ChronA

Chinese textbooks are the one infallible authority on any question of historical truth. /s Snark aside, there is a kernel of truth here that any absolute statement about the gear and tactics of an ancient military unit that operated over hundreds of years is likely to have counter examples. In early times these were people acting as military emissaries of a distinct ethnic group , and later an evolving military company shaped by the traditions of those forbearers as well as the organizational and operational requirements of their own circumstances. They were not inanimate weapons systems, like a particular model of rifle or tank. They could and would change their gear and tactics to keep up with changing times and situations. That said, in a game like this there needs to be some some sort of typical representation for a special unit like this that is functionally distinct from other units. We can quibble about their precise representation, but I think the choice to draw them as elite medium-to-light-ish melee infantry is representative of their most celebrated exploits. (As attested in the accounts above.)

Gameplay wise, what differentiates corrals from farms? I've never given them much thought personally, but presumably the player gets something like 2-10 times more resource generation per unit time, and a hugely reduced territory footprint, and in exchange for much more micromanagement. The first thing to ask is whether corral management represents a distinctly fun skill challenge. Is it engaging? Does it reward the player's attention in a different way from farming? Secondly does it create a distinct set of strategic considerations? Like could provide players with reduced territory footprint with a comeback mechanic? A way to get food from land that is unavailable for farming (because of terrain, or auras, or threat of attack)? Maybe it makes cavalry more cost effective by allowing them to participate in food generation? If the answer to both these questions is no, the feature should be cut. Otherwise any buffs should ideally be concentrated on intensifying these differentiators.

Is there a link on the wiki? I've looked a bit for that sort of info for 0 AD (because I would like to have larger projectile models so I can tell who is shooting who) and I've not found anything.

I think this misses the point of the complaint. The ability to rescale things DOES already exist in the 3D modeling software, and that is great for those who already know how to use these programs and want all that extra flexibility. But for anyone who doesn't know how to use Blender it is a huge impediment to their ability to mod the game. There are a bunch of potential applications where the ability to easily grow or shrink game models without changing any animations would be helpful: like larger projectiles so that its actually possible to see them in flight. Or ships and units that actually match the dimensions of their collision footprints. Or an AoE style tiny trees mod. These become huge projects if every model must be rescaled and exported from source, but would be almost trivial if there was just a number in an xml that could be adjusted in on the fly with a text editor.

You're headed the right direction. The biggest problem with the source image is that the facture pattern gives away the scale (very small). Sharp edges like that melt or even sublimate away really quickly. So stable, geological-scale ice that has been around for a while rarely presents such abrupt, jagged reflection edges. I think you might experiment with applying a bit of blur to give the surface a more smoothed-away look. I'd also suggest trying to add a few little traces of snow drifts. Like, when it is very cold for a long time, snow particles blown by the wind get snagged in little cracks in a standing ice sheet, and then more snow gets hung up on those particles forming little dune-like drifts that follow the course of the original crack. Don't overdo it, but a few spots here and there might help sell the scale of the ice sheet more. Those are my suggestions, but no guarantees they are any good. I'm not an artist of any sort. Just a yearly admirer of winter landscapes.

That is a fair counterpoint. There might be some room to debate whether those skirmishes (if they are decisive) are actually so small that LOLN breaks down, or if they are just protracted exchanges still involving hundreds of projectiles but now spread out over a few minutes instead of 30-60 seconds. But I admit I lack the experience base to evaluate that question. Also I do agree with the concern that slower projectiles could throw of the balance in a major way, as it opens up a new avenue for systematic counter-play that could change the balance of tactics in unpredictable ways. (Dancing!) Also, with fewer, chunkier projectiles there could be problems with overkill weirdness. Like if previously it takes 10 arrows to kill a unit and 50% of the last arrow is overkill, that means 5% of the unit's DPS is wasted. Where as if it only takes 2 arrows with 50% overkill on the last shot now you are losing 25% of your theoretical DPS. Because of issues like this I would actually agree that any changes to attack rates should be lumped in with a general rebalancing of ranged vs melee troops. No sense doing the same work twice. (It helps that a melee buff is sorely needed if 0 AD is to have any pretenses of being historical.)

