submit the patch or make a mod. if the change creates a requirement for civs to have at least 8 ruler names, that's a new requirement codewise and it should be made clear.
I liked this video quite a lot. Maybe pvp onboarding is the true weak spot of RTS.
I also liked his whole onboarding video, the idea that multitasking is the core skill of RTS whole genre is interesting, and the sections about build orders and strategy were good too.
there was never a tide change. just bad balancing.
if competitive players complain about a feature, making that feature optional doesn't change a thing for such competitive players (they'll just work around the change trough shortcuts or whatever), but it does disrupt the game experience for newbes and give them a bad impression of what the game is like when you learn how to optimize your performance.
acyually, I was thinking about something focused on the community mod because it could be merged to a27 and then the community mod would become the standard for pvp games.
time ago, I suggested that a massage would pop up every time someone with an outdated community mod joined the lobby. can you do that?
the latest version to the mod could be retrieved with a web request.
If that's the case, I would try, if possible, to just disallow audio captchas. I don't imagine many visually impaired people to be interested in a game like 0AD.
quite too early for worrying. but in fact I guess the champion units captcha would be a problem for people who look for help because they can't install the game, for instance. too bad, it was a fun idea.
about captchas, something like "which of these is a champion unit" would really work better than anything else, I'm not joking. It's a test too challenging for any AI not spefically trained for it, only thing to worry about would be if we want out the humans who can't solve it as well.