ChronA

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.

Why is that? If you mean that it would break a lot of work that has already gone into preparing A26, I can understand holding off on introducing something like this until A27. I can also understand wanting to wait until a more polished implementation can be demoed, since this BuildingAI is obviously janky AF. But if you are speaking more generally... Well, much ink has already been spilled about how this project's development is too conservative. Meaningful changes will always break things and piss people off, but that doesn't make them any less necessary. 0 AD is undeniably a feast for the eyes but in terms of depth and polish of gameplay it sits somewhere around Age of Empires 1, which quite frankly is unacceptable in this day and age. If not now then when?

I think this buildingAI target selection sounds promising in terms of getting gameplay out of its rut. Making a core skill mechanic out of required player micro for preventing unit-AI misplay is a really frustrating approach to game design. It seems that was the case here, if even random target selection is boosting combat effectiveness compared to the old prioritization. This approach also has the added benefit of not requiring any new UI design. Yes this will require some unit roles to be revised for balance purposes (pikemen), but these design conventions were never exactly that interesting and were ahistorical to boot. (To my understanding it is true that pikemen were quite good at maintaining cohesion against missile fire, but they absolutely took casualties from it. And sustained small arms bombardment was one of the best and only ways of dealing with pike blocks in ancient warfare when flanking was not possible.) If the change improves performance too, I heartily hope it will be adopted.

chrstgtr's analysis is based on a faulty understanding of the engine, as explained by Grapjas above. To my mind that answers all of their objections in one stroke. If they want to reformulate their argument based on the actual behavior, I think the ball is in their court. Give them a chance to make a new case before continuing to litigate the old one.

Sorry, that feels like a no-true-scotsman fallacy to me. Yes, everyone wants both balance and new features, but the important distinction is which one you prefer when you can't have both. It seems like this community ends up picking balance over features every time. Perhaps a more useful framing of the problem is that the project's consensus view of what constitutes balance is too narrow for its own good. It's not enough that every strategy has a viable counter; that counter must be tuned to an exacting level of minimal surplus efficiency to preserve the soft counter character of the game. Moreover, you have to do this with consideration to every single civilization in the game. If a new feature makes any one of the game's dozen civilizations grossly over or underpowered then it is automatically not fit for purpose. And forget about trying to deliberately change the nature of any particular strategy or counter relationship, or majorly adjust the unit roster available to any civilization. The community has certain expectations about how things are supposed to look in 0 AD. The problem is, when combining all those constraints the only valid solution is gridlock. With counter margins so finely tuned, every single tiny simulation or stat difference triggers a cascade of unacceptable changes that must be fastidiously counteracted every patch, eating up development energy. Meanwhile, anyone trying to contribute new features has to run a gauntlet of predicting and adjusting for every balance implication across every combination of civs. It is simply not possible to innovate successfully in such an environment. To get out of this rut, this community needs to accept that 1. it is worth breaking things to add features, and 2. that a more bold, rough-strokes approach to balance and counter design will cause less balance problems while the game is in heavy development. Otherwise I think 0AD should accept that its game design has fully matured to its natural conclusion, and slap a beta number on the next update.

I think "general shape" is a bit of an understatement there, Radiotraining . The Starcraft CC has 3 major features: a pseudo-dome body with an open bay on the bottom, a flying bridge on top, and thruster "legs" on the sides. It looks to me like you have just those same 3 features for your design as well. That makes it look less like a stand alone concept and more like a SC2 custom skin. Maybe that's what you are going for, because if the intent is to convey that this building will work exactly the same as a Starcraft CC then the first design succeeds admirably. Otherwise I think you should really try to remix one of the features. Even when using someone else's work as a template, I think aesthetic innovation is an important mark of craftsmanship. It demonstrates that care and thought were invested in the project. For instance, (unless this building can fly like a SC CC) you might want to change the thruster legs into auxiliary habitation pods or armored weapons ports (if it will be able to attack when garrisoned like a 0 AD CC). Or maybe stick a fortified landing pad on top in place of the bridge-looking thingy... Anyway, you get the idea. On the whole this is impressive work and a good start.

