BreakfastBurrito_007

Sometimes people complain about aoe2 expansions adding civs that are OP. Of course the standard for gameplay quality is 10-20x higher in aoe2, but aside from that there are some really troubling things evident in the aoe4 new civs. There's not much new art, the new civs are basically just buffed versions of old civs. Its not that they tried to make new bonuses that create new gameplay styles and learning opportunities, and they encountered balance changes. It seems to me both pay-to-win and also low effort content. you can tell some things about the developer when you see that they have walking zones around buildings that prevent you from making walls out of buildings.

I view it more as a quality of life change. If enough people were against the capture/delete as a valid way to destroy buildings in 0ad, then perhaps some economic incentive for a slow "deconstruction" would be a good move. In my opinion such a change would have more cons than pros depending on how its implemented.

I can get used to manually choosing whichever mode no matter what the default is. The only case where I think it matters is for capturing low value things like houses. If you are attacking someone and if for whatever reason your best way to damage them is capturing and deleting buildings, then capture is the better default as multiple buildings can be captured in parallel.

Well this is a bit more complicated. It depends on which method your enemy is using to snipe. The best method for sniping in most cases involves using alt to rapidly task all 80-100 or so of your ranged units on your enemies' ranged units. I think buffing healers would have the effect of nerfing this kind of sniping because spam clicking usually means that damage gets spread out more among enemy units. lol that was so fun for a little bit. I think the main thing that made it problematic was that there was no way for the charging units to ever slow down or run out of "charge".

Oh goodness, thats an even bigger scam than normal iberian towers XD

hmm, did you wind up getting that upgrade? did it turn into a 5 spot tower like it suggests or the 8 spot Iberian tower?

Thank you Stan, you're a champ!

I think another challenge is that the height of buildings can make it a bit visually harder to help distinguish things while clicking quickly through the base.

its actually fairly easy to see if someone is using revealed map as they will react to things they shouldn't know about. It does take some time to investigate though.

yea anyway

Well it would be way easier if the toggle had a preference for idle barracks/stables/blacksmiths. In that case you would just hit the toggle button even if just to check for an idle building of the type. Usually if you have even and simultaneous batch sizes across all the barracks it means you need to make houses in larger batches, with some barracks becoming idle due to insufficient res to make the same size batch, housing issues, an upgrade, or a previously delayed batch. Of course its not really worth the effort to get this marginal improvement of efficiency if there isn't a good way to do it. To be honest part of my inspiration for the idea for this toggle was seeing how efficiently progui generates batches across different barracks.

Ah, I see what you mean. Doing it with a bunch of control groups would probably not be worth the extra attention span lol. I'll probably try putting all of them in one control group though.

@krt0143 I think people are getting upset with the way you are phrasing things. I think you should focus on asking how you can change these things for your own game for PvAI gameplay, instead of proclaiming these gameplay elements to be flawed in general. It's not right to complain about the game design when you've already gone and "fixed" so much of it to suit your gameplay preferences. The rest of the community will not change the entire game because of your complaints, so you need to be clear in your writing that you want to change things for your version of the game rather than complaining about the way vanilla 0ad works.

Yea I was testing out the existing autociv toggle feature because I wanted to do custom batches on each barracks 1 by 1 instead of making a the same batch across all barracks. The idea came from comparing early game boom with barracks to the last 70-100 pop trained. Usually players will go from 2-3 barracks in p1 with medium or large asynchronous batches to 5-10 barracks in p2 and/or p3 with small synchronous batches. I think its because eventually it gets easier to just select all barracks instead of trying to manage them individually. I think it could be more efficient (especially if you are trying to hit a timing or a transition to cav or champions) to attempt to continue the individual barracks management through the whole boom process, and perhaps even when managing army composition later in the game.

0ad is not an instant gratification based game. Learning and improving are features of games that people keep playing for fun. There are great 0ad tutorials and advice videos online as well.

