BreakfastBurrito_007

Decger is built different. The curious thing with persians is that they don't have strong eco bonuses for booming. Cheaper production buildings is great but they still cost stone, and after spending the first 300 you don't save enough to cleanly spend extra stone on another production building or a tech. All persians eco buffs usually after they already reach 200 pop (more prod buildings more savings, also res trickle from ice houses, hero building). The reason I think they are so fast in this data is less so because they are faster at booming (I would say gauls, brits and even rome are faster), but because players are very incentivized to boom with this civ.

I have a replay where things were different.

Using continuous cavalry production through p1, p2, p3 to overwhelm a clean player's multitasking abilities. This does not perform nearly as well without progui because both players are on an even field in terms of multitasking, and you even avoid doing it when progui is turned off. One thing you do better without progui is build houses in time. This is because you are actually aware of your production rate when you dont use progui. Isn't that remarkable.

I don’t think it can be stressed enough how important it is to eliminate the grey area of legality which is where all of the impact on clean players occurs. I think visibility mods could accomplish this depending on how they are executed, provided that players and especially hosts are aware of how progui is affecting them in games. @Atrik When people play against you they actually have a lot of commands to put in. I guess you can’t relate to that. This makes it so that they don’t have time to investigate your cheating. Players do notice the gameplay meta changes that result from your using progui, but they usually don’t understand why they can beat you in some cases but not in situations where your advantage is maximized. Once this happens a couple times, players watch the replay or spec the next match to see what’s up.

Aye

There is if someone volunteers the information that they want to use progui. Then a discussion can be had about whether to allow it. If someone starts the game with it hidden and someone discovers it (very easy to do), then they are simply banned from the host, just like with any cheat. everyone would agree that an unfair advantage is not allowed, no matter how small. Also its worth pointing out that it is quite a substantial advantage anyway. Also these are not assumptions that I've made, they are observations. Usually what happens is a player out of 8 asks a progui user to abstain, the user deflects/ignores/makes excuses about why they deserve to have this advantage (not honest negotiations), and then the objecting player is put as a spec by the host because they see 1 player not ready. The core of the problem is that offenders wield a negotiation advantage as long as there is no official stance or action about progui, which brings us back to the very beginning of this topic. I certainly agree with tabasco that a variety of the proposed solutions could work, but I'm certain that a requirement for an effective solution is to make it so that the working, default assumption is that progui is not allowed.

Its fair for the players because everyone is playing the same game and has the same opportunities to succeed. I'm not as hardline about banning progui as some, but I think the status quo needs to change. Frankly, it is not a matter of opinion whether progui provides an advantage, so users need to request when they want to use it, like a handicap in other games. The reason I am not concerned with progui going "underground" is that players actually do a great job of enforcing the rules so long as everyone is in agreement. "no cav" a22, ("no bolts" eventually didnt have to be said), we even started having "no merc cav" games in a25. The reason there is not widespread agreement right now is because of disinformation regarding progui, lack of awareness, and the monumental effort required to get widespread multilingual agreement to disallow something when its easier to just start the game. The problem is that all negotiation work is on numerous clean players to come to an agreement to disallow it, when it should be the work of the mod user(s) to ask for permission to use it.

@guerringuerrin I think if it was an autociv pause situation, then we would see a different profile of actions per turn: probably a huge peak followed by some relative decay. To me the profile visible with a peak of 70 is consistent with a group of ranged units walk into range of a group of targets.

Some of that is part of the issue. No clean player should have to ask a progui user not to use it, it should be up to the person who wants to use it to ask if they may. The default should be that no one is allowed to cheat. Also not all cheaters will be honest or participatory negotiators as we have seen. Surely also you may see why having equal numbers of progui users per team is balanced for the teams but unfair for the players. @ffm2 I think in this case the 20 commands is just sniping attack commands to distribute damage. This can be done in the base game.

It makes it harder for cheats to be used and it also cements the “status” of such mods. When discussions of progui usage come up, some players ask me: “if it’s so bad then why is it allowed” If users have to hide it, it decreases visibility for new users who may be unaware of it being considered a cheat. Users also can’t hide it for long because it’s very obvious when observing and also there are changes to the meta-gameplay that result from using progui which would arouse suspicion.

Progui is already very easy to detect from an observer's point of view and also from replays, even without these statistics. The main value is in determining the impact the cheats have on the gameplay, which is very important for increasing awareness. In the case of a more subtle cheat like a macro that could arise in the future, an actions per minute statistic could help detect those cheats early on. I think the same statistics that could help reveal cheats would also be very helpful for players to try to improve their skills. They could look through the cumulative idle time plots to see where their first big increases happen.

I guess you see it as a black and white issue. I promise you its not, most players disapprove of cheating with progui but don't work together to exclude it from games, that still makes it cheating. It only takes one person to offend but it takes the near unanimous and timely agreement of multiple players to actually stop it. Most players don't want to "disturb the peace" to argue that a player should should be disallowed from using cheats, which starts heated arguments and delays the game. Instead the conversation online should be about whether to allow it when someone asks to use it.

Yea those things I talked about as far as I know are just in progui (quickstart and autotrainer), which is what the calamity is about. The autociv hotkeys still require the player to execute every action. I think for adding things from autociv we probably want to focus on things that provide a useful quality of life enhancement but also avoiding anything that accomplishes multiple tasks in one action (macros).

