BreakfastBurrito_007

don't worry, everyone gets pissed off by this @BeTe . Yea the chickens around the cc make for an interesting gameplay situation, where the booming player has a delay before he can scout, and the rushing player can move out faster. I think after 3 minutes usually players have had a chance to check out what their enemy border is doing and prepare something, but a typical chicken rush comes in well before that. One option a booming player has is to check for enemy cav with one of his ranged infantry, which isn't so bad in terms of idle time on the border. The downside to this if your enemy has cav he may notice and kill one of your units which could save you when the cav do arrive at your base. I'd like it if something was done to nerf the chicken-rush, but I'm not sure what change is needed.

One other concern which is hopefully not a problem in a27 is the community mod player base separation. The community mod fixes a lot of bugs and has significantly improved gameplay as well, it is considered to be the better version of the game to play. I think allowing the community mod to experiment with features and fulfill the role of playtesting would be nice, so that the players can always fall back on the base game if the features under testing are not successful.

Even if a game is not competitive its still important to have game design depth that allows players to continue to improve. Improvements in some areas are needed: civ differentiation: more to learn for each civ melee/ranged re-balance, and unit specific upgrades: more complexity to upgrade valuation and choice of unit composition. performance upgrades: games will run faster with less lag and will make it harder for a slow player to keep up with the multitasking of a fast player multiplayer oriented, strategic, balanced maps, option for fixed positions. Maps designed for gameplay with diverse focuses and different dominant strategies. From what I've heard and seen there is work underway in almost all of these categories. I don't think the future for 0ad is that bleak to be honest. Thanks to all the devs and contributors who've put in time for 0ad!

The need for sniping to win an engagement in 0ad a26 doesn't come from overkill. There are numerous ways to reduce and induce overkill that aren't sniping. Sniping originates from the lack of combat value of melee units (some champions can be valuable, but not very). Hopefully @real_tabasco_sauce's melee rebalance can deprecate sniping when compared to traditional micro exampes like @Atrik mentioned. While everyone loves to hate sniping, just everyone loved to hate the meat-shield meta before it, automating it will not fix the underlying balance issues that are the root cause. Anyone remember the formation spam micro from a23? I for one really appreciate how far we've come from those days.

What's RL?

Many modern games in a variety of forms like fps rts and whatever have attempted to dumb down, simplify, and remove skills when compared to older games. In RTS games you have strategies and then strategy execution, a higher skill player will beat a lower skill player when using the same strategy and that is expected and good. There are examples of fps and rts games that attempt to "level the playing field" by limiting the advantages that skilled players can develop over unskilled players. The expectation in fps games is that "everyone will have fun", and in rts games the expectation is that "the game will be purely strategic", but in reality it makes the game very shallow and gives no reward for someone who is trying to learn to play better. In fps games an example is removing and simplifying player movement mechanics and learnable gun recoil control. These are things players can learn and master to beat other players, and if they are removed or randomized or automated it makes the game both "noob friendly" and boring to play because once you max out the basic mechanics there is nothing else to learn. In Rts games such as Aoe4 you can see that strategies for different civs are decided entirely by which "landmark" you choose when you age up. The landmarks usually have some automatic, non-executable bonus that has no actionable effect on the game, the game-winning actions of the player are focused on to one simple A or B decision of what landmark to build. Another example from aoe4 is the removal of opportunities for battle micro, where battles become entirely decided by previous eco and landmark choices. RTS games should absolutely have skills involved, strategy execution should take skill. It gives games depth, makes them more fun, and improves player retention. Removing opportunities for learning skills and strategy execution will have a negative effect on 0ad. I'm not saying that sniping is a good thing, its just that when aspects of the game are optimally automated, we effectively lose those features of the game.

Will there be a draft of civs? or will we do normal tg style where we could all be gauls if we wanted. I think it would be pretty simple to go t1 pick, 2 t2 picks, 2 t1 picks, 2 t2 picks, and then 1 t1 pick.

good find!

@Atrik I totally agree that spamming alt-clicks to win a fight is not a good place for the meta to be at, but I think adding automated tools that are optimized for the best results don't just remove clicks, they also remove the game we enjoy. This stands in stark contrast to the default unit and structure behavior which is not optimized and needs player engagement to get better results, meaning that players need skills to execute strategies as opposed to choosing them from a menu. I think the best case scenario is that we have a successful melee/ranged rebalance effort that makes alt-clicking less powerful.