Interesting that they were removed because of historical reasons. Did brits actually train dogs in the stable then? I feel like they would get stepped on by the horses. If Britons did have any organized process for training and breeding the dogs, then its totally logical for there to be a kennel building that trains them even if there isn't physical kennel evidence.

Don't worry, as you gain experience it'll get easier to control your units. Take the case of repairing a dock, you might have an idea of what you want your units to do after repairing the dock, so just use shift to queue their next task. Even if you don't want them to do anything after repairing the dock, you can always use shift to tell them to move to a spot next to the dock so that they can wait for your next order.

@Gurken Khan I think it might be confusing at first, but I think most people would learn after realizing they are unselectable. There are probably some art tricks that may help them "belong" inside the barracks, like maybe giving them a duller version of the player color, or perhaps without player color.

@guerringuerrin I was thinking for the working barracks you could have a couple guys in there training with weapons, and then when idle those same guys would just sit on the floor cross-legged. I'm not sure how hard this would be to make, but it would a nice art/gameplay feature.

the hotkeys are not macros. They do not accomplish multiple tasks with one click or press. Also there is no need to modify the config file or anything fancy to set hotkeys, everything can be done easily through the 0ad menu. Are you suggesting that autociv has hidden features that allow you to create macros? I suspected some people would make this argument. And that is why it makes more sense to have it in the base game rather than autociv. Additionally if you compare random toggle selections without idle preference to clicking the buildings with a mouse, you'll find toggling actually results in more actions because there is no way to know which barracks is next on the toggle list. Adding the idle preference takes away the unpredictability of the toggle selection, but each barracks would still need to be selected and then set to a task.

yep, thats why you would choose the 5-10 you want to use or the ones you keep forgetting. Does it make sense now? Of course no one uses all the available hotkeys.

nah, I meant like in the top right corner or something as you play the game, with a show/no show toggle option.

Autociv is a great mod for 0ad. It helps make hosting easier and faster, adds chat options like /link /mute and stuff, and provides a multitude of hotkeys so that you can pick and choose which ones are most useful for your gameplay. There are a bunch of hotkeys that are expected for a standard rts game, and none of them allow the player to move multiple actions into one button (this would be a macro and therefore cheating). While progui has some quite egregious macros, there was at least the positive vision of reducing the necessary clicks to play 0ad. The vision fell apart when reducing clicks turned into reducing actions, and then decisions; resulting in a more boring, automated gaming experience. Among the most useful hotkeys for autociv are buttons you can assign to toggle through your buildings of that type. For example you can use a button to select each barracks one at a time and then proceed to tell it to get working even if your screen is not over the barracks. Even with these hotkeys, I still find that the fastest way to train with barracks and stables, or get upgrades with storehouses and blacksmiths is to manually click through them. This necessitates a click on the minimap to go to your base and then a double click to select all. I think these hotkeys that toggle through buildings should have a preference for the buildings that are idle, so that you don't have to search through each building to find the one or two that are idle. I think this would enhance gameplay by improving the possible rate of multitasking. Keep in mind that these hotkeys do not reduce the actions and decisions a player must make, it just reduces the use of the mouse for those same actions. Because the player would then be able to train without looking back at the base, I'd consider it a big enough advantage (as well as an expected feature) that it should be available in the base game without getting autociv. This being said, I know devs are busy with other things at the moment including performance, balance, and content. I'd mainly like to see what other people think about the idle preference for this hotkey including @nani who made autociv. Also, do you guys think it would be cool to have a visual queue that shows when a building is working or idle? For example blacksmith smoke could be only present (or maybe thicker/darker) when upgrades are being worked on, or maybe some action could be visible inside the stable or barracks to show training.

I think it would be cool to be able to select a menu of your favorite hotkeys to show somewhere on-sreen while playing. I am trying to use more hotkeys now-a-days, but I frequently forget which buttons I've assigned. Maybe this is a nub issue, but I'm certain some other players would also find this helpful.

Maybe somehow a hotkey got changed that deals with batches? I guess you could try restoring default hotkeys unless you haven't changed any.