badosu

Yeah, I'm not sure I use much stuff that has changed, but thanks for the heads up

I think you underestimate the power of user friendliness. I think redownloading SVN has been one of the more challenging things I've ever done technically in the last few months. I'd wish I was joking.

I mean, if changes are only stats, new techs, buildings, artwork etc.. Why would engine change affect it? You already have `mod.io` :-). Every week a new version is released.

That is not a bad idea actually, would require collaboration with the development team though. To have a mod apart from 'public' that contains all balance changes in a25. All new development is done there then the files are replaced before release. That would work only until incompatible changes (that can't be done on a mod) are implemented in A25.

Thanks @Samulis for your hard work, even though I feel it's not comfortable the new sounds indeed are way more realistic and show more refinement.

I feel ya. The heroes standardized health was something I never was a huge fan of (without other adjustments). Some other concerns: sound, lack of communication on the a24 release (all that effort for the 1v1 invitational thrown away), etc. Hopefully something that could be improved. Unfortunately that threw me off completely.

I get your point and it's a fair one. Keep in mind one thing though, before we're able to differentiate civs we need a baseline, this baseline was achieved even if in detraction of other aspects. Now we know how to differentiate civs with champs, cav, slingers, ranged, melee all fair against each other (and no dancing!). To be frank I'd have been more careful with the champ and techs rework but I stand for the team with their decision. The only thing we should have instead is some way of pushing balance updates more often (as I mentioned with weekly builds). E.g. increase a bit the bonuses brits had, give or buff some good tech for persia (as mentioned with nicean horses) and we should be able to test it on a weekly basis and iterate over it. The advantage of having a baseline is that you can make changes to each civ at a time. e.g. after that buff now a civ will be better than others, and that is cool we can now buff and differentiate another to be comparable (but in a different aspect) and then so on.

Try updating `mod.json` without the a23 restriction. If it works it works! I'll try to update my system and a24 on the weekend.

Believe in the process, the first release that actually accounts for balance taking player experience into consideration will always be controversial. It had to start from somewhere, remember all cav or all champ metas, how is it that different? If you feel a game is slower you can make proposals, e.g. decrease economy requirements overall (buildings/training cost) etc... Granted, 0ad does not make it easy to provide accountable feedback, no continuous testing mechanism or a better platform (forum is too difficult to track and prioritize channels and discussions). Testing dev version requires dealing with SVN some technical prowess, synced rev, etc.. Hopefully with 6-mo cycle it will be more straightforward (though I'd better have a weekly release, make an AppImage for linux, exe for windows built by CI gg). The only thing that has turned me away are the sounds, maybe I'm a bit autistic but I can't absolutely play with those sounds so preeminent in the foreground (unit selection, unit move, fight actions, etc). Maybe I'll play when there is (or I make) a mod to have unit selections/actions sound fader.

Also, don't be surprised if you die because you didn't scout dogs and counter it properly. Any meta change that punishes lack of scouting will be controversial in my opinion since so few players do it properly. I'm not sure I should comment in these terms, since I'm not even playing regularly anymore but I know the effort that goes into balancing and the fact this is the first 0ad release we actually released with actual player feedback (and implementation). Chill out, we'll figure things out, as long as we continue and improve the feedback process. (pls enable weekly a25 lobby :-))

Remember also that most are probably not taking use of loom (that is now only a 100 food) and the fact that on phase 2 you can take melee resistance upgrade for low cost. People need to be less alarmist of balance 'issues' until the meta has stabilized, especially on a small low competitive community.

Both balanced maps and monitor mod should be straightforward to update, (bal maps more so) I'll see if I can do it this weekend. I haven't tested but just removing the a23 constraint in mod.json could be enough for bal maps. a24 isn't even available for Arch yet xD

I've seen TG ranking working well (enough) for autobalance (not in 0ad). The small community issues are still present but with a bigger amount of tgs in 0ad i'd expect it to work better. Granted it uses trueskill but I wonder if ELO has something similar. Anyways, since the lobby implementation is separate from the main game it should be straightforward to implement without having to wait for a new release. It would improve Quality-of-Life considerably imo.

