BreakfastBurrito_007

My apologies, I group all of the cheats together so I don't consider autostart to have any exception despite it providing a smaller advantage compared to others. My point is that one player shouldn't be allowed to cheat and then when challenged about it, claim that the game "isn't competitive" so its no big deal. The gameplay experience of everyone in the host matters. Autociv still has 1:1 action to input correspondence so I don't think it should be considered a cheat. Cheats like maphacks or progui actually deliver additional capabilities like extra vision or large volumes of management actions for a single gui level input. 1: any time I raise the question about progui before game start (whether it will be disallowed or not) I usually have to explain it to at least 3 to 4 people, others are tired of debates about this and don't invest any of their attention. During this discussion progui users are totally silent and do not respond do inquiries about their mod usage. Usually at least one person is outraged, but they quickly realize that there's nothing they can do about it. If enough people in the host express concern about progui before game start, the progui user will break silence and verbally attack the person who raised the issue with words I can not put on the forum. This serves to derail conversation about the mod. Additionally there are also dishonest people who claim that the scripted autotrainer is "equivalent" to vanilla autoqueue which is mathematically false. 2: There aren't really any stats on the summary which illustrate directly the advantages provided by automation, so players (even good ones) mistakenly believe that their usage of vanilla autoqueue or manual batch training is as efficient. I've advocated for cumulative barracks/stable/cc idle time statistics before. Additionally players do not realize how much of their mental capacity manual batch training consumes because its a practiced action that they are used to doing every game, so they underestimate how much extra time a progui user has. While its obvious to us that certain players use progui, the forum discussions are started by a vocal few who are aware of them and grasp the size of the advantage. Its easy to point to me or chrstgtr or reza and make the claim that "everyone knows and everyone accepts my cheating", but that is not the reality in multiplayer. Getting away with it in a team game does not mean that everyone there gave you consent to cheat, quite the opposite.

This is an assumption that one player makes about 7 others. And when they find out they lost because someone was cheating, the answer is "chill out its just a game". Awesome argument guys. Usually all 7 other players are unaware that this advantage exists, and even the minority of players who know that such mods exist do not grasp the magnitude of advantage that automation scripts provide. The discussion about the game being "non-competitive" is very convenient when cheaters use it to downplay the negative gameplay consequences that results from cheating. Funny enough the "competitive" nature of 0ad has been used to justify the same automation scripts by players who claim that their mouse can't click fast enough to compete with players who have "better" hardware. No player can click faster than even the cheapest mice allow, and some players even prefer not to have a mouse. Even more funny is that an auto-clicker which people have claimed to be in-use in 0ad would be considered an automation script and therefore cheating. The hypocrisy is mind boggling. I also totally reject the car analogy because in this case the automatic car is simply faster.

This is a common verbal attack motif of geriatrix. He does this so that he can have a martyr for his crusade against whatever player he is focused on. There need not be any actual reason for the player to have left or any causal connection between geriatrix, the “victim” or the person he is accusing. The main thing is to just not take a single thing he says seriously.

Undisclosed. Players who use automation mods, and presumably map hacks (I’ve never observed someone use map hacks) do not disclose this before game start, and avoid/ignore any discussion of this. I think fair gameplay is fun gameplay so I don’t play when there is a cheater. 0ad does not need to be competitive like an esport but the game itself is a competition (we are trying to win right?) so yes it needs to be fair by default. If any player could select a 2.5% handicap without anyone knowing it would probably make the game less fun. We’ve had this discussion so many times, everything has already been said but the problem remains.

Can we change the name of this topic to something slightly more positive so that it’s not the first thing visible when searching for 0ad forums.

To me it’s clear that the counter alone (whether it should be 2.5x or 3x) is not enough to balance the champ cav and cs cav. In my opinion a speed nerf is needed.

