ChronA

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.

2. A different way to achieve the same effect... Implementing this stuff would require a complete rework of the map pool anyway. So I think the easier solution is just to have the same amount of resources divided between more, smaller resource nodes, rather than try to adjust dozens of price and income rate stats; but reasonable minds may differ. 3. Last I experimented with these things (alpha 23), unrooted buildings can be placed in unclaimed territory, and even have their own territory field. They just don't count as controlled territory for the purpose of building other structures, and they bleed control over to gaia at a rate controlled by their territory decay stat---basically the same as what happens to all the buildings in a town when the CC is destroyed. For relatively inconsequential buildings like storehouses & farmsteads one might just want to disable their decay. Or they could be garrison-able in order to keep control always topped up. 4. I think the performance fears about auras are overblown in this specific case. The aura projectors under discussion do not move, which should allow for certain (hopefully already implemented) optimizations. Additionally since this whole discussion is about hypothetical design overhauls, let's recognize that 0 AD suffers from a severe misalignment between its engine's technical capabilities, its design intentions, and its realized simulation parameters. A lot of resources are being wasted right now simulating units that don't need to exist. Rather than simulating dozens of individual trees in a patch of forest, why not bundle them together as one entity? Why simulate the lives of hundreds of individual soldiers in combat that has no meaningful collision or individual unit maneuvering, instead of simulating at the squad or battalion level where all the gameplay is actually taking place? Do this and we could easy have 8 player games with dozens of active auras and still no CPU lag. 5. Why towers? i. Watch-towers are an easy way of representing the forceful hand of civil order and public works that enables efficient logistics. Basically they are stand-ins for roads and law-enforcement patrols. ii. Players would want to build towers anyway for protection. Giving them some secondary benefits makes it a little less ruinous when someone invest into turtling and the opponent booms. 6. Universal chronic difficulty placing buildings sounds like a map design problem. And if non-chronic it's just a skill gap that can be filled by study and practice. We know this kind of gameplay can be fun because there are very popular genres of puzzle games that consists entirely of this sort of planning and optimization challenge. But anyway, don't misunderstand! I'm not suggesting that this is the way that 0 AD should be! It's not going to happen; and even if by some act of insane developer collusion it did, the established player base would not accept it. I'm just speculating that the possibility exists within the explorable design space and within the capabilities of the engine. At best I can hope maybe someone with ambitions of making their own spin off game or mod sees such ideas and gets inspired! But these are still within (or just outside) the starting CC's territory radius. It's better than nothing I'll admit, but I stand firm that creative resource exploitation doesn't begin until players get the P2 territory multiplier and the option to build secondary CCs. Not to be mean about it, but even as the lesser siblings of AoE2, those games have large, passionate, and active global fan bases. 0 AD is only relevant to FOSS enthusiasts. If you doubt that, see if you can find any articles by real games journalists suggesting "why not try 0 AD instead of AoE4". Part of the reason for that popularity gap is this project's obsession with reinventing square wheels. It is good to try new things and push innovation, but when it becomes indisputable that those innovations are objectively worse than the proven design (like if they fracture the community or cause persistent balance problems), it's time to swallow one's pride and get on the bandwagon.

