BreakfastBurrito_007

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.

I actually really like this idea of his, because it gives an extra way for players to respond to changes in enemy unit composition. A player would want to be careful with the units they select for rank 2 or rank 3, because they would want to leave some at home for eco. I have not heard many people talk about it in opposition or support, so if you are interested go to "all civs are my favorite" and see how you like it.

@ValihrAnt is leading a thread for coming up with civilization economic bonuses. For example, one idea for kushite eco bonus is farms and corrals are 50% cheaper.

By this you mean that skirmishers can beat either pikes or spears 1 to 1? I agree this is a problem that won't be addressed by attack-ground. Would you prefer just reducing the damage of skirmishers? (I guess we could also reduce skirm cav damage too since they beat spearcav in 1 to 1 also)

The main thing making archers underpowered in a25 is their inability to target ranged units like skirmishers because the skirms are behind some melee units. This effectively means their range advantage is nearly useless. Since they do so much less damage, they would be unable to kill melee inf as fast as skirms can, so skirms are a better unit. If you add attack-ground into the equation, it could be possible to begin killing enemy skirms before they can even attack your melee units. This adds variability and balancing to gameplay without even changing unit stats. @alre the main reason champions are massed (champion cavalry) is because there is no way to beat them with CS units, even spearmen. I would be in support of adding back champion training to forts with no unlock upgrade, and adding 500 food 500 wood and 500 metal to the barracks or stable training upgrades. If this were the case, you would usually see a few champions added to mostly CS or merc armies, and would see massed champions only after a long game. Also I recommend should go to the "all civs are my favorite" page and share their thoughts on @wowgetoffyourcellphone's ideas for civ differentiation there. I am particularly interested in the new kinds of military upgrades that would raise the cost and gather rate of the unit they affect (buy rank 2 for spearmen), these upgrades could be offered in different amounts to different units per civilization.

Hmm, perhaps 100 hp in p1 and +50 per phase

Another example of a possible mechanic that boosts immersion, and improves gameplay all in one: attack-ground for ranged units Also melee unit charging (much further from implementable I think)

I would say this is pretty similar to both what @Dizaka had brought up for ideas and agrees with how civs behave in-game.

The only way I could see this happening would be to give the sparta the option to train hoplites 1 at a time for 30 seconds each from the cc to prevent them from booming women while making hoplites for free, this way the 0 cost of hoplites would also be an opportunity cost of the CS and women that could not be trained in the meantime. This feature is one that would be either not strong enough and no one would ever use or too strong and it would be OP.

I feel a26 could be a great improvement if we are able to add and then balance out some good civ differentiation options like those from @Dizaka and an attack-ground feature for ranged units. Bringing AOE catapults back alongside attack-ground feature would be awesome.

I feel this might go to far for sparta, but I like the "make him ride a horse" upgrade idea for some civs. Could you please elaborate on this one? Is this a new merc? @Dizaka I think these are great ideas overall, and I like the vision for each civ. There are a couple things here and there that seem a little op.

We have swordcav, which are considered slightly op by many people. If we buff spearcav rather than nerf swordcav, more cavalry units become more powerful, which by weighted average makes cavalry as a class of unit more powerful. What problems would arise? In my opinion, buffing the counter to other cav would make them annoyingly effective at stopping other cavalry during early game, and leave them simply worse than swordcavalry for everything else. I think -1 armor for swordcavalry would be fine.