BreakfastBurrito_007

I could imagine it would be really nice to be able to snag weak cav units when being rushed. At least it could be something for the rushed player to do while they are made into a cupcake.

In my opinion, competitive aspects of the game are inherently more fun and should be maintained for casual matches. It's no coincidence that competitive e-sports in the RTS genre consistently use ancient games such as Aoe2 as opposed to recent releases like aoe4. Modern game designs seem to forget that gaining skills and knowledge and mastering challenging techniques are what make games fun and re-playable in addition to being more viable in a competitive environment. It's really great to bring this up. The reason that its allowed in competitive environments is because its not optimized, intentional scout control will beat autoscout every single time. Automation aspects that aren't easily beaten by player control should never be considered for inclusion in the game. Even with 0ad's vanilla autoqueue it was mathematically proven that 1 by 1 training provides the fastest return on costs spent on the units, yet because 1 by 1 training is outpaced by manual batches, players can invest more of their resources for faster population growth which gives more resources than 1 by 1 eventually.

There are no controversial gui mods, particularly if you define "gui mod" as mods that change appearances and do not affect gameplay. my mouse is 3 USD and works just fine for sniping. I agree sniping is a pretty unfavorable gameplay result, but its being worked on from a unit roles/balance standpoint. I also don't think banning mods is a good idea because people will get carried away, in addition I'm pretty sure its uncharted territory for the 0ad leadership; The last major case of useing scripts for cheating was in a23 and flew under the radar. I think its better for now to find a way to allow total visibility of mods for every player in-game and for hosts to decide what they will/won't allow.

Seleucids have farms that build very fast and cost a lot less wood, it could be worth it for them. I think the main challenge is having all your women spread out which makes it harder to keep them safe. I'm not a big fan of the diminishing returns on number of farmers, but I think we need something interesting to replace that feature instead of just removing it, because farms are already too simple gameplay wise. In vanilla 0ad the main thing is to keep citizen soldiers working instead of standing around (especially if there is a ceasefire). At the same time you want to make more citizen soldiers for more eco which usually cost 50 food 50 wood so its good to focus on those resources early on.

I think also a campaign could serve to prepare players very well for entering multiplayer, sort of exposing them to some typical multiplayer strategies that the AI just doesn't execute.

I suppose, but it would be pretty boring to have all civs with spearmen only in p1. At the moment for iberians and romans its mainly a vulnerability and not a strength that they have swords in p1 (because of cavalry being the main threat early in the game). Popular upcoming design changes may include a melee rebalance and possibly palisade and stone wall ease of placement/snapping improvements, so this could make swords in p1 quite interesting for those civs.

I know a lot of players like medium map size and normal map size. I'd kinda like a size between large and medium. I think the issue with shorter vision ranges is that ranged units need to see as far as they can shoot.

well most of the problems of aoe4 come down to implementation, so I'm sure there's a good way to make a more balanced spy unit. I think the only concern for it in 0ad is how easy it is to see much of what happens on the map. Once all players in a tg have made their first moves after a relatively boomy game then its very easy to predict the flow of the match from then on.

lol I love to hate aoe4. I think its a great source of things to avoid implementing for 0ad. Aoe4 was intended to have a fewer number of more differentiated civs. However they designed each civ with a unique way of being equal in every category, be it archers, cavalry, late-game gold eco, siege, you name it. For example with a late game gold generation/trickle, every civ has some way to generate gold, whereas in aoe2 the 3-4 civs out of 45 that can do this are truly special. The only truly unique features of the civs are then boiled down to shockingly gimmicky features like the japanese unique unit that hides as a villager in your enemy's eco and then can attack and go invisible.

If this is implemented I'd like to see opportunities for counter-play. Extending the range makes sense and happens anyway due to the way elevation bonuses work in the game. Extending the minimum range by the same amount could allow for players to rush the wall in a higher-risk play that could help counter the wall mounted bolt shooters. A challenge of balancing these positions will be that different civs have varying levels of siege capability.

