BreakfastBurrito_007

My only concern with the "attack-group" option is that it could make it too east to ignore pikemen in that group, I want to allow the other player to do some kind of micro to try to avoid it. For example, if you used attack group your enemy would continue to have his pikemen be ignored even after they are mixed back into the army, which would be quite frustrating. I think it is ok if attack-ground can result in the ranged units shooting at nothing, because in a big battle, when this feature would be most useful, the player is already watching, making sure they are not losing too many units/ responding to enemy battle tactics. @wowgetoffyourcellphone do you know how I could test that bit of code that already exists for attack-ground? I have no idea how. If @real_tabasco_sauce and I were able to each get it to work, we could test it in different larger scale scenarios to see if it is useful, behaves as expected, or helps unit balance. While AoE4 has almost no battle behavior optimization to be done by the player, 0ad could improve in that area.

I think since it has better armor and better attack it is quite op. It has substantially more armor than any other cavalry unit. Only the seleucid +2 armor (hero) boosted champion cavalry can equal them, and that is without a roman cav hero. I think it would be best to reduce champion swordcav armor to below that of champion spearcavalry, and leave their attack damage the way it is in a25 I am not sure about this one yet, right now I am more in support of reducing pierce armor and/or travel speed by a level to make them more vulnerable. I think a better way to reduce damage would be eliminating fire damage to units. It is true, players with pikemen do not always win, but they do have a huge advantage over those with spears. Most frustrating is that 10-15 pikemen can make 50+ ranged units invulnerable for as long as there are pikes. I think we need to break the "melee units die first" forced fighting trend by adding attack-ground or attack area, I think pikes would still be quite powerful after this is added, but players would have more ways of working around them, and also battles would be more interesting overall, with no one class of unit necessarily dying first. I am trying to test the attack-ground thing this weekend, but to be honest I have no idea how to do that.

That is an interesting way to spell "carthaginian merc cav" But seriously best units for general winning- pikemen (when in combination with other ranged units) merc swordcav iber champ cavalry consular bodyguard the bottom three are considerably more overpowered, but they are less universal and or require an economic process to reach.

Yekaterina yes swordsmen do counter pikes the best, but they will still lose their melee units first against pike/skirm or pike/sling (unless equal numbers of skiri, which is a different ball game). Cav do provide other options to beat the composition.

Yes, this is the best way to kill the slingers, keep in mind though that you need to kill each individual one because the archers will go back to killing pikes. It becomes untenable to do this after units reach more than 20-30 in number. If you have a larger army, focus firing will not be effective, but it can be possible to maneuver units to ignore the pikemen, but your opponent can adjust pretty easily by choosing box formation. Its an astounding prediction XD. Does this mean you agree and have heard enough of me, or that you disagree and it should not be added? I will try to test the existing thing this weekend, but I am computer ultranub and will probably fail.

@Huffman3829Another idea would be to watch the replay and see if the archer spammer has a much bigger pop and or eco than you. If they do, then it will be hard to muster any kind of army that can match.

@Grapjas, the mod looks awesome. I have long been against ammo system but the way you have implemented it seems quite reasonable. I like the ram/unit interactions as well as charging mechanic. I wonder if some units could be given more charge damage than others as a way to differentiate them. I can also try to test it this weekend.

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.