BreakfastBurrito_007

@Gurken Khan perhaps trees could be given double their current value and spread with 1/2 density.

interesting @Yekaterina, what does it mean?

@LetswaveaBook I totally agree about having CS melee cav with jav cav being a great combo, that is yet another bonus to the iberian cavalry. The lack of a cs spearcav make seleucid cavalry a bit awkward, but they are still good in cavalry overall.

I have observed only one player so far make out of (non-camel) mounted archers successfully and this was none other than @Philip the Swaggerless. I spectated him for 2 games (TGs) and on the second one his enemy (spartans) was slowed down by the fluid mass of cav archers, but eventually realized he could tank the damage and simply use CS spearmen push the cav archers all the way back to their base before taking significant losses. At Phil's base, the sparta player simply brought in rams and destroyed the base while the cav archers had to stand aside and gradually deal damage to the mass of melee units. It seems, like with infantry archers, that they could be greatly improved by the implementation of "area attack" or "attack-ground". This would allow them to use their full range and for cav archers, maneuverability, to attack the optimal areas of the enemy army, rather than only the strong melee in front.

hehe XD maf OP I am about to do a bunch of these here differential equations, I can't wait.

I think it is ok to have this condition, but it is good that they can only be captured by monks, but cancelled by any enemy unit who kills the monks. It makes map control a little more important when there are so many resource generation mechanics in AoE4 that otherwise would not require you to have much map control. By far the worst victory condition is landmark victory, where a player just builds trebuchets and snipes the enemy landmarks (which can sometimes be only 3-4 buildings) faster than the enemy can repair them. I watched SOTL play a AoE4 4v4 and he was winning but then was eliminated because he did not notice his landmarks were being destroyed. My favorite features of AoE4 are the garrisonable and upgradeable walls and upgradeable castles. Another cool thing is the weapon based unit upgrades and melee unit charging. To me it is so strange that they made all of these nice realism/gameplay improvement features but then decided to make all projectiles a 100% hit probability, I feel that it is wasting all of the effort they put into the other features in the game to make projectiles so comedically simple. Without accuracy/ projectile simulation, ranged units are just melee units with long attack range, like extremely long pikes that just do a small amount of damage. Some people argue that inaccuracy is RNG, but in my opinion this is fine because the outcome is still controllable by the player. I argue that there is much less skill in knowing exactly how long your scout can spend under a TC before dying, rather than a skill-based intuition made up of your estimate of your enemies' accuracy upgrades/willingness to garrison to increase arrows/how much of the TC you need to see/how much of a threat you want your scout to be. Another example is if you have a knight looking to kill vills and it encounters X amount of archers, you can't run away because you know X amount of archers will one-shot your knight, so you just look away and accept the knight is dead even before the archers shoot. The inaccuracy does not have to be as extreme as AoE2, but it should at least be present in game.

Yea, the goal it to make it an “attack-zone” controllable by the player. In a25 right now there is a huge emphasis on things that can create or overcome a meatshield. In that regard the worst units are archers and spearmen. This would not be problematic if there was a way for ranged units to shoot over incoming melee, in alpha 25 right now there is no feasible way for ranged units to target enemies besides the closest ones. For example: archers are worse than skirmishers because skirmishers can kill the melee in the middle first; if archers were able to use attack-ground (or attack-zone) then they would be able to make use of their range.

@KKaslana There has been talk about attack-ground improving unit balance as well as diversifying and improving battle skill. there is https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1971. I have talked to @Yekaterina about it being put in a mod already, but I wonder if this is a possible good mod to add it to? also Hi nagasushi! its been a while

My main concern is how annoying it will be to fight mangudai when they are faster than most other units in the game and able to attack while moving while hitting 100% of their shots (each arrow is laser-guided). I feel this will lead to situations where the mangudai are always able to do damage and always able to avoid damage. I feel the projectile (even bombard cannon) 100% accuracy will make the game very shallow and eventually boring. Right now the "landmark victory" means all you need to do is snipe 4-5 buildings to win the game, even if your enemy is easily capable of beating you after the loss of those buildings.

I agree that it is too easy to mass champions. I think they should be added with no unlock to fortresses and the unlock for stable/ barrack should cost a lot more food some wood and metal. This way, it would be harder to plan to mass champions as you may have to forego some back-up eco, some military upgrades, or some time. By then an enemy could have killed you with other units. Adding them with no unlock from the fortress would help players to train a few and use them wisely rather than massing and killing everything. Implementing some way to train rank 2/3 units in p3 (at increased food/wood for rank 2 and +10 further metal for rank 3) for different civs/units should also help bridge the gap between CS and champion units. Attack-ground should also help reduce the over-importance of meat shielding.

@ I agree with this, but I think it would be better to just give an inherent .3x counter vs palisades to melee cavalry, this way, palisades actually offer a more significant protection vs cavalry and will allow a smart player to position his units and palisades in such a way as to prevent cavalry from going in. I also think there should be some adjustments made to palisade and stone wall placement to make it easier to seal off an area, like going between houses or barracks.

what a mad lad! thats a lot of eles @Dizaka

alre, the main drawback to eles is that they usually come from archer civs. One of the strongest ele civs this alpha is seleucids because eles can back an army that is already strong in dps. Even if all their skirms are shooting your eles, your skirms/melee will be killing their skirms. Also, if you have metal left over, it is easy to keep making eles since all they require is food and metal.

Why this rule? Also, you know you can just use /ban and get rid of any player you want to ban.

That does not sound that bad to me, but I guess in the netherlands, volume comes at a premium. From what I heard, the US just stores all the waste on site, in temporary containers (really dumb). As for storage, I think people have to just start building/digging these storage facilities if they want to keep having nuclear power. Otherwise it will only be more and more problematic as time goes on.

