macemen

Right, I misunderstood. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad. Just marching past all outposts on the way has the potential that your army is ambushed (especially the siege engines). So mopping up everything on the way is actually the correct behaviour IMO. That's how I play as well, unless I just want to raid.

What do you expect to do with your base in an RTS after you finished your enemies off? I'm not sure Stronghold is an example to be followed when it comes to game mechanics. As far as I remember, about the only fun thing was building castles, the economy was a pain in the @#$%, requiring constant supervision and micromanagement. Battle was really dull as well, without even the simplest tactical elements such as units moving together, much less in a formation.

I really like this idea. On certain maps (desert) farmland should be a resource you fight for, just like you (should) do for mines. To bring up an example of a game where this was implemented: in Stronghold Crusader there were "green" areas on the map, usually very limited in size. All agricultural structures could *only* be built on these green areas, which became one of the most valuable territories one owned. It worked really well. Please don't make farms finite though. Microing farms is one of the least pleasant RTS experiences ever. On a related note I also don't think the game should force players to do or not to do certain things, like building farms around the CC, just because it's not pretty or realistic. Instead make it a multilateral decision. Currently there is a single aspect to take into consideration when placing farms: risk of the farmers being killed. And this risk can be minimized by building the farms around the CC, as simple as that. But if you introduce another aspect, say a terrain bonus, you suddenly don't have a single best way to place farms. You can take more risk for more gain, or play safe and loose on income. Placing farms is suddenly a *strategic* decision.

IMO its fine to have all resource nodes (stone, iron) needed for reaching the last age and building a reasonable base in close proximity to the CC. But they should contain much smaller amount of resources. I've seen many SP games where the initial resources were still not depleted by the end of the (~1h) match. One should be able to turtle/boom without strictly having to expand but at the same time one should also be strongly encouraged to expand, either to seize other resource nodes or to have enough territory to initiate trade. Also big +1 for forcing the fields to the perimeters of the base by penalizing gather rates when build close to the CC.

Oh I see.

I'm confused. Do I remember it wrongly or do some civs have all-female workers?

Many vastly popular historical RTS either feature no woman at all or use them only for support roles, similar for the woman in 0 A.D. I don't see any bubble to be bursted here. Of course that is not to say there won't be people who find this offensive. People get offended by everything nowadays, they made this an art. On a personal note I also find it weird that women = peasant and men = fighter. At the very least women should be made a generic "citizen", "villager" or "peasant", a generic economic unit, half of them being men and half women, like in AoE. There were non-fighting men in most societies. Also, and this was already brought up in other topics, currently women have very little role in the gameplay. Basically they are only required for gathering food, but one can get away entirely without training them. This leads to the game being mostly about spamming the most citizen soldiers possible. I think citizen soldiers' economic capabilities should be nerfed and the basic economic units' should be boosted, making them a much more central piece of one's economy, not just a support role.

That is something ASAN (address sanitizer) is very good catching at. Have you guys tried doing some runs with ASAN enabled? It does slow down things a bit (having to check every memory allocation/deallocation and access) so it might be impractical but it's worth a try.

I brought up this very issue in:

This is very similar to option 2 (practically the same). Have all melee units deal hack attack and all ranged ones deal pierce attack, leaving crush for siege weapons.

