BreakfastBurrito_007

Some people may be against homing projectiles due to the visual, or historical accuracy, but to me the number one thing is dumbing down the gameplay. If you remove accuracy stats from ranged units they become functionally equivalent to melee units. I talked to SaidRdz and he said this is a main reason why he gave up playing aoe4. you keep accuracy for ranged units for the same reason you try to implement attack ground for them, charging for melee units, movement characteristics for horsemen (acceleration can be a start). The reason is to make the units have actionable mechanisms that influence their use.

I think it is too cheap as well, 500 wood 300 stone (civic center) sounds a bit better in my opinion. Keep in mind the build time is a lot longer than 2 houses, 1 barracks, and a storehouse. I do like the removal of the metal cost though.

yea I tried it out and it certainly did not seem OP or abusable.

I like some of the balance changes, and I am worried about others. I am not sure if you wanted free livestock available at all corrals or just the gaia ones, but free livestock seems like a nice way to allow for both fields and corral food income through the whole timespan of a match. @Player of 0AD is, from my observation, the best player at managing corral economy as it exists in A25, so I would be interested to hear his thoughts about that part of the mod. I think this mod is complex enough that we ought to just get together and test its gameplay before more discussion.

This is very exciting @ValihrAnt, I will try it soon.

Large farmsteads can also connect apple trees that are farther apart. Therefore civs with large farmsteads can often connect patches of food resources more efficiently than other civs. There are also trade offs for each house type 5, 10, or 20. Easy to place, afforded earlier, less hassle, using non-wood resource.

I tried out the bundle just now and I must say the unit movement looks great. I was impressed that the units slow down more when they make a bigger turn. As for the overall acceleration values with regard to balance, I think infantry should have faster acceleration.

Well, from the test match we played (3v3) I can definitely say that attack-group results in a much higher damage output (ignoring things like units moving while shooting, chickens not dying etc.). At this point I think a true attack ground would be better for gameplay and would require less rebalancing of units. attack-ground scoring a smaller percentage of hits would be ok, since there is still the power of choosing where those hits go. I think there would be an actual tradeoff, which would allow for situations where u want to use attack-ground and some where you don't.

kill/death ratio means ratio of enemy units killed/ your units lost. It is an indicator of how well your battles are going. Usually you want to kill your enemy more than he kills you so a KD greater than 1 is good and a KD less than 1 is bad. It certainly is possible to win games with KD < 1, but it is not common.

@LetswaveaBook do you think it makes sense to have the other ranged units have this behavior? Also, do you like it the way it is, or do you think the area where units look for targets should be controlled by the player? Ideally we would play some multiplayer games to see whether this is OP in some situations, rather than reaching the fast and maybe not accurate conclusions that we got from simulated battle tests. Also, I am interested in healers becoming useful again.

@real_tabasco_sauce That really is a concerning amount of damage. Perhaps attack-ground (from video) would be worth it even with many archers missing and hitting the ground, because there would still be the trade-off of doing less hits but on preferred targets (like skirms). @LetswaveaBook had some concerns about making pikes useless. I am not sure, but it seemed that you could still use pikes as meat shields with @LetswaveaBook mod, but it is less effective and less easy as in a25. Pikes as a meatshield would be more effective if the pikes were a larger percentage of the army. Perhaps also allowing skirms and slingers to use this would allow them to spread their dmg more efficiently.

I wonder if there is a way to make the archers get a greater accuracy penalty when shooting over other units? Maybe we could just give them an accuracy penalty when using these features. Also, what are peoples thoughts on giving other ranged units these features? Do you think slingers or skirms would be able to see as much benefit from them?

Minecraft has a few things going for it. When there is time for it, for example the holidays, I like to start basic survival worlds with my bro, and I find it much more relaxing than other games.

Ok my main question I have with attack-group as some have described it is: do the selected units remain the exclusive targets of that group until all are dead? In my opinion, this would render the pikemen useless (unless their stats are changed of course). This leads me to support @chrstgtr's explanation of the function the most, since it is counterable, and also does not remove the meatshield functionality of melee units. I agree, the units could just cancel the area-attack and then just revert to normal behavior once there is no one in their area to attack.

