alre

I see one of the roads always passes trough a mountain. maybe the roads should follow a bitmap like altitude.

logically, to avoid people shooting missiles at you, you would go hide, or just attack them. It doesn't sound to me like a fun game one where people has to attack ground instead of targeting enemy units, and they can just move to avoid your fire because your men are too dumb to keep targeting them. It sounds lame and mechanical.

I don't see how that's true. you would just delay by some seconds the production of houses in your build order and you would still risk being blocked.

I'd like the E key retreat, it would be especially useful when being invaded, as the best way to save men is usually to garrison them in barracks and temples and buildings, so those are also safe from capture. On the other hand, it would be nice if the "call to arms" button would also ungarrison all the men who retreated, so they can all come out and push back at once. @Huffman3829 in your case a newly added key stroke won't save your men, it seems like you wait too much before calling them back anyway. If they are hugely outnumbered a retreat may prove pointless anyway, as your men will be slaughtered anyway on their way back. Call back your men as soon as the battle shift away from your favour, don't wait any longer. This is a critical skill. Never commit to a losing position. The success of a retreat also clearly depends on the speed of your men compared to the speed of those chasing them.

nope. that doesn't work with changes to the engine, like this one. c++ needs to be complied, mods need to be not.

I don't have strong feelings about it, it could be good but maybe other solutions could be better. also I don't have much hope that the proposed implementation (bare attack-ground uninformed on where possible targets are) would be any good in practice.

- archers are good for provoking a fight from a distance, but they are not actually good for fighting, never commit to a fight with archers alone - when fighting against pikes, it's worth using swordsmen instead of spearmen, in any case, you need a share of your army to be melee fighters. If you don't have good ranged units (archers are the worst ones in this alpha) just use melee. - everybody give me a like if @BreakfastBurrito_007 comes here proposing to add attack ground to the game

that is not really an aura, I forced into one because I couldn't put it into the engine. I originally designed it to be into the engine aside unit pushing.

the aura can be integrated into unit pushing, for a minimal computational expense overall.

While formations may have a great potential for changing the game, I still think that first of all, we should avoid units overlapping like breezes. I'm very convinced that the pathfinder can work perfectly without units passing trough each other all the time. I attach here a simple mod I made that tweaks the parameters of unit pushing to limit what I think are the shortcomings of this new pathfinder: wild unit overlapping and irrelevance of chokepoints. From the video below you can see that the number of units is always easy enough to guess from the size of the mob, and that cavalry slows down a bit when it has to pass trough a chockepoint. Remember that this is just a demonstration made trough the simple tweaking of some parameters, one can achieve much better results by changing the c++ script that defines unit pushing. Atlas - Scenario Editor - maps_scenarios_prova.xml 2021-10-27 09-56-42.mp4 Atlas - Scenario Editor - maps_scenarios_prova.xml 2021-10-27 09-56-42.mp4 For instance, the aura that I gave to cavalry to enforce friction between units next to each others (not the same as in Res gestae mod, although I invite you to try that as well), could be integrated into the unit pushing system whitout much problem. Also I tried giving it to infantry as well, but the game wouldn't allow me because of limitations on the rendering of auras, which would not be a problem if that was made with c++. In general, it could be possible to change the game in a finer and also more effective way by tweaking the engine instead of just trough a mod, I can try it, I just don't know how to compile the engine (and my VS try license expired). Please let me know what do you think. I believe there is no reason for not trying to change this, and I hope I convince you as well. As always, I claim no right on the mod attached, which isn't really that creative so... you can add it to the game and whatever. stronger_pushing.pyromod

I tested it, but I didn't look at the code. I was under the impression that smaller turns the unit would also slow down, but less. I must have been confused by the actual turning time, that was already there. Maybe the best result could be achieved if for all turns that are sharper than <InstantTurnAngle> rotation time could be taken down near 0 (seeing a horse spinning around itself is not the best one can ask), but after the turn then acceleration applies? I wouldn't think acceleration looks quite good on infantry though. Still, other units like ships and chariots seem like they may very good use of acceleration. I would love to see this feature used to the best, but yet again I must insist that it doesn't break this hardly achieved balance (I agree with @a 0ad player here). Once again, I think that single/multiplayer is largely a false dichotomy.