I want to hate the idea of a demilitarized P1, but to be honest in this game it might work. 0 AD and the games that inspired it have an unusually well developed base-builder gameplay loop--and one that could be strengthened even further by using auras and build restrictions to deepen the challenge of optimal building placement. It might be enough to carry game for 5-10 minutes even without any combat or immediate threat of serious attack. (I might even argue AoE2 already operates within this paradigm, and it is the most popular entry in the entire ancient warfare genre.) Players would still need to prepare for the start of hostilities in P2, which I suspect would impose its own version of the boom-rush-turtle strategy counter cycle. If I were redesigning the game to support this kind of design, this is what I would do: Reduce the CC territory radius and increase the territory radii of houses, towers, and military buildings. This enables players to actively position these structures to expand and shape their territory in P1 onward as part of an overall strategy, rather than just working with what they are given by their starting CC. Greatly reduce the max number of units who can harvest from metal, stone, trees, and food sources at the same time. This would require players to cultivate multiple simultaneous resource extraction operations, rather than just piling all their economy onto one or two good sources. Allow farmsteads and storehouses to be built in neutral territory, enabling map generation that requires players to actually venture out beyond the safety of the CC to find some resources, rather than automatically getting everything they need in their starting base. Houses get a 30-to-50-radius aura that boosts resource harvesting speed, increases build rates, and slowly regenerates hp of friendly units in its area of effect. This adds an incentive to annex productive resource operations into your territory and build them up into little town like settlements, instead of only using houses for a wall around your CC. It also adds a little defensive bonus, since you are no longer relying so heavily on the CC for protection. Sentry and Defense Towers get a 30-to-50-radius aura that increases movement speed of friendly units in its area of effect. Like the house aura, this is another incentive to annex and further build up useful territory, and a 2-for-1 defensive boost to compensate for reduced protection from the CC. Fields cannot be built within 40 m of other Fields or P2+ buildings (and vice versa). One again the idea is to spread out production and force the players to think harder about base layout. This restriction forces the creation of separate farming and military/commercial districts. (The idea could be further developed by restricting the proximity of civil and military P2+ buildings from each other.)

Personally, I think it would make the most sense to have civilians fight enemies and animals by throwing stones. In a panic, rocks will almost always be available immediately at hand. For hunting, one would have a chance to go and get a bow and arrows before you set out, but when ambushed by raiders you would have to use the tools on and near your person. Getting in to hand to hand combat with an aggressor is also extremely scary (and dangerous), so a non-militarized populous will prefer to deal with threats at range... which against an enemy without ranged armament is the objectively correct way to handle the situation if you want to live. Lastly, perverse as it seems, I think perception that a thrown stone is sub-lethal compared to dedicated ordinance like an arrow or javelin is actually a huge advantage in getting untrained people to overcome their cognitive aversion to killing. If it takes multiple stones to kill someone, you can always deny that you were responsible for delivering the killing blow. (Maybe this is why stoning is a historically popular form of execution.)

Yes. First though, I suggest undertaking some light rewrites to give it a bit more positive spin. Right now I feel like there is a lot of weight on the "sorry we did something that isn't working well" part of the situation, and not enough on the "here's a plan to try something new" side. I am for this. Just for the sake of communication clarity alone, it's not a good policy having two separate tiers/fora for one public discussion. It's much worse to have any appearance of deliberately excluding some voices from the more important of those tiers. That's really only justified if some speakers have a massive advantage in influence or understanding that makes it vital for their voices to be heard, and a proven risk of them being drowned out by the noise of the crowd otherwise. 0 AD is not currently in such a position. It is fine and even desirable to have some discussion taking place through private channels, but all public communications should ideally be open to direct public comment.

A few comments on the discussion so far: 1. I agree that introducing greater player control over ranged target prioritization is one possible solution; whether that be via attack ground, or a new attack stance, or changes to the target selection algorithm, or even adding a new ranged unit type to the unit roster that prioritizes other ranged units over melee. The problem is there are so many different ways to implement that concept that I fear it will an spawn an infinite debate, preventing a consensus ever emerging about which option to pick. 2. Another viable option, alluded to above, is fine tuning unit stats so that e.g. 100% melee decisively beats 50% melee + 50% ranged in an open field, but the mixed composition beats the pure one if there is also a palisade or building wall separating them. However, this option is extremely sensitive to any changes to movement efficiency or changes in tactics (like if players started preemptively walling everywhere on the map so the ranged composition would always have the advantage). As such, this would be a tricky solution to implement and maintain, potentially requiring a lot of very precise testing to fine tune and a lot of cunning competitive proving ahead of each release to prevent major balance failures that would alienate the player base. 3. It might be instructive to consider how AOE2 successfully tackles this problem: counter cycles. Specifically AOE2 has the skirmisher as a dedicated anti-ranged-ranged infantry unit that performs inefficiently against melee infantry. This means the more optimal a composition is for winning a ranged vs ranged brawl, the harder it will lose if the opponent switches into a melee counter push. Of course there are still problems with this solution. Players can get locked into their composition by upgrades or civ bonuses. The AOE2 skirmisher bonuses against archers are also really mechanically arbitrary and I don't think they have much historical grounding. In theory, 0AD should be able to do the same thing with cavalry countering ranged and getting countered by melee, except: 1. Not every civ has good cavalry. 2. There is very little to share between infantry and cav in terms of upgrades or infrastructure, so the lock-in problem is much more severe. And 3. melee cavalry effectiveness is even more sensitive to movement obstruction than melee infantry, so the objections to my point 2 above apply equally here... unless you want to build the counter around ranged cavalry, in which case what is left to counter them?

