BreakfastBurrito_007

Hmm, then are people saying that its unethical to have war crimes included in videogames? Sorry I just read your original post as basically the same idea. especially this part: At this point I'm a bit confused about what you meant in the first post, but I think war crimes can be in 0ad or frankly any game as long as they aren't glorified or justified in a good versus evil or us versus them lens.

People have had this idea that videogames cause violence for as long as videogames have existed. People with normal cognitive function are able to distinguish between the objectives and victory conditions of a game, regardless of how they are achieved, and real life, traumatic violence. I don't think this is worth our time to be honest, especially not any developer's time.

Automation as powerful as auto-sniping would be a cheat if not everyone had it. If everyone had it, it would break the game. There is a community mod effort re-balance melee and ranged units such that sniping is much less advantageous (while also making melee units more fun to play with). It may still be useful at times, but other micro methods will become much more influential by contrast.

Better elephants, better mercenaries, interesting eco and military boost potential with pyramids. Anything a civ is good at can be thought of as a bonus, it is up to the player whether, but also to what extent to use or take advantage of these bonuses. These are all complicated choices that evolve during gameplay. Clicking "The Governor" and then proceeding with the game affected by that choice is a one-click decision that carries little gameplay value. I agree that there needs to be move strategic depth to the game, but I consider shifting bonuses into a decision tree to be dumbing down the gameplay. @real_tabasco_sauce's unit specific upgrades are an attempt to give the players more options for how much they want to dedicate to a unit composition, as well as options for improving specific areas of performance of units.

use this to prioritize killing enemy ranged units. This is known as sniping, and I think it uses left click instead of right. Due to the way melee and ranged units are balanced, this is the best micro to do during a fight.

I think player controlled and player executed strategies are what make AoE 2 so successful compared to other AoEs. I don't want to be picking and choosing from a menu, rather I want to make the dishes myself!

in a26 sniping beats any other kind of micro by a huge margin. There is simply nothing else that will give you as much value per click as sniping. A step by step for how to snipe can be seen at the discussion below. I hope that with unit roles, balance, and other gameplay changes, sniping will have a less critical role in battles and other micro techniques will come forward.

Sniping: targeting ranged units in order to maximize the effective damage of your units. select all your ranged units hold alt, or option (for mac) attack click rapidly, clicking units that you want to prioritize (enemy ranged units) with each click, the number of units you have in your selection will go down by 1. This is because each click tasks one unit from your selected group to that task. When you run out of units in your selected group, repeat steps 1-4. In a26, this will cause you to win every single even fight due to the way melee and ranged units are balanced. This will be more impactful when pikemen are involved. Keep in mind different ranges of ranged units Don't be afraid to snipe with selections as large as 100-150 ranged units, just click super fast in step 3 and you will be in a great position. I hope that in future community mod releases and alphas that sniping becomes inferior to other micro forms and that we can move away from the "meatsheild meta" that causes this tip to be so valuable.

Horses garrisoning in barracks and infantry garrisoning in stables isn’t illogical, but I feel somewhat indifferent about the gameplay effect. As for horses in towers: op towers would be easily captured by horses who could then garrison to deny resources in an enemy base.

@Helicity it’s also possible to repair rams in the middle of the fight, get ram damage upgrade and hack armor upgrade. Pikemen are great for repairing rams because their damage contribution is negligible, so anything else they can do while tanking damage is quite significant.

Well I agree it’s not that deep. I was just trying to counter the idea that this is somehow automating the game.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone talk to @Atrik about that, his level of automation is quite interesting. I would argue that this change gives the players more choices as the optimal choice depends on what is going on, because the player has the choice of clicking it as soon as its available and affordable or waiting to see if they time it better to save a small amount of resources or click a different upgrade first. One choice is quick and dirty, the other is more efficient but management-heavy. I like to think of this as being a step in the opposite direction of automation.

yes pls, some people's strengths are not aligned to use Linux lol.

Well it wouldn't need to be autotrain the way it exists for units. You would just click twice and the next upgrade would appear in green (already purchased) in queue behind the first clicked tech. As for the benefits and drawbacks I already discussed it in topic and I agree that it won't always be the best option.

@Grautvornix you would have to have the resources available, unlike autoqueue for units. So you would still actually spend the resources when you click the upgrade if it is behind its precursor.

In 0ad blacksmith for example, you need to wait until ranged damage 1 completes before you click ranged damage 2. I think it would reduce the unnecessary timing requirements if the next tech could be queued before the first has completed, so that it can automatically begin researching after the first is done. Keep in mind that this is not always the best way to get the techs since you would be paying further in advance for the same tech which makes it relatively more expensive, but the advantage would lie in focusing your efforts elsewhere rather than waiting for the first tech to complete and clicking the next one just in time. What do you think?

They will be an option to vote for in next alpha's release of the community mod. @real_tabasco_sauce made some changes with them to make them less vague in the units they apply to, and changed the accuracy tech to be more conventional.

That is very close to what has been done by @real_tabasco_sauce. Although not quite a factor of 1/2.

@Helicity Infantry being armor focused is what makes them suck. In 0ad there are 2 types of players: those that snipe and those that don't. Players that snipe find it easy to deal with pikemen because they can target the ranged units behind them and simply ignore the damage of the pikemen. Players that don't snipe are frustrated by their low-dps units struggling to kill pikemen while their lower armor (persians) melee units die much faster than enemy pikes. Given equal force composition, a player who snipes will win 100% of the time. This overall situation describes a25 and a26, which has been called 'meatshield meta'. The core of the issue is that melee units are balanced such that they have huge armor and low damage. This results in them being used simply as a "meat shield" to save your ranged units which account for the vast majority of the damage of armies. In order to give melee units combat value (killing potential) they need to do way more damage than they do currently. 2x damage would make melee units quite powerful, but with the current armor they would be quite OP. Reducing armor is done to allow their balance to settle at a higher damage value, so that they can have a higher combat value.

CS soldiers do make the game unique, and they should be kept in the game of course. The "solution" people are looking for is a way to make citizen soldiers primary role military and secondary role economic. This means that the best use for CS is for fighting and that you are inherently incurring some opportunity cost if you get them just for eco. I hope this helps explain from a gameplay perspective. I Agree here. The topic is about gameplay, not realism.

I have seen different players in the 1500+ range discuss every one of these civs as being top performers. If anything, I see mace and seles less frequently than the other civs you described. Civ balance right now is actually quite good, even considering that plenty of civs are lacking particular units.

wait what? please explain more, I must have misunderstood.

This is considerably more complicated than adding a male eco unit or adjusting existing gather rates between women and cs. Rank 2 and 3 citizen soldiers obviously need to start as rank 1 with some exceptions. Champions can't be a meta since there are too few of them to create a balanced system. Mercenaries are not available to all civs. The reason I prefer creating a male eco unit as opposed to buffing women gather rates as suggested by @chrstgtr and @wowgetoffyourcellphone is that women can be made using ff from houses, they are super weak, and CS would still be needed for metal and stone. Having a male eco creates the opportunity to make the cc a more economically valuable building responsible for booming, avoiding the women- only eco, differentiating cost, gather rates, and creation time. Also, the gameplay choice of making women as opposed to the male economic unit would be interesting to me.

its point +