BreakfastBurrito_007

@leopard I've found that cavalry only compositions are very rare and hard to pull off. I've had some successful cav play and some disasters myself. A lot of players are having success with some cavalry and some infantry, sometimes operating independently. I think the main change has been that cavalry is not universally superior to infantry as it was before the mod, which is good. A balance challenge emerges for civs like persians whose strengths lie mostly in cav.

the change to net damage across all units is definitely smaller than the net change to units durability (melee lost armor). The driver of any net ttk change is because of the reduction of melee armor. Before this mod, battles felt slower because either before or after sniping there was this damage sponge you had to kill. I think one reason why melee seem to kill ranged units faster is because they rank up while killing them and this increases their damage, hp, and armor further. I think further changes to melee/ranged balance aren't clear, but reduction to the rank up bonuses of melee is a clear change.

Interestingly, quite a few players particularly Havran have argued that champions have become meta. I'm not saying I agree. In fact my argument so far about balance is that its actually pretty good. It is truly a weird situation to have almost every player claim one thing or another is OP with some certainty, all while having very little agreement. Clearly the meta has been more elusive than everyone thinks. If there is any one thing that I think most people can agree is now OP it is spartans and athenians, the reasons being several bonuses and heroes that combine particularly well with the melee rebalance: iphricates (previously determined to be OP): seems to be more important now that melee units have less armor Leonidas: the damage addition to spearmen is much more significant now that the base rate is increased Skiritai commandos start rank 3 which is now a much stronger advantage over rank 1 hoplite tradition: improved rank up speed means hoplites can reach rank 2/3 in one good fight, fast enough to make a big difference in the fight in which they rank up. Combining these civ specific bonuses with the melee rebalance has led to melee units from these civs being too strong. I think removing armor from melee rankup bonuses, and nerfing iphricates would solve these concerns effectively.

At the start of the community mod changes were limited to bugfixes and small unit/hero/civ tweaks. The main vision of the mod was to act as a testing environment for future changes. Through 2022, 2023 and until now the community mod has served as the base game for quite a few 0ad players. This is the first release of the community mod to feature significant experimentation, and it has been both successful and unsuccessful. Every player has felt some level of discomfort as their established understanding of the game is challenged, some people reject such discomfort and some people tolerate it. People who have considered the changes and adapted to them by and large are contributing to the mod (and 0ad) with constructive criticism. That is really good to see. Another group of people who do not wish for the game to change, who are unable to adapt and learn, yearn to execute the same strategies that they have always preferred. When they encounter the discomfort of looking outside of their box, they become enraged. For this group it feels like the end of the world, or the end of 0ad. Its obviously no use to include people of the second category in playtesting as it is in the community mod, because they can't or don't explain what it is they don't like (what is imbalanced?, what is broken?, what plays poorly? ect.). In previous alphas where there were balance issues there was nearly unanimous understanding, think of merc cav, firecav of a25, slingers of a23, or archers of a24. In the case of comm mod 6, there is almost no agreement between the most vocal disparagers of the mod. The lack of constructive feedback from this most vocal group is an indication that its best to protect these people from new things by making sure that the base game is in a bug free and balanced state upon alpha releases. This way, players interested in contributing to balancing/game development can test things, provide feedback and then go back to the base game if there are issues with the community mod version.

There are many proposed ideas for adjusting non-random buildingAI for better gameplay outcomes, I'm gonna list some here: reduce max arrow count in cc random arrows for cc and fort, but keep non-random for towers increasing arrow damage with phase or blacksmith tech (ranged damage) fixed ranges for buildings, or adjust the default range so that it matches the current default+bonus for a flat map. random arrows default, player click focuses arrows. I've noticed that the primary change is that the cost/benefit analysis of diving under the cc to get kill is much more complicated now, it used to be that you would only trade hp that would eventually make you need to heal your units in the cc. Now that there is an immediate threat (units actually die) from the cc, a rusher needs to make sure that what they do under the cc is worth losing at least one unit. At the same time rushers and rush defenders are learning ways to distract and focus cc fire respectively. It's good to see players developing skills to maximize their results for both defense and offense in these scenarios.

