BreakfastBurrito_007

Brilliant @nani I think we just need to make sure that there is a reasonable amount of time for stopping the upgrade if one really wants to keep that enemy camp from getting stronger, perhaps a bit longer than current sentry to defense tower upgrade. Thoughts?

@sil-vous-plait I understand how frustrating it is too see such profanity beyond any semblance of “dark humor”. But please understand that it is a challenging and controversial problem that is present in all sorts of games even at the highest level of development funding. I give Call of Duty as an example, I know the level of toxicity in Call of Duty multiplayer is unparalleled, and that it is maybe surprising to see this in a smaller game that otherwise has a very wholesome community. The online multiplayers of any game is the safe haven of trolls and white supremacists, It is tiresome to be around them. Just call them out when it makes sense and otherwise don’t let it ruin your fun in multiplayer.

I think a great option is to make “archery tradition” a free trade off tech available in p3 that would no longer be an absolute buff, but instead make archers more vulnerable to melee cavalry and melee infantry.

Hmm. You are both right. @Lion.Kanzen I think choosing to do a "naked" turtle should be more risky than going for a rush in an average game. This will encourage more scouting and players should be careful determining how much defenses to build. @Dizaka as you know I generally don't rush XD, and did not also in a23. I think I am accustomed to the fighting happening in p3 but I think if I tried to attack in p1 I would encounter similar challenges. However I think the classic "if you attack you are 2v1ed" situation does not occur much in p1.

@Dizaka I apologize, I was talking beyond the topic of conversation. I tend to focus on p3 turtling issues since this is where turtleing is the worst. In p3 those towers in the string are usually garrisoned. I liked in a23 when archers were the easiest thing to flank (besides ranged siege),that was their main disadvantage. @Lion.Kanzen like that but no one has metal to afford 1-2 rams XD.

When the whole map is like this, you may as well close host. But often, even just a string of towers can defended by archers that are far away, since they can run to the defenses before the attackers reach them and do much damage.

Well.. I can start I guess. I liked that different attack strategies were used depending on the ranged unit types. Ranged units were much more dynamic and variable in a23. The damage increases for slingers and skirmishers did not come close to compensating for their inability to reach archers. Archers have neigh unlimited flexibility and they can not be over-extended easily like in a23 archery accuracy and archery tradition were enough to make archers a bit op, let alone the effective buff to their speed. I think a good idea would be to revert speeds for them all to a23 levels and start changes for a25 from there. Slingers could remain the same speed as in a24, with skirmishers a bit faster and archers a bit slower.

I liked the way skirmishers worked in a23, a unit that did lots of damage, but died fast, moved fast and was good for surprise attacks and accompanying heavy infantry. They would not win vs heavy infantry in a fight, but would help one group of heavy infantry beat another, more so than archers. In a23 archers were slightly underpowered but were great for putting concentrated pressure and for defense. Players like me learned not to make whole armies out of skirmishers and we acknowledged that slingers were op.

Please put some reasons why you disliked or liked the alpha 23 ranged infantry speeds in comparison to alpha 24's ranged infantry speeds, and what should have been the course of action to equalize the overall power of different ranged infantry types, slingers being more op than the other two in alpha 23.

The reason to spam palisades is to ruin pathfinders and limit movement of the enemy and make rams spend eternity taking them down. The power in palisades is not health of the barrier, that much I can say for sure. In a23 people had no extra time to sit and build defenses anyway, the game was much more dynamic. Usually only a few strings of walls. Only exception being the roman siege spam, which was a rare tactic and even rarer to succeed. @Dizaka surely you can explain this you are an expert in palisades

These no longer can counter archers because 1 archers can kill them quite quickly and 2 no more splash damage :I. The best siege against archers right now is siege towers. So in a24 Rome has worse siege overall than ptol.

Archers have always been (and should be) quite good at defending buildings like fortresses. However, the main change in a24 is that archers are the fastest infantry, so they can pull a turtle-like defense of a huge area. In a24 you can not be over-extended with archers, because archers are effectively faster than every other infantry. To be honest, ranged infantry balance only needed a nerf to slingers from a23, and archers needed a slight buff.

@Lion.Kanzen Thank you for finding and showing me that patch, it is great to see the discussion behind the change. I think most players agree that the ranged/melee balance is much improved this alpha, but that ranged/ranged balance is much worse. I also don't think the turtleing issue can totally solved without reducing archer walk speed, but many more people will agree with me on the other argument for speeds: skirmisher>slinger>archer. That being the inability of every kind of infantry to outmaneuver archers.