I've been thinking about the damage and armour system of 0 A.D. EA. Maybe this was discussed already in other topics or there are future plans that I'm unaware of. Feel free to enlighten/dismiss me. Anyway this is my two cents about the above mentioned damage and armour system in 0 A.D. EA (EA in the reminder of the post). Currently there are three damage types: hack pierce crush And, conversely three armour types (for each of the listed damage type). Each unit deals some damage in one or more of these damage types and has armour values for all three. The damage types dealt by the unit reflect some realistic approximation of the damage caused by the unit's weapon. This system, while it's more realistic, has some weaknesses. Some examples: Rams should be practically impregnable to range unit attacks. To achieve this its pierce armour is huge (99%). This achieves the desired effect as all ranged units have piercing attack (some have piercing and crush but the ram has very high defence against crush attacks as well so this doesn't cause a problem). But it also has an undesired effect: rams are practically invulnerable to spear wielding units, as those also have piercing attack, which is highly unrealistic as rams would be very vulnerable to all melee attacks. In real life attackers would not go and try to hack the wooden parts to pieces but attack the people moving it who would be vulnerable to attacks in the confined interior of the ram. Pikemen should be very hard to tackle in close-combat. To achieve this it has very high hack and piercing armour levels. But this also results in being very hard to kill via range units as well. While this is desirable to some extent its unlikely that real pikemen were as good at defending against range attacks as they were defending against melee attacks, due to having a smallish shield. In general this system makes it very hard to implement a proper counter system, which in my opinion is highly desirable for an RTS . The reason is that a unit's ability to defend against range and melee attacks cannot be detached from each other. Increasing one, in some cases, will increase the other as well, also discriminating against particular weapon types, leading to absurd situations, like the tank-like ram that some civilizations simply cannot defend themselves against as they have very limited access to sword infantry/cavalry. I think there are two ways to fix this: Go all the way with the realistic system. Instead of units only having three armour levels, take other aspects of a unit into consideration: its shield (or the lack of it), its ability (skill) to defend itself from melee and ranged attacks. Pros: Can be very realistic. Fine-grained definition of unit's strength/weaknesses, units behave as you instinctly expect (knowing their historical role). Cons: Complicated system that is hard to implement and model mentally. Lots of numbers to juggle, one could say it doesn't really fit an RTS. Elite units tend to become strong all-rounders, prime candidates for mindless massing without any tactics or strategy. Go the Age of * route. Units either have melee or ranged primary attack and have melee and range armour levels (maybe a third for siege/crush). Pros: Very few numbers to juggle. A unit has HP, speed, an attack and two armour levels. Easy to build a good counter system that forces players to carefully consider the composition of their armies. Easy to build a mental model of. Cons: Can be overly simplistic at cases. I personally prefer option (2) for being simpler and for already being familiar to people coming from the Age of * universe (of which EA is member in some sense). What do you guys think? Feel free to add additional options or add/dispute the pros/cons on the presented ones.

I'm not sure I fully agree with that. All RTSs I play have some way or another to ensure that numbers alone are not enough to win. Elaborate counter systems (soft and hard counter units) ensure that spamming mindlessly just a few units will take you nowhere. So army composition and battlefield tactics (making sure units attack those enemy units they are best against) is extremely important. This is an area 0 A.D. is severely lacking in. Spamming just ranged units and rams is all you need . Maybe also a few spearman to fend off cavalry, but given how useless melee cavalry is this is unlikely. I agree, I don't think an RTS should look at the TW series for inspiration, it's an entirely different genre. In TW a single battle alone can last as long as an entire 0 A.D. match.

I like your suggestion. I like the idea of giving the underdog in a fight a chance to break their opponent (or at least get some breathing time) by a well executed quick raid. I hate to see players resign as soon as they loose their army in the first collision because "I have no realistic chance any more". One should not be able to sit back and relax after the first battle is won, knowing that the enemy has no real fighting chance to recover any more. Whether something like this would be annoying or a pleasant addition to game-play depends mostly on how well it would be executed. Of course care must be taken to not make matches last forever by making it nigh-impossible to take the enemy's base. A standing war is disheartening, I hate when it is impossible to break a front in the middle of the map and it takes many minutes to move it even a few centimetres. So some degree of snowballing effect is absolutely fine.

This was implemented in Rise Of Nations if I recall correctly. There, you had to carry around a special unit (storage wagon?). When leaving your own territory your units started to loose health unless they were in the radius of this special units. I don't remember the specifics (didin't play much RoN) except that this was extremely annoying, but then it was also probably a nuisance to the generals of old.

They could have different limits or could be balanced in some other way.

Another idea: instead of having a global population limit, limit the amount of houses that a given settlement can have in a given phase. So village phase settlements could only support a handful of houses, towns would support more and cities a lot more. Upgrading between phases would require the house limit to be reached (maybe not fully?). To avoid spamming settlements to increase the limits they could have a minimum required distance between them, much like CC's already do. This could cause the population to scale nicely with map sizes as small maps would simply not have enough space for more than 1-2 settlements.

You can even go even further and penalize (maybe severely) resource gathering in cities. This would have, compound with your suggestions, several beneficial consequences. Settlement development would not be about mindlessly upgrading everything to the highest possible level. Farming and lumber-jacking, etc. would move to the peripheries which would suddenly become valuable or even vital resource gathering sites as opposed cheap, throw-away and redundant expansion colonies. Trade would get a whole new meaning.

This would also have other desirable side effects. Players in the most cases would strive to capture these settlements intact to extract the invested resources, instead of just raising everything to the ground with a bunch of rams. It would give a whole new meaning to walls, towers and garrison, as it would be very costly to loose settlement to a raiding party.

