BreakfastBurrito_007

Maybe this movie was cool, but I have seen way too many ads for it to really want to watch it.

sheesh, talk about differentiating units! Is this in the pipeline? how would it work?

The hacker was "just kidding around"

I think if more players had seen/tested the a24 turn rates before release people would have realized how detrimental they were. I think acceleration should only be non-negligible for cavalry. For infantry it can be there, but it should not feel different. I wish I knew how to test the attack-ground code because I am very excited about it and its balancing implications, these are both things I want to try out this weekend. I agree that there has been great progress in balancing units, the main exception being the meatshield superiority that we see in a25 and a few freak units. This is precisely what I think attack-ground can solve.

@lagger I do not know the full situation of course, but I can say that there are two likely possibilities for why the host closed early The game may have been lost after everyone but you was destroyed, so the host closed before it was your turn to get destroyed.In this case, I would recommend that you fight alongside your teammates. It may seem that your allies are quitting early because your base has not been attacked yet, so I would advise to seek out involvement in the course of the game rather than waiting for the battle to come to you. the host was rage-quitting, which means they don't see the value in letting the game play out after they have lost their part of it (selfishness).

hmm, this and the unit acceleration seem to be two large gameplay features very much worth testing to make sure they are great for A26. @real_tabasco_sauce and I can try the SVN maybe this weekend.

@bad playerWhat is interesting to me about AOE4 is that it does not have any ranged units, they just have melee units that can follow a ranged animation to attack a target with 100% accuracy (basically spears with very long poles and a time delay). I don't think people realize what a downgrade this is from having at least some type of trajectory or accuracy system in the game. As for wether or not your should buy it, I would say the safest thing to to is wait 3-4 months and see if the game has a good, strong playerbase.

@alreI noticed this change as well but I have not tested it out. Thank you for bringing up the topic and starting the conversation. I had envisioned the change to help differentiate cavalry from infantry, as well as improve balance between the two. Compare swordsmen and cavalry swordsmen, and we realize that cav swords are just fast, strong, swordsmen. Adding differences in movement behavior is the main way to distinguish cavalry from infantry, and I feel if the unit acceleration values are done right then at the end of the day we would have cavalry that have quite noticeable acceleration while infantry are harder to notice. I predict the following results if unit acceleration is less noticeable for infantry and quite pronounced for cavalry: cavalry rushes in the early game will be harder palisades will be more effective against cavalry even if they have the same time to kill when attacked by cavalry (cavalry will have to stop) cavalry taking a bad fight will be more punished (I hope this would extend to cavalry champions) cavalry micromanagement in battle will be less easy A key remaining question to do with acceleration values is how to assign them to the different weapon classes, such as spear, pike, archer, sling? or should these values be strictly determined by whether or not the unit is riding a horse? @alre did you find the acceleration rates too slow when you tried them?

I think a good example of this is how all battles between ranged and melee units will always go the same way: melee die first, ranged die after melee. If we add player control to the areas shot by ranged units (like attack-ground, attack-area), it adds a new way to avoid ranged unit shots and a new way to deal damage to particular sides/back of an enemy formation rather than just the front. If you think about how one-dimensional the battles are in 0ad, then you would probably realize what a welcome change this would be. And even that would be ignoring all the positive balancing outcomes that would result.

@Philip the Swaggerless It is already very easy to disrupt food economy. It is common in TGs to see the barter rates show food as the most sought resource for bartering (rather than metal in a24). I agree with your idea about having bigger mines further away from cc, but I think that rather than buffing palisades, it would be better to give cavalry (the primary disruptor of food eco) a .3x counter versus palisades. This is good because it does not make palisades hard to take down given the army size advantage that comes with a large attack (larger than defending force). Another solution could be making CS men almost as good as women in farming (not sure of their current rate) so that it is not too inefficient to farm with CS men.

I suppose I could try to figure it out sometime. How can I do that? (for dummies aka me). If it eventually works I could team up with @real_tabasco_sauce or someone to check out how well the feature plays in more realistic battles. I am particularly interested in how balance between pikes, skirms, and archers will be affected by the feature.

Do you know this for sure or are you speculating? The only piece of content about it that I saw was a video where the demonstrator used 20 archers and a single horse (before turn rate increased), he danced the horse back and forth, but it does not give me any clues as to how it would perform in normal sized battles. My favorite idea for the concept was from @Jofursloft, he brought up the idea to have attack-ground just establish an area to attack, drawn by a corner-rectangle, and have the ranged units prioritize them. I am not sure how hard/laggy it would be to make each ranged unit target a random unit in the area, but I think using the current preference system (closest=best target) would be ok to prioritize the units inside the area.

not when you now have the option to shoot enemy skirms instead of pikes, because they would be further back in the enemy group, and 1/4 damage output vs skirms will get you more value as 100% damage against pikes. I suppose there would be times where either mode of attack would be good. I do see what you mean about attack-ground doing less damage overall and I remain open minded to other options like the ones you mentioned, but I would still like to try out the feature that currently exists.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone I think this would be fine, but not if you could select a particular kind of unit that you want to attack out of the bunch. The existing diff demonstration only shows it vs a single horse, I wonder how it might behave in a more realistic 0ad battle. I feel like a mod could be helpful to evaluate whether or not the feature would be a good addition to 0ad and we could also investigate whether it results in the unit balance improvements that are anticipated.

@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.