I think people should also recognize when making their vote that keeping the changes in the mod allows them to be balanced and tweaked, where as "bad change" is preferring the previous version with any undesirable features that we have accepted for a while as a playerbase. Basically "bad change" is if you see absolutely no potential for the change to improve gameplay.

this is how the implemented buildingai works unless there are bugs. Be sure that there are units closer than buildings and that you didnt attack-click the building.

Arbitrary limitations on in-game functions like champs or sniping show that balance problems are present, capping the number of these things isnt really a solution but a coping mechanism. So far there hasn't been enough gameplay of the new mod to establish what, if anything is OP. Many people claim certain things are op when they lose to it, but there needs to be widespread agreement to make a conclusion. In fact several in game factors in the mod are changed to the detriment of the camel rush, consider: non random building arrows (kills individual camels as opposed to weakening all of them) spearcav have increased damage (this is mathematically before the 3x counter, so the counter is effectively buffed)

Well this micro is really only theoretical until someone can make it work. I agree that the logic is simple, but this would be very difficult to execute. Don’t throw around the word sniping here as it’s not applicable here. The value of shift clicking in the situation is not there either, since the defender would want to respond in real time to the movements of the attacker. “Spam clicking” is a highly unrealistic projected outcome, like your personal boogeyman that you see around every alley.

Thats quite a good point. The random arrow system seems like a placeholder for some system that could yield better gameplay results. I know there will be some growing pains because players and balance have only known random arrows, but its definitely for the best to have something more intentional and situational in place.

This won't happen but is absolutely desirable. We always love opportunities for a player to out-skill the other. For some context, a23 dancing (most infamous) had no counter play other than to also dance with an opposing army. In this case you can just pay attention and click a different unit. if you switch targets while your enemy dances with his cav you are killing him and his units are doing nothing productive.

Thats a good point, I think it could get pretty annoying due to the inaccuracy of the circular building range indicator. Rushes can still be extremely powerful without diving under the cc, though so I think it wont hurt rushing too much. I suspect players will look for ways to dodge arrows by wiggling the unit that the cc has clicked. Its also worth considering how useless the cc is at killing any melee units on its own, so getting the opportunity to pick off an extra melee cav each time an enemy raids would be a welcome change. I mainly see this whole change as a new avenue for skill to influence the game, which is great.

I could imagine it would be really nice to be able to snag weak cav units when being rushed. At least it could be something for the rushed player to do while they are made into a cupcake.

In my opinion, competitive aspects of the game are inherently more fun and should be maintained for casual matches. It's no coincidence that competitive e-sports in the RTS genre consistently use ancient games such as Aoe2 as opposed to recent releases like aoe4. Modern game designs seem to forget that gaining skills and knowledge and mastering challenging techniques are what make games fun and re-playable in addition to being more viable in a competitive environment. It's really great to bring this up. The reason that its allowed in competitive environments is because its not optimized, intentional scout control will beat autoscout every single time. Automation aspects that aren't easily beaten by player control should never be considered for inclusion in the game. Even with 0ad's vanilla autoqueue it was mathematically proven that 1 by 1 training provides the fastest return on costs spent on the units, yet because 1 by 1 training is outpaced by manual batches, players can invest more of their resources for faster population growth which gives more resources than 1 by 1 eventually.

There are no controversial gui mods, particularly if you define "gui mod" as mods that change appearances and do not affect gameplay. my mouse is 3 USD and works just fine for sniping. I agree sniping is a pretty unfavorable gameplay result, but its being worked on from a unit roles/balance standpoint. I also don't think banning mods is a good idea because people will get carried away, in addition I'm pretty sure its uncharted territory for the 0ad leadership; The last major case of useing scripts for cheating was in a23 and flew under the radar. I think its better for now to find a way to allow total visibility of mods for every player in-game and for hosts to decide what they will/won't allow.

