alre

but if the forest is half-cut, doesn't it look strange to have all the bushes on the outside only? is this actually for performance reasons?

The side with extra javelineers almost always won. Although I too must admit I didn't sign down all the results, so I'm going by memory. Also when priests work well, it's just few of them (they support champions wonderfully). I agree that maybe archers would be a better comparison for priests. I chose javelineers because are. more comparable to them in range. Also healers are costier so it didn't feel they deserved an easy benchmark. Anyway I'd say that any other ranged unit other than skirmishers are quite UP in this alpha (or rather they are OP, but you would also use spears otherwise).

Not really. I made tests, a support javelineer makes your melee survive better than a priest. I tried 100% spearmen battles, and also 50% pikemen + 50% javelines. I don't know why but not even level 3 healers could save those pikemen from an army with extra skirmishers (the opposing army had skirmishers instead of healers, 1 to 1). I also tried spearmen champions, and they work better with healers instead. Metal? No please! At least now you can train priests without problems when you have extra food. Stone maybe? As in temples? By the way, it's not like they are totally useless in this alpha either. If you have a level 3 priest somewhere, it arguably means that he had repaid his cost. It's just that only a smaller part of their job is during battles.

whatever is your army composition, healers have a very weak effect on battles, a single javelineer deals more damage a priest can heal. The value of priests is given by the fact that they can keep healing your troops after they stop fighting. If your army is fighting without rest, it makes much more use of a javelineer than a priest. However, note that, while ranged soldiers get almost no benefit from veterancy, veteran healers are extremely more effective than base healers, also note that healers have their dedicated set of techs in addition to blacksmith techs for soldiers, so it is possible to have healers make a decisive impact to battles (especially in support of melee infantry champions), but it requires a lot of preparation, and I honestly don't see how can it be worth it.

Biden's reputation was indeed spoiled a little by this retreat going so bad, at least here in Italy. But I myself can't see it this way. Would it be so much better if the Afghan republic lasted one more year? The only true disaster was the occupation of that country, not the retreat. Everything that went bad during the retreat itself, did it so because of how the occupation was managed. Obama may have had a much better perceived image, but he should better have listened to Biden at his time, his commitments in Afghanistan were truly a total disaster.

I know

don't think that's necessary. red color could rather give a negative impression, like the bush was an obstacle, which is the opposite of what's happening.

yes it does. it is a well established convention to comunicate the position on the clock by just typing the number at the beginning of the match. it's very fast and simple and just good enough for most maps.

box formation does exactly that.

you want a loot level so high that if you manage to do a succesfull rush (and it doesn't even have to be extraordinarily succesful, you said) then you have an economy that can compare with that of other players that have been booming instead? now imagine this in a 1v1 setting, could be a school example of what snowballing is: you have been raided and you managed to reduce damage a little, so you may think you are fine, or at least that you can catch on, but no, the other player is so much forward (as if he was booming) that he can keep rushing without fear of being reset, because just a small margin snowballs more and more again.

you can use ctrl+selection to take out units from the ones you have already selected. about towers, I usually send them all to the tower, and queue another command that gets passed only to those units that are left out the tower.

if we consider the initial example by @Ceres, we see that communication is not the issue, we may even be telepathic, but if I send troops to help in a battle my ally is leading, while I'm also busy elsewhere, there is no way I'm gonna be as effective in managing those troops, as he/she could be with shared command. Also it's not like the option to share troops excludes the need for good communication anyway. However, this could escalate quickly and it's up to developers to decide how far to allow sharing control between allies: worse players could take the habit to give control of their troops to better players, and also couples of players could specialise so that one always works on the eco of both of them, and the other follows the military expansion, for the benefit of both (this is actually an example of how sharing units could foster communication, rather than avoid it).

I realised what's the problem with Ngorongoro map: heightmap gets modified by player placement, after cliffs are painted. SlopeConstraint may be working after all.

You can't use the same rushing tactics in 1v1 and team games. With or without loot.

Related: note that Ngorongoro map uses SlopeConstraint to paint cliffs, and unfortunately they don't quite fit to unpassable areas: I tried to change the value of TILE_CENTERED_HEIGTH_MAP for that map, but it seems it actually doesn't make any difference. I gave up on making my map.

they don't exit randomly, they follow the current rally point of that building, so you have to ask to your ally to set it appropriately.

