BreakfastBurrito_007

What is the source of this bonus? On paper there should be nothing to give Han a farming bonus

It is worth considering that it is easy to download and that the community was already somewhat split by those skill levels anyway. It would be nice to add some kind of news rundown in the lobby that advertises some recent changes in the mod, @guerringuerrin was manually doing this by hosting a game with such a title, but I think one made automatically in the lobby chat would be great.

I would be ok with arson if it did not affect gameplay and was just an animation for units to make it look more realistic. -melee units (aside from clubmen and axemen) would just lay burning sticks against the building. While holding weapon in other hand and shield on back. -ranged units (aside from slingers) would just do normal attack but with some small amount of glow or embers on their projectiles. The main obstacle isn’t really fire effects but all the multiplayer players who would dislike it and prefer development be focused on gameplay improvement, lag reduction and those sorts of things.

Loot would be a decent bonus by itself if it was addition based rather than multiplying to already quite low loot values. Maybe +10 food for each woman kill and + 5 food, 5 wood for men kills. There is also no problematic interactions with other bonuses or civ specifics as far as I am aware.

These sound great for civ specific bonuses, but I am wondering what kind of team bonus they should get. Did you intend this to be the Team bonus for britons? I would like to see something that has dual military and economic purpose, but I haven't thought of any good ones myself.

I would like to mention that swordcavalry do purely hack damage, and javelin cavalry start in p1 with 3 hack armor. I think the best way to counter them in p1 is with a few extra spearmen on the woodline and a few javelin cavalry to do damage and lead the swordcavalry to the spearmen; also it is notable that most civs have this setup. I saw @Boudica do this very effectively early in the alpha, but I have not tried this myself, nor have I come across the swordcav rush. The best course of action would be to add a pierce armor to spearcav and subtract one from swordcav. Also we can look to Unit Specific Upgrades from @real_tabasco_sauce as a method of diversification of units and finer balancing.

This is not intended lol. I have kept arguing for a jav cav damage nerf from 18 to 16, but almost everyone seems to be ok with this unit being considerably OP. Jav cav are not only too powerful in this regard, but too powerful in almost every application. Most cavalry compositions eventually lead to pure skirmcav because it is plainly the best unit for general fighting, with 2 more pierce attack, 2.2x the hp, and +2 hack armor over skirmisher infantry, all for the small price of 50 food. Acceleration was implemented to make cavalry easier to chase, specifically to allow spearmen more chances to get hits off on cavalry. Rather than eliminating acceleration, I think it makes sense to speed up acceleration for: melee inf, melee cav, and of course rams like in the community mod. Also I do think more heros should come from unique building rather than the fortress, with only a few civs getting heros from cc. Ptol heros should remain from the fortress since ptols are likely to attack a minute or two before other civs, they should at least need to do that without a hero, or else wait for it.

I think many people who make new features, discuss gameplay, and advocate for certain features are all very excited about this mod due to the potential to make progress on ideas that have been discussed for a long time but never tested to any degree because players would never do anything on svn, release candidates, or concept mods. Also there is the potential for feature optimization, where a feature can be tweaked to be more fun based on more prompt feedback from the community. Despite the excitement I think its important to start of with bugfixes and tweaks and gradually expand the scope toward balance changes, new civ differentiation work, and maybe even new mechanics.

250 metal I would suggest for the cc, rather than 100.

Usually extra metal, stone, or a better woodline can be reached with a barracks or two, but this change would reduce the amount of territory increase that happens when p3 is clicked. I think it also reduces the territory value of colonies too so it is harder to secure a multi-resource location with one colony. I think this will make ccs and map control more important in the game, potentially increasing the value of p2 for map control. With this change we should probably check to make sure minimum placement distance is not a problem.

@chrstgtr what is your opinion on the gameplay potential of the [male economic unit]? Could it be designed to offer a divergence between booming and turtling? Would that be good for gameplay? I am leaning toward that it could be great for gameplay, but needs to be carefully considered.

It is usually safe to assume his army is slightly bigger, at least I do whenever I have a battle. Remember your opponent knows much about his own army, so if you can try to read his behavior you can have an idea whether or not you can beat him. Unless it is visually apparent, the army size difference will be less important than micro and upgrades and unit composition.

Well, there are options holy moly. I guess there will need to be a big debate about what to call the unit and how to model it. My interests lie purely in the gameplay quality that we could provide with the unit. If different civs have different types of slaves or lower social status men or whatever it is/was, then we can call it that and model it that way, and the basic stats and cost and gameplay functionality can remain the same between the civs.

That's a good point. Calling the unit one of those options you discussed also gives us more freedom to design the unit to suit gameplay, which was my main motivation to investigate its potential. I think the stats and attributes we gave it are still valid, even with carth training them from markets, since its not unreasonable to think you could hire them from the market. The cost we were thinking about was 60 food 20 metal, that is still reasonable I think.

markets maybe at 1/2 rate. @wowgetoffyourcellphone what are the gather rates and costs of the slaves in DE? what about hp and armor?

