BreakfastBurrito_007

I think it would be my preference to give something else to other civs rather than take away from some unique aspects. I know it is not always possible balance-wise but it helps to get creative.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone what is a battalion system? only other RTS I have played is AoE3 and that had some very frustrating pathfinding and battle mechanics. If I remember correctly, any group of units were always in a formation of some kind. One thing I liked about 0ad when I joined was the freedom with which units moved.

It is true I am pretty ignorant of what is possible/easy to program or easier/harder for the engine to run, so I thought a simpler solution would automatically be better. The more I think about it, the charge mechanic could be pretty good. If people like this charge mechanic, then I think we would like a way to select the units that are ready to charge, or at least see how many of the units are ready to charge. Please could you just be a little bit nicer when you talk to me? I was not saying I would be incapable of microing such a situation, I was saying that there needs to be some kind of way to micromanage this effect, like there is for most other things in 0ad. I was also not trying to denigrate your idea, in fact I like it quite a bit. I was just coming up with what I thought was a simpler alternative for people to consider.

I like this quite a bit but I am worried about the timing, what if you attack once with 20 spears and then add 20 more spears, then your army separates from each other and it could get frustrating. What do you guys think about melee units simply moving at a faster (x% faster) when they are 10 or 20 m from an enemy? I feel this is simple, but there might be situations where this is frustrating that are not coming to mind. I don't think it can be eco-abused at least. maybe the x% faster within 10 m mechanic could be used only when an attack order is given, so they could not retreat at the same speed which would be super annoying. I have been bugged by this for a long time and I am very appreciative of you guys for starting to do something about it

This is an awesome idea and I like the creativity of having blended buildings. From this, I expect the traders of this civ to be easier to protect, and to have a more blended economy. The only thing about the general design of the civ is that people will want to play it on land too. I love the idea of making a dock/military colony/market, but I am worried about how infrequently 0ad players in general use water maps. Perhaps there can be added a function similar to iber starting walls, where on an all land map a pond spawns somewhere along the p1 border of territory so that a syracuse playe could at least build one "fortified port". This would enable the civ to be played more comfortably on land maps. I think this civ idea is unique and awesome. Good work

I just tried romans and I really like the compromise that was reached at the army camps. Training the rank 2 units is a nice perk for the camps and the rams make them a lethal threat. I think I prefer this so far to the a23 camps where a great variety of ranged siege was available to torture civs like ptol and gauls/brits from the back of the base. In a23, the army camps were mostly used either to quickly spam out some siege weapons without a fort or to do what I previously described. Nice work!

I saw the 1,2,3 tiers of upgrades are available in the blacksmith. I think I like this change so far. Would it be good to correlate the tier 1,2,3 techs with phase 1,2,3 and make blacksmith available in p1? I feel this would be an interesting option to allow players to somewhat counter that booming=turtling situation that we have discussed a lot. If I remember correctly @ValihrAnt you came up with the third tier? what do you think?

Ok I got the svn version and tried it with my brother, it seems the fighting is much faster paced which I like. Who wants to setup some kind of TG on the svn version? I think we could do a TG using as many different civs as possible, to get a feel for the balance.

From what I remember, this was to allow mauryas to more easily train that archer champion. Sparta has an identically functioning building called "mess hall" that can be built as much as needed as well.

Awesome news @wraitii, I will try it out tonight after work! I have heard only good things so far and can't wait to try it out.

Nice. This is good to hear. Are the release candidates easier for people who are not so good at computer stuff to test? I might try one out if that is the case.

metal is different from other resources. 50 metal is not worth 50 wood in a game of 0ad. The mining rates are slower than wood and food. And most importantly, metal is a limited resource, which is ok, but it means the things you buy with it must be consequential. This is why I don't like mercs costing metal (a side note). so 25 spear cav are cheaper than 5 cataphracts

Oh yea that effect probably did depend on what "order" they were on, they probably would not move then. The reason the ranged units move I think is to try to get within range boundaries again. It is quite rough and would need to be more developed if it were to be implemented.

I am not sure how I feel about buffing champions more. Seleucid spearcav are very good units and I don't think they die too fast, they are strong and do high damage, their main weakness is players correctly choosing to kill them first with their ranged units. If you have 15 sele cataphracts, and you attack 50 archers with them, the champions will all die. If you have 10 persian cataphracts (same unit) and 25 spearcav, you will have much more success at a lower cost. Buffing each champion does not help this problem. For nearer to future alphas I would advocate for adding a suitable minimum range for slingers and archers. Some skilled mod folk demonstrated the effects of this earlier in the year, and I thought it produced a nice melee versus ranged unit "rout" effect.

Seles are basically not a cav civ what on earth. Iber cavalry is way better than seles. If it is true that antiochus does not effect ranged cav then there is no excuse not to give seles a spearcav unit for a25.

It better, because seles hardly have cavalry besides ranged cavalry. All other cav civs besides seles can pair a more expensive melee cavalry (champions, or mercenaries if they were ever worth getting) with CS melee cavalry to extend their lives and make the metal investment worth it. With a melee cavalry sele army, you would be relegated to never using champions or mercenaries in open combat since they are too expensive to lose. People recognize how much metal champions and mercenaries cost and will simply focus them down. Even if they lose 100 units to 40 units, economically it is a win for the non-cav player. Melee champions are most useful when they are embedded with large numbers of citizen soldiers so that an enemy has a harder time killing your most expensive units first, seles do not have this option and I really think they should if their mercenary or champion melee cavalry are ever to be used for anything other than killing traders or killing women (a task CS cavalry can do just fine).

