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Also, skirmishers being faster, they can chase archers, but if archers are close enough to a defensive position (and they are, because they are slow and you don't want to expose them too much), archers still beat skirms easy, and can still kite them to some extent (if the map is dense enough, kiting is just as possible as without the mod). Skirmishers weren't good fighters in a23, aren't now in a24, and still aren't with this mod.

We had a couple of games yesterday with this mod (4v4, couldn't believe so many people were ready to try it), and here's my personal 2 cents: welcome back to old training times! strenght of fortifications is not being altered by this mod, but probably that's the most due change to come in a25, that is something worth a test if you remember what I've being writing in this forum lately, it will come to no surprise, but I'm not a fan of differentiating ranged speed again: archers feel goofy and slow, and archer rush is much weaker and slower. Having played half a game (crash? ddos?) as ptole bordering to maurya, I can assure archers are still strong defensively, slowing them down affects their offensive potential more than their defensive one (I played persia the previous match, and I had to move my soldiers very little, still dealing much damage) turning times feel fine. In a game were archers shoot one arrow per second, and foot soldiers cover the distance of a bow shot in just some seconds, it doesn't feel unrealistic or unnatural to have people turning around in almost no time.

no better way to invest food than in livestock.

@ChronA I had autociv, I tried again without it and I can confirm that the gazelle always takes quite precisely 6 damages at each shot, regardless of the distance, and that the arrows can miss. This archer was shooting arrows at a fleeing gazelle, when it suddenly stopped; the arrow landed where the gazelle was going, but since it stopped it was a miss. The gazelle had only 1 hp, but it survived until the following shot. I was using a persian CS archer, one of the two you get at the beginning of a game.

Well it's not like those peoples had actual embassies in carthage (or anywhere else), so realism is not an issue here really.

I don't know this thing about xp and barracks. Is is worth it? Anyway, if only the AI was better at managing battles, that would make it like 300 points stronger, and much more similar to a human player.

@ChronA I just tested it and it doesn't work for me. Damage dealt by archers is constant, and even if it rarely fails, it does sometimes (I only observed that on a gazelle though, on people it always lands for what I could see).

this happens to me as well (in a24, not sure about svn)

poor princess... Yekaterina check on the campaign by @SciGuy42, it covers all macedonian wars from philippos to alexandros, in greece, persia, egypt and india.

and why would that armor be pierce-resistant then, instead of mostly hack-resistant? The latter seems more logical.

About myself, I played a23 quite much, and I'm a 100% team player. You know what I think. While something like this has been wished for a long time (not just for ranged units), it's not so simple. Soldiers can go all the map to gather whatever you ask them to gather, I hope for a better solution. I can see that it would make for a decent patch though. [edit: I just saw @Freagarach's post, well scratch this part] In general, it seems that although archers have longer range than all the other units, you want them to perform at the same level, by making them slower (you say that they have the greatest "effective speed", I had said before, that they have a particularly high "effective range", we are talking about the same thing here). My question is (and is not limited to you): why the hell would someone want to have different units, with different stats, perform the same? For example, I'm asking, on solid historical grounding, that slingers and archers are given the same range and stats overall: then of course they will perform the same and everybody will be able to tell that, with no ambiguity and no balancing hassles, but javeliners will lose to them because that's realistic and because they will have other strong points. Hit and run can be frustrating, I get that, but saying that it denies balance for certain is plain wrong to say the least. Archers and ranged in general must be balanced with melee, which doesn't mean that they destroy each other in 1v1, but that they fill different roles, and those are equally effective in the gameplay.

I noticed today that han fields look... mmmh, let's say they look weirder than some stone wall. I'm guessing that's impossible to create buildings that go under ground level in 0ad, but it would be much more logical if rice fields looked more like square patches of low terrain, circled by simple embankments on their sides. Something less eyecatching, it's just fields. Now they look like some kind of hot springs. Of course if fields are built on slopes, than the current model are much better.

a change in the role of pikemen or elephants, DE farmland or bushes, bonuses for formations, are just examples of things that may be changed, or maybe not, but are relevant for the present topic. I'm not saying new assets block the development of the game, and I don't believe that, I was just expressing a sincere worry I would have if I were to create a new asset myself.