The main issue with sending infantry is that you use and lose your economic units. I have been thinking that adding a slave or serf type of economic unit would allow for citizen soldiers to be more efficiently used as military units. The idea is that it has better gather rate than CS infantry, which would relegate CS infantry's economic value as mainly supplementary while there is a break in fighting. I am not yet sure if this would be a better game after the unit is added (it absolutely depends on the units stats), and there is yet to be any mod that implements such a feature into otherwise vanilla 0ad. It is worth noting that infantry can be used very successfully in p1 too, usually if there is a border fight.

@real_tabasco_sauce I think sele team bonus should be better than that. Here are some I have come up with. -Maybe add to women farm rate? More of a plain option. -30%cost, and research time on farmstead techs as well as fields +20 food capacity to cav and buff gather rate of men to be .45 base rate. (Women are .5) Maybe add a 50 wood upgrade to farms (similar to sentry->stone tower) that gives +3 pop and adds a shed to a corner of the farm, 2 woman can garrison. Add some creativity:D

also if there was a way to task healers on melee units then you are basically healing at a faster rate.

I have not seen very many battles where both players are sniping ranged units. In such a case I would predict that melee units rank and dmg would be more important. I agree that the two new Athens heroes bonuses are not very powerful and could use a buff. perhaps the xp bonus could also boost friendly units xp while denying enemy xp. XP does boost ranged units more than you think, an HP boost puts them from a 2 shot kill to a 3 shot kill from crossbows which almost doubles the time to kill. -15% tech cost could maybe be increased to 20%, it won't help that much for the blacksmith or eco upgrades since a lot of those would come before the hero, but it would help more for expensive things like will to fight if a player decides to get it. (I predict if the research buff was good enough, a player would make the hero, get upgrades, delete him and then get iphricates in time for the main fight). To be honest, Iphricates is a very powerful hero, so I don't think the new Athens heroes should be equally powerful as him.

I think the community mod has been great so far, so I think we should take it slow from here and gradually expand the scope of the mod to see what works well, being careful with gameplay changes. I think after these few ones go in we should look at adding a few other team bonuses besides rome, iber, ptol, gaul, kush, and mace. It could potentially be very fun to add these to civs that currently have a negligible team bonus.

what is this logic lmao. @Darkcity, @real_tabasco_sauce's solution to the naval hero was to add a bonus that works on land too, so that the hero can be used in either situation so that map generation won't make the hero totally useless.

@guerringuerrin The first gameplay changes were just fixing the han fields. I would guess we would gradually introduce more comprehensive changes to see what can be accomplished with the mod. For example, @LetswaveaBook's idea about house women training is not a drastic overhaul so I think it would be an easy next step for the mod. Adding gameplay features quickly can still leave time for people to comment on them so long as they dont interfere with each other. For example, the sparta overhaul followed by a cavalry rework can be tested and evaluated independently in the same mod. But we should certainly leave time for players to evaluate and play new features before we add ones that are dependent on those earlier additions. I don't think we should be afraid to add gameplay elements that we are not 100% sure are improvements, because getting player feedback is essential to improving the game, and the mod can be changed and updated semi-continuously. We should look into ways to ensure only the most recent version of the mod is playable, because players could have the tendency to settle on the older version and not care to try anything new, which is what the mod is all about (as I understand it).

@LetswaveaBook I think since the first series of upgrades are so cheap, people get them on the way to p3 anyway. So a player who gets them for a p2 fight will only have a small window to use that advantage. I think adding 2-tier blacksmith upgrades in p2 will allow the player who postpones p3 to get a bigger military advantage in p2 that wont be overshadowed by the enemy clicking p3 faster along with 1-tier upgrades. If players dislike the change by and large, we can just pull it in the next update of the mod. At least we will finally have a little feedback.

I think this would be great to add to community mod. Other quick things that could be tried would be giving team bonuses to carth, han, pers, athenians, and britons who don't have one worth considering. I think some simple, but multipurpose bonuses would be nice. I think if some creative and powerful ones are added, people will soon stop complaining about the ptol, iber, roman, and gaul bonuses. I definitely think athenians could offer a cost and time reduction to phase up research (or maybe all cc-based upgrades), this could be justified by democracy. This would be flexible because you could rush into p2, rush into p3, or delay metal/stone mining to try to have a faster pop increase for example. Also a side note: its amazing how many players are using the mod and getting it in MP, it seems to have had a very smooth entry into MP lobby.

It would be amazing to see a multiplayer aspect added to the game. At least one where you can directly control military units. The villager control via buildings is a very nice system and the amount of realism is impressive, but not detrimental to gameplay. Also, if you remember the camera zoom fiasco in aoe4, this game obviously puts it to shame.