ChronA

Considering the other changes currently under discussion, I think adjustments to elephants and siege engines are premature. You are going to waste a lot of energy if you start designing solutions to problems that may not even exist any more by the time you implement them. (Or worse, you will create whole new sets of problems for yourself with too many degrees of freedom to know for sure what even caused them.) Better to take things slow and apply your work tactically.

Personally I would like it if <default><Clearance> in simulation/data/pathfinder.xml was bumped up to 1.5 from its current value of 0.8. Right now there are an awful lot of units clipping through each other in melee fights. Increasing the unit separation would make fights more readable, increase the importance of concavity, and would make the range differences of the melee unit types much more apparent and significant.

I'm happy to code in falloff damage as tool for modders to experiment with, but personally I don't think its going to end up being a good fit for EA or any of its spinoffs without major changes to unit AI. Right now ranged units want to start attacking enemies at maximum range, and they will stay at maximum range unless their enemies move towards them or their player orders them to move closer. That means, with damage falloff, ranged units default behavior will cause them to do minimum damage, and additional micro steps are required to make them become effective at their intended role. That would be fine for an RTS in the Blizzard style, but for Ensemble Studios style games (post AoK) I think low level players expect units can be left unsupervised without completely negating their combat performance. But, I could also be wrong about that! It might be a question of fine tuning parameters. I mean, technically the situation I just described already exists with the projectile-spread mechanic. However, either no-one minds, or spread is currently so small and units pack together so tightly that at normal engagement ranges that it's not an issue. Anyway... re: linear vs exponential model: I am leaning toward the exponential. I think elevation range bonuses (and target leading) is going to make linear damage falloff complicated. Exponential ironically should be simpler.

Hm, I could probably add on an "optimal range" option too without much difficulty... Make it so if the distance to the target is beyond the optimal range, the damage delivered is penalized (maybe linearly, maybe logarithmically). Combining that with <AccuracyOverride>1.0</AccuracyOverride> ought to give the behavior you want right?

I agree. I don't think the resilience of attributed to phalangites against ranged infantry had much to do with their gear. While its true that they were heavily armored, its not like heavy spearmen weren't wearing the exact same armor too, with the added advantage of a great big shield. Something worth considering is that in ancient battles, moral and intimidation were much, much more important than they are in modern warfare. Enemies were defeated, not by killing them to the last man, but by convincing them to break and run away. It could be the tight formation of pikemen made it harder to see the casualties inflicted by projectile attack than the looser formations used by other infantry types. Or maybe they were so hemmed in that it was impossible to turn and run away as an individual even if you wanted to. Regardless... I agree that the point is well made. The pikemen models in the game do not look they should by 25% more resistant to ranged attack than the spearmen. This is a case of art design saying one and gameplay saying another.

No. I'd prefer to keep things simple. The system I've set up adds an optional <AccuracyOverride> tag to <Projectile> in templates. If you wanted (for instance) a 20% chance for archers to always hit their intended target, you could set <AccuracyOverride>0.2</AccuracyOverride>. The other 80% of the time it would depend where the projectile lands. If there is no AccuracyOverride, it defaults to 0, and you get the current behavior.

There is no need to change projectile speeds. I am currently working on a script modification that will give support for 100% accurate projectiles (or any other percentage you want). It should be finished in a day or two.

I should state my bias: I don't like when games use attack multipliers to effect their counter networks. I think it makes it harder to construct balance analysis spreadsheets, and it stifles opportunities for creative emergent gameplay by reducing the relative importance of situational gameplay systems. However, I do agree with the plan @wowgetoffyourcellphone is proposing to copy from DE. It is well conceived. Is it within our scope to test a large, general melee-buff or ranged-nerf? I think it's a good idea, but would the community accept it? It would drastically rewrite the state of play. If we have a go, I vote for just doubling RepeatTime on all the ranged units. I really don't like the way that right now you can barely see the attack animations of ranged units because they play so fast. Kill 2 birds with 1 stone Good test, but I agree that 10 Athenian sword cavalry vs 10 Carthaginian archers and 5 spearmen might be the more relevant question. Even more so if the archers were hiding behind buildings, or put 4-6 towers around the archers and see if the cav can still get out alive.