Why not a campaign teaching multiplayer principles and standards? That's something you can do better than others. The only problem is that it could be made obsolete easily, by changes relatively small changes in the game. But the game is accumulating some inertia anyway, with all the new assets.

shouldn't C be "quit and view summary" instead?

Elephants are now the only counter to siege towers, which would be riddicously OP if they were faster. I am against turning 0ad in a tank battles game.

I never said that your observation was wrong or out of place, and I never attributed the statement that archers are faster than other units, that's what @BreakfastBurrito_007 said. There's no need to get offended.

It's not about the weight of a sword, light infantry is understood to have been more mobile than havy infantry in general. My biggest problem with @BreakfastBurrito_007's idea, however, is about gameplay: slowing down archers would kill their defining tactics, which are hit and run and archer rushes. Those are what make archers so fun to play, and if we slow them down they will be heavily crippled. What BB wants is to reduce their effective range around defensive positions, and that can be achieved in many ways, not only lowering archers speed. I think reducing archers damage at higher distances - either by raising arrows spread (already in SVN I believe), or enforcing a fixed damage dependent on distance - is the best way out of this bog, it would not change archers identity, but would make them just enough less effective in what they do best. It doesn't have any creepy eco implication, and it doesn't push us back in this endless swing where every alpha we reconsider the choices made in the last releases. Light infantry speeds were made equal for good reasons. And no, archers are not faster than slingers or javeliners, they have the same stats.

but that doesn't happen currently. My idea was lowering attack range of other melee to see if it helps it. Maybe with unit pushing if not with a24 engine already.

This I agree. It's not going to make a real city anyway.

how is it plain to have an administrative center of a "something" without houses, production, anything really, just eight chickens?

those won't make the game feel more realistic though.

I don't know how reliable the poll is, as many options were added later, but if I'm to say what I think, it's that it makes no much sense to me to try to take farms away from the cc. It's not going to make the game more realistic because the cc itself is not realistic. A defendable dropsite/store makes a lot of sense in itself, unfortunately though, that is no way related to the meaning of the words "civic center" or to they way the building is depicted. If I start a game with just a defendable dropsite, I will of course make fields around it, while civic centres were built by cities that were already populated, fed and defended. Agoràs were built in the middle of the cities because people needed to go to the agorà to participate in democratic decisions, public trials and whatnot. Were they used as dropsites, they would have been built in the countryside. In other words, either we accept the way the game works, with its weird but gameplay-wise functional city layout, or we change the game radically, by not giving a cc to players at the start of the game, but just a defendable dropsite that also looks like one. Here a slightly more developed idea: Moving the farms to less defendable positions is another bucket of worms and is a thing we can do regardless by enforcing one worker per farm, as @Feldfeld said. Also automatic spawning of fields around farmsteads would help (reseeding, kind of), but neither of these will change the fact that at the start of the game players have one preferential spot where to build farms, which is around the cc. It's only logic.

love it. I had in mind to try to create a mod like that.

I like the proposal of @Dakara of disabling the rank system for mercenaries. It's a good idea because makes them an instant reward (good warrior, fast train), but not a long term investment. That would be even more evident if combined with @wowgetoffyourcellphone's proposal of negating loot collected from them. Pushing it a little more we can even make that they are not cured by garrison or temples, so they are 100% expendable. Making them builders maybe, but not gatherers, would also help in this same direction. For better distinction, we could give mercs a selection circle with a square inside, like chinese coins: it's a symbol easy to recognise internationally, but I guess if we wanted better cultural coherence, we could make different symbols in the circle for each civ, resembling their coinage. I say the square is a good option. A variation is needed if they are made so different from citizens. About making them in ready-made companies, I support the idea, I had proposed the same here: