mysticjim

How to kill an opponent really quickly with the Athenians! plus, here is the replay file if you want a closer look 2021-12-10_0004_Ath slinger guide.zip

Great stuff, dude. Thumbnails certainly do make a difference. Will check your video out properly over the next couple of days, and will add it to my playlist of related 0AD content on my channel. Also like the fact you've included the replay - I definitely think I will start doing that myself, people are asking me for it - probably to see exactly what details I've missed in my commentaries, mind, but hosting them here for the download is quite a good idea for diverting some extra traffic to the forums.

There are a couple of advantages. Your subscribers who have clicked the Bell icon for notifications get a notification as soon as it's uploaded and scheduled and you can post links to the premiere holding screen on forums like this in advance - useful if you don't get chance to advertise the video at the time of release. Although be very wary of doing that on Reddit - people get funny about being sent to a premiere screen instead of the full video!

Merry Christmas y'all! I got presents, and I totally don't got Covid - PCR test result finally turned up this morning, and have Xmas day Borg match for you. Life, for now, is good. And please spare a thought for @LetswaveaBook - he fared better than most of us would! And see previous post above, he's got more games uploaded as well, check them out (after you've watched mine, of course!)

@wowgetoffyourcellphone - you beat me to posting this! Was off fighting with (another) PCR test!!!!! Thanks dude

Just adding the official 0AD Newbie Rush edition of @Yekaterina's guide here; Download link below Massive thanks to @Yekaterina for allowing me to produce the official tie-in version, I've no doubt it's going to be popular and look forward to reading future, updated editions (not least because I'm so bad at the game myself and need all the help I can get!) From_nub_to_OP_Dec2021.pdf

Huge double episode today!

And just about got a Sunday game out this week. Newbie Rush, and indeed, Christmas, were threatened by a very near miss Covid 19 scare in work, but for now at least, I seem to be in the clear! Enjoy.

Dude, you should messaged me, only found out about the tournament 2nd hand Very happy to cover some games if you can get me the replay files.

It's a bit of an epic!

Sunday Game!

Late Sunday advertising. Sorry, announcements delayed due to a sleepless night and an early morning visit by an ambulance crew! Just a typical Saturday evening/Sunday morning in Newbie Rush Towers!

Okay, I got a number of issues with the whole business of tournaments in 0AD, broadcasting them, prize money - and the proposed funding of this specific instance. I'm going to deal with the latter first. @DerekO - you're what now, 14 or 15 years old? While I don't doubt you have $1000 knocking around - and if you do, technically it's yours to do what you want with it, but I do have serious concerns, if 0AD players really want tournament play with cash prizes, as to why a 14 year old should be funding it? From what I can tell, the business of monetizing any part of 0AD officially, even if it's to generate prize money for a tournament, is a major administrative nightmare, and anything 3rd party is currently as unofficial as it gets. In the event of a private tournament being run by a third party, WFG would have to distance itself from it legally in the event of any potential issue that might come up, such as reports of cheating, technical issues, disputed results and ultimately, delivery or non-delivery of the promised prize money. Not to mention the person putting up said prize having the capabilities to wire prize funds to potentially any country in the world. Tournaments involving money need at least some form of regulation, they can't just be thrown out there on the fly. To my knowledge, hardly any of the free tournaments I've seen have managed full participation by all players or reached a satisfactory conclusion within a sensible timescale. Tournament play in 0AD is nowhere near mature enough to support the sudden introduction of cash prizes. Regarding tournament play itself, without an official means of hosting tournaments within the game lobby, the whole thing would be a bit of a DIY effort, further relying on third parties for tournament structure. WFG and the current dev direction of 0AD have shown no particular priority towards formalising tournament play in game at this stage. Add to that the practicalities of players from 0AD's international player base in all the different time-zones actually taking part and the chances of technical fault free competitive play are severally limited. Finally, 0AD's current potential streaming audience is tiny. I do video on demand, mostly, with the occasional live recording - that I still edit to meet certain base production standards, and the final product is still VOD released to a schedule. If the VOD audience were to grow by a significant factor, regular live streaming would be a viable pursuit for the investment of time into it. Right now, it simply isn't, the metrics aren't there. I love the idea of tournament play, it adds a massive narrative to a series of games, they actually mean something - people can get invested in them. But right now, there simply isn't anything like enough of a professional or technical infrastructure to support it. Sorry, I probably sound like a complete old party-pooper, but I see more immovable obstacles than I see good outcomes at this time.

Midweek action

Hello all Just a speculative query, but does anyone out there make a habit of using the Halt command (hotkey default 'H') on a regular basis? If so, how do you utilise it, and if not - why? Very interested to hear. Myself, I have enough trouble stopping my units going idle without having a button to especially make that happen, so I actually reassign the H key to place a house - ignoring the halt command altogether, but interested to know if I'm missing a vital function that it serves. Jim

@Radiotraining- about to DM you...

Another Sunday showdown!

I hadn't considered 'Seasons' - I actually really like the sound of that.

Yes, I do agree with this statement 100% - as I said, the existing player base who've been here a while know it, and it goes without saying that the volunteers contributing to the project know it. But for the sake of a moniker, potentially a lot of new players, influencers and maybe even future prospective future volunteers might not understand it due to preconceived notions of what a project in an 'alpha' might be. I'm slightly wary of the alpha and even the beta tags, both suggest a state of pre-completion that apply much more to commercial projects. The impression I get is that alpha means early, unfinished, not fully functional to a lot of people. Beta suggests almost finished, perhaps not quite fully featured yet, but may be soon. Neither of the above truly apply in the case of 0AD. It certainly won't be 'finished' soon, if ever (as you rightly suggested.) And while there are longstanding things involving ongoing work to improve, it's also a competitively played game with a fully functional and growing feature set. It can be played and enjoyed in a state of completeness with very professional presentation. It is what it is now, and it will be what it evolves into in the future. I don't think a changing of the versioning name would change the perception of 0AD overnight, but possibly it might subtly improve certain first impressions, maybe cause people to take a deeper look at the project rather than dismiss it through misguided preconception. Maybe?

Heading off the topic, we'll get told off if we have too long a discussion on it, but... This whole business of discriminating against the concept of an 'Alpha' version - I know this is purely semantics, but if alpha has such poor connotations, why not drop it? Just call it Version 25 or release 25? We all know what it actually means, and we all know the game is and has been fully playable for literally years.

I was inspired! and for reference

We've got fireworks this episode (literally!)

Honestly though, it's in progress - I'm trying to build a buffer of completed match replays to give me a good week or so playing Delenda Est properly. Last time I tried this, I barely scratched the surface of the differences in gameplay between vanilla 0AD and Delenda Est. I recorded the audio of me talking about it, but it wasn't very convincing as I'd barely had chance to play it properly. I do want to do it justice because it's clearly quite an achievement.