Unlikely it would cause any noticeable difference with respect to <Accuracy>. The Law of Large Numbers applies because, even with a reduced rate-of-fire, you are still flinging hundreds of projectiles over the course of a typical battle (most of which hit something). That is more than a large enough sample size to push the tendency very close to the theoretical expectation. In intuitive terms, yes misses would be a bigger lost opportunity, but the projectiles that do hit balance it out by having a proportionately larger punch that almost exactly makes up for the damage that is lost. Plus, I don't think the threshold of "game breaking chaos" is nearly as sensitive as this objection makes it out to be. There are a bunch of really unpredictable factors in 0 AD's combat already: e.g. not being able to tell how many units are in an enemy formation due to the obscene model overlap, or the way that promotions can randomly change a few lucky units' stats on the fly. Despite this, I don't hear anyone complaining that the combat gameplay is unskillful.

Every aspect of combat in 0 AD (and most other games like it) is tremendously abstracted. If you hypothetically wanted to simulate the process of attacking buildings in more detail I'd vote to go all out: with actual fire propagation spreading to other nearby buildings, attackers adding more torches to make it burn faster but not actually doing damage, and defenders "repairing" the building by throwing water on.

This is the kind of thing I'd like to be able to help with, however I've currently got other obligations that require my full attention. It would be really irresponsible for me to get back into 0 AD right now. Instead, let me just try to assuage you to consider giving it a shot yourself. Modifying unit stats in 0 AD is trivially easy. The hardest part is probably just setting up a new mod, but even that is pretty straight forward.

While I remain an advocate of big structural changes for 0 AD, at this juncture I think restraint would be wise for this mod. With the brand new alpha no one knows yet what the current crop of balance problems will be (even if we have some guesses). Rushing into a set of features that don't reflect the current balance zeitgeist, or worse create entirely new problems on top of the endogenous deficiencies, would risk discrediting the project. Plus there might be governance problems in these early days that would be easier to sort out before real balance politics begins. Better to wait a month or so to see how things shake out with alpha 26. Maybe start collecting proposals, drafting design documents, and organizing in the mean time.

I just meant that alre's comment that (to paraphrase) "back in alpha 24 it was important to stream reinforcements" would seem to imply that in alpha 25 (and maybe the in development alpha 26) it is no longer vital to stream reinforcements like it used to be. I haven't kept up with the evolving 0 AD meta during alpha 25 unfortunately--haven't had the time--so I too was kind of hoping they would elaborate. Do they mean that the technique was more popular back then, or that some of the more prominent players made very good use of the technique at the time, or that alre personally has just not played that way a lot or maybe played many matches in general since a24? Certainly nothing about the game appears to have changed that would alter the foundations of gameplay so profoundly! The idea that continuous reinforcement is suddenly no longer required to sustain a push or was a special property of a specific alpha is very odd, I agree.

That's not quite the same thing as friction of war; actually it's kind of the opposite. Although it is definitely a good thing to incentivize streaming reinforcements, and the covert implication that this might no longer be the case is worrisome. Friction is basically the idea that the deeper into enemy territory you get, the less effective your military assets become. When this is the case you don't actually want to follow up your attack with a stream of reinforcements to push deeper into enemy territory. You actually want to pull the attack group back and link up with the reinforcements in the previous no-man's-land so together they can consolidate the gains by either fortifying the newly claimed territory or attacking on a newly exposed flank. To really appreciate the distinction, look at the difference in tactics between Starcraft Brood War (a high friction game) and Starcraft 2 (a much lower friction game). SC2 features a lot more all-in deathball-style battles and decapitation base trades.

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: