alre

STs in game don't look such as the one used at Rhodes, they look like ordinary, much more modest STs that throw arrows, or darts at best. Their projectiles have that appearance too. Elephant archers are too good for their cost. It's been proposed to raise their population to two. I agree. I agree with you here, but It think that, as siege weapons, they look weird. It strikes me as very strange that a ST can destroy a fortress, while a fortress can't hope to do any damage to STs. What I'm suggesting is to make a quick rebalancing of STs to define better their role while not changing it too much. Siege in general could be changed again in the future. For instance, if garrison is displayed one day on top of fortresses and fortifications, the ST could be given a much more realistic role of shooting at them (not the building).

I like the idea, and maybe have 5 siluette turrets? One can only dream... What do you mean? catapult and ramming are two very different things.

With this feature soldiers move much more smootly, meaning that in those situations where you would use formations in a24 to smooth out your men, you don't need anymore. On the other hand, formations still move in a clumsy and rigid way that loses a lot of time, and brings no advantage anymore.

This may be late to discuss in time for A25, but I think it's the case. From the point of view of game experience, it's weird that STs have crush damage, while fortress and stone towers don't have it, and bolt shooters don't have it either. For the way a ST looks, and the way is darts look, it's odd that it has crush damage. Also, from the look of it, a siege tower may host a little bolt shooter, maybe, but not a whole catapult. From an historic point of view, STs built by most civilizations in the game generally only hosted light infantry hand shooting at the besieged, and if other siege engines where present, they would have been used on the garrison anyway. AFAIK the only siege towers we know to have been used to breach walls were those that included a battering ram. From a balancing point of view, crush damage makes ST pretty strong, not much against buildings (also against buildings of course, but that's not the relevant bit), but against enemy rams, which should intuitively make splinters of siege towers (at least by my intuition). Rams are a clear candidate for countering STs, but they can't sustain STs crush damage in practice. Especially if elephants are nerfed, STs should still have viable counters, because they don't have many. In practice, if crush damage was removed from STs, it would make it necessary to play ST together with rams, which would make the strategy more expensive and micro-requiring. Other strategies that employ STs as mobile fortifications would not be changed, as pierce damage it what counts against people.

noone is going to use formations in a25. this feature makes them totally useless.

I always thought that it was three different buildings lol. I may have assumed it was like some other game (AoM?), but it actually makes more sense to me. Anyway, maybe it should be made explicit.

that is op? not the eagle?

towers don't have to be mounted, have a superior damage output, have crash damage, and can move while shooting. The only interesting advantage of bolt shooters is their range, but why would that matter, if you have to use a tower to protect them from archers?

lol. if you want to take this from imperivm, you should have a special ability of priests that can turn themselves into birds for some limited time.

Of course the lance was used from horseback for a long time, but what was novel with macedonian hetaroi was that they put together a number of mounted lancers and they decided for the first time to try to charge infantry in closed formation. They themselves used a wedge formation they made up for that. Before that, it appears that the lance was used in 1v1 combat between horsemen, much like jousting, at least this is what appears in roman accounts of spolia opima, with the first accounted case in fifth century BC (semi-legendary, Livy wrote about that in first century BC, and the following, similar but more grounded, case of spolia opima is from the same period). So, the difference between simple spear cav and shock cavalry may be just that you need to organize and train a division of your army specifically for charging into enemy lines, and than you have shock cav, otherwise you don't. Consider that only great generals ever had the power to make reforms to their armies. In westwern Europe it appears that cavalry was used exclusively as a skirmish force for the whole duration of 0AD timeframe, probably not because shock cav was completely unheard of, but more likely because skirmisher cav was more helpful in the context of heavy infantry centered warfare in use in the mediterranean basin.

I feel you. Comunicating positions in multyplayer is like almost impossible to me and my buddies.

we can introduce flanking mechanics with single units too, it's just that we never considered the idea seriously. I think that, for melee damage in particular, it would be an improvement for how the game plays. even if battallions were indeed introduced, for even finer sofistications like having spearmen win against swords when in closed order, and lose otherwise, how would that work with battalions? it seems to me that it could actually work better with a single units based flanking bonus.

spear cav and sword cav are both pretty effective against archers. bolt shooters are really not, I've always seen them used only as a last stand defence in this alpha.

why wouldn't you use cs for the scouting and building foundations? why even train mercs in phase 1 then?

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.