alre

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.

because you have to build houses anyway

it is a disadvantage if the map doesn't allow much building space. it can become quite stressing and time consumimg to find a spot for every house and building. 10 pop houses are better in such maps.

let's not forget that sword cav was relatively OP in A24 too. it's just that cavalry wasn't nearly as effective as it is now. I think that comes from unit pushing and better turn times, and faster game turns pace. You can see, for instance, that sword cav not only has better pierce armor than axe cav, but even wins in a direct fight against it. also spear cav is UP and already was (not drammatically, but yet, they would deserve a little buff).

ok, thanks, now it's clearer. this means in practice that with autoqueue training times are rounded up to the nearest second, right?

ok ok. I did test that, and the results once again confuse me: after 5 batches (of 2 men) manual queuing had gained 2/3 seconds over autoqueing already, after 10 batches, there was more than 6 seconds of a distance. if it was just due to autoqueue waiting to the end of the 0.2s turn, it should have been less than 2 seconds after 10 batches.

I made some test and training 6 spearmen takes 1 minute, either with manual queuing and with autoqueue. that time is effectively 6 times the individual training time. maybe some very slight difference may have slipped from my attention, but I'm quite convinced that autoqueue is not inefficient compared to manual queuing.

I'm not sure I understand. what you are asking is the game to behave differently if you use the keyboard shortcut respect to when you use the related command on the GUI?

well they did have some form of walling around all their settlements. it's just that fields weren't usually included.

the problem with SlopeConstraint is that it seems to work when TILE_CENTERED_HEIGTH_MAP = true, but it doesn't quite reflect passability (for units to walk on them) if TILE_CENTERED_HEIGTH_MAP = false. this is more like a mishap than a deal breaker, but it's a pity that PassableMapAreaConstraint doesn't work. besides, I'd like to ruefully notice that none of this is documented anywhere, so I still have a very rough understanding of how the heightmap is rendered, or what's the role of tiles in the pathfinder in general, like what's the true maximum passable slope, and how is it computed.

PassableMapAreaConstraint doesn't work at all for me. I mean, it selects all tiles as they all were passable.

the ancients built their cities in no way similar to how it's done in the game. they would have fields before the agorà, for instance. it's not about how the ancients would actually build cities.

between javascript and lua, I'd have gone with lua all the time, but that is my personal preference. anyway, I wonder if there is some way to test javascript files in some way different from running the game. I'm working on my random map project and I don't know any other way than editing the files with notepad++ and then directly try the game. since there is some relatively complex algorithm involved, that's quite suboptimal, there is some way I can set an IDE to run my code and see how it works?

in general i'd like to have all my military units in defensive stance by default. at least when playing archer civs I would put them in defensive stance in many games.

if you want to be able to decide the exact spot where to start the game from, have a nomad game (it's nomad until you place your first cc).

I like it. Isn't it strange that they decided to "come back" somehow, from the more realistic trade routes of AoE 3? I liked that concept better.

point is that archer walk speed is not there anymore.

maurya had a very good economy in A24. now that's gone.

Fair enough, I guess I couldn't remember the true infantry speed. We will eventually see if archers are still OP or severely UP as I think instead. However, I think camels are still impossible to deal with by units with lesser range, which was the point in question. They can escape anywhere without problems in A25.

lol. how comes than than camels are broken again, and archers are in a worse position than in A23? I feared that. However, is a tweak of two parameters really something that needs a further RC? well I guess we will catch up in no-skirms TGs.

changing preferred targets of archers from any organic unit to skirmishers seems like a nice off-the-charts idea to buff archers. I like it, but I don't know how effective that would be, we should make a mod and test it. That would be a very simple mod, but still, I don't think this is the right time to try new ideas. how good was the "OP pop bonus" of persia and maurya in A23? Noone ever played persia, and maurya too were regarded as underdogs. People would complain that archers in general were too weak, and now they are going to be even weaker than then. skirmisher civs are OP in this release candidate, I would bet on it.

60 massed archers vs 60 skirms properly managed to stay massed as well (avoid slow unwinding), ends with a crushing win by the skirms (26 left).

I tried again, this time with 60 extremely massed archers against 60 javeliners. javs won again by a small margin (6 left). For the game to be balanced they should have lost bad.

Yes, at least archer civs retain their pop cap bonus. But they lose to massed skirms despite their superior range, because lower speed compensates for that.