats of a typical match are unrefined compared to other representatives of the genre, the game is missing expected polish and key features like naval combat and formation tactics, and optimal combat tactics have scant resemblance to the historical militaries they are supposed to be depicting. The situation is a breeding ground for toxicity. New contributors and pundits are routinely popping up, excited to share their creative visions, only to slink away dejected a few months later once they realize how intransigent this project and community really is. (Granted, this is actually a healthy state of affairs for a vibrant project with a clear vision of what it wants to be, in order to maintain quality and focus development & organizational resources where they will be most appreciated by the community at large. But I don't think 0AD can be so-described.) And clearly this negativity is taking its toll on senior project managers too. Stan is obviously having some doubts about the sustainability of this state of affairs. If you look at that list of contributors, it's pretty clear the most experienced are actively trying to avoid any work that would touch on the gameplay part of the titular game. That is not good, and if it keeps up long enough, eventually your time and luck will run out and this project will die. Once again I put it to everyone that too much openness and communitarian idealism is the problem here. The whole point of "openness" is to prevent conflict by giving everyone a stake and voice in the process. However in this case we see too many stakes and voices causing gridlock, which is directly creating the biggest ongoing conflict afflicting this project. We have talked at length about technological, organizational, and philosophical remedies to this quandary. It is time for the guiding hands behind 0AD to make some decisions about what they are going to do... and then maybe practice some of that openness (transparency) you guys preach by not asking but telling us what you are planning and doing, so that we can have some confidence that this ship is headed in the right direction, or else make our own informed decisions about whether we want to jump off.

@Sevda had a good concrete-suggestion on another thread: Make it easier to play mods by automatically syncing with the host when joining a modded multiplayer game. Their post implies a host-client simulation architecture that I assume would require completely redesigning the net code (so that is unlikely to happen), but could not the same effect be achieved by just having the players' clients automatically download and install the mod files from the host? (Subject to all parties' affirmative consent obviously.) For very large mods like DE this installation method would take a long time, but for small balance changes it ought to be pretty snappy. From a casual user's perspective this would make playing modded multiplayer content more like having custom map rules. It would allow more people to very easily experiment with new gameplay innovations, without effectively forking the project into two separate versions with the attendant doubling of the code-maintenance workload, as discussed previously. Maybe there are some valid cybersecurity arguments why one would not want to support a feature like that, but this might be a case this requires soberly considering a tradeoff. 0AD is niche entertainment software with an active user base of a few thousands maybe, it's not exactly a prime target for black hats to exploit. Maybe at worst someone with a grudge might think use this nefariously against specific objects of their ire. On the other side of the scale, I think the discussion on this and other threads demonstrate a pervasive consensus that this project is stuck in a creative crisis... Badly stuck. There are too many objectors coming out of the woodwork any time someone suggests serious design or organizational reforms that might let 0AD get un-mired from its dubiously balanced, half-finished state. The only other option you have is to start removing barriers to independent creatives to realize their own visions of the game's future, and then hope that a new consensus organically coalesces around one of these offerings so that it can become the new roadmap for 0AD:EA proper. link to the other thread:

Not necessarily. The problem with CS arises because the optimal total unit composition--when a player needs both economic and military work done as fast as possible--is pure CS, rather than a mix of CS and Civilian units. This means that 1. there is very little tradeoff between economic and military buildups and 2. it is possible to instantly pivot from a 100% economic strategy to a 100% military strategy, and back, with no build-up or fore warning. These factors, combined with 0AD's commitment to soft (i.e. weak) or non-existent counters, makes for a very simplified strategic environment. CS provide your offense, your defense, and your economy all in one place, better than a mix of CS and Civilian. Put another way, CS is just too near parity to civilians in terms cost effectiveness for economic tasks. If they were made less effective at harvesting (and maybe building), or if their cost were increased, that would tip the scales more in favor of making CS + Civilian mixes. Efficiency at economic tasks would then be less of a critical balance point for CS units, once it is no longer one of their primary responsibilities: meaning more freedom to change movement speed or price without breaking the game; resource harvesting and building become a bonus thing CS are able to do when they are not preforming their primary purpose of military action. All without ever needing to abandon the historically authentic concept that ancient soldiers usually performed non-military roles within their societies in addition to their martial service.

Replay data can definitely be useful, especially for answering specific questions--like whether a certain civ matchup is unfair. It can be a little more changing to draw wholistic balance assessments just from analyzing multiplayer stats. There are a lot of confounding variables: like differences in player skill, effects of prior RTS experience, and the influence of the continuously evolving metagame. Basically unless you a tremendous volume of data to work from (and a lot of life experience with multivar statistical analysis), you are going to have to filter everything through some prior conception of how the balance situation works, which is just inviting confirmation bias (ending with reinforcing the status quo and never noticing the out-of-context issues). The other problem for a FOSS project like this is that someone has to volunteer their time to do all that analysis, and then get argued with and accused of bias and/or incompetence because some people don't like their conclusions. Normally you need to pay people large sums of money to put up with that **** for more than a few weeks. Also, I should have qualified on my previous comment by adding that AI driven or scripted scenario testing can be very useful for quantifying the effects of specific balance changes, and just diagnosing what is actually going on with the game's balance situation. I don't want to poo poo automated testing entirely; just point out that such tests usually need to be very cunningly conceived and tightly constrained in order to produce useful information. And lastly I want to point out that game balance is about more than who wins and who loses. It is really about whether the game supports entertaining interactions. A game with exactly one optimal strategy that always results in a draw is "perfectly balanced" but also has a huge balance problem. 0 A.D. is actually seems quite successful in terms of providing a fair contest, but it does so by paring away unit and faction diversity to their bare bone. Consequently there is no slack left in the fabric to iron out the last remaining wrinkles.

AI vs AI testing is not very useful for RTS balancing purposes because it is very difficult to make an AI that plays optimally AND in a human like way. A huge part of the effectiveness of a unit is determined by 1. how it can be micromanaged to avoid threats, 2. how fast it can move between strategically important locations compared to opponent compositions, (i.e. if your force can threaten multiple locations at once, that is a force multiplier,) and 3. how effective it is across the totality of optimal compositions (i.e. a unit you don't usually need to replace when your opponent changes strategies is more valuable than one that frequently becomes obsolete). AI is good at testing precisely none of these factors.

@alre Ah! If you already have an updated version of my old work that's even better! And you are correct, without synergistic changes to other stats, the effects of directional armor might be pretty miniscule. But, there are other ways to amplify it besides nerfing rotation speed, if you don't want to risk degrading unit responsiveness. It should definitely have an amplifying interaction with friendly fire damage, provided your ranged units have enough attack spread to friendly fire.

I'll try to dig that information up for you. It may take a few days, as I've got some other projects eating up my free time currently.

I can foresee a few frustrating edge cases with this sort of thing, that could be mitigated to greater or lesser extents depending on implementation. For instance, if I designate a Persian champion lancer as the preferred target do my units only target Persian champion lancers, non-civ specific champion lancers, generic elite spear cavalry, or spear cavalry in general? Do they go on to prefer melee cavalry or cavalry in general over infantry-type units after all the champion lancers are dead? What happens if all the champion lancers at the front of the battle are dead but there is still one stuck back in the rear? Should melee units try to wade through the enemy line to get him until the player orders them to stop? Should there be a attack-range-based preference calculus? Paradoxically, a more predictable version of this idea might be to specify more preferred target classes for various unit types. (Which, as a bonus, is a feature that the game already supports.) E.g. spearmen and pikes might have melee as their preferred target class, swordsmen could prefer infantry. Maybe melee cavalry prefer to target ranged infantry, or spear cavalry might have other cavalry as their most favorite target. Maybe foot skirmishers target melee, slingers target ranged, and perhaps foot archers target cavalry if you want to get weird. Etc. This would increase unit class differentiation and players would basically pre-select their units' battle tactics by way of the composition they decide to build (which is probably a little more realistic--people need training to do stuff effectively in the heat of battle). No additional micromanagement would be added to the game (which I'm sure some would appreciate and others could consider an inexcusable missed opportunity). This I very much agree with.