Yes that was my general understanding too. I guess when you put it that way, since archers and slingers also favored broken ground as a natural defense against heavy infantry and cavalry, you could justly say that skirmishers are anti-ranged! However I still think you'd also be equally justified to call archers and slingers anti-skirmisher. (I believe that is called a paradox!) I wish there was a way to represent that terrain interaction systemically, instead of abstracting it out as a goofy damage multiplier bonus... that would sit with me much better. Also, this gives me an idea for a truly eccentric counter cycle: cavalry > skirmishers > archers/slingers > cavalry I doubt the community would accept that, since cavalry beat ranged infantry is like one of the ten commandments of RTS design... but it might be more historically accurate than the other way around.

You thinking an anti-ranged attack damage bonus like in AOK? Kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It seems a bit arbitrary and a bit ahistorical. I mean... IIRC this kind of skirmisher was sometimes used against other ranged infantry, but that seems like that's a case of fighting fire with fire for lack of water. Their gear wasn't really designed to counter archers or slingers, arguably the opposite, but they were nimble and expendable enough to do a job that no one else could, so that's how they were used. I guess you could simulate that by making them cheap, but that would scramble the economic balance. Right I forgot about that item in the changelog. Thanks for the correction.

Patch notes make good arguments in favor of regularized unit speeds, IMO. Unfortunately then I must conclude that BreakfastBurrito is correct: unless their speed or range is nerfed, the archer must remain the king of infantry. That limits their multiplayer-viable direct counters to cavalry, static defense turrets, and artillery engines. Personally I think that means job is done for archer and slingers. It's mainly on whoever is working on cavalry buffs to bring balance to the infantry types. Of course, if it transpires that the way to do that is nerfing all ranged units DPS or something there may be more work to do. The other thing that may be worth considering in the context of archers and ranged units though, is indirect counters. These would be units that can't hurt the archers but neither can the archers hurt them. Right now that's just rams right? But if you gave heavy infantry enough pierce armor they could also qualify. Buildings and static defense could also gain that relationship if you took away the archer's capture attack. Put those together and you could seemingly restrict archers to a much more niche role: skirmisher-slinger-and-villager hunter. That's a pretty radical concept, but maybe not outside our Overton window? Regardless, the main question remains: what role is the javelinist for? Right now it can't be anti-melee-infantry, because that is a job archers already do incidentally in their primary role as ranged superiority weapons. Making javelinist anti-cavalry would be too absurd! Anti elephant they already do, but is too niche. Maybe make them anti-building?

I agree with this. Slingers seem to be in an ok spot in A24, even if they are not as shiny as they were in A23. We could possibly discuss bumping up their range to equal or slightly exceed the archer's, based on historical evidence (with compensatory nerfs), but that should be a much lower priority for this thread than figuring out the javelinist's identity and the archer's counter cycle. I agree. Basically kiting and static defense (which in this context is both actively damage-dealing turrets and normal buildings and walls acting as pathing blockers) both greatly advantage the archer, breaking its intended counter cycles. Fix that and you fix a lot of what is wrong with the ranged unit lines. Question is: are these efforts meant to be part of that generalized fix you are alluding to, or separate?

Yes, that appears to be our consensus objective with this thread. If the javelinist is just a inferior archer variant, why would anyone with a choice make it? And if we buffed it to make it better than archers, why would anyone make archer? It needs a distinct identity. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On my sandbox testing: actually I am wrong. The unmodified Javelinist already performs well on all of my analysis criteria. They lose to the archers but consistently beat equal resource groups of melee infantry, which in turn beat the same number of archers by a considerable margin. That means there should be a functioning counter cycle. Build melee infantry to beat archers, javelinists to beat melee infantry, archers to beat javelinists. The question is why this is not happening in real gameplay.

Because unless javelinists are good for something, no one will ever make 40 skirmishers, and thus whether 30 spear cav can beat them or not will be irrelevant.

I tested Dakara's & Yekaterina's proposal in my sandbox. My findings: Javelinist attack to 32 P, speed 2.000, range 20 -- Good changes IMO. Slower attack means units no longer look like they are having seizures! 32 attack hits like a truck, but doesn't seem game breaking. 20 base range might be a little short. It definitely underlines the idea that these guys are not just off-brand archers, which is good. Less good is that they almost feel like weird melee-infantry with such short range. 25 may be a better compromise number. 25 +5 range per rank would sweeten the deal IMO. Javelinist HP to 75 -- Way overpowered! 75 HP javs annihilate archers, and every other unit type I tested them against. That's way too much meat. If the intent is to make javelins tanky, without massively changing their role, I'd suggest a different idea... Javelinist armor to 5 H, 2 P (which is +4 H, +1 P compared to their current) -- I think this is much more in line with the visual depiction of their gear. Those small light shields would not be so great against projectiles, but they would be excellent for parrying sword and spear strikes. I think the balance effect is better too. In combination with Dakara's changes, these javelinists have a strong anti-melee flavor, both as a tank for other ranged units and as a DPS source in themselves. This seems to have been the intent with their base stats as well, but now it is accentuated. And against archers they still lose by a respectable margin, which I think is right.

