clavz

the discord link is outdated… could I get a new one?

frankly this is the first comment against inclusion of new civs that I see. I agree that testing is possible and sometimes happens, even as things are now. I believe, but maybe I'm alone, that few testers can't be as good as many testers. For example, what I see is that most of the ones that tested a24 were rushers, that mean that inside that bubble the game was probably fine. When the game was then tried by the community, turtling and archer spam were discovered in a week after the release. Well this is easier. It was done even recently (I think for a24) but the last week before release. Still it looks strange to me, but I'm not a dev, that creating new installers and ask everyone to download is easier to make a "gameplay mod" as the one they were referring to in this post. Again, it is not a problem of me not being able to install svn. It costs too much effort to the average "competitive" player in the lobby. If the effort is similar to the one needed to install autociv, maybe more people will do it. The point is, sure balancing can be done this way. But if it's easier, more people will help and test. The more they are, the better it would be. What do you mean?

I mean, I can do it. But it’s gonna be hard to convince most lobby players. There is a big difference between what is possible and what is going to happen. Instead of fighting this inertia, I think it would be wiser to accept it, let svn to developers and make balancing easier for players

I think there is quite a large consensus that civs should be added. It looks like there is some attrition between balancing advisor and devs, that probably is due to balancing advisors mostly complaining. I feel like the only tool balancing advisors have is complain on this forum ("thats why we made this forum section") and to make mods/patches ("if you want to try it, you can make a mod yourself"). Complaining is the only usable one, because mods/patches don't help much since you can't balance if you don't convince the more players as possible to play and try the new balance. While being theoretically possible, looking back at the last two alphas it never happened (there were few matches, mostly 1v1 or some the last week before release). What's more, you need to make all the svn stuff to make it work. I did it for a25 and it took a long time and around 20 giga of space and lot of network data and I needed to get rid of it to update the OS. Again, it is possible, but it is kinda complex and many people will just give up, and the number of people is important. So by now there are balancing advisors complaining of balance because that's the only thing they can do and devs complaining that they can do nothing without balancing advisors complaining for balance. I'm neither a dev nor a balancing advisor, but this is what I can see from outside. I think that balancing should have some "release process" as well. If each new alpha had the new features in the engine, but set so that it does not to affect gameplay (or it does as less as possible), and changes to gameplay are in an "official" mod, then devs and balancing advisors could just try the new gameplay and include it in the next alpha. If it's just a mod and people are pushed by wildfire games it is possible that it gets popular in the competitive community, helping a constructive balancing process.

You can even set a shortcut for it… i use backslash

You could easily use fake info, but many potential players would not join. Require email would be much better (even for resetting pw), together with rating for multiplayer games and masking player names in-game as suggested by Dizaka

1. deleting all the barracks instead of the one being captured by the enemy because of a double click 2. assigning passive stance to the attacking army

Here we go again: @user1 my name: clavz host name: boomboompow metadata.json commands.txt

falling stars have never been so scary…

@user1 My name: clavz host name: Basiliskos Host closed the match when losing. commands.txt metadata.json

@user1 as you asked, I write it here. In a rated 1v1, the opponent resigned and everything was fine, except my default.cfg file. I re-downloaded it from github but I forgot to change these lines: xpartamupp = "wfgbot26" ; Name of the server-side XMPP-account that manage games echelon = "echelon26" ; Name of the server-side XMPP-account that manages ratings so ratings didn't change. My nick is clavz (1401) and my opponent was Gutterer (1575). Thank you! metadata.json commands.txt

the problem here is with the sword cav you can produce from the iberian embassy with carth, that is rank 2 and costs 80 metal. It is always hard to counter, but in early game other civs can't counter it effectively. did you see some replay? @Dizaka posted several here:

hi, I used to use ffm_visibility and some of the older versions of this mod. Despite most of the features are useful, I can't really use it anymore because of the "Shift-S" hotkey. I tried to remove it from the hotkeys editor, but I think it gets restored every time you go to the main menu. Using the arrows to move the camera makes no sense to me, since they are far from all the other hotkeys on the keyboard.

An old guide on basics: A new guide by @alre on Persians, that are among the best civs in the current alpha:

This is the first time I tried a25 (RC3), a chill 1v1 with @alre, being on voice chat. Nice boom, nice graphics, everything feeling smooth overall. We decide to invade each others base and since it was a chill game we didn't consider defending home a priority. It ended up with me losing my army and him losing all the buildings and having no resources for building a new cc. I was feeling like I won an undeserved match, when he told "I think I should resign". I shouldn't have replied with a "btw I'm 80 pop now". I didn't really understand the importance of forge upgrades in a25 and… of charging. He just raided me from time to time, using charging for killing pretty much all my soldiers, while gathering from a dock all the resources he needed. With charging it is impossible to escape when you are in inferiority. Your units will get caught and die if you can't garrison quickly (it is horrible when the opponent is on the voice chat saying "you can't escape, I'll kill them all" and then making some stupid noise with his mouth that he thinks is a "funny fast-forward sound"). Because of the anti-turtling changes (that are welcome, btw), there is nothing you can do to defend efficiently. While there are probably some strategies that can prevent it (having all the units always near to each others, having some building where to garrison them always near…) the gameplay would have been heavily affected by this bug. Thanks for fixing @Stan` and @Angen!! metadata.json commands.txt

I’m not exactly an expert in the field, but from what I could understand the inactivity is part of the Glicko-2 system. Provisional ratings should be ratings with a deviation lower than some cut off level (around 100, but I couldn’t find the value lichess uses).

Switching to Glicko-2 would be nice, yep.

I forgot to reply to this: why?

until now most players find opponents by joining the lobby and finding someone online in the mood of playing 1v1, hopefully having a rating that is more or less the same as yours. No mid level player nor newbie would ever find somebody on the leaderboard, because players are rated >1600. Even making the leaderboard count until 1000, players would be >1400, so newbies would not benefit from it. Finding some values of reduction does not make sense to me. A 1400 player that stops for 1 year is like a 1100???

The rating purpose should be to find the right opponent, and that's particularly useful for newbies and mid-level players. Top players in our community are few and know each others, so they could play without rating easily. The “certificate to not be constantly asked about my ability” should be the TG rating, that I think should be implemented to reduce the toxicity of the lobby and to make more people join it, ultimately making the community of MP grow. Being forced to play to keep your place in a leaderboard would keep more players active, in my opinion… and with the small number of players we have online it should be one of our targets, as well as making newbies like the lobby. Having a dynamic leaderboard and fair ratings for both single and multiplayer could help.

I thought that the leaderboard and the "current rank" are there for gratification. I don't like it neither, but I think it helps making people be more active. IMO, there is no need for a leaderboard then, and the simplest solution to make it better would be to get rid of it.

The rating is needed for balancing and for gratification. For balancing, IMHO, the best is to keep the rating of inactive players unchanged. If a player rated ≈1700 comes after six months of inactivity, he is likely to have more or less the same rating as before, and for sure he will be much stronger than a noob. Resetting the ranking would just frustrate the noobs. For gratification, the best would be to exclude inactive players from the leaderboard and from the ranking. A good compromise would be to split player into "active" and "inactive" players. Then it would be possible to delete players who switch to inactive (>6mo with no unranked games?) from the leaderboard and from the “current rank” in the box in the lower left, but to show the rating of players that are present in the lobby, so that balancing is kept and the leaderboard gratifies the active players more than inactive players. In “current rank” there could be written something like “Not Active”. The rating could have some graphical feature so that is clear a player is inactive (some symbol or a different color).

Thank you for your explanation, and sorry for the OT. btw, sure it would be nice to have more civs! And I hope some differentiation between civs will be back as well, after this balancing phase.

@Yekaterina there is a 0ad discord server? I mean something somewhat official