A huge part of the problem is how densely packed units in 0 AD tend to be, even clipping through each other more often than not. It is impossible to read silhouettes for important clues like shields and weapons when the eye cannot locate where one unit starts and another begins.

IMO, what makes a good design document is that the design document + the technical documentation of the engine and and any other development tool + any good encyclopedia should give enough information for any competent developer to deliver the completed product. Yes, that does not usually require specifying exact unit stats or civilizations to include, but that is because this information is implied by the more general descriptions of the gameplay and the scope of the project given by the design doc. On the other hand though sometimes is is necessary (or maybe a better word is proper) to get into specifics. The most useful thing the design doc can do is let you detect problems before you go to the trouble of actually writing code. That is easier to do when systems are described directly. (This is why I suggest describing counter cycles in detail, we know that this is a hard thing to get right. Being specific about them makes it easier to to spot any contradictions and logic holes before someone has to start interpreting the intent into working code. Their job is hard enough already.)

The whole point of that proposal was to not have to consult and explain. Consulting and explaining take up valuable energy and time that should be focused on development. Consultation also gives the impression that the consulter has some degree of moral obligation to listen to the consulted. We are all just arguing about the best courses of action on the basis of our own prejudices without any definitive evidence to back us up. Why not give someone a chance to shoot their shot at revising the game and then just judge the result on its actual merits? To do that though, I think you need to give some strong (verging on excessive) guarantees that the contributor will be able to work without interference and their work will be judged fairly. Otherwise no-one in their right mind will be willing to take on the burden. That's also why I suggest a 2 year period. Yes it is a lot longer than such an endeavor should ever take to develop, but you also need to provide time for players get used to a new patch and really feel out its subtleties before asking them to pass judgement. Maybe you could go as low as 18 months: a generous 8 months to develop the main overhaul patch, a tight 1.5 months for the community to playtest and give feedback on the new alpha, then another tight 2.5 months turnaround to fine tune the balance for another alpha release, then finally 6 months to play the result before the community makes their decision whether to persevere onward with on the new vision or to revert back to before it started.

Same . I thought it looked promising provided it got some hefty post launch support, especially for modders to do their thing, but that has failed to materialize. I'm ready to call AoE4 a flop. So yeah, I did do some Googling before making that claim so as not to look like an ass! I found only one article that listed 0 AD as an alternative to Age of Empires 4, but it also suggested games like Starcraft 2 and Total War Warhammer.... and 0 AD was further down the list! Obviously there is bias in that, since publishers are going to incentivize exposure for their products, but it would still be damaging to the journo's credibility if they were ignoring a popular open source alternative just for kickbacks. (As a point of comparison, I'm sure I have seen articles citing the open source "Dark Mod" project as a better successor to the classic Thief series than the modern official reboot, Thief 4. That's not a perfect analog because medieval/steampunk immersive stealth sim is so obscenely niche that there are no direct commercial competitors to discuss. But still...) Right now two are weighing heavily on my mind: First one is citizen soldiers. I love the concept as a representation of the non-professional status of ancient warfare, and the overlap of civilian and military roles in ancient society. However it's getting hard to ignore the frequency and prominence of the CS discussion's recurrence in so many balance complaints. It may be that trying to finesse stats so units are simultaneously balanced as fighter AND as resource gatherers is just too hard. Second one is 0 AD's lack of catapults for anti-infantry AOE. AFAIK this idea of anti-infantry artillery has no basis in ancient history. It is pure modern warfare if anything. However in competitive AoE2 it forms a key part of several prominent balance triangles. It disrupts the death-ball meta. I'm worried that without this utility, 0 AD might have no counter-play to the player who gets the bigger army, balls them up and ctrl-moves other than to respond in kind. That might be why I can't shake the idea that 0 AD's late match gameplay is bland.

