BreakfastBurrito_007

In many games you need to consider whether you actually need these or not. It costs a lot of stone and the other resources are more useful for attacking your opponents. Gauls can use the least stone of any civ since their barracks don't cost stone and they don't need a fort for p3. Gauls can be very powerful with cav and other fast units, so when I play gauls I don't mine any stone the whole game and instead barter the 525 or 750 stone I need to go to p3.

archers are amazingly strong if you can "snipe" with them. Also if you have a decent mass of archers in your base for economic purposes, then it can be very easy to defend against skirm cav or archer cav rushes as long as you outnumber them significantly.

AoE 4 is a bad reference for this, previous AoE games have done this quite well. Counter systems make for good gameplay and we can have some in 0ad too. Hard counters are challenging from a balance perspective in 0ad because non-cavalry units are the primary economic units.

I agree they seem more vertical, but I actually think it looks great.

Shyft boomed and fought usually 2 minutes before yekaterina accounts do. I know you are a good enough player to easily beat both of them, but I am not so I think its easier for me to see the differences. If yekaterina was able to change seamlessly from behaving like shyft to normal, I think it would be a multiple personality disorder situation.

"yekaterina" might have a ton of smurf accounts, but there is still a huge gap in playstyle and more importantly behavior between them and shyft.

I am just unsure how much of the game you actually want to play. Researching techs is part of the game and so is building buildings, if you don't want to spend time and resources getting techs I don't see why you would want to wait for buildings to be completed. Well the end of the story is that the best way to achieve free and instant tech researching is with in-game cheats, I am aware that there is a variety of them so perhaps there is another cheat that better suits your interest. As for a mod that you suggest, someone has to make it for it to be there. no

What is wrong with this? With this cheat you save time on everything, including buildings. Cheats can be used online too.

you can always just use in-game cheats if you want to do sim-city. just click "cheats enabled" and when the game starts write: "gift from the gods".

Ideally the fun comes from figuring out how to win vs other players and with other players. Ultimately this should not be stressful or else its not fun. I agree some people take things too far, I am not concerned about @Atrik's setup, I am just suggesting that we decide what things can and can't be automated before we lose parts of the game.

main concern is the meat shield meta now applying to this. Perhaps if melee armor/damage values are rebalanced in the next community mod, then it won’t be as much of a problem.

I think we probably want to have a target selection similar to units before it gets put in community mod, I think it would reduce ways to exploit the new building AI and give players more control.

Wow! This would be so busted in gameplay! Could you imagine you are desperately chasing these archercav and losing all of your units in a tedious course of 5 minutes and you realize your opponent hasn't even looked over to control them? @Yekaterina I guess I had a lucky first guess for a cheat that is possible.

How about making archercav that know when to run away before getting damaged.

that is a very simplistic and pre-conclusive statement. Please consider the following differences between buildings and units: lower overall damage output no volleys enemies do not shoot back at the tower (unless its slingers/melee) There are many cases where you would want enemies to die sooner rather than later. A rush, where you want to kill 1 cav unit rather than none. Slingers attacking your tower and you want to kill some rather than none. Perhaps an army you want to weaken before you fight it. The main takeaway I can forsee is that building arrows would have a greater immediate effect than before.

@chrstgtr we tested it just now and we encountered that it currently kills the units in the order that they entered the range of the tower, first to last. He is working on a way to make it update so that it prefers the closer unit.

At this point I think it might kill the army slower overall, but make initial kills faster, which is usually more valuable.

@Stan` that's a good point about the snares. I would argue that there is a spectrum and that skill elements should neither be eliminated nor overcome strategy as the basis of the game. There is coming up with a strategy and then executing the strategy and both should be important. In AoE 4 the player's strategy is nearly totally defined by what building they choose to age up with, which makes for highly formulaic gameplay. I am worried that if we add enough automated mechanics to the game, then we will lose the execution of strategies.

What advantage is this?

I disagree, RTS games should be based on skill as well as strategy. Aoe2 is more popular than aoe 4 for this reason because aoe4 removed almost all skill in unit movement eco management ect. It is inherently more boring to automate aspects of the game. I am not saying that we should consider @Atrik a cheater, I am saying we need to establish a boundary so that the game remains fun

guys its off topic, and there are times when and when not to feed/help a rushed ally, and player skill is taken into that valuation unoffensively. simple as that. The main topic at hand is way more concerning. It is about the design scope of 0ad. I have noticed @Atrik's mod in-game and find it very interesting. In other games they consider such features as autoqueue, % management, and especially quick-start to be "macros" that automate smaller aspects of the game. In some games it is allowed and in others they are not, but it is important for us to decide on a boundary for them in 0ad. In Aoe2 there have been macros that allow for rapid sequential placement of farms and 1-to-1 villager assignment with 1 click and drag, and this is a cheat. I am confident that someone could design a feature that automatically executes the "sniping" micromanagement technique that we have been using in the current meta, and this would be disastrous.

Yea I was thinking like push to talk, click to mute others etc. I think a lot of players would use an in-game system if it was there.

Another thought I had was about team voice chat. I have recently seen some teams start to use mumble or discord to talk to each other while they play, and it is quite evident how big of an advantage it is over typing in ally chat. I think adding an in-game system for this would be great since it is not ideal to have to find and follow players when you are on a new team.

Its already possible to do this, but I think the key difference would be the cases where the answer the spec has to give is very simple answer such as "champions" or even "yes/no" in response to a more pointed question. guess it comes down to a choice: specs accessing global chat and not reading team's chat, or specs being able to read team chat but not write to global chat. I am not sure which is better/ which people would want. I just think the entertainment value of spectating games would be a lot more if specs could see what teams are planning/discussing.

I always thought it would be fun if specs could read ally chat from teams during a game. Is this something that can be added in the community mod?