alre

that's the idea. the whole appeal of horse archers comes from there.

kings mounds are the single thing that make most sense for xiongnu to have as wonders. it has been considered that mounds would be pretty bland as a wonder, but the fact that only earth survives now doesn't mean there weren't other decorative elements: a good wonder may be a mound with a series of eyecandy elements taken from modern ovoos.

elephants are fine.

if that was to be added, I'd make it for all champions. sele for example have access to pike champions, who are much more effective meatshields than eles (spear champions are too, although I must reconsider: eles are also quite good meatshields). massing champions has been an issue in this alpha. I wouldn't think that massing mercs has been an issue in itself, because sword cav is usually massed by gaul players too. it's just that sword cav is OP, and that mercs are too strong for their price.

your AI is a lot better than Petra. you should consider merging it into the main game.

"Whoever is playing sucks, because they never make it past the Stone Age." LOL.

you don't say. eles are not particularly good meatshields. if you have the right spare resources everything is easy to produce. btw carth and ptol are both ele civs and very popular in this alpha, as well as sele as you said.

you managed to get your cavalry circled by elephants? it's like turles outmanouvring rabbits. Seriously though, I don't think this is a fight you'd think elephants should lose, in general. Elephants are nicely countered by ranged troops, more so than the equivalent resource value in champion infantry, for instance. Since in MP games you generally see a lot of ranged troops (especially OP javeliners), competitive player almost never use elephants in this last alpha. I guess eles could be nerfed, but ranged troops should be nerfed first.

probably more.

Weren't sheeps used in the A25 trailer to show unit pushing?

You are not an ordinary person by any ancient world standard. People were not just "forced into service", war was very common and people were already aware in time of peace if they were required to fight or not in the next war, and would train in their own community. Also fighters were ofter voluntaries, who had provided by themselves for the weapons and the training, and were compensated with a wager and/or social mobility. There was no "draft" in ancient world. I too sometimes send cav into stables to train, but it never seems like they quite level up. I always need them too soon to enjoy the results.

such building could simply take the place of barracks, that are quite anachronistic, since people in antiquity would generally train for war in the open, often not away from home. just saying.

incomplete answer: 2. yes. unfortunately, 0AD is still in its alpha phase and it's changing a lot from release to release. there is effort to stabilise it, but not warrant whatsoever yet. 7. mods can be made using xml templates and javascript scripts. I'll let more experienced users give their answer to the other questions.

@Freagarach this is the patch. It's my first patch and I didn't really know how to do it, so there are potentially many things wrong, in fact I also created this other patch by mistake, with the other file in my original post proposing the mod. About that, if you are going to make some test, consider that I've being trying to sort unit_list before line 755 (here in the correct diff), but no kind of sorting seems to have any effect, and I have no idea why. For merging the files, and all the phab-related processes, I can take any instruction and try to do them myself, however, I should really know what's the purpose of the parts of the file that you edited in the meanwhile, because noone told me yet.

the fact that it takes another merc strategy to beat carth merc rush actually quite proves the point that mercs are OP. carth merc rush is not all-powerfull, there are ways to resist it, and ways to prevent it, but depending on your civ and the map/other players positions, it may be totally impossible to counter. when your best option to fight sword cav is CS spear cav, it's not fun to try to keep the pace with stronger, cheaper, and faster trained units.

I don't know how to do that. Besides, the mod itself is the patch. Unfortunately, the relevant script has been updated since, in a part that I don't know the working of. @Freagarach made the edit. Maybe he can merge the files, or help.

raise a bigger army. archers are actually pretty weak, so any army will do. in general though, avoid 100% melee armies, use a good share of ranged units, especially when using infantry. 0AD doesn't have hard counters, so army size is always the most relevant factor for winning battles.

try boongui mod.

yes. yes, but not only that. pikes take so long to kill that they manage to be an effective annoyance even without ranged support (or without supporting the ranged guys, you may say). pikes just can't go wasted, they are so good. They also only need micro for when they get lost around hitting farms or such. About all ideas that came up for making civs more unique (some of which I find quite likeable), and about the original subject of the thread, I have a couple more things to say: - always remember that a bonus that gives an objective advantage to a particular player in any specific map, phase of the game, or team arrangement, should be avoided. the strategies available to all civs should be always balanced, at lest in principle. I, as @faction02, reject the idea of civs stronger than others is early game, or wither in late game, and I also don't like how imbalanced is naval warfare currently, it doesn't need more asymmetry, but more balance. - as I already said, and I hope @LetswaveaBook made a good enough argument for that, civs are already actually very different. people keeps asking for more difference because they can't see or can't appreciate what's already there. That's not their fault: for how 0AD is made, differences between civs are quite hard to navigate and understand. Some strategies being feasible with some civs is sometimes only the result of a series of quirks of the game that are very hard to spot, and I still wouldn't know about those strategies if I didn't see someone use them. Actually this is quite true about all RTS games, but is even more true for a game that is in its alpha phase, like 0AD. I'm not saying that civs can't be any more varied than they are now: they could have completely different sets of buildings and techs, like in starcraft, they could have different sets of resources even, different phasing mechanics, like in AOE4, and whatnot, but the level of asymmetry the game already has is not bad at all. I would rather see different playstyles enabled by new game mechanics, than fixate on how to change some civ economy so that it feels different from the others, without any real consequence apart from some eco convenience (not that such features are bad, ptole free houses for instance were very nice, but it can't be said they conveyed any particular playstyle).

