Yekaterina

I am not sure about formations, but I can tweak the stats from the XML files and test it out locally. To be honest the only formation I use is close order

Siege towers are already vulnerable to sword cavalry. To take it further we can give them no hack and crush armour. Slingers do 5.5 pierce and no crush. This is not great against siege. We should change it to 3 crush and 1 pierce, so that they are better against siege. I also noticed that ranged infantry do not have a crush resistance but spearmen have a crush resistance of 5. Perhaps we should give ranged infantry some crush resistance as well? If slingers can take on siege towers then Celts and Athens are sorted. To stop the Mauryan archers we can use a mixture of pikemen and skirmishers. The archers will be bulldozed by pikemen syntagma. The only catch is if Mauryan player mixes some spear and sword into their formation. In this case pikes die instantly and the strategy fails. The solution is to give pikemen more hack and crush armour, not just pierce. We can boost the spear and pikes just for Hellenic civs and Celts, excluding archer civs from the bonus. I can edit the XML files to make it so. The Mauryan elephants are harder to deal with. If we give spear, pike and skirmishers bonus against elephants then that would be smooth. We can also limit it to non-elephant civs. I also noticed something interesting: all archer civs are elephant civs...

@Lion.Kanzen @Stan` I have tripled the attack speed of the spearman but also decreased its damage by two-thirds (1 hack, 1 pierce). The damage per second is the same but he has faster reaction, which is reasonable in battle. ele vs 3 spear.webm

elef vs spear.webm This is a demonstration of 1 spearman vs 1 Mauryan elephant. I had healers to prevent it from dying. The attack rate of the spearman was 1500ms, I can't remember the default attack rate. I would imaging they can attack quite quickly because they have been training to stab people for their whole professional career I suggest maybe 500ms? But to balance that we decrease the damage.

@Lion.Kanzen should this apply to just Greeks or all spearmen?

Yes, I will send you a video

I edited the xml file for infantry spearman to give it 5x bonus against elephants. I changed the pierce to 5 and hack to 3, because I think spearmen should be pretty decent at melee. Also very low prepare time because the dudes should be ready for battle. Hope this will help: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Entity parent="template_unit_infantry_melee"> <Attack> <Melee> <AttackName>Spear</AttackName> <Damage> <Hack>3</Hack> <Pierce>5</Pierce> <Crush>0</Crush> </Damage> <MaxRange>4</MaxRange> <PrepareTime>50</PrepareTime> <RepeatTime>1500</RepeatTime> <Bonuses> <BonusCavMelee> <Classes>Cavalry</Classes> <Multiplier>3.0</Multiplier> <Classes>Elephant</Classes> <Multiplier>5.0</Multiplier> </BonusCavMelee> </Bonuses> <PreferredClasses datatype="tokens">Human</PreferredClasses> </Melee> </Attack> <Cost> <Resources> <wood>50</wood> </Resources> </Cost> <Identity> <GenericName>Spearman</GenericName> <Tooltip>Counters: 3× vs Cavalry.</Tooltip> <VisibleClasses datatype="tokens">Spearman</VisibleClasses> </Identity> <Loot> <wood>5</wood> </Loot> <Resistance> <Entity> <Damage> <Hack>5</Hack> <Pierce>5</Pierce> <Crush>5</Crush> </Damage> </Entity> </Resistance> <Sound> <SoundGroups> <attack_melee>attack/weapon/spear_attack.xml</attack_melee> </SoundGroups> </Sound> </Entity>

Very nice idea. This would boost the Greeks a lot. Do you think the Chinese need something like this? They have neither rams nor elephants. What about Romans? I guess they can do pretty well at defending against elephants it's just they lack a bit of attacking options now considering catapults are nerfed.