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/23895/ Idk but it might be this one... it took me a long time to find it. It does not give any justification, but maybe I am looking at the wrong thing. Archers being the longest range unit makes them the fastest infantry because they dont have to travel as far to "reach" the enemy. I care less about why it was introduced/implemented and more about why there is hesitancy to revert these ranged infantry walk-speed values to a23.

Why are people hesitant to re-introduce ranged unit speed differences? when all ranged units were given the same speed, this made archers the most maneuverable unit in the game besides cavalry. If they need to go somewhere, and do damage, archers will have the shortest timespan to do that out of any infantry unit. This is a problem because it enables them to turtle with spread-out defenses over a wide area and effectively lock down the map, making it hard to move anywhere but back and forth along your defenses.

This is what I am talking about for longitudinal spread damage, I am wondering wether this could also apply to next layer immediately behind the palisades (ones within a certain distance). One other thing that might serve to limit the effectiveness of palisade spam is reduced archer move speed, since in a24 archers can run to defend every corner of a huge area of turtled territory faster than an attacking army can flank to undefended spots. Reducing archer run speed will mean that palisades and walls will be less effective over ludicrous lengths.

@Yekaterina I think some form of damage spread from layer to layer and along the length of a section of wall is a good way to address both of these things: wall spam and small fragments With damage spread, multiple layers would be more effective, but each additional layer effectively gives you less total hitpoints. This means that rams and elephants will accelerate across and along wall segments, meaning that quantity of wall placement does not equal quality (such as shorter segments, using chokepoints, and existing defenses). small scattered remnants of palisades do not have any positive effect on gameplay, they do not reward skill, action, or risk taking. They only cause frustration, and are another reason why palisades contribute to turtling and hesitancy to attack.

Looking at images of such palisade walls, I get the impression that it would not take many strikes from a ram to take them down. Also, wood has leasst strength in shear with respect to the grain. This is the situation of 0ad palisades. If there are no horizontal stabilizers to keep the vertical logs in position then 2 things happen: the absence of one log allows surrounding logs to move more, creating more instability the impact of a ram is not distributed, meaning only one or two pieces of wood takes the whole load of the ram strike. This is enough to justify halving the crush armor of palisades, A ram should probably be able to breach it in 2 strikes. This discussion of historical accuracy and engineering limitations is pretty pointless for these palisades as they are just art-pieces for a game mechanism. We should free ourselves from this thinking, and let us make the palisade walls perform a logical, fun, and varied function in 0ad based off of a gameplay point of view. lets ask these questions: How much do we want small fragments of un-destroyed palisades to just sit and clutter the map and cause bad pathfinding? How effective should spamming multiple layers of palisades be in multiplying the strength of the overall barricade? How does it affect gameplay movement, fluidity, and decisions? I think the answers to these questions can be found in area damage, cost, and build time.

I have played some cavalry games in a24. I noticed that they work very well against archers with some spears, provided your numbers are more like 30 cav 50 archers. Spearcav are great versus archers, but their main issue is that only the front bunch of spearcav can fight at the same time, for this it is helpful to have at least some javelin cav to bring the damage. I think spears and pikes are good counters vs cav in a24, and dont need buffing or nerfing with respect to cav. Spears and pikes are not a "prevent all" to cav, but require considerable effort to work around. I think implementing cavalry acceleration like I have described in that topic would be a good way to make cavalry more than just high health high speed versions of infantry, and trickier and more risky to use. As for archers, I think "archery tradition" should not apply to cavalry-archers and should make archers more susceptible to smaller groups of cavalry.

+ Area damage to walls (and maybe light structures: house walls) + a little build time + a little cost This sounds good to me. I am thinking palisades will be good to help thwart p2 aggression and p3 nuisance raiding. But will not do much to prevent a full scale attack.

I think the main things making rushing challenging are the slower men training times, cc extra range, and unit rotation being a bit too slow. I don’t think nerfing sentry towers is a good idea, although making them less valuable for P3 means that they still have an opportunity cost. As for palisades, they are almost never built in p1 as wood goes to: houses, upgrades, men in normal games. Many of these things are being addressed already and I think the overall effect will be fine without extra nerfs to defenses. (Think being border next to rauls)

Hmm. This is a much more complicated debate than the other balancing topics. It is important to point out that these changes will/can contribute to civ and strategy differentiation.

This is actually a super brain idea. Sparta could have a flexible champion available in all ages, This can probably help Sparta with its unit diversity problem. And make it have a potential advantage at any phase. We would need to be careful to balance the unit accurately at each phase and with each personalisation/upgrade.

New gamemode: Hyper pizza.

My main qualm with this would be pocket usage in 4v4. imagine ur a border player and ur facing equal army plus 2 rams, then suddenly 20 spartan hoplites hop out of the rams and cap ur cc. I would be very worried about how this might work in 4v4s.