It was not forgotten, people have raised concerns over hero standardization multiple times. All other aspects of the game are better now at least. And I'd rather have less hero abuse than a more rounded hero balance, so it's fine by now. And something that can be iterated over.

Remember, for each incomprehensible seemingly redundant and void code path there's a use case

Can we have the female SWAT team as an easter egg? 100 melee dmg, 50% pierce/crush/hack armor :`-)

Hmmm.. I'm not sure about that. With regard to meta changes, I think it stabilizes pretty fast and is actually safer to do it this way since you have a constant stream of feedback (which might be invaluable early on). That said, you are the guys on the frontlines and you know what makes sense for the team. And as always, thank you for the huge effort, 0ad rocks

Engine changes are compartmentalized, the lobby is dissociated from the version going on but can detect if a different map/engine is being used. Also having dedicated servers handle that, current the clusters run on very inexpensive VPS instances. That said I'm not sure that would be practical for 0ad, just having it weekly would be great already (e.g. updates on wednesdays or thursdays to identify issues with new version before weekend).

Look again :-) https://www.beyondallreason.info/ https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason

Bar has an autoupdater that does it on every new commit, it's pretty great for alpha development. I think having an 'alpha' lobby together with an autoupdater would do wonders for the dev-feedback cycle, does not even need to be per commit, nightly or weekly would suffice. Could keep the 'stable' one and balance the load to whichever players prefer the most. I think the result could be surprising and exciting :-).

Thank you for the exciting new work Hopefully we will see this in A25, we got a feature freeze recently (the announcement was not public for a while) and am not sure this is too safe to pull in in a short timeframe. If the team deems so, great! Anyways, just to say I appreciate the innovations you're bringing and that exercising patience is somewhat important.

Mods can do whatever they want :-). 0ad Empires Ascendant, the mainline game also called 'vanilla', strives for historical accuracy from the period between 300bc-300ad. In this case I don't think you'll find too many other factions to incorporate in a compatible manner (xiongnu and han certainly are), but I'd love to know if there are.

Bar has a functionality in lobby where you can type `!preset team|duel|ffa` and it works well. Would be interesting to have a default chat bot that can listen to similar commands. With regard to other points, the preset or map flags should enable that. Would also deprecate having to use autociv or fgod as a patch for that, for example `!balance` automatically balances per rating (though ideally we'd have to calculate and use rating for team games instead of 1v1), as its done there. One can set a `!clan <myclanname>` so balance can prioritize player who like to play together. I know people (and myself) complain about rating not being reliable, but that's only because we calculate it on a very specific circumstance (rated enabled in 1v1). IMO we should be safe to enable tg rating for all tgs, it's what's most played anyway and people shouldn't really bother that much with it. Nubs will have a good notion of actual rating, experienced players will have a better experience, caring about tg rating is much less stressful since if you have a bad rating you will be included in teams with better players so I think that should be fine. Most map decisions can be performed by voting as instead of the rooms boss, voting would help considerably. Anyway, a bit off-topic but some food for inspiration (and A25). I would not have any expectancy of having balancing changes to maps in A24 as we are feature frozen and the changes would not be trivial (and tbh not deemed essential).

Should be straightforward enough to use the new map flags and include it as a 'preset'. Balanced Maps codebase is not in a state I'd deem easy to port to upstream due to not following conventions though. I'd be more than happy with assisting with information on our extensively tested, and iterated over, balancing decisions though.

Yeah, the sound in game sounds similar. The problem is that its a very low heavy sound that distracts, not saying its an issue with the realism of the sound itself, but an holistic approach to sound design (considering all together arrows, javelin throws, melee 'shield thump', building, resource fetching, etc.. All of these overlap in the same frequencies. Although high frequency sounds are more annoying they are easier to mix.