BreakfastBurrito_007

Well played @seeh we are very proud of you!

translator must have failed there, sorry. "alt" would be used for everything but mac. I am not sure what it is on a chinese keyboard.

Another thing you can do is press "alt" or "option" if you have a mac, while clicking to attack. What this does is tell the soldiers to attack rather than capture the target. In multiplayer we like this option because there are times where it is faster to capture a building and times where it is faster to destroy it.

@Fabiusthe idea is that they are better suited for protecting against the most potent threats that usually can’t be countered by ones own infantry CS: these are merc cav, champ cav, and to a lesser extent regular cavalry. Even with -500 hp, I think it would be easier to defend walls due to the extra garrison space on top. In a24 we found that slowing down the pace at which an average attack could destroy an enemy (rotation times, archer damage, building damage) resulted in very static gameplay that made it impossible to advance. If the changes above had that effect they would be tossed out for sure.

I think this would just lead to frustration since you can't always decide whether units go into forests. It also does not have the level of control that the wall improvements I outlined could offer. It is also worth noting that forests are already slower for units to travel through and this means that cavalry caught in them will take more losses as they try to escape defenders or approach a target.

merc cav are OP in a25 and I predict they will still be OP in a26, just less so. I don't think the merc-rush strategy should become weak, I just think there should be more options to counter it besides 1: rush before enemy makes mercs 2: make your own cav both of which are situational and are not always useful to protect against merc cav. I think the solution comes down to walls, we need to improve walls ease of placement so that they are used not to irritatingly slow down the game, but to be placed skillfully in anticipation of harassment. The suggestions here are not to make walls/palisades stronger overall, but to allow them to better fill their purpose. increase ease of placement of stone walls/palisades. This could be done by tolerating some overlap of structures or resources. Since stone walls can't be placed out of territory, perhaps they could be built through forests deleting the trees upon wall completion. decreasing hp of stone walls by around 500-1000. The changes would probably make stone walls more common, and the hp decrease is to prevent this from slowing down gameplay giving melee cavalry .5x counter versus palisades. This gives a defending player more time to bring in infantry, but does not make palisades stronger versus infantry and rams; units that don't have the same raiding capability that palisades are intended to protect against. increase turret positions of stone walls to 16. This is a more practical amount that might make a difference in a battle. tell me what you think please.

@Yekaterina 0ad has a good community and is not pay to win. I would not consider it time wasted in my book.

good observation. That probably goes for any RTS game that uses resources.

^The booming=turtling discussion from like a year ago. Mercenaries have been a step in the right direction in this regard but have produced some OP units (merc cav) I think the simplest and most effective way to proceed with decoupling economic boom from military buildup is to add a male unarmed unit that gathers faster than CS infantry. Ideally it would cost like 75 or 80 food (or maybe like 35 metal as a "purchase"), become available in p2, and have the following gather rates: food: 1, wood: 1, metal: .75, stone: .75. Starting hp 50, also affected by loom. Since the unit would be pretty powerful, perhaps it should only come from CC at 2x train time of woman. Unit could be called slave, or villager if we think this is immoral to have in the game (historically there were slaves for sure). The point is that the fastest boom will not involve citizen soldiers, but will be incredibly risky. Also, it will mean that Citizen soldiers are better used for fighting in more scenarios, which would break some inhibitions for early attacks for non-cav units, as well as breaking the couple between military loss and economic loss for infantry.

between autoqueue and manual batch training, the main thing is to do whatever it takes to keep your resource counts low. I like the options right now and I don’t think I will commit to either. In my opinion, the ease of autoqueue and the mental space it frees up is the most important aspect of it

I think african eles make more sense since they are closer to rome. But I think it would be cooler if there was capability to train african or asian eles depending on the civ that the stables are captured from.

I have done and always seek to do this against Carthage. I usually want my own cav first which is hard to get, but this is due to those mercs being op. Playing and winning the game is highly situational and the best moves are not often planned long in advance.

I have to agree with @Sevda on this one about capturing ele stables. IMO being limited to 7-8 is either a gimmick, or has no effect because most games people only ever get about 7-8 eles anyway. eles from captured ele stable might change the way romans attack and put their siege camps. imagine you put a siege camp next to enemy ele stable and keep ele stable captured long enough to make Roman eles. I think this would be a fine mechanic. Perhaps not always being relevant, but it would certainly be a potentially powerful option for romans.

This is actually a great idea. Its not something that could really help them win in p2 like merc-cav, but its something they could use to pressure and gain an advantageous position as the civs head into p3. Roman camps are kind of hard to time correctly and this would give them more options. You make good points about the blacksmith cost too btw, I guess we will think about this more in a26 and see if people want blacksmith changes then.

true and we have @ValihrAnt for that anyway lol

why more than 1 market? usually I build 4 blacksmiths unless I am ptol and 2 if I am ptol. If my eco balance is good I often just forget to build a market (bad habit). To be honest I think 50 stone would be a nice cost addition for blacksmiths which would make it harder to get upgrades while being on a metal only economy (merc cav lol). Nearly all civs actually have good options in p2 (athens and rome are the main worst ones imo), and I think these are diminished in a25 by how powerful the merc cav are. Even iberians can do a building rush if they are close to an enemy. Iberian monument can often mean that any fight over those forward buildings is winnable by Iberians if they put it in the right spot.

@real_tabasco_sauce I agree hyrcanian cavs are garbage I like skiritai commandos and their price and power kind of between champion and CS. They are strong, but never impossible to deal with. I would like to see some other units in other civs potentially have this stat relationship. Perhaps even some champions for some civs could be made cheaper but worse. I think even if we can't agree on the particular stats you came up with, giving hrycanians more dps than swordcav to account for their very weak pierce armor would be great change.

@real_tabasco_sauce yea it amazing seeing all these baby strollers "powered by AI". Not to mention all the bingbongs who got caught in cryptocurrency scams just because they heard people got rich off of Dogecoin. Much of the hype over emerging technology comes from people who don't understand it, and is fueled by media who want to get views on "amazing" "flashy" or "end of the world" type stories.

It nice. It will never be as op as the civ that can build them.

@Donair One thing that can help against rams is swordsmen or swordcavalry. Just keep some in a nearby high value building like temple, cc, or fort and you can ungarrison to kill rams if they are spammed. 5 swordsmen can kill a ram in about 4 seconds if it is stationary (like when its hitting a building).

I have an idea: what do you think?

It would not be too hard to ungarrison them in time. From gameplay standpoint it’s not a big deal to have to degarrison the walls. Sounds good.

Hmm perhaps I oversimplified the situation due to not knowing much about how the game is coded.

There are upcoming changes in a26 that make formations move much more smoothly. Perhaps the pikemen frontal armor directional damage could be added for that formation (syntagma?) and that way it might have a controllable and counterable effect on gameplay depending on how the formation behaves.

@chrstgtr This, or something similiar was brought up in that thread about "meatshield meta". As much as I dislike the meatshield meta, I feel that this would not be a good alternative. No matter how balanced the units are there will always be a unit to prioritize killing in battle, and I think such a system as choosing a particular unit to kill while ignoring others would be too automatic and we would lose some skill-factor to the game. The reason I liked attack-ground was that its applications depends on the situation and there would still be ways to counter it. Also, attack-ground or area-attack would be more imprecise than selecting a particular unit and would also have its own skill factor. A true attack-ground such as the one from that youtube video would offer reduced hit-rate as a tradeoff for targeting a particular area of an enemy army.