I wonder if miniature reactors are an improvement in safety over the big ones?

@Freagarach That sounds great, to create the rank 2/rank 3 option from barracks. Ideally they would also raise in cost to become +30% f,w for rank 2. And then plus 10 metal from rank 2 to 3. We don’t want to make mercenaries or skiritai commando useless so we should be careful about: the cost, the number of available units per civ who can be trained rank 2 or rank 3, and the train time for that.

I have thought about it some more and I realize that instead of making a whole new building just for training, it would be easier to add functionality to the barracks/stable to facilitate this change. Do you think that there should be a training cost rate? My thinking is you could garrison and make some kind of purchase that speeds up the training without making an upgrade to a particular unit. Perhaps the simplest and least gimmicky way to do it would be garrisoning the units and clicking a "train" button in the barracks that just adds x amount of xp to the units over time, with some kind of sound signal when it is done. The things to address would be how much it should cost (Probably double the food cost and add some metal cost for cavalry or elephants or priests) and how much faster training should be than when it is done without the "train" button. Another way to do it could be to have the button display what rank the units will be when done and calculate the price needed to bring all of those units to that rank. I think for the final time to train, it should not be fast enough that defending players can simply react by doing this and be saved by it. Perhaps 30 seconds for rank 1 to rank 2 and 45 seconds for rank 2 to rank 3 would be good. I hope this sounds more reasonable for gameplay.

@Dizaka @chrstgtr@ValihrAnt@Yekaterina@borg- @Palaiologos What do you think? could this be a good feature that you would imagine using?

These would probably be people who are interested in war, like champions, heros, gladiators, not ordinary citizens who see no reason to be a warrior. For example, I am not preparing for world war 3 right now. Ordinary people would be forced into service and told how to use a weapon, perhaps receive some group training. Barracks/ stable is just a convenient way to show military unit creation. Because of this, I think it is quite reasonable historically to have a training area, even if these would be makeshift in real life and not dedicated facilities.

People have been trying to bridge the gap between champions and CS for a long time. I think this is necessary because not all civs will have a champion counter to an enemy champion unit. If a player is able to "invest" in their CS, then there is more room for military unit improvement beyond the robotic purchase of all the blacksmith upgrades. I liked @wowgetoffyourcellphone's idea because of the way you could choose a unit to upgrade and because of its ability to help differentiate civs. Also, if you wanted to go back to training rank 1 units for eco, you could not. I must say that I like this idea more, because it is a more direct player choice that "adds" training onto units after they come out of production building. There is much less abusability with this mechanism than with purchasing a rank 2 or rank 3 upgrade that then affects the unit cost. A player could get all the units and then purchase the upgrades, so they would then have a powerful army without having to pay very much of the rank 2-altered unit cost. I have a few issues with barracks/stable unit training. It is a slow mechanic that has no extra cost and makes players lazy with how they upgrade their units. It is rarely used, and it is also hard to tell how much xp/rank the units inside have gained. Some ideas of mine about the training building: 3 facilities: cavalry training, ranged infantry training, melee infantry training. 300 stone 300 wood cost and footprint size of military colony. All civs should have access to these but they should have different amounts of available rank limits for different units. garrison limit of 20, garrisoned units train rank 3 limit should be allowed in phase 3 unless it could become unique ability of some civ(s) rate food cost per unit they gotta eat more while training) flat metal cost for operating whole facility (paying the instructors). rank 1-->2 food rate per unit:0.25 food/s. rank 2-->3: 0.5 food/s. instructor cost for rank 1-->2 and 2-->3 5 metal per second (cavalry have double the food rate cost) rank 0 to rank 1 in 45s, rank 2 to 3 in 1.5 minute (half-upgraded units stop early, but do not effect cost rates) garrison units (all of 1 type) click train button, they go to next rank (some kind of applause sound when they are done training) healers and elephants would garrison in their own training buildings (maybe change garrison limit for ele stable) and require 10 metal cost per second per facility as well as 2 food per second per unit cost. ideas for civ bonuses: reduced time to train, buildable in phase 1, some civ has 1.5x garrison space per training building I feel this would be a great macro element to add to the game and give players a lot of opportunities to use this for a variety of strategies. It would also help bridge the power divide between champions and CS. @RadiotrainingTo be fair, I don't see the need to have special building animations per unit. The artwork could just mean taking a stable or barracks, enlarging it, and adding some key distinguishing features.

At this point, I like the way towers work. You can build them strategically to deny resources and you can prevent an enemy from having a long term presence underneath it. The towers do not function to deny entry to the area that they can shoot because they don’t kill units fast enough.

@Dizaka That seems like a great idea, especially if it is based off of their proximity rather than a particular formation, since formations are not always the best way to move around in game. This would add some element of skill in the positioning of pikemen, especially if you bring attack-ground into the equation. With both features, a player using pikemen needs to decide between the compactness of their pikes versus the volume of ranged units they protect from attack-ground, as well as how far to advance forward.

This is a healthy environment right? How does it take less skill to do what @LetswaveaBook did? I think it is worth noting how successful @LetswaveaBook's rush was and also how even it was despite the advantage he gained from it. Also, his civ choice (seles) is perhaps the best civ to counter the carth rush, because its military colonies are quite cheap, and the combination of spearmen/pikemen/javlineers is much better to counter merc swordcav than spearmen and archers will counter merc spearcav, so in each fight where he included CS infantry, he had an advantage from that. @hyperion have you personally tried playing against this in a TG or 1v1?

@alre this is true, it is possible to lose once training those mercs. However, any strategy to counter them requires way more resources, way more skill just to stay alive, rather than turn over the fight. In a TG, it will make you disadvantaged compared to the carth players' allies.