BreakfastBurrito_007

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.

I disagree about the source of turtling in a24. During the "boom or rush" part of the game: beginning to ~15 minutes, the primary reason not to attack would be the extended range and increased effective damage of towers and ccs, and the absolute lack of means to get more bang for your buck (p2 champs, p2 siege could be the source of this). All of this is considering the game to be balanced. Turtling is worst after 20 minutes in a24. At this stage, everyone is out of metal, no one can successfully flank or maneuver, and the map is totally built up with fortresses, towers, temples and walls. After all, barracks was just as much if not more economic in a 23, because of training times being closer to women (the other eco unit; which is only from the cc usually). In a23 rushes and booming tradeoffs were nicely balanced.

@Dakara This reminds me of AOE 3 with shipments. I think that if mercenaries are to be expensive and only cost metal + small food, then there needs to be some options to get more metal than is logical to have mineable on the map at the start of the game. I think a combination of tax tech like @wowgetoffyourcellphone mentioned where each unit gives a trickle of metal, but works more slowly for every resource, and a storehouse tech, where double the metal can be extracted from 1 source like @Dakara said. The bonus of these upgrades is that they have drawbacks, Dakara one would be very expensive, wow idea would force a decision to dedicate to mercs (high risk). The nice thing about these upgrades is that they allow you to choose the amount you expect to be making mercs: a few for antiram, a bunch for small battles and raids, or a closer to full composition. It will be very hard to balance these upgrades and mercenaries themselves right.

This is a good consideration, perhaps some kind of color change on the market icon is good. It should not be too easy to adjust, but then again, the most scarce resource may not be the one the player wants. The main thing I want to know is if people think this is a good gameplay mechanic that should be implemented or tested in a mod.

This is true, and because of this now I am thinking it is better to keep expertise in war at rank 2 so that skill is needed to keep them alive to see veteran rank. I think reducing metal cost by 20 and adding 40 wood, 40 food or 30 stone to the existing costs is a great way to fix the usability/power problem for now. The mercenaries would still cost plenty of metal but would be worth the buy. I also think that 2 metal mines should be available to a player, one maybe a bit further out.

I think they are great ideas as long as they are balanced well, and metal distribution becomes more equal. You could call the tax increase upgrade "Opulence" or maybe "Big Government". Also I think this is a good example of improving historical accuracy and expanding gameplay depth and quality simultaneously.

@Lion.Kanzen Do you see any value to the changes to mercenaries in a24 or should the whole idea be scrapped? I quite like the prospect of having some middle tier unit available in different varieties in difference civs. As for more outlandish (still great) ideas like from @wowgetoffyourcellphone, they are less likely to be accepted by the multiplayer community and I am not sure how I feel about them myself.

I don't know about the patch, but I am almost certain the reason for the change was to differentiate citizen soldiers from mercenaries.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone At first I was upset reading some of this, but now I see it reflects some of the societal changes that people might associate with hiring a mercenary army. These changes could potentially be quite good added to the game. I could see varying levels of availability of these techs depending on how much of a "merc civ" the civilization is. Upon seeing this: Could be a risky choice for civs that don't have a great selection of mercs (this is ok, risky gameplay is exciting) Will be very hard to get adequately balanced as an overall tech and will need to be carefully tested and reviewed. Also, for these things to exist, we need to make the amount of metal available much more for all players as well as less variable.

Hello everyone! I had an idea that would be easy to implement and might make traders a more interesting and less predictable economic unit to use. At a given point in the game, the resources available for barter in the market have different values. Most often metal is by far the most valuable, but this appears set to become less extreme in a25. In alpha 23 traders were not even considered in 95% of games due to the fast paced gameplay and need to be ready for fighting at all times. In a24 barter rates immediately slam to value metal, further disadvantaging people without metal mines. This seeks to bridge the gap and make market gameplay a big improvement on both. If traders got more resources for each pass when they were trading for the most valuable resource, this would (maybe) make some economic sense because traders would want to take more value on each trip and this would be found in the most scarce resource. For example's sake (the values can be changed) a trader gets 100 of each resource when barter rates are equal 100:82. This is the default setup when no one has bartered, I call it the equilibrium rates. If someone barters all their resources for metal, the value of metal goes way up and now each resource is 100:1 with metal (maximum disturbance), this means the trader will get 100% more metal than before. Ideally, each addition of disturbance past equilibrium rates has a smaller and smaller affect on the traders. This is so that the effect is both tangible on small to medium price fluctuations, and not insanely profitable for large price deviations. The relationship would be proportional to a curve like the example attached where the x axis is a measure of barter price disturbance for a scarce resource and y axis is profitability of the scarce resource in barter trade. I chose the curve as an example just to show the behavior Im looking for. Possible benefits of the mechanic: sometimes rewards for the risk of putting metal into traders around 15 minutes instead of upgrades or champions or siege grants flexibility in strategies requires some micromanagement/ at least paying attention to prices. lessens the problem of certain resources being overvalued. I remember some civ has a trade advantage, this could be a little trick that they are good at. Serves to counterbalance barter rates and allow them to reach equilibrium sooner. Makes market decisions much more complicated. Do I barter everything to get traders so I can use the good trade rates I created? No, because you wont have a short term army and someone with excess metal may use the barter rates you created to trade their metal for other resources to mount a huge short term attack against you. I think this mechanic would be super dope. I don't see any downsides to it that can not be eliminated by adjusting relationship values. I feel this will make trade economy less hands off and more interactive and skill based. I am excited to hear what you guys think!