Can it? Yes: There are plenty of other ancient warfare themed RTS games where melee units are a viable DPS source. There is nothing particularly exotic about 0 AD's pathfinding, or combat model, or unit conventions that would seem to prevent it reaching a similar balance point. Will it? Maybe: For the entire time I have been watching this project develop (which is going on 5 or 6 years now) its design has never strayed from one rigid network of established unit roles and interactions. In order to introduce melee that is useful as more than just a meat shield, without simultaneously rendering ranged units entirely redundant, the developers are going to have to throw out that established counter network and replace it with something new. If the wider community rebels the moment such a thing is even suggested then it will never happen. Should it? Yes: For the sake of both historical authenticity and playstyle diversity, it really must. As the game currently exists, it is the ranged units that make up the survivable core of any infantry attack force. Melee infantry act as an expendable auxiliary contingent that exists to boost the combat efficiency of the core until it is killed off. I don't want to go too far and say that no ancient militaries worked this way, but it is certainly not how the ancient Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, or Macedonian successor states operated. For them it was the (mostly but not always entirely melee) heavy infantry that made up the survivable core of their armies. Light, usually ranged infantry were the ones deployed as the expendable support auxiliaries, and together with cavalry they usually represented only a small faction of an army's total fighting numbers. The status quo is a huge misrepresentation of these cultures' normal tactics. Additionally, such tight synergy between ranged and melee is very limiting to a player's creativity and to the operational diversity of different civilizations the game can feature. The game may have civs that claim to specialize in heavy infantry, but they are still locked into the same composition as any other civ. No one is going to boom into melee infantry only, or skip basic ranged infantry upgrades in favor of more melee upgrades, and the game is poorer for not having these options. This is not to say either that the meat shield meta should be removed entirely. It would be interesting if there were actually a few civs where ranged still forms the survivable core of the army, but for the majority not permitting melee heavy infantry to stand on their own is limiting and profoundly anachronistic.

This was my only disagreement with the original video. Consumers will absolutely tolerate shocking amounts of control jank and unresponsiveness if they service truly unique and compelling gameplay. E.g. Dark Souls: a combat focused action RPG that bucks 15 years of button mapping convention and features a combat system that locks the player into a long, high latency animation each time they try to attack. It spawned a hugely popular series and a copycat genre that continue to feature these limitations as a calling card to this day. There is also a whole genre of popular games based on trying to perform mundane tasks through a clumsy interface of procedural, physics based moment. Heck, even the character movement in most acclaimed third person RPGs of recent years, e.g. Witcher 3 and GTA/RDR, is pretty clumsy. The key however is that these games offer unique value propositions that cannot be satisfied otherwise. In the context of an RTS, if all you are fundamentally offering is another SC2 or AOE2 clone, then yes you better provide an interface that is as good or better. (This is leaving aside the open question of whether RTS can even produce anything worth playing besides SC2 and AOE2 clones.)