RTS games have a focus on using strategies to beat opponents, however good rts games force players to execute those strategies using skill, focus, and multitasking. To see an example of this compare the success of AoE 2 to AoE 4. In order to execute strategies in Aoe4 players just choose a landmark to age up which decides their strategy and then follow a formulaic build order. There is nothing inherently good about reducing the clicks needed to execute strategies in 0ad like ProGUI does. I am not upset yet about proGUI only because I haven't lost to it yet, but I am sure that it will happen sooner or later. Definitely not. Unlike the ProGUI army composition manager and population generator, this feature is not optimized. Some players spread out their units and focus them so that they gather the right resources and gather them efficiently. In other cases and situations, players rely on the automatic behavior of the storehouse, accepting the inefficiency, because their focus is on more important things.

interesting point @halep. I really don't think its healthy for players to have to investigate each other for having cheat mods so I think some kind of identifier should be emplaced. I think genuine GUI mods or visibility mods, such as autociv, feldmap, and some others that don't have macros should be left as they are as they don't cause balance problems.

Deathmatch and revealed map are fair since it applies to everyone. ProGUI is not since players can choose to use it in a game where other people don't use it. Right now there is not really a mutual agreement not to use it in multiplayer, and my worry is that it could become the standard for multiplayer because people want to use it to win. If it becomes the standard for multiplayer, then people who enjoy the game without the automated "easy mode" won't be able to find games to join.

While its obvious the need for sniping comes from a balance situation that can be improved, I don't think auto-sniping would help improve gameplay. I am also very concerned about other things in the pro-GUI mod but this one would be most OP by far.

Like all realism based changes, I'm ok with it as long as it is a well thought out mechanic for gameplay purposes. Realism isn't fun by itself.

If someone has 80 skirms and 20 pikemen and they snipe your ranged units then they will win. Citizen skirms do more damage than champion melee units, so even melee damage from champions can be ignored to some extent. another simpler possibility is they could have had a better army, or more upgrades.

Option/alt: individually task units. This can make you win any fair fight in a26, as well as gather resources and build buildings more efficiently.

free siege I think is hard to balance. If we make the train time slower it will add significant time to the “fast siege” strategy. On the other hand more normal train times would result in ram attrition strategies where rams are killed as fast as they are made, which idles units and lets the mace player’s army win at no additional cost (pop space cost is non-negligible ofc so this would be most op for border conflict).

I like the non-random building ai, but I think there should be a target choice component of it as well.

@Mentula Very interesting results. I would expect the auto-batching to be quite powerful economically, because the only reason not to use autoqueue as it is in a26 is that when you have 1-by-1 training you can start to float resources, which causes the economic return rate advantage of smaller batches (ie 1 by 1) to be offset by the negative economic effect of having unspent resources. With automatically scaling batch sizes, you can ensure that you are using up your resources while ensuring 0 idle time, all while not paying attention to the barracks. Earlier we were discussing the unfair advantage purely from the standpoint of focusing more on military, but considering that it causes a faster boom even in non-combat situations is really concerning. Obviously for testing purposes you have to isolate the economic effect, but it is important to keep in mind the compounding effect that increased military focus would have on the advantage of proGUI.

I'm against all macros, so the "solution" I am most in favor of is no solution at all.

Usually units (people) do all the seeing in the game. If you have plenty of units around compared to the number of buildings you will be able to see far and wide. In a standard multiplayer game, especially team games, you can usually know what is happening over 100% of the map by late city phase.

Interesting developments! There has been work by @real_tabasco_sauce to give melee units more combat value which would go a long way to make sniping a secondary form of micro, with actual movement, formations, and positioning being more important. Sniping, automatic or not, is not a great place for the game to be. During fall of 2021, the meta was all about melee units (mainly pikemen) allowing ranged units to be invincible. Around that time I learned how to snipe using option/alt after watching berhudar spread women out on his berries and since then I have been teaching players to snipe who are frustrated/want to learn how. I figured if everyone knew about it it would be fair, but its just not good to have such a powerful micro technique not be obvious to newer players, 0ad in multiplayer right now is basically divided by those who snipe and those who don't. I suppose we just have to all vote for @real_tabasco_sauce's melee rework when its on the ballot

In settings you can also adjust the hp fraction that classifies the unit as wounded or not. Usually the units that I want to evacuate are expensive champions which usually take a lot of damage before dying, so I set it to 1/4 or 1/5 of total hp.

There are a lot of maps that aren't much fun to play. Its a bit more serious in multiplayer too, where 80% of the time mainland is the map of choice. If I recall correctly, someone was working on a series of multiplayer optimized maps, which would be lovely to see.

The K means a lot, it means 1000. From a gameplay standpoint if you see a K by any resource, it means you need to do more fighting and less gathering with your units, ie spend that resource that you have more than 10,000 of.