I have an idea: let attacks still be this dangerous for your eco (to be fair, that's only logic) but balance this by making guerrilla tactics a lot easier in your territory. concrete proposal: allow teleporting units from any building to any other inside the same continuous territory patch. from bug to feature! whenever you send men into buildings, you can send them back on your enemy from anywhere! ok this would be too much, but maybe it could work if entering/exiting from buildings was slower, and if conquering buildings wasn't a thing (and I wouldn't really mind if it wasn't). Anyway, I'm just tossing ideas.

This actually changed a lot from A24, but I agree that now attacking seems very often convenient over defending, even if the defender has some few towers. Guessing reasons, that could be because raiding the economy is so convenient. You can do it also when you are defending, with some cav, but it's harder because you have to split your attention among far battles. To be honest, I don't like this attacker advantage and it may be, in fact, the most important pro-snowballing factor of this game. In any case, loot hardly has any real strategical consequence by itself, because it's only 10% of killed units value (if you want an army to replenish itself with loot alone, it should have a kill ratio of 10!), it's just a gift for whatever player has made more kills, attacker or defender that is. Anyway, if we are still going to keep loot, I'd like if you could visualize it somehow. @Micfild idea is not bad, maybe it could be a message that pops up when a battle is over (starting from any attack alarm, until some time passes without fighting inside that same area). That same message could also give more details like the number of killed and lost. It seems to me like you are describing A24 still. In A25 melee cavalry gets used a lot, and melee infantry also is sometimes used without any ranged support at all. Someone should make a map like that. That's how much it takes. I had something like that planned, but it's very low in my priorities now, I still have to make sense of the map I'm already working on.

how so, if the defender also gains loot he can immediately spend to counterattack? I don't think attacking is that bad as a risk, especially if you are near to a base of yours

he means signaling the position of each player to his/her allies. sounds like a good idea to me, although it's not better than each player giving the position in chat, so that you know where's who.

man, sometimes I literally loose whole groups of men to the lag! because commands don't pass trough it, and so my people makes suicide charges instead of retreating.

all loots are 10% of the value of the unit/building. it means that a battle that gives you an advantage of 50 men, for instance, also gives you a resource advantage for 5 more men. why would that be a fair number? why not 0? you now have a men advantage, isn't that a sufficient reward? this kind of situations can happen when a player manages to group all together a very big army and overwhelm defending armies if not properly prepared. a single mistake by the defender can throw the whole game away for him/her.

could be that looting is that unimportant, I'm not sure. can't be unless we try the game without I think. it's also possible that I'm exaggerating the difficulty of comebacks, but to me it seems that if your army starts to break trough in its way to the enemy city center, there's no way out for that player, even if he/she was ahead in eco and maybe is able to raid your own or is able to play smart some other way. borg- is right about expansion potentially playing against snowballing, although that would be a huge shift for 0AD, as CCs are currently very costy and also not that necessary for economic growth.

I want to share a video that I found some time ago, thanks to another post by @Lion.Kanzen: Before watching this, I hadn't realised how much attention should be put on snowballing when designing a RTS game, and I think it's important for us to discuss this because 0AD is a game that snowballs an awful lot: after losing a fight, you may come up with a plan for coming back and turn the tables, but in 1v1, it's better just to resign, because you know it's gonna be pointless anyway. In fact, 0AD would be a lot more fun if it it wasn't so easy to escalate any advantage so quickly. I think that 0AD could be a lot better in terms of anti/pro snowballing mechanics both in economy and in warfare, but one thing that really stands out, and thus I'd like to discuss immediately, is loot: the author of the clip above says that pro-snowballing mechanics are not necessarely bad, because they can be very fun to benefit from, like veterancy in many games, included 0AD, while anti-snowballing mechanics should be more hidden to avoid feeling punishing. Well, loot in 0AD is a mechanic that is hidden (not fun at all, almost impossible to notice in fact) but favours snowballing: it has it all wrong. I think looting could be a fun thing, if it was more evident, or even explicitly commanded by players (like plundering enemy buildings, or maybe even collecting resources from corpses if you gain control of the battlefield) but they way it is now, it's just a free gift for players who are already winning, and a strong factor towards making it impossible for losing players to come back from a bad position.

that's more or less the opposite of what I do: - biggest possible batches for eco, split among all production buildings I got. - also batch production for military, unless destined to a fight that's already ongoing, in that case single unit spam.