I actually agree with this sentiment. There are a lot of things in 0 AD that could be improved, or at least made more unique, with greater realism. However I don't see why anyone would take special umbrage with miss-scaled walk speeds specifically. Distance and time relationships must be inconsistent with reality in a game like this in order for it to be playable. In the real world humans are basically tiny little fleas compared to some of the structures they build and they are positively microscopic compared to the distances they travel in the course of their daily affairs. So to even have actors visible on screen you need to massively inflate them relative to the features of their environments. Likewise with projectiles, you need to massively foreshorten typical engagement distances and inflate and slow the projectile models just to be able to see who is shooting who with what. But the distance dilations for combat are still not even within an order of magnitude of the dilations to the environment. Thus inconsistent space/time scaling is basically unavoidable if you want to have a functioning RTS. Therefore it seems to me that what you are really asking for is that each of those relationships gets its own unique standard of measurement so it will conform to reality. But is this really helpful? Why do I actually want to know the walk speed of my units? Well for me there is only one overriding reason: I want to know how long it will take them to do things in the game. E.g. how many seconds will it take a spearman to close the attack range of a slinger (and thus how much damage is he expected to take during that transit). This is easy to calculate right now. Under your proposed system not so much, because the spearman's speed may be listed as 1.5 m/s and the slinger's range may be 300 m, but 300 projectile m / 1.5 walk speed m/s != 200 s... But lets even suppose coding and mod compatibility were non factors, and the dev team decided to rebase all distances consistently in the engine so that the human actors would be in their proper scale (i.e. 1.5 to 1.8 meters tall instead of 4.5). (And for the record, if coding and mod compatibility were non factors, I agree that this would be a good move because it would stop all the people making stupid mistakes like setting the projectile gravity wrong!) But if we did this, even then would we ever want to give our units their real-world walk speed of 1.5 m/s? I don't think so. Waiting for people to leisurely saunter to a destination is boring. And if you are the omnipotent god who ordered them to go there, anything less than a resolute power walk or sustainable jog implies that they don't respect your authority! There's a reason Doom Guy's default walk speed is 2.5X faster than Usain Bolt's fastest sprint... So uh... it seems from your posts like you have some ambition or interest with respect to the Pyrogenesis engine and 0 AD's asset library. What I am trying to say with my word vomit is that wonky distance and velocity scaling seems like an odd thing to be a deal breaker. Maybe you should give some more thought to what you want to do, and maybe even give us a hint so we can provide more helpful insights.

Not when the people doing the walking are 4 meters tall and can build up a whole civilization from a single building in the space of half an hour! Games like this intrinsically operate on Paul Bunyon logic, which as arbitrary as it seems does actually follow a consistent set of rules. The only thing that is illogical is certain people coming in and demanding engine design choices to conform to their personal understanding of real world physics, without thinking about how that would affect other game systems. You are in the wrong here my friend, but you are welcome to make a mod that changes the walk speed to whatever you want it to be and see how the game plays.

This is the same **** that makes people keep changing the projectile gravity to 9.81! The distance units in the game are not meters! They are their own thing with no consistent relation to real world distances. The numbers have to be fudged for anything feel right or make sense in gameplay. Yes, units walk insanely fast, projectile ranges are absurdly short, most buildings are comically tiny, and in the real world it takes months to plant a farm.

This is the correct answer. Rams, Siege Towers, and perhaps Elephants are the only units is the game that can really be described as decisive in combat from what I've seen. That's not to say they are without counters, but unless they are countered they will be effective at changing the outcome of a battle. Everything else is just indistinct canon fodder; whoever can produce more or marginally better canon fodder wins. There's no fundamental differences in tactics.

Lion.Kanzen's explanation is usually correct, however a more precise definition is that the hardness of a counter is determined by the ratio of cost effectiveness of the counter-unit/composition against the thing it is intended to counter. A soft counter requires nearly equal resources to be invested for a counter to be effective, while for a hard counter a small investment in the counter unit can shut down a much larger investment from the opponent. The dividing line between soft and hard counter depends on context, so it is a little tricky to try to generalize a dividing line. But if you are spending less than 75 resources on your counter for every 100 the opponent spends then you are probably talking about a hard counter. If you spend more than 80 for every 100 you are probably talking about a soft counter. I don't want to give the impression that designing a game around soft counters is bad. Soft counters give a certain amount of inertia to proceedings, which gives players more time to consciously strategize. They also lend much more weight to economic activities, which makes the game accessible and "fair." However, when a game is under active development, soft counters have one huge disadvantage: they are susceptible to perturbation. When the margin of victory is small, it is easy to unintentionally reverse the direction of a counter just as a consequence of small mechanical changes; for instance by making a unit slightly faster, or introducing a rotation delay, or changing the speed, range, or accuracy of projectiles. That can cause the metagame to completely rearrange in unintended ways with each patch and makes life very difficult for whoever is supposed to be in charge of the balance design. Sound familiar?

I agree that the addition of some high quality scripted campaigns will be a great boon to 0 AD's value propositions. However, I must point out that in the RTS space, single player scripted (ie campaign) content has only a weak relationship to long term playability. For a lot of serious RTS players, a campaign is only something they might try for a few days (or hours) to get a taste of gameplay. Others might beat all the campaign content over the course of a few weeks then never touch it again. I think it is a only a small minority who find enjoyment in replaying campaign content repeatedly for the duration of their engagement. So let's not lose focus on the real reason Bad Player raised this (IMO very legitimate) complaint: 0 AD has a shallow core gameplay loop. There needs to be more diversity between civilizations. There needs to be more diversity between units. The game needs to have some mechanics-based hard counter cycles so that not every battle is decided by marginal differences in unit numbers or strength that are mostly attributable to the snowballing of minor decisions and tactical blunders from 10 minutes ago. Otherwise the game is too easily "solved" and most players will lose interest almost as soon as they have a taste of mastery (e.g. within 6 months). As for why some people might stick around longer: I would posit the main reasons are they become invested in the drama of the game's development. In some ways I think the evolution of 0 AD's metagame and design philosophy is a much more interesting strategic sandbox than the game itself. Others might be fanatic devotees of FOSS and have literally nothing better they can stomach to play.

edit: oops wrong thread... but I concur with the OP. Having huge freebie mineral deposits right next to the starting CC is odd, in that it effectively negates any strategic choice to take minerals elsewhere on the map until the main deposits are exhausted.