alre

unnecessary. slingers and archers were also used with success against cavalry.

is there any reason to believe persian ice houses were used outside settlements, for hunt? just add hunter huts buildable directly by cavalry, in neutral territory.

consider that persians are already strong in late game. saving pop space and boosting corrals are both late game bonuses (additional to pop bonus).

yeah, @wraitii corrected this in A26. I had the impression that it's not enough, but I never bothered to test a new set of parameters. If you want to, check this discussion:

that's not how it works unfortunately. by slowing the pace of the game the mechanics don't change, micro-management only becomes more important because you can give your units finer instructions with the added time.

the game doesn't do anything to make you believe that persian sparabara (translated in game as shield bearer - spearman is only listed in little among their many classes) is the same unit as athenian hoplites. I believe it makes no sense to assume that random players understand that all CS units with a spear (but not a pike) have the same stats. whatever notion you have about history and fighting, you wouldn't think that persian shield bearers have the same stats than all other spearmen, and the only way the game tells you that is by showing you the units stats. change those and the problem is solved. they will just be used for walling like houses. I wouldn't assume that a mostly agricultural, patriarchal society like the ancient persian one, had many women learning to use the bow. just saying.

I was referring to the same concept that you described as avoiding "Fastest click wins". Namely, I had in mind those players that discuss and propose new features trying to preserve or even raise the level of "skill" required to win fights, where "skill" is basically APM.

the thing with simmetry is not that it's boring (variation is still possible), but that, by exploring a part of the map, you get to know another one, which is kinda weird.

just give to all ranged units the same stats already, if you want them all to play the same way. that won't be much different than increasing their speed, just less engaging I guess. don't need it, they do fine already against cav.

@#$%ing no. rushing woodlines with archers is very frustrating, next to masochist, because skirms "dodge the trees" easily and come kill the archers like it's nothing. even sniping over spearmen doesn't help that much.

fortifications of the humblest kind will always be a hard counter to archers. also even in a24 horse archers could be countered by armies of spartan hoplites (or the such) by just hitting the persian city like a meetball of death full of rams. please give back to archers some use, raise their speed.

the queue is several months long

also it would be nice to have immortals switch spear and shield with bow and arrow.

on second thought, this shouldn't change the way persian play too much. they already have 220 max pop, so they can have more people farming anyway.

just buff all archers. very good. a differentiation between shield bearers and line spearmen is overdue. also add hoplite mercenaries. doesn't a26 have two cav in p1 for persia? that I think is enough of a differentiation. leave something to p2. nice. use DE ice houses for that.

no

and how archers are crap. archer rushes used to be fun in a23 and a24. now they are wasted.

fine. I was thinking about cav in general.

why is that?

I doubt more people on walls would be very useful anyway, they are tricky to use and the resistance bonus does not make up for the loss in mobility. to counter cav it makes a lot more sense to me to give palisades a resistance bonus against them, palisadas would be dedicated counters for cav, easily overcame by infantry.

isn't it ctrl, rather than alt?

ok there has been a lot of comments and a lot of heat, so it took some time to let my thoughts cool down enough for sharing. first of all, I must say I'm sorry for having caused flame, I'm unhappy with how things are going (not a secret) and my criticisms have probably been quite too sour. I shouldn't have said that the state of development of the game is bad, that was completely pointless on my side and it wasn't my place to complain about it. I should have focused solely on the constructive part of my criticism. I'm sorry for spoiling the discussion. now recapping, I think we can agree that the efforts for balancing the game are inefficient, misplaced, and I see three possible solutions to this, all of them being discussed above: - have all balancing staff on svn and phab. changes must be made, discussed, tested, emended on a continuous cycle. - same as above, but on github/gitlab instead. - have a faster release cycle where an official balancing mod can be updated using a different system from the main game (like github) I don't think it's ever been an issue about openness of discussion. balancing simply cannot work if all the testing is made on a game that only gets major releases.

I suggest a more explainatory name for your metric (any two values make a ratio) like "military/economy ratio". conceptually, it's similar to the killed/trained ratio (not shown in the game).

usually it is implied that the development of something has the goal of obtaining a developed thing. but I can see that the dev team has more of a "the trip is the goal" mindset.

that makes totally sense actually. at the present rate though, the game will be finished in half a century, in fact it probably won't unless there is some kind of spur. the game is progressing so slow that it's practically stuck: major mechanics, like capturing and deleting buildings, even though they're considered to be brocken, are not being touched for years. I think you should try to accelerate the development of the game, and that the best way to do that is to have more people contribute to and test the gameplay trough a faster release cycle, in the form of a recommended mod for multiplayer, that gets automatically downloaded in some way. it shouldn't be hard to make up a simple and secure way to make this work. what do you think it would be a good solution?