Seleucids have farms that build very fast and cost a lot less wood, it could be worth it for them. I think the main challenge is having all your women spread out which makes it harder to keep them safe. I'm not a big fan of the diminishing returns on number of farmers, but I think we need something interesting to replace that feature instead of just removing it, because farms are already too simple gameplay wise. In vanilla 0ad the main thing is to keep citizen soldiers working instead of standing around (especially if there is a ceasefire). At the same time you want to make more citizen soldiers for more eco which usually cost 50 food 50 wood so its good to focus on those resources early on.

I think also a campaign could serve to prepare players very well for entering multiplayer, sort of exposing them to some typical multiplayer strategies that the AI just doesn't execute.

I suppose, but it would be pretty boring to have all civs with spearmen only in p1. At the moment for iberians and romans its mainly a vulnerability and not a strength that they have swords in p1 (because of cavalry being the main threat early in the game). Popular upcoming design changes may include a melee rebalance and possibly palisade and stone wall ease of placement/snapping improvements, so this could make swords in p1 quite interesting for those civs.

I know a lot of players like medium map size and normal map size. I'd kinda like a size between large and medium. I think the issue with shorter vision ranges is that ranged units need to see as far as they can shoot.

well most of the problems of aoe4 come down to implementation, so I'm sure there's a good way to make a more balanced spy unit. I think the only concern for it in 0ad is how easy it is to see much of what happens on the map. Once all players in a tg have made their first moves after a relatively boomy game then its very easy to predict the flow of the match from then on.

lol I love to hate aoe4. I think its a great source of things to avoid implementing for 0ad. Aoe4 was intended to have a fewer number of more differentiated civs. However they designed each civ with a unique way of being equal in every category, be it archers, cavalry, late-game gold eco, siege, you name it. For example with a late game gold generation/trickle, every civ has some way to generate gold, whereas in aoe2 the 3-4 civs out of 45 that can do this are truly special. The only truly unique features of the civs are then boiled down to shockingly gimmicky features like the japanese unique unit that hides as a villager in your enemy's eco and then can attack and go invisible.

If this is implemented I'd like to see opportunities for counter-play. Extending the range makes sense and happens anyway due to the way elevation bonuses work in the game. Extending the minimum range by the same amount could allow for players to rush the wall in a higher-risk play that could help counter the wall mounted bolt shooters. A challenge of balancing these positions will be that different civs have varying levels of siege capability.

The damage dampening across walls would be really challenging to balance considering not all civs have a full siege capability. We already sort of have a version of this regarding the units atop stone walls, only its level of exploitation is much more controllable. About palisade walls I agree they should be used not for slowing down pathfinding, but by blocking it altogether (closing off sections) like walls are supposed to do. palisades are very bad at stopping melee cavalry (in particular axe and sword), so I think melee cav (not sword/axe inf) should have a 0.3x multiplier against palisades. If they are too effective at stopping all aggression, then we could consider a cost increase or some other action. nerfing melee cav vs walls would also give some advantages to using infantry rushes which we rarely see in MP anymore. Ease of placement improvements would also work wonders for palisades and stone walls. It may look ugly, but increasing the allowable overlap would help a lot especially for straggler trees, small mines, and other res and terrain.

yea so the buildings are placed on a tile system like in aoe2, but the physical building has a 1/2 tile perimeter where units can still walk through. So you can't make house walls like in 0ad or aoe2. Another thing about aoe4 is that all civ bonuses and mechanics are these basic inert bonuses that you either decide to use or not, there is no skill-based execution component for the player to master. While the learning curve is tough for aoe2, its obvious that the depth of learnable skills and strategies are what has kept the game alive for so long. people argue about civs being the same in aoe2 and that aoe4 has improvements here, but the civs in aoe4 just look different. Every civ in aoe4 has to have some kind of gold generation trickle, it just appears in gimmicky new ways. Also many of the units for each civ are unique units, which makes unique units... not feel unique.