There is a grey area where the majority of people know about the mod in a given host, no one mentions it, and the mod user(s) ignore players when it gets brought up. The status quo is unfortunately that clean users need to ask mod users to stop instead of mod users asking if they can be allowed to use the mod. I'm not clued in to the signing/compatibility checks situation, but we need some setup where the onus is on the mod user to make sure everyone in the host is ok with the mod. The mod does not have to be banned to solve the issue of player discontentment like that of @RangerK. There is absolutely an advantage of using progui's autotrainer compared to basic autoqueue, I'm tired of this fact being denied. It is good that autoqueue is unoptimized for the sake of the game, automatic features should always perform worse than direct player management. Quickstart and autotrainer both break this rule of thumb by providing automation that outpaces even the best 0ad players' direct management, all without even a thought. I think quite a few high level players aren't interested in disturbing cheaters unless they are beaten by it. Some of this is due to players being unaware of the amount of production building idle time they have when they play (more than you think). I think there are statistics that could be shown on the summary table that would reveal the magnitude of the progui advantage.

Probably the best way to go about it would be not letting foundations be visible to enemies until it starts being built. There are also gameplay reasons to do this that occur much more frequently.

The gameplay effect that is attractive is how players will handle the early eco. The overall eco effect shouldn't be as strong as romans (-10% barracks train time, but usually players have 3 barracks by around 5-7 mins), but there is a time value where the CC is a bigger proportion of a civ's eco. I'm envisioning a good variety of ways to use this, like 0 barracks fast p2 builds, a basic boom, protective infantry early, early infantry pushes/tower war or other things. Maybe the only conflict is what happens to the han "super cc" upgrade.

Han chinese team bonus as of a26: 10% trade international bonus. idea for han team bonus: Centralization: CC trains citizen soldier inf 20% faster, cavalry 10% faster and women 5% faster. Han dynasty was notable for having a strong centralized government.

Well I can explain my routine in similar steps: want to play a game see atrik (or other progui user) is playing in an otherwise fair game request to spec Someone asks me why I'm spectating and I explain the above. You failed to mention that the autotrainer scales batches in order to optimally use resources, which maximizes the boom when compared to vanilla autoqueue. And you also said the golden word too "attention". Progui autotrainer frees up attention so that you can raid/harass players who actually have to play the whole game, quickly overwhelming them and causing them to lose both economically and militarily. Sometimes these players don't even know that you have this mod. This is what makes progui autoqueue NOT equivalent to vanilla autoqueue and are what make your mod an unfair advantage. Finally, using an unfair advantage in a game is cheating. So bedevil me for using the correct word in a situation.

Maybe the best way to do this with gameplay value in mind would be to have a number of universal techs that can be bought by anybody regardless of civs, but once bought become unavailable for other players. Personally, I'd rather have more unit specific upgrades available across the board than big techs like those. In a way we already have the "sharing of ideas" effect on gameplay with team bonuses.

I really appreciate this feature as I've been trying to make myself more resistant to cav rushes. One missing aspect of snapping seems to be for palisades and walls. In the meantime there is progress on wall segments deleting trees upon completion. To complement that it would be great to snap palisades and wall segments to other buildings to help eliminate holes!

I'm starting to hear suggestions that rome is borderline OP due to the fertility festival (ff), at the same time people seem to agree it is cool bonus. I agree, but personally I would want to wait for copycats (of chrstgtr's strategy, or a better one) to appear before deciding to make any adjustments. At the same time there are other issues relating to ff which we could look at if we want to adjust things: 30 second train time for all house sizes (5 pop 10 pop 20 pop): regardless of rome, it would be nice to adjust this so that 5 pop is slower, and 10pop houses are still 30 seconds) batch modifier for CC is slower than that for barracks: I would suggest lowering cc batch modifier to equal that of barracks. This would mean the gap between cc production and fertility festival would be less extreme fertility festival is expensive in food which is already needed to make use of the tech, and takes 60 seconds to research. I think if something like bullet 1 and or 2 is done, then a cost and research time reduction is warranted, reducing some food cost and 60-> 40 seconds. in the meantime you can just rush lules.

CPU: How many traders? "More"

I don't think a discount on half of the smith techs would take away options from players. Just like the iber team bonus doesnt take away the option to make slingers (many players continue to make slingers because they prefer them for combat). The main holdup for me about this change would be which techs to choose for which civ. No matter how hard you try to balance the techs there will be one that is better than the other. Also because its a team bonus very often see the same effect as the original bonus because of how frequently we see both brit and gaul in the same team. I take the Athens team bonus as a recent addition that has been very fun to play with.

it was about someone's pre-existing personal dislike for that spec, the spectating player had not written anything in chat.

I think also that there is unlimited potential for both skill and strategy in aoe2. If we compare it to aoe4 for example we see the dos and don'ts for making a great rts. Each strategy in aoe2 also rewards skill development to execute them better, which enables a pro scene but also enhances replayability for lower level players. Ranged units don't always hit, you need to manage them to maximize their efficacy. If you open a gate it stays open until it can close, so you can put a unit there to hold it open. In aoe4 strategies are formed just by a tree of choices with limited room for differences in execution beyond the basic mechanics. How lame is it in aoe4 that ranged units always hit and that gates are a 100% effective passive filter for your units? I guess I've harped on this before lol