OP!2021-04-27 17-45-36.mkv

That is basically Delenda Est... 300 stone for barracks is too expensive for 300 starting resource. Most players in A24 build more than 2 barracks. I think current cost for barracks is great. Moving champions back to fortress is great, but I would still like siege workshops. It would be a disaster to train both of them from the same building. Will archery range be in A25? Stable cost is nice either way Not sure what you mean by wooden tower. If it can count as a town phase structure, that would be very good news.

Thanks guys I am no good at art.

I managed to modify a file which ended up giving Marcus Claudius Maximus increase the attack of all cavalry in 120 meters radius by 820%. All pikemen within 160 metres radius of Ptolemy Philopator have health of 580.

I have a feeling that public.zip is the one you are looking for

Just take a look at Ratings disputes and Offence reportings forum As long as it is multiplayer it involves some degree of competition, and we need to make that competition fair.

@Player of 0AD did you install via apt or snap? if snap then everything is in ~/snap/0ad If apt then should be in the same folder as mods. You should see a zipped A24 folder, extract that and edit files inside.

Make elephants have the same armour and speed as dogs?

I mean a built-in voice chat function in the lobby and in multiplayer games, just like there is already a text chat. If you have played PUBG then that is what I mean. Not all players can agree to use the same platform due to incompatibility / trust issues / privacy, so if 0AD can be its own telephone then that would be great.

Ok. How about 1 pierce, 1 hack, 1 crush ?

Elephants are already vulnerable to skirmisher and archers; they have quite small pierce shield. Decreasing health is the easiest way. Also an elephant would definitely die if it gets hit by a boltshooter or catapult directly.

Would you agree that differentiation is less important than balance? It is a competitive game after all and back in A23 we had more differentiation and it was less balanced. Celts were unstoppable but now at least we have 3 ways to counter archer civs, so you see people choosing a wide range of civs other than just the 2 OP ones. Instead of differentiating civs, why don't we integrate them?

Mumble is a good idea. We can even implement voice chat. The only catch of mumble is some players don't have good quality stereo headphones, making the game unfair on them. (I do have 1 so I am ok with that)

I want elephants to be strong against infantry and not so strong against my siege towers ; ) To counteract the increased attack I massively cut their health so they can be killed quicker and do less damage.

Elephants were used to shock enemy infantry and cavalry instead of knocking down fortresses, therefore I propose the following changes in their stats to make them more historically realistic and less OP for gameplay. Civs without elephants are very difficult to play because elephants can walk faster than rams and towers by default and take them out, giving elephant civs a huge defensive advantage. 1. Change the hack damage to pierce damage. Elephant trunks can bash other units and do huge crush damage, that I agree. However, their tusks were more capable at thrusting / piercing rather than hacking. Mauryans installed dagger blades onto elephant tasks to stab the enemy to death. This would make them much much more effective against enemy infantry / cavalry instead of buildings and siege, although their huge crush damage can still take out a siege weapon without much effort. When I played against an AI their elephant needed 3-4 hits to take out a pikeman, which is ridiculous as it would be able to throw away 5 at a time. 2. No elephant racism. Asian and African elephants were not that different in size, and the amount of food needed to feed one is approximately the same. Sometimes an African elephant might even be bigger than an Asian one, therefore there should be no difference in stats. I suggest we use identical values for both 'ethnic groups'. 3. Reduce health. 850 health is way too much for an elephant, normally an elephant will die after being hit by a few javelins. I suggest we reduce it down to 450 for all. This way non-elephant civs would not feel too disadvantaged, considering everyone has rams. 4. Berserker mode and area damage I really like the suggestion of elephants dealing group melee damage. We can even add a negative aura for enemy units due to fear. The berserker mode from Delenda Est is also a great addition to elephants. If elephant civs don't have rams then nothing needs to be changed. Elephant + ram + ranged is too OP.

Perhaps we can give Iberians and Celts a champion slinger unit: crush attack: 15 pierce: 2 HP: 120 (like any other ranged champion) Cost: 100 food, 100 stone, 10 wood.

May I ask, what is the point to this discussion? Are we going to add new maps or civs based on this? Or are we going to change some game mechanics?