It seems right to me that archers remain the ranged supremacy troop type of choice, so long as 0 AD maintains its commitment to historical authenticity. Good quality bows and arrows take a huge amount of engineering and labor to manufacture compared to slings and shot, or javelins. If all of these weapons had a similar degree of effectiveness, why would anyone in the ancient world have bother equipping their armies with bows instead of the cheaper options? Ultimately, some type of generic range unit has to be the best generic ranged unit, and to me it fits that that unit would be the archer. The challenge for maintaining unit diversity then is to give slingers and javelinists some sort of role besides generic ranged DPS, so that they are not just a disappointing version of an archer.

(LetswaveaBook and Yekaterina with the ninja!) Yeah, after some thought, I guess you are right. Just put a binary override onto the collision test of MissileHit() in DelayedDamage.js. Best practice would probably be to add an "always hit" tag to ranged weapons that would control this behavior. That way, if for instance someone wanted to make a Myth style total conversion using the game assets, they would have an easy time re-enabling projectile simulation. I don't think updating the visualizations is really necessary. Individual projectiles are hard to see anyway, and clear misses should be pretty rare if projectile speeds are fast enough. It would be much weirder to see arrows bending to track their targets.

Do you mean removing the random spread element from projectile targeting, or are you talking about removing ballistic projectile simulation for ranged attacks entirely? (The latter would be like the system used in the StarCraft games, where ranged attacks launch a homing projectile that are guaranteed to hit .) It's an important distinction because zero-spread projectiles can still be dodged by dancing.

Put me in coach! I'm ready! Positives: I can work on component scripts and templates. I can also do low-fi texture work if push comes to shove. I'd be very happy to run sandbox balance tests and discuss high-level design-theory-crafting (as much as time allows) if the need arises. Negatives: I don't have any hands on multiplayer experience, nor have I been able to watch enough A24 competitive to authoritatively opine on the current gestalt balance-state. My coding skills are also entirely self-taught. So exercise caution when handling anything I produce. Plus, my old Linux laptop is currently in a coma, and I was never very good at using it anyway. Thus I am Windows 10 bound at this time, and trying to get into your version control system confuses and frightens me... If you think you can use any of my services, please point me at a task.

Oh!!! Wow do I feel stupid! Thanks. I forgot that the helper scripts were a thing. (I guess I'm still suffering from a bit of mental fog from recent fever -- Covid vaccine side effect.) In that case I'll read through that thread you linked, then (unless something in there changes my mind) I'll draft up a pull request for you to debate.

0 AD's design document contains a number of interesting gameplay concepts that have yet to be implemented. However, there hasn't been much public facing movement on that front since auras were introduced with Alpha 15, back in 2014. It is discouraging for those of us who were (are?) enthusiastic for an innovative, historically-grounded RTS and not just an open source retread of other prominent titles' gameplay. I want to suggest that adding support for directionally-dependent attack resistance values in A25 would be relatively low hanging fruit, to demonstrate progress on the gameplay wish list. I was even going to offer to do the coding myself. Unfortunately, I am discovering that the damage-effect handing pipeling has undergone some radical revisions between A23 and A24. Most importantly, the code that defined the relationship between armor and damage-received seems to have been removed from its former residence in the Resistance (formerly Armor) component script. In fact I'm beginning to fear it is now hardcoded into the engine, which would put it beyond my meager abilities to manipulate. Never-the-less, I think directional attack resistance remains one of the easiest gameplay features to support in terms of the simplicity of its mathematics and its decision tree implementation. Therefore I am putting out the question: what would it take to add support for directional attack resistance with Alpha 25? Particularly, what files need to be edited? Does anyone have any strong preferences on the kind of system to use? Personally I think the best combination of simplicity and versatility would be to allow separate values for flank and rear armor to be defined in each resistance type in the unit template, plus fields to define the angles where the flanks and rear start. If any of these values are missing the algorithm should default back to using the main resistance value, ensuring innate compatibility with any projects that don't want to directional armor. I also don't think it is necessary or wise to implement the concept, beyond minimal support, in Alpha 25. One of this project's strengths is the active modding scene's ability to test new ideas. I would rely on them to determine the best ways to incorporate new features into gameplay and UI, just like you are doing with status effects. I'm hopeful we can get some interesting new gameplay from both these features diffusing back into the vanilla game in A26 and A27.