This looks like a city building styled proposal, and while I'm not contrary to any such proposals that has the goal of making city building nicer and more immersive, I'm not convinced by this one, because it doesn't seem like it makes cities prettier, on top of the fact that it doesn't really serve 0AD RTS gameplay: synergy between buildings is not fun, and gives birth to forced choices of preferred builds that have poor strategic consequences, if any at all. This is not to say that any concept of synergy in base building should be disregarded, but that more flexible interactions between buildings and units should be considered, that give rise to visible and counterable strategies. Otherwise I don't think it's worth the complication honestly.

I think civs are already very different, competitive players see that and pay attention to adjust their strategies accordingly. The problem is that such differences are not very enjoyable, and it's pointless to try to introduce other differences yet, if they are not going to make the game enjoyably different. For instance, ptole houses and drop sites are considerably cheaper, which make ptole boom quite faster, but that doesn't streak quite as much in players experience as free houses, like they were in A23. When that bonus was dropped, there was much complaint, and it appears we still haven't learnt what makes people happy in terms of civ differentiation. But that is a eco bonus, it doesn't affect military composition and strategies. I want now propose a small analysis of how varied are military units in the game now, viable tactics, and how this can affect different civs. ---- Each civ starts with a particular cav type available to phase 1, for this reason, cav rushes play quite differently among different civs: spear cav rushes don't feel like jav cav rushes, which don't feel like camel rushes, they are quite balanced tactics that feel different from each other. This is a successful differentiation. Unfortunately, sword cav doesn't quite fit in here because they are simply OP, but we can include dogs in the comparison: they add a nice variation mainly because of their low vision. When coming to infantry, I think differentiation is much less enjoyable: archers are very different from skirmishers, but they are also very worse. I still think it was an error to take away from them the walking speed they had in A24, because archers could actually be employed in a way that is quite enjoyably different from shorter range units, if it just was viable. Same problem holds for pikes and spears: pikes are just better, because they are so damm persistent. Their speed that is so low does make them feel different, but the toy is broken because their role as undying pests is too effective in a game like 0 AD (and is also anti-historical, so that's another reason why I'd like to see an attempt to change them). About swords, they are simply not a valid substitute for spears and pikes, and one may decide to mix them in the melee for some extra hack, but apart changing your army stats a little, they don't change tactics in any enjoyable way. Now to champions: they are just units stronger than CS. Their usage consists in ammassing enough of them so that you have an army stronger than any other and thus you are unstoppable. Champions are effective tie breakers, but don't result in any particular tactic different from any other in the game. Even iber fire cav is just comparable to rome champ sword cav gameplay-wise: you make a big enough bunch of them, and then you go to rain havoc wherever you please. Will champs in P2 be a substantial buff to any civ that gets them? Definitively, especially in the current meta. Will that be a fun, enjoyable differentiation? I don't see how. The game must try to propose new and different game mechanics in order to have in itself the variation the many civs need. It's nice to read about civs good in ambushed or smaller fights, but how exactly? the game as it is now doesn't allow it. This is not a problem about civilizations, is a problem about game mechanics. The game allows, for instance, ammassing horse archers rather than fighting for map control, and I played some nice games around this strategy choice in A24. With a sufficient number of well balanced tactics like these two, the game can provide well differentiated civs that never play the same.

leaving aside this historical food for thought, I think both sword and spear cav should have the same pierce armor. there are two reasons for this: - as already pointed out by @LetswaveaBook, there is no realistic motive for this difference, it's anti-historical and counter-intuitive - from a gameplay perspective, I'm convinced that its higher armor is justified by the fact that sword cav is designed as a natural counter for ranged units, however, it's perplexing that only a handful of civs have access to a part of this fundamental rock-paper-scissor system. sword cav and spear cav can be differentiated in some way that makes them both decent against ranged units.

yes, but even for infantry swords were often just side arms, not the only weapon anyway. on his text on equitation, Xenophon reccomends using two throwing spears and a long sword (makhaira). swords were used by hellenistic cavalry (not just celtic) just as much as by roman legionnaires, or almost so.

come on, it's not about who's better, it's the magnitude. they are about equal when factoring the bonus, sword cavalry is like twice as good otherwise. at now noone makes spear cav if they can make sword cav instead, it's not like any nerf can only result in the opposite situation. mmh not sure. we know of cavalrymen using spears for dueling since antiquity. the bonus makes sense.

much more relevant (in my mind at least): to this day women gatherers still have lower vision than males. this is quite absurd, and clearly has no historical justification, there's only a gameplay motive, but effect on gameplay is actually minimal, and some times even paradoxical, like women not seeing archers attacking them.