This. Consensus governance inevitably tends toward conservatism and policy gridlock (sometimes punctuated by episodes of violent identitarianism). If you can't get everyone to agree to do something, then the one thing you can agree to do is nothing. The Romans understood this, which is why they permitted the office of Dictator to be instituted during moments of crisis. Maybe this project needs a Balance Dictator? If you are looking for a policy proposal, here's what I would do if I were Princeps: First, a counsel of the most active developers should be convened to discuss candidates and appoint the balance dictator. Whoever they pick will then get 2 years to enact any balance overhaul plan they think is necessary, without any obligation to consult with the council of active developers or anyone else. To do this the dictator would for their 2 year office exercise a non-negotiable discretion to summarily approve or block any changes to the 0 AD development codebase and design documents, without any binding responsibility to defend or explain their reasons. At the end of their 2 year office, the active developers or the community at large would vote whether to revert the dictator's balance contributions, and/or whether to elect a new dictator or extend the current dictator's office for another term. If no one can agree to enact such a plan (or any reasonable alternative), or if the dictator or other parties violate the terms of the concord, that'd be viewed that as strong evidence that the current design is effectively locked in. In that case the active developers should adopt a binding resolution to spend the next two years excising any problem/unfinished features from the work and release it at the end of that period... as 0 AD Beta 1! But that's just my 2 cents. There are obvious risks to investing too much authority in one person. Even if the person with absolute power is a perfect saint, you risk alienating anyone anyone with a good faith difference of opinion about the direction of the project. But at the end of the day you are not trying to run a country here, you are trying to make a world-class video game. People don't need to be happy with the development process for the project to be successful, just the end product. P.S. "I love democracy..." /Palpatine.gif

I suggest that a more in depth discussion of counter relationships for each unit type and any unusual information about attack interactions or composition synergies/anti-synergies should be added. E.g. for the spearman line: Spearmen will usually be the basic melee troop, armed with spears. They will have moderate damage, armor, and speed, and a strong attack bonus against cavalry. They will have a slightly longer attack range than sword units [interaction quirk] and therefore benefit more from fighting in dense formations than swordsmen [synergy]. They should decisively lose to an equal value of pikes in dense formation fighting [situational counter]. In equal value comparisons, Spearmen should effectively counter sword cavalry, spear cavalry, rams, catapults, and artillery towers. They should be countered by elephants, swordsmen, skirmishers, slingers, archers, crossbowmen, javelin cavalry, archer cavalry, bolt shooters, and fortresses. (note: when you write it up this way, the spearman line looks pretty bad huh?) Other suggestions: I think the Mechanics section needs to be filled out with more information about civ phases, techs, resource harvesting, production, and all that jazz. I'm sure that was the intent already for that section but its worth making explicit. I would also add a separate section after the Units & Structures to cleanly summarize of the key counter cycles: Counter Cycle Design The tactics of combat engagements will be characterized by the following type-counter relationships: melee cavalry > ranged infantry > spearmen > melee cavalry ranged cavalry > swordsmen, spearmen > melee cavalry > infantry archers > ranged cavalry [etc...] And lastly, I would add a section about civ design principles. This should lay out the logic of designing a multiplayer-viable civ, the temporal and geographic bound of the game's representation, maybe list some civilizations. Others with a stronger sense of the game's vision can opine on what to say here. The one thing I would urge you to put in writing is that Every civilization will have access to at least one viable counter to every established unit type. While that sounds completely obvious, I think it is important to stress because it runs counter to the intuitive civ development methodology the game is built around. We're not starting with the question "what would be a fun faction concept to play with." We are starting with real civilizations and trying to represent them in the game. But real civilizations were not balanced. They did not always have answers to every military doctrine. When they met a doctrine they could not deal with they either changed their own identity or ceased to exist, which makes it hard to to produce iconic, accurate, and balanced representations. Make these changes and I think you will have a good format and foundation to build from. Then the real work of debating about design and balance philosophy can begin.