There is a level difference here that causes some disagreements in what the “meta” is and what is possible to do in 0ad. For example trading is far from the best way to get champions in team games, currently only feasible on select maps and optimal on just the wolf map I think. Of course trading is great on huge timescales or when metal mines are gone, but it’s rare for higher level games to even reach that state. Adding a male economic in no way forces the game to be like aoe2. I’d also like to mention that while many units are shared between civs in aoe2 the civ context and uniqueness always apply to those units so saying that every civ feels the same is a very surface level observation. If the gameplay design is thoughtful, a male eco unit can have its own role and different use cases in different situations, rather than acting simply as a villager from aoe2.

When I was originally advocating to implement unit acceleration I was suggesting it only for cav. It seems people wanted it for infantry as well so here we are. @Seleucids of course any nerf to cav speed would need to be proportional and take the full gameplay result into consideration, so forgetting to update archer and firecav move speed would be an obvious mistake rather than something inevitable.

There is a limit when it comes to balancing units civ to civ. It is entirely fine that some civs champions counter another’s. What matters is the overall power of the civ. There will always be bad matchups bad maps for a given civ and that is a mark of good civ differentiation.

Well the main way units gain experience is by having a successful fight, using healers, or moving wounded units to the back of the group. I think it is a desirable outcome that units generally take a long time to rank up by garrisoning, but it would be nice to show the mean rank of the units on the corresponding icon of the unit garrison stack within the barracks.

@TheCJ you get to the core of the problem. If others are confused be sure to read up on the booming=turtling discussion to see what causes the main issues with the CS system. For cavalry the citizen soldier eco/fighting balance seems to be pretty good when we look at the early game when hunt is available. The same can be done with infantry, its just more difficult. I believe we can absolutely still maintain a citizen soldier system with CS infantry being useful for eco, fighting, and building while introducing a male economic unit. The balance of the male eco unit versus citizen soldiers would be tailored to make the choice of whether to eco or fight with CS a less obvious one. Yes it will make the eco situation of the game more complicated as there will be more ways to boom, but the potential depth of strategy would be very worth it.

People would argue whether or not seleucids have the best champ cav. Not me, I think they are the best but only with the hero alive. Seleucids also do not have a cheap melee cav option, so in a way they need their champ cav to be good. I agree champ cav in general needs to be nerfed of course but I disagree that seleucids unique bonuses are problematic.

I really appreciate this mod! It is especially helpful when users don’t disclose what mods they use, often trying to avoid having any discussion about rules. There have been many players already surprised to find out that they have been playing on an uneven field for months.

There are also players who don't boom as well but do a good job of winning the first fight in p3, but this is more rare. I think the very fact that we put so much effort into this discussion shows how effective this time to reach 100 pop, or ecu score is as a predictor of a person's 0ad ability. Basically the game boils down to booming or preventing someone from booming, which leads us to the "booming=turtling" thread which highlights the gameplay disadvantages of the citizen soldier system. I'd wonder if this predictor (time to reach 100 pop) would be less effective if there was a male eco unit in the game.

Zapotecs

Idk if you know about it, but triple clicking the hero portrait on the top left will select the hero and take your screen to it. Usually I do a decent job keeping track of my hero and if I notice the portrait blinking when I don't expect it I go and correct my mistake. That being said this is still an amazing mod, a very good quality of life feature.

Also depends on how many more you expect them to make. Some players will make 12 or even less and then stop there and some will continue to make them. If you don't have enough cav to stop them or deter them you may still be able to look at their base and spot stables or extra hunts they may yet take. Another option not previously mentioned is to make a new wood storehouse behind your barracks, so that the camels need to approach your barracks to range your woodline. If the camel player ever has to look at his eco, then you may have a chance to jump through the barracks and kill some camels. Iberians are pretty limited vs camel rush but one of the few nice aspects is that if you have wood against the edge of the map there's only 2 approaches for camels to hit the woodline, so this makes a big difference for iberians' case.

