BreakfastBurrito_007

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?

There are certainly better solutions.

In either case I would like to see melee units die faster to towers and ranged units slower to towers.

well to take his point literally is to miss the point.

excuse my foul language here, but it is incessant from this guy. every other word he writes has something to do with hate.

I wonder if Nazism is something we can moderate within hosted games? I am quite tired of seeing it as it brings down the fun of a game. I wish more hosts would ban adequately when it is in chat but it seems not to happen except for 1 or two hosts I know.

If you independently target units, you can avoid being distracted by heroes. In other situations killing the hero is extremely valuable. Hero raids in your base is just something you need to notice. Another thing that helps thwart hero raids is loom which prevents hero from killing women in 1 hit.

Wow! That is amazingly OP. I have observed Han players being losing massive fights and staying at 200 pop. This alongside the crossbow training tech is probably why.

Wow I did not know that! OP @real_tabasco_sauce

You don't always need to commit everything to a fight, if you start fighting and you realize you are losing you can retreat. An extremely common way to reinforce an army when playing infantry versus infantry is to retreat toward your production buildings as your units trickle forward from them. This way each step you take toward your base you are increasing your army size and you can eventually take a fight versus your enemy who is chasing you. I hope this helps! I definitely agree that briton chariots do far too much damage and skirmisher cavalry should have their damaged reduced from 18 to 16 as they usually wind up being the all-around best unit in every game.

Nope, micro, uprades, unit choices, heros, civ bonuses also matter. If your team works well together this shouldn't happen so this in particular is not a fault of game design.

I am not sure how I feel about battle tactic game mechanics that just rely on the player to choose "wedge" or some other tactic to execute. My worry is that some of these pre-made tactic options could take away from the player-controlled battle tactics that organically exist. I think there is a number of ways to design such mechanics, so it certainly doesn't have to detract from organic battle tactics.