well I did test Valihrant turn rates mod at the time, and I liked most of it. I'm not sure what do you mean when you say I didn't bother.

yet they messed up the game balance and meta. we already decided to revert that change for a reason.

yeah, this patch slows down movement, because introduces acceleration time, without increasing max speed. on the other hand, unit pushing sped up movement, because it avoided "stop bumps" and made it possible to have units that actually push other units in the back making them run forward, which was previously absolutely impossible. "Balancing team" wasn't really aware of how deep the consequences this would have had. In general, I wouldn't mind the game to be more slow. I'd like booming to stay this fast more or less, but battles are currently quite a bit too fast in my opinion. This however, is a complicate matter, and acceleration per se is a simpler one: for how it is implemented, it just means that turning is slower, and since A24, we know what that means. If it was implemented just for cavalry, it would still be problematic. The main complaint about slower turning rates in A24 was precisely about cavalry. To make cav more strategic and realistic, acceleration is not enough.

because of slower turn times, cavalry was harder to use in A24, and noone liked that. Noone would cav rush, noone would use cavalry except for cav archers. what's that?

I thought it would be easier, but I see the problems now. Maybe if audio chat was added to 0AD one day, something like this could be made easier, already avaible for the observers of a commented game.

In SVN version of the game, units don't move at full speed right after they are told to, but take a brief acceleration time to get to full speed. If told to turn, they start moving after the turn with a speed that is slower when the turn is sharper. Effectively, this is the same thing as having slower unit turn rates. I think it looks better though, and I'm not sure about how this may have a better effect on how ranged units correct throwing direction (but it looks promising). What puzzles me, is that A24 turn times were unpopular and have been corrected in A25 for that reason. However, they are coming back now with another name, also I'm not sure, but they feel even slower than in A24 to me. The motive for the change, apparently, is to avoid dancing, but I never saw anyone complaining about dancing lately. Maybe, now that unit acceleration has been introduced in the engine, turn rate and acceleration stats can be tweaked as to make turns overall not slower than they are now, which is what the community has been asking before.

that works for me! 0AD has a lot of flaws (it's an alpha after all), but seeing how many opportunities for a change are always open makes me appreciate the game a lot more. yes but also no. don't underestimate little stat adjustments. they make the difference between A24 meta dominated by archers, and A25 meta where archers are crap, mercs are OP, and thus MP matches last a lot less and employed strategies are completely different. Ideally, for the game to be varied and thus enjoyable for a longer time, a wide variety of strategies should all be viable at the same time. Remember that MP has the potential to enlarge engagement time indefinitely.

thanks! actually, I think I explained myself poorly: I only meant the audio commentary. You could broadcast them live and we could listen to it while in the game watching the match. To me it sounds like a real step up for the experience of spectating a game, and I would enjoy it a lot. You can make the video for youtube after the editing. I don't know if this is good for you, but I hope you like the idea.

problem is there are no skirmish maps good for bigger team games.

about the Sunday live commentaries, could you maybe stream them live someway? It would be super cool to watch the game on 0AD with the added commentary on the background.

I don't think ranged units are always more valuable than melee. If you are losing melee units, you usually want to replace it, then an extra melee is more valuable than an extra ranged in that case. Also melee units have steeper ranking benefits, so increasing the value of melee units may actually result in heavier snowballing probably (kind of what we have seen with melee cav in this alpha: when it starts rolling it just gets stronger).

turtling is not a bad thing, many players like that strategy and should be given the opportunity to enjoy it. hence, there is no need to just penalise turtling in every change to the game. actually, turtling is pretty weak in this alpha and I don't think that buffing it would be bad at all.

and it's very much into Russia's mainland.

nice!