BreakfastBurrito_007

@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.

Sacred sites are a way to make the game winnable while each civ has some ridiculous combination of free, generated units, resource trickle types, and other kinds of unraidable eco. On the surface level it seems great that each civ has many unique features. It is easy to see that those unique mechanics are the sole basis of civ balance and design, so those unique aspects of each civ are forced and so they lose the gameplay benefit of being unique. Basically the player has no “basic” or “universal” unit or mechanic to choose while playing. It would be like if burgundians from aoe2 always had to get Flemish revolution as part of their win condition, or if Iberians always had to make firecav as their win condition.

I think a serf unit would be best designed if it was distinctly a better economic unit than the citizen soldier. This will mean that the citizen soldiers' economic role will become more secondary, and that the standard "boom" we see from players will be more focused on women and serf/slave units rather than just citizen soldiers, leaving citizen soldiers open to do battle without rapidly losing their economic value by either dying or being idle. Also, CCs would become a more economic building with this change due to the barracks being de-throned as the main economic building. I think there are a variety of different peoples ideas to achieve the same thing, and I think this would be an addition that would stay out of the community mod at least for now. I think the slave/serf becoming a cc trainable unit upon reaching p2 with 70 hp and same attack/armor stats as women would be ideal. Gather rates of .85 wood, .70 stone, .70 metal (a bit less than @real_tabasco_sauce said). I think it should cost 65 food and 15 metal so that they can't be spammed as easily from early berries/hunt eco. Train times for the unit should be the same as CS I think.

@wraitii I was playing with rams today and found that acceleration for them is pretty slow. At one point the ram was pathfinding along the corners of a diagonal row of houses, and for whatever reason it was having to zig zag around them. This meant that the ram was re-accelerating at each 90 degree turn. Acceleration for rams is frustrating because rams already have to make bigger turns around objects. I think we should try removing acceleration for them in the community mod.

This would be nice for melee units when they get within 10 m or so of an enemy (but also outside of any formation mechanic).

That would be a fantastic use for them, my only concern would be the other two xp/ promotion buffs the Han get through the hero and the upgrade. I would be in favor of this mechanic replacing the upgrade that han have for promotion experience, since the mechanic has a trade off and a management aspect that is not present with the percentage based upgrade. Ministers could be an amazingly flexible and fun unit with such an overhaul.

This sounds great in my opinion. I was concerned about how small an impact the ministers have on gameplay before the release. I think the capture attack hero changes are good to allow for an interesting use of the ministers. I think these changes, with some player creativity, would make the ministers worth making. I think it would also be cool if you could speed the production rate of a barracks or stable or imperial academy by up to 2x as fast with like 20% faster per minister. Only thing I disagree with would be moving blacksmith techs to fortress, but perhaps I misunderstood that part.

I think it would be nice for certain gameplay features or balance concerns that are widely agreed upon. For example, in a25 we could have added some merc cav nerf or firecav/brit chariot nerf and go back to playing with those units. I think the main challenge for the mod is the same that the RC's have before alpha releases: people don't get the mod, and if they do, they cant find a host they want to join, so they go back to the main release. I think the community mod would be most useful as a way to test gameplay features such as unit specific upgrades or the Sparta diversification package. My thinking is if the community mod is continually progressed, it will be important to have clear and easy ways to see what is on it, and for only the most recent version to be supported.

Acceleration may make unit motion appear slower. I wouldn't say performance overall is worse than a25, but I do think some performance tuning is needed for a27. I've seen multiple players in the lobby say they would even rather take performance improvements over content if they had to choose one of the two.

So far I am seeing worryingly good performance from the Han CS crossbow. The main point of concern is that with upgrade parity the crossbow will kill a ranged inf cs unit in 2 shots, which is 4.5 seconds. That is faster than the skirmisher. For comparison we can use the mace crossbow champion. In order for it to kill a ranged cs unit in 1 shot it needs a 2 upgrade advantage (you need 2 of: will to fight, champ hero, or the enemy lacking final pierce armor upgrade). This means that in most games the champion crossbow takes the same number of shots to kill a ranged unit (2) as the cs version. The strength of the cs crossbow is when it is targeting ranged units, and it relies on upgrade parity. An additional armor bonus from a hero or unique tech would put crossbows into the 3 shot kill range, which would help a lot in battles where both parties are using ranged units to hit ranged units. The crossbow is not as good against melee units due to the combination of lowest speed of ranged inf, lower dps than slingers, and same range as slingers. Javelin cav are also fantastic against them because it takes more hits to kill them and the lower dps of the crossbow is reflected in battle. I predict the unit going in 2 routes balance wise: it teaches people ways to try to counter sniping which we know exist those counter-sniping methods, and armor hero bonuses are not enough and the unit is OP enough to be banned (this would be sad)

too much smoking, it is annoying and harmful to breathe their smoke and it seems they can do it where and when they want.

Come to usa.... many bathroom and infinite parking space!

Sorry for the confusion @chrstgtr and @LetswaveaBook. I added quotations around "unfair" on that post because I was acknowledging that my previous idea about attack upgrades being unfair was wrong. I hope that makes sense for everybody.

It would be nice to have the unit specific upgrades listed vertically in the spare space underneath the unit icons in the barracks or stable. But since there are no unique icons and the upgrades are just strung in a line, it seems more complicated than the system is. Also, some of the ones that adjust damage and increase repeat time might not be clear enough that the damage increases overall. Making axe cav into a cool unit is a very sore spot for @real_tabasco_sauce XD. Ideally a player would think about what they want their units to do, quickly hover over the 1 or 2 upgrades available and make a decision if it works for them. The goal is for the upgrades to be more situational than inherent to a strategy of the civ. When we came up with the upgrades we tried to base them off of things that the particular units that underperform in expected roles, for example: one of the spearmen specific upgrades help them get hits on cavalry. Another example: decreasing prepare time and increasing acceleration for spearcav helps them catch ranged cavalry that are running away from them.

: o lmaoo I feel a bit embarrassed now and I hope all of you can forgive me. sure enough just as attack upgrades increase damage "unfairly" for higher damage units, armor upgrades remove damage as a percentage. For example archers: 6.7 x1.7(attack upgrades) times (1-.41)= 6.7. Firecav 35*1.7*(1-.41)=35. I suppose then only hero bonuses, wtf, and relics are sources of damage that don't always have armor to compensate.

ya its nothing to hold up the release for, but if it can be quickly and harmlessly done then of course its no problem.

yes that is correct, but I was confused about the situation you are applying that math to.