@LetswaveaBook personally I liked @chrstgtr's description of it best: working like a tower but for a square drawn area. My main issue with attack group would be that you could 'select' a group of vulnerable units and your enemy would have no way of ensuring that those specific units are not targeted. For example, the 'tower' idea would mean that someone could move their units out of the area if they were paying attention, I like this because there are some ways to counter play it and ensure that pikes can still be useful. I am worried that attack-group would make it too easy shoot prioritized targets, especially while the target army is moving across the map. Example: you are Rauls with 20 pikes and 30 slingers, when suddenly a group of skirms attack-group selects your slingers and so they all die while your pikes sustain no damage. (obviously no attack-group exists like this, but this is just my worry of what it could be like). I would advocate for starting with what we have, which is the "attack-ground" that exists as a diff.

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@LetswaveaBook I totally agree. While it’s obvious that the merc cav are op, I would hate to see them become useless next alpha.

@real_tabasco_sauce I think other benefits of the +25% train time would be to make the choice of iberian heroes more important and less easy, and also to add economic risk when trying to make ibercav (firecav+spearcav+cs javcav). If a player trains indibil and then suddenly gets hit by a strong attack, they will have a hard time retraining, especially if they have prioritized stables rather than barracks. This means that it would be more viable to try beat the iber player in one blow (sele ele) to prevent the transition to champions. I definitely still think the iberian fire damage should not apply to units.

@LetswaveaBook I always like having more options, to be honest. This sounds great to me. It would be especially interesting if players find ways to make that mercenary useful to that civ or CC location. For example, Athenians could put a cc next to an enemy in p2 and train merc archers to deny metal/stone stop towers from being made while they themselves go p3 to build a forward siege workshop.

@alre, to be fair I have no idea how powerful the phase cost and time 50% reduction would be. My goal was to introduce a bonus that is both economic and highly exploitable, just like the iberian bonus and ptol bonuses are. I am not sure if a pure time reduction would suffice to be equivalent. For Pers I have been thinking some kind of bonus to cavalry food gathering, but idk how OP that might be for rushes. Perhaps the best way to do it would be general units +200% carrying capacity for meat. So a horse could carry 60 food instead of 20 and a regular unit could carry 30 food. It could prove useful in a number of ways. Maybe with this bonus, a person would be able to steal their enemies hunt to prevent a big cavalry rush later in p2.

Perhaps a good way to help players judge whether a player is smurf or not is a "date created" for the account. This could be found under "User Profile Lookup" thing in lobby.

IDK, some kind of historical justification could be found. If britons were found to adopt technology quickly, or their society developed quickly, then that could justify it. I suppose we could give it to athens and call it "democracy" or something. What is important is that each civ has some bonus significant enough to strategize upon.

maybe you mean 1 stone per 2 second right? Just considering that ptol bonus is 1 food/s and stone is more useful for athens. I think the britons should get a 50% reduction in phase up time and cost as a team bonus. This would make for some very fun strategies. Help with mercs in p2, or fast siege in p3. Other civs that desperately need attention for team bonus: carthage, persians. We need to allow ourselves to think of things that seem "OP", considering how used to the iberian team bonus we are.

My favorite way to play regicide is to go nomad but not give enough resources for a cc. Then it’s just a fight to the death.

I think the iberian team bonus is fine. Keep in mind it has already been nerfed once. Also, this alpha skirmishers are more powerful than usual (from melee units dying first). The main issue is that other civs have outrageously bad team bonuses. Many of them are practically non-existant. Some of the ones that could be changed or buffed are: Britons: -25% hero cost and train time. (LOL) My idea for britons would be -50% phase cost and time. Seleucids: -20% cc cost. Perhaps it could be buffed to 40% to actually result in a strategy change. Persians, Carthage (trade bonuses): these could be left alone, but they should be given something else in addition. Athens: -25% ship training time @ValihrAnt has a thread where he has come up with some interesting economic bonuses for individual civ and team.