If the AI is totally predictable after only a few matches, adding another civ ain't gonna help you with that...

A gaming story which some might find interesting, though perhaps not directly relevant: About a decade I got involved in the alpha and beta of an indie RTS called Achron. The game was based around a time travel mechanic similar to 5d chess. We quickly discovered it had a similar problem to what you guys have. It turned out there was no opportunity cost to rushing, because if an attack didn't work out perfectly you could go back in time, cancel the attack, and order the soldiers back to guard your base. We had Rushing=Turtling, and there was no way of disentangling them without removing the game's defining mechanic. It made for weird games with 30+ minutes of posturing but very little combat or tech progression. In consultation with the devs, we decided it could be fix it by reducing the cost of resource gatherers (to buff booming), removing defensive chokes around bases (to nerf the turtling), and playing on much larger maps (to nerf the rushing). The game release and for about a month it seemed good. Then the meta shifted with the influx of new skilled players. The new meta was naked booming. It turned out that some of the late game air units scaled super well, because with the time manipulation it was impossible to pin them down in a bad fight and score kills. Therefore whoever got to them first could just fly into the enemy's base and win. So we tired addressing the problem with map changes but to no avail. The inflection region where a map went from completely boom favored to completely rush favored was too small for our map makers to ever identify. The problem was only solved much later when the devs finally patched the gatherer cost higher again AND the remaining player base adopted a gentlemen's agreement that effectively banned playing mass air strategies. The moral I took away is that you should make sure you understand the source and nature of a problem before trying to fix it. We thought the problem was that time manipulation made it possible to simultaneously attack and defend without any tradeoffs. The real problem was that time manipulation can make war so precise and deadly that there is no point in fighting unless you are prepared with an unbeatable killing blow. The game only became fun again once we stopped worrying about the rush-boom balance and stated focusing on systematically removing unbeatable killing blows. So I ask what is 0 AD's real problem? Is it really the combat-ready gatherers blurring the lines between Boom and Turtle? Is it a diversity-vacuum afflicting unit-role interactions and utility? Perhaps it's even clinging to closely to the example of a venerated ancestor, without considering how outdated circumstances, luck, and survivorship bias figured into its successes. I really don't have any sure answers to that one.

Personally I would prefer 0AD to bravely forge its own distinct path. There is a lot the Age-of games do poorly with both history and gameplay that I hope this project can improve on. But Ensemble's games are still great games, and I want to be able to say the same for 0AD, even if it means just aping its most obvious point of inspiration. Better to make a great game by copying another great game (where applicable) than to make a mediocre game by refusing to. In point of fact, if I remember my RTS history rightly, Blizzard did not invent the mature RTS formula, nor did they do most of the legwork in perfecting it, but they are a highly visible point of reference when discussing it. I believe that is an important distinction. It's not that everyone is copy Blizzard because they are popular; Blizzard and everyone else are all copying a common zeitgeist because they recognize its wisdom. Anyway that is largely tangential, because I am not saying you should copy every aspect of SC2's design or anything like that! I am specifically talking only about the rush-boom-turtle counter cycle. Context sir! Context!

I don't think rams are the solution you want to this problem. They are slow, expensive, and provide no additional utility to a player's economy or map control. That means rushing them out will put you very far behind, and likely turn your attack into an all-in. That's not good. If you want to solve this, you either need to toss out the citizen-soldier concept (as has so often been proposed); or you need to take a cue from Blizzard's RTS design book instead of Ensemble's, and allow at least some of your basic units to have favorable matchups against static defenses. And frankly, even if you take option one, I not sure you won't end up needing option 2 anyway. -------------------------- About the poll question, you are missing the most important option: nerfing the gather rate of soldiers. The last thing you want to do when you are trying to encourage rushes is to speed up economic activities... Naked booming is a thing you know! It could easily become the dominant strategy if you fix the free-turtling problem.