alre

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.

p2 rush is good only for some civs. you could try spartan skiri

cousin claimed one or two months ago, that melee+slingers is more effective than melee+javs, but of course there's the fact that slingers are more expensive. then there is trash archers.

is this guy jerking off?

yeah, clearly they are more interested in game accessibility than in botanics. in reality there is a whole lot of trees that give edible fruits and can also be cut down for wood, figs for instance give a high quality wood, but in 0AD can only be exploited for food. at AoE they decided to have food and wood gathering separated in order to simplify game mechanics, and they had food gathering limited to berry bushes because they are easier to render in a clearly different way. this is mindful designing. something 0AD never bothered about.