The damage dampening across walls would be really challenging to balance considering not all civs have a full siege capability. We already sort of have a version of this regarding the units atop stone walls, only its level of exploitation is much more controllable. About palisade walls I agree they should be used not for slowing down pathfinding, but by blocking it altogether (closing off sections) like walls are supposed to do. palisades are very bad at stopping melee cavalry (in particular axe and sword), so I think melee cav (not sword/axe inf) should have a 0.3x multiplier against palisades. If they are too effective at stopping all aggression, then we could consider a cost increase or some other action. nerfing melee cav vs walls would also give some advantages to using infantry rushes which we rarely see in MP anymore. Ease of placement improvements would also work wonders for palisades and stone walls. It may look ugly, but increasing the allowable overlap would help a lot especially for straggler trees, small mines, and other res and terrain.

yea so the buildings are placed on a tile system like in aoe2, but the physical building has a 1/2 tile perimeter where units can still walk through. So you can't make house walls like in 0ad or aoe2. Another thing about aoe4 is that all civ bonuses and mechanics are these basic inert bonuses that you either decide to use or not, there is no skill-based execution component for the player to master. While the learning curve is tough for aoe2, its obvious that the depth of learnable skills and strategies are what has kept the game alive for so long. people argue about civs being the same in aoe2 and that aoe4 has improvements here, but the civs in aoe4 just look different. Every civ in aoe4 has to have some kind of gold generation trickle, it just appears in gimmicky new ways. Also many of the units for each civ are unique units, which makes unique units... not feel unique.

Sometimes people complain about aoe2 expansions adding civs that are OP. Of course the standard for gameplay quality is 10-20x higher in aoe2, but aside from that there are some really troubling things evident in the aoe4 new civs. There's not much new art, the new civs are basically just buffed versions of old civs. Its not that they tried to make new bonuses that create new gameplay styles and learning opportunities, and they encountered balance changes. It seems to me both pay-to-win and also low effort content. you can tell some things about the developer when you see that they have walking zones around buildings that prevent you from making walls out of buildings.

I view it more as a quality of life change. If enough people were against the capture/delete as a valid way to destroy buildings in 0ad, then perhaps some economic incentive for a slow "deconstruction" would be a good move. In my opinion such a change would have more cons than pros depending on how its implemented.

I can get used to manually choosing whichever mode no matter what the default is. The only case where I think it matters is for capturing low value things like houses. If you are attacking someone and if for whatever reason your best way to damage them is capturing and deleting buildings, then capture is the better default as multiple buildings can be captured in parallel.

Well this is a bit more complicated. It depends on which method your enemy is using to snipe. The best method for sniping in most cases involves using alt to rapidly task all 80-100 or so of your ranged units on your enemies' ranged units. I think buffing healers would have the effect of nerfing this kind of sniping because spam clicking usually means that damage gets spread out more among enemy units. lol that was so fun for a little bit. I think the main thing that made it problematic was that there was no way for the charging units to ever slow down or run out of "charge".

Oh goodness, thats an even bigger scam than normal iberian towers XD

hmm, did you wind up getting that upgrade? did it turn into a 5 spot tower like it suggests or the 8 spot Iberian tower?

Thank you Stan, you're a champ!

I think another challenge is that the height of buildings can make it a bit visually harder to help distinguish things while clicking quickly through the base.

its actually fairly easy to see if someone is using revealed map as they will react to things they shouldn't know about. It does take some time to investigate though.

yea anyway

Well it would be way easier if the toggle had a preference for idle barracks/stables/blacksmiths. In that case you would just hit the toggle button even if just to check for an idle building of the type. Usually if you have even and simultaneous batch sizes across all the barracks it means you need to make houses in larger batches, with some barracks becoming idle due to insufficient res to make the same size batch, housing issues, an upgrade, or a previously delayed batch. Of course its not really worth the effort to get this marginal improvement of efficiency if there isn't a good way to do it. To be honest part of my inspiration for the idea for this toggle was seeing how efficiently progui generates batches across different barracks.

Ah, I see what you mean. Doing it with a bunch of control groups would probably not be worth the extra attention span lol. I'll probably try putting all of them in one control group though.