In my opinion the biggest hindrance for walls being effective for their intended use (apart from annoying wall spam that turtle players do) is ease of placement and sealing. Snapping to/from buildings and obstructions such as cliffs would be awesome but I recognize its a complicated thing to accomplish. There have been games where I was able to get a lot of value out of palisade walls, trapping cav in my base or stopping raids, but usually the amount of attention and planning required is as prohibitively expensive as their cost and build time. Real tabasco's comm mod changes for palisades and walls should be a good step in the right direction, and hopefully we get enough comm mod games to make sure of that.

Ah yes this I agree with. Sniping is quite undesirable, I'm not in defense of it I'm just against the game working entirely through buttons using optimized automatic behavior. In my personal opinion automated things are ok so long as they are outperformed by manual human control, and unit behavior falls into this category.

How much faster compared to infantry do cavalry need to be to have a significant mobility advantage? Do they still have a mobility advantage if they are say 1.5x faster instead of 2x? would that result in less cavalry balance problems? Also about the automatic targeting preferences, do we want to control the game entirely through menu systems and functions? or should we accept some imperfection of automated systems (like basic unit behavior) so that players can develop skills to outmicro others and win battles?

It doesn't take any multiplayer or even 0ad experience to understand that automating a signification portion of the game provides an unfair advantage. I wouldn't go hounding grapjas to "verify" if his level is high enough to critique your mod, anyone of any level can do so just like anyone can see through your self-serving argumentation and your dishonest downplaying of the advantages you get from progui.

That is not true. There is a reason you added the autoscaling batches, otherwise you would have left it at 1 by 1. About batch sizes: 1 by 1: highest ROI per unit resource expenditure as is correctly calculated (but largely mischaracterized) by the thread you mentioned. ROI is not everything ofc. batch training: faster population growth, less unspent resources. Progui makes an optimization between these two. Its the same optimization that players try to make in game with their own production, only without even looking at the barracks. Its hard to estimate the net advantage in a pure boom with autotrainer, but it is objectively not 0. There are statistics that could be measured that can help show how big the advantage is, some of them were worked on by @ffm2, and others were deemed to be performance heavy. As others have said recently and as I have said before, the advantage is maximized when a user is able to rush or at least harass clean players so that a clean player is overwhelmed all while a progui user has the minimum possible production building idle time. This manifests itself in gameplay and balance patterns that I've had the misfortune to observe for 2+ years. @Seleucids balancing the game does not automatically make it fair, so balancing atrik including his unwarranted advantage does not solve any problems. Additionally your visibility mod(s) can't be considered cheats as they don't provide an advantage over players who can already see everything fine enough to suit themselves.

balanced does not mean fair. If I play a 1v1 against a better player, its fair but imbalanced. If I use progui to "balance" the game, then its balanced but unfair. Progui also offers strong enough advantages for particular playstyles that it actually alters the unit/strategy/civ balance. @strat0spheric do u know about autostart? thats also in progui, the units path to the nearest resource automatically teleporting thru the cc when necessary. Join a host with me later today and I can show you live.

How else is anyone to learn that you're using this cheat? you certainly don't discuss it during game setup. Also, if a policy is made for tagging hosts that allow progui, I support that. For hosts that don't allow progui no tag should be required as in games its implied that cheating is not allowed, and that also prevents hosts who don't know about progui from being preyed upon.

@TheCJ I'm not sure if you've closely watched progui in effect, but the key difference is that autociv building selections still require a 1:1 action ratio for the each task. In progui 0 cumulative production building idle time can be achieved without so much as a thought let alone an action. Progui basically manages all of the unit production for you, so that your economy automatically grows at the optimal rate while you focus on rushing someone. In this situation the rushed player is overwhelmed with required actions, having to manage economy and micro at the same time while his opponent can simply focus on the fight. To compare autociv and progui as equals is nonsense. Fortunately its very easy to detect. But if you know someone who uses it and would like them to stop, you'll find it very hard to even get a response out of them. Meanwhile hosts simply don't want to deal with drama and would rather start the next game. When I bring attention to cheating its not me that is making the drama its people getting away with cheating.