alre

depends on which particular cases of the current version of the game you want to avoid, in which a unit is targeting another that is past the nearest enemy. why break the consistency with garrisoned units?

no. way more radical changes to formations would be needed for that, otherwise it's like charging in the A25 RCs.

I can't seem to find @ChronA's mod, which I was sure I had installed. anyway, this one attached should be the tentative one I realised. Notice that friendly fire is not turned on, and at first, I was skeptic about it, but I have to admit that if I think about it now, I think I realised that the directional armor+ff combo would be a hard reset for 0 AD meta, without any form of the "melee on front, ranged behind" tactic, which would be for the best probably. Only problem is the forced extra micro, I think it's unfair to punish macro-managers and newbies making their men kill each other. directional-damage.zip

attack code is pretty simple, one of these days I can upload a mod that introduces directional armor, which is based on a previous mod by @ChronA. his mod is for A24, mine is for A25. in any case, we are talking about a few changes to javascript code. edit: I may add that I never advertised my mod because I wasn't satisfied with the result. units in 0AD rotate quickly and suddenly, and it's hard to appreciate the effect of directional damage.

I bet. it's a terrible idea, players would hate each other for picking romans.

there is another option: soldiers building rams on the field. wow has the code for it if I remember well.

how does the bell works in these cases? I would make use of shared code for the two fearures. in any case, I suggest having an "error sound" that gives feedback that the order failed. we can consider another edge case: there is not enough garrison space for all men. in that case the error sound would play as well. maybe we can also make so that units who manage to run for shelter are taken out of the selection, and those who are left out can be given new orders seamlessly.

@Lion.Kanzen's post just triggered a fun thought: if you wanted to completely destroy a building, you would do it by hand, but if you wanted to conquer it, you may want to use a ram to get inside.

p2 club men are too costy in metal, rams are much more convenient. clubmen rush is almost never tried (although sometimes it is) but rams rush would definitely be a thing if rams were just moved to p2, at the expense of civs which don't have good ram counters in the early game. if only 0AD went over this silly thing about pierce+hack damage for polearms, moving rams to p2 would not be a problem and there would be an increase in strat differentiation.

queuing garrison orders is how I do it right now, although it can be a bit inefficient when the garrisonable buildings are not at the same side of you retreating forces, and inefficiency while being chased can be catastrophic. that's why I suggested allowing it on a selection of men instead of from the cc. it would only affect them. the utility would be that you save your men from a sudden overwhelming attack and at the same time you save your buildings from capture, meanwhile you can regroup the rest of your men and maybe ask for help from your allies, and think about the next move. I've saved desperate situations using garrison order to deny favorable fights to attacking forces.

same as the alarm bell basically, but with men instead of women, and possibly from selecting the men who you want to call back, instead of from selecting the cc.

strongly agree on the 'retreat to barracks' command, as already stated in previous discussions.

you are right when you say that clear and throughout design is a good thing when developing software. this is something 0AD lacks. but don't let you be distracted by it. that level of design comes right before implementation, and should be the product of the dialogue between the developers who are currently working on that issue, and the community (in a corporate setting, that would be called customer oriented - also consider the Agile statement that working software is more important than comprehensive documentation, and that responding to change is more important than following a plan). if you put design too much before development, than you are building on quicksand: even the most polished design may prove ineffective or brocken in the end, for whatever reason you couldn't foresee. a design document should indeed look much more alike what hyperion proposed, and finally, it would be very useful if really adopted by the team and its management: I can see here that people are still confused about what civ differentiation should achieve, what level of micro should be required, how good is rock-paper-scissors design, what's should it be the purpose of territory, what level of snowballing is best, why some tactics are considerd abusive and some aren't, etc...

you know what's funny? if 0 AD went trough the kind of rework borg- asks, right now the first two groups to choose from would be greek and non-greek.

yeah. it's pointless to have more details on the design documents, ifthey're not going to be used anyway. I recon that some solutions that avoid micro may be bad for other reasons, but it's against the doc to argue that micro should be empowered for its own sake, and still people sometimes argue exactly that, and noone ever cares to bring up the design docs.

the purpose of a design document is to fix things and avoid always rediscussing them. the document is not enough in itself, a real leadership is necessary to make people respect the document. we actually already have one, the problem is noone cares (the base principles of 0AD design could still be taken as valid, and they say some very clear things about micromanagement, but I remember seing micro role in the game being questioned many many times, and noone ever pointing out the design principles).

I don't unserstand.

and honestly, even if I had an onager on a war ship, I wouldn't put its projectiles on fire. that would mean to risk putting on fire my own ship, and I can't see why someone would want to take such a big risk.

a catabult (ballista) is basically a big bow that uses torsion instead of flection, you can aim it the same way as a normal sized bow. in its size I mean. the picture you posted depicts an onager, also called catapult, but not of the tipe you would use on a ship. a bolt shooter would be more useful than that.

how comes it can't shoot directly? the projectiles don't need to pass the deck.

what about the fact that a catapult can sink a ship, while arrows can be of little effect on a ship covered by a canopy? siege weapons weren't very common on warships for what I know, so you can bet they weren't that important, but there is still a conception among historians, that catapults were a relevant tactical element in mediterranean ancient warfare.

the problem was the distance between the balancing discussions and the game development. big changes are introduced to the game without previous notice, apparently being part of personal plans by each dev, not disclosed to the larger community. on the other hand, there is not enough effort on the balancing part for testing game changes, which in turn depends on technical difficulties, small user base, low engagement with the game development and its management. these are my two cents, from the perspective of a "balancing advisor".

tributes received could be taken out someone's eco score. it would make sense I think, and it wouldn't be that big of a change, but I guess it's also ok to not count tributes, scores can't be perfect anyway.

quite the opposite: if someone is efficient at gathering, he will spend everything, redundancy and efficiency are contrary. also wasteful players will have low returns from their eco investements and will have lower eco scores in the end. tributes should better count as spent though.

champion pikemen are outstanding meatshields and champion infantry in general is pretty good to have mixed to your army, the problem is that it costs too much. champion cavalry is also expensive, but it adds up stats-wise to CS cavalry, which is already a unit whith little economic value: while CS infantry is very iseful for the economy, more than a very few cavalrymen are a pure military investement, and thus champ infantry represent a limited value gain compared to CS inf, whereas champ cav is a strict improvement compared to CS cav, and are worth the extra cost. the solution? reduce the price of unused infantry champs and reduce the stats of OP champ cav.