Yep... it's not fun waiting for a messiah (especially when one can envision some of the solutions that are needed, but recognize that it is beyond your power to deliver them). For all my @#$%ing about these topics, I do have a great deal of respect for you active developers who are keeping the lights on and consistently delivering incremental progress (and valuable experimentation) in so many areas. You guys deserve more praise.

Yeah, sorry, but I truly have very little faith that any of these ideas (including friendly fire) will ever get used... or at least not in any way that permanently fixes the problem they are supposed to fix. I mean, just for this one issue we have 5 different proposed solutions for the same flaw, all but one of which each entertains half a dozen competing implementation options, with just as many pros and cons for each. There is no way this group will ever come to a consensus to use any of them. (Except maybe the 9% buff, which does nothing to change the flimsy unit-role interaction model that's creating the issue to begin with, and will therefore break the second anyone so much as sneezes on the pathfinding or target selection code.) This is to say I do not believe the value of these kinds of discussions is in identifying solutions to this game's balance problems. What it does do is indirectly illuminate the organizational deficiencies that perpetuate this and so many other problems in the 0AD constellation, so that if ever someone emerges with the drive and vision to fix it, maybe the wider community will have the sagacity to rally around them.

That would be like having a toggle for allowing buildings to be captured. It might be illuminating in the short term, but eventually you need to make a decision about how you want the game to work. Friendly fire creates an anti-synergy between ranged and melee fighters, while the lack of it produces a synergy from the meat shield effect. In a properly balanced game these factors should be reflected in unit stats. E.g. with friendly fire, movement speed, HP, and armor suddenly become extremely important to the effectiveness of ranged units, where without friendly fire the most important stats are DPS for ranged unit and defense for melee .

The friendly fire option exists for all units (unless something drastically changed in the most recent alpha). It just has never been turned on for anything except siege units. I don't think any modder has publicly explored the possibilities yet. And I can't blame them, since innovations like this have a snowballs chance in hell of ever being embraced by the wider community. Personally however, the interaction you describe is exactly the kind of thing I wish 0AD EA would try out. Edit: I should add, I privately tested precisely this sort of generalized friendly fire convention in combination with directional armor back during alpha 24. For my tastes I thought it was brilliant. It made literally-backing-up a friendly meat shield with ranged units worse than completely useless, because the fire support would nail the friendly guys in their unarmored backs and end up doing more damage to you than the enemy. To get any kind of advantage you had to send the archers/slingers/peltasts out to flank and encircle the enemy's melee line using their superior speed, at which point they were absolutely lethal. But then they would be very vulnerable to the enemy cavalry and fire support, meaning you would have to pick your moment. And the kicker is that this is MUCH closer to the real doctrine of ancient warfare than what is currently represented by games like 0AD. However... I can see how players acclimated to the conventions of Age of Empires would have a well founded beef with added micromanagement burden like that. it would either entirely overstrain the attention economy for any normal player, or necessitate a huge shift in focus to the tactical. Successful integration of friendly fire as a game mechanic is mostly associated with the Myth series; and those are very different games...

What would the point be then? The range would allow the researching of upgrades for ranged units. It could also be made to produce ranged units a little bit faster than a standard barracks. Or for something really wild, maybe ranges and stables could produce thematically appropriate units at promotion level 2! (Admittedly that would require new icons, so it's a bit of a tall order, plus veteran units are so powerful the balance implications would be significant.) Maybe "Target Range"

I like this idea. The system that exists now definitely feels extremely contrived and produces some head scratching emergent gameplay conventions. It's also frustrating mechanically having to judge whether you have enough men to capture a structure, and then needing to tell them to switch to regular attack if they are not up to the task. I think if the feature were being implemented today it would probably not make it into the game. There would be too much wrangling over competing proposals for the specific implementation, and too much concern for destabilizing the competitive scene's and its metagame. Or it would be supported in the engine but, after the inevitable outcry following its first demonstration, it would be so heavily nerfed in the succeeding alpha as to have no practical impact on gameplay.