I think the classic RTS genre is everything but dead, it's just fine. I don't think they are overly simplistic, repetitive or boring. It's only so if you ever play against the AI. Apparently a lot of people agree, otherwise we wouldn't see new expansions made to the most classic of the classic RTSs, AoE2. You are right in that a circle of houses (or any other buildings) protecting something is ridiculous. If you think about it so is the fact that the CC fires missiles and there are tons of other things that don't make any sense in real life. But these things are needed to keep the game playable. You can be only so much realistic without making a game complex to the point of being completely unenjoyable and unplayable. Again you are right but there is a trade-off between realisticity and simplicity that has to be made to keep the game playable. Have you played Stronghold Crusader? That has a much more realistic economy... that you end up managing in 90% of the gameplay, instead of laying awesome sieges to castles (which you might think the game is all about). It's even worse in Stronghold2 in which you spend all your time making sure the rats are not eating your people's food, that you have enough candle wax to light your temple and other equally ridiculous micromanagement that I won't list here. Who wants that in an RTS? Rhetorical question, I'm sure there are people who want just that. I'm all for spicing thing up. I'm not advertising discrimination against certain types of players or strategies. Quite the opposite, I think that games where there is a single strategy to win are boring. The point I was trying to make is that making a passive playing style overly rewarding *could* easily lead the opposite of spicy. Imagine that scouting the map and expanding could easily be avoided by just choosing certain techs and building certain buildings, without having to sacrifice anything. Wouldn't that lead to boring games? Maybe I just don't have enough imagination but I can't see how that would work well. It is not historically correct either. I can't think of a single case where isolation lead to greatness.

For me an RTS is about a very simple economy (a few resource types), quick, fully strategical base building (e.g. build houses in a circle around fields), scouting and fast reactions to the enemy's moves. Strategic depth is in how I build my economy (rush/boom) when and where I expand and what troops to train (if the enemy has paper I try to train scissors, not rocks). What you describe above would lead to many hour long matches with everybody sitting in their bases and building monuments because nothing would motivate them to go out and attack the enemy with all they have. In my opinion a good RTS should not encourage turtling. It should reward those who take the risk and act and react fast, not the cautious ones who play safe. Otherwise the matches will never end. Evil nitpick: how is priests blessing monuments raising morale and reducing corruption historically accurate?

I see. So this is already on the roadmap. Excellent.

Sorry I'm not sure I follow. Do you mean using only what techs are already in the game? Also who is they? The devs?

This is the topic I was looking for and didn't find before I wrote (though in a less articulated manner) suggesting to diversify the civilizations more on the suggestions topic. I strongly agree with the points raised by @Thorfinn the Shallow Minded. I think in its present form the excellent work put into making each civilization look so amazingly unique is a missed opportunity as bluntly speaking "if you played one you played all of them". There is very little to differentiate them besides look. A few unique buildings, perhaps an extra tech and slightly different unit selection. There is so much more potential in the game. It should be obvious, based on one's preference or current mood, what civilization should one pick for a given match. Like to play with cavalry? Go with the Persians. Like infantry? Go with the Athenians. Like extremely aggressive gameplay? Go with the Spartans. Like balanced civs? Go with the Seleucids. While most of these choices are already quite obvious it is somewhat disheartening to know that the Romans, well known for not having good cavalry, will be able to field heavy cavalry just as good as your awesome Baktrian Lancers. Similarly it is somewhat mood-ruining to find out that the half-naked Celtic spearman is just as skilled as your hoplites or Triarii (which was an elite veteran unit BTW). I think each civilization should feel unique in its gameplay too. AoE2 proved to us that for this you don't even need wildly different unit sets and/or base stats, which would be really hard to balance with this many civilizations. Its enough to have a technology tree and make available to each civilization a unique subset of it. This technology tree should encompass everything from economy to military. Some of this is already in place. For example Greek civilizations have the Theatre building which helps them expand. Some civilizations have the Archery Tradition tech which makes their archers stronger. We need more of these. We need such techs for many more aspects of how effective melee/ranged infantry and cavalry, elephants, siege units, mercenaries, etc. is. An important thing to note is that, although we tend to stereotypically view barbarian civilizations as of lesser ones, this is not true. So I am *not* suggesting at all to make for example the Gauls weaker, contrary to what my example with the hoplite vs. half-naked Celtic spearman above might suggest. The Celts were known highly-skilled blacksmiths just like many of the steppe nomads.

Won't that cause the strong to be even stronger and the weak to be even weaker? Imagine that one of your outer bases was ambushed and the local workforce and garrison slaughtered. Your enemy will now also have the benefit of high morale, while you, in addition to having to quickly restore your army, also have to deal with poor morale due to lost territory, buildings and units.

Right, good point about the Companion Cavalry. Exactly, something along these lines. My point is that it would be nice to have a clear focus for each civilization. E.g. have each civilization focused on either infantry, cavalry, archers or a combination of these. This is already kind-of the case by civilizations having access to different units but I feel this should be emphasized even more by perhaps some additional bonus techs or slightly different base stats.