I think civ differentiation, balancing, and mercenary rework (depending on how good they are in a25) should be a focus during life-cycle of a25. In the long term I think it would be cool to add new mechanics that deepen gameplay and could contribute to historical accuracy/physics realism. These things are undestandably quite challenging and I am ignorant of how hard they will be to code. Also some of these are divisive and will need long discussions to get right. Cavalry acceleration and momentum system more realistic system for ranged units, volleys, walls blocking projectiles in different circumstances unit differentiation: examples seleucid champ spear cav different from persians spear cav champ, advantages/disadvantages to both. extended debate on blacksmith upgrades.

Personally I have never seen a player use autotrain to any winnable effect. I feel that if it were to be the ideal unit production method that it would be very bad and boring. It can be like AoE2 Auto-scout. Lazy players or players who are going afk for beer or coffee or both can use auto-train and accept the losses in exchange for comfort and concentration elsewhere. Sometimes it may be a good way to top-off the population during a battle, but it should not be comparable in results to a player putting focus and effort into eco. I would be in favor of making it slightly inefficient. The one I saw seems quite inefficient, but I have not seen many players use this. I think it is important to note that @chrstgtr's point about APM works the other way too: unit training and timing is APM that serves a purpose to the game, and it is skill based. Much of the frustration in the game comes from Actions that have a probability of being translated into the game, like moving an ele past a house. We need to reduce necessary APM in the right areas: like how many clicks it should take to get an ele past the godforsaken house, or how many clicks you need to make to keep all of your units from bleeding to an enemy tower, or how many times you must click "unpack" or "pack" on catapults.

I was thinking a very unique way to have lancer cavalry would be to have a very low attack repeat rate like once every 4 seconds, but a high pierce damage and very low prepare time. This way, the best way to use them would be to attack with smaller groups and then run away to charge back and attack again. My thinking is that this would be worse versus ranged units, since it would be harder for them to get out of range in time before losing quite a few of them, but actually be very good vs swords and acceptable vs spears and still bad vs pikes. I think ideal micro for them could be like trying to get melee inf to pursue, but then doubling back and sniping individuals before too many of the enemy melee inf get into attack range. I could see this being a CS soldier for some civs that were famous for using long pointy things with their horses, maybe it should be a unit for civs that have a strange/underpowered/not persians cavalry selection. Perhaps a champion version could be made for the civ with the most historical tendency for pikes. I think if it is balanced right as a CS unit, then it should not need any price or train time changes.

It is a good thing that auto-training is quite slower than manual, at least for eco growth. We have batch training to thank for that.

People in the topic were trying to figure out separating lancer cavalry versus spear cavalry. I was confused and wondered how far they got in making a gameplay distinction.

maybe she could train marines capable of swimming? so it would not affect a huge number of units. if they swim, what stroke should they do as an animation? Butterfly backstroke breastroke freestyle People may be joking, but I think it could be a fun feature Unit could be like naked fanatic. Little armor but strong bod from swimming.

Are lancers and spearcav being differentiated in a25? It just sounds like they are/will be.

It is indeed a map issue, however I think it would be nice if forts and towers costed a bit more stone. In a23 stone ran out a bit before metal because of the amount of slingers everyone was making, usually this would happen around minute 30 rather than 20, in most games people never saw stone completely run out, unless you were unlucky enough to only get one 5000 stone source. In a24 about half the time players can expect to have only 1 metal mine. Right now choosing map to increase metal means choosing a larger map, many players don't like this due to sometimes increased lag and some players just don't like walking so far. I usually like playing on bigger maps for 4v4s. I would like it if there was a size between medium and large, or better yet, a slider between minimum map size and maximum, with a percentage listed for consistency. Beyond metal supply issues, there is also the problem of having a maximum rate of 24 people on metal for one mine. Probably this is also solved by your mod. It remains to be seen how bad the metal problem is in a25.

@alre@Freagarach If I understood you guys correctly, this would mean that when garrisoning the fortress with ranged units, the ranged units appear on top, like on stone walls, and can be killed. How would this mechanic work? I imagine it would go along with a more comprehensive siege/fortress overhaul. I might make a separate topic to discuss this. Increase garrison limit of fort to 40. First 20 units just stay in fortress and don't go on top, additional units get sorted so that only ranged units go on top. If there are 19 spears and 1 archer, then garrisoning 1 extra spear would make the 1 archer automatically go on top. Top capacity: 30 units. I think a UI button could be added as a formation for fort: where you choose "man the walls" or "hold the gate". "hold the gate" maximizes your internal garrison and leaves remaining ranged units on top. "man the walls" moves up to 30 ranged units from your overall garrison to the top positions. ranged units on top of walls/fort do not contribute to arrows or capture defense. Bonus to ranged units on top of Fort: +20% range+200% hack and pierce armor. On top of wall: +10% range, +200% hack and pierce armor Units that can damage units on top of walls/fort: bolt shooters, archers, catapults (with splash), siege towers (explained below) arrows/bolt from siege tower do 5x damage bonus versus units garrisoned on top of stone wall and fortress, and normal damage to all other units. These changes would make defending forts a more active situation: I think we should remove 1250 HP from forts and raise their stone cost back up to 1000. Also, removing their territory root would be good. Fort's strength, low cost, and territory root made forts less about defense and more about drawing out the game time in a24. I think that britons' and gauls' rams should get + some hack armor, because it is very frustrating to send 5 rams to a fort so that a few cheap swordsmen can quickly de-garrison and kill the rams. The overall changes would make a fort/wall siege a more interesting mechanic that takes effort and planning from both sides to be successful, but a process that can be finished fairly quickly, unlike real medieval and ancient sieges.