alre

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?

lol so the *mitigation* strategy for a unit categorization problem is to remake from scratch the whole eco of the game? criticizing the citizen-soldier concept: you are doing it wrong

if you really want that, start by creating a dialogue between the dev team and those who would become part of the new team, empower them and give responsibility to them. I stand by my proposal of having a faster release cycle for the balancing part of the game. problem is, there a good part of the playerbase that doesn't use mods and doesn't know how to. many other players needed a lot of support before learning how to do it. you can make a gameplay changing mod, but you don't want to cut out all those players, when there is already so little. your proposal can't work, unless the game itself makes it easier to download and install new mods (one of them could be the official MP mod).

I expect you to stop using the mouse entirely at some point.

uhm what? also @wraitii, thank you for the insight, but 'incremental changes' is how all software development is made nowadays, it doesn't preclude anything really. you want to get out the deadlock? set the rules and start a decision process. what's the manager doing about this?

and it's wrong. mathematically more and less depend on the metric space you are using, and using the familiar euclidean metric on percentages is pretty naive. An upgrade that raises by 1 the pierce armor of some unit is like canceling one arrow in 10 that hits that unit (maybe not exacly 10 idk), regardless of its original armor value. its health is just as relevant.

there are not, really. life time of soldiers under constant attack increases exponentially with resistance level.

it's not a phylosophical question, it's just bad practice, plain and simple.

levels just hide the complexity. you either blindly accept them, or, if you want to actually understand what's happening, you have to dig in some unpleasant math. would you rather have the shield technologies at the forge say "soldiers gain +1 pierce resistance" or "soldiers receive 10% less pierce damage"? both are simple and correct (reducing some value by 10% twice results in a 19% decrease), but only the second one is also explainatory. the first one actually means nothing at all.

"+10% hack resistance" is not very clear as it doesn't really explain what resistance is, and is not correct if you apply it on percentages. "-10% hack damage suffered" is unambiguos and clear enough.

siege was a pain for me too when I was a new player. sword counter siege is unintuitive and siege pairs well with surprise tactics that are particularly effective (and frustrating) with new players.