LetswaveaBook

I disagree here. Hoplite tradition was not tested a lot and it was added to the game, so I think this point is not true either. You can just put a post on the gameplay forum and see if you get support. For example, I suggested affordable kushite pyramids in p1, and vali made a patch for that. If you do a good suggestion, then you can find people(like me) that can be convinced to make a patch. So it is not so difficult. What the balancing team lacks, is mainly one thing: Action. There was also some testing for A25. My personal experience was that without autocivs hotkeys, it was difficult to judge.

These are things that I mostly don't really do. Anyway, thanks for the guide to 2k.

Your great looks didn't save you this time! Looks like a smurf has been banned. But honestly I also know of @gator303 having troubles logging in without apparent reason. Sadly I think he has not returned since. So maybe it is not a punishment for your smurfing actions.

I think it is wrong to blame the balance team for these functions not being implemented. Can someone point out where the balance team is obstructing these changes? The reason these things aren't being implemented is not because there a people that obstruct, but because nobody took serious effort to create them. Also you could be a little more creative than just say champions in p1. What about a male helot cap depending on how many spartans you have. Also Spartan women were considered strong defenders, so the spartan female warriors could be another champion. A suggestion would be that they are not as strong as other male champions, but gains a bonus when fighting close to the CC or under the command of Archidamia.

Being able to rush with heroes is ridiculous anyway. In age of empires 2, Kings do not have any fighting force and I think that would be a better way for regicide.

I will be picky here. It does not mean that many of 0 AD's design choices are near sighted and balanced =/= good design, it only resulted in that many of 0 AD's design choices are near sighted and balanced =/= good design. This wasn't doomed to happen, but it did. I don't think the size of the team is the problem. The main problem is that balance advisors rarely make a differential, or concretely suggest one. Hmmm.... Do you have evidence for that? What is probably closer to the truth is that Balancing team=more imbalances. In my view most inballances that are in A25 are either introduced by the balance changes or they were present in A24 and nobody cared about them. It would have been easy to make a mod that gives players 2 metal mines o mainland, but the balancing team did not push such a mod forward. If such a mod were there, then a number of inbalances would have been solved before we went to A25, but here we are. If you took a look at the scenario editor in A24, you would have seen that skirmishers are good for something, but nobody in A24 could imagine that they were useful. What this community needs is a mentality of complain about it & fix it. It is better to continuously have balance mods being tested rather than having only changes every alpha. If people complain about Roman/Iberian champion cavalry, they are childish. Because if they were smart and really bothered they would make a mod with better balance, nothing is stopping them to mod 0AD. Blaming anyone but the balancing team for imbalances is hypocrite. I like the coral-idea though and I think new features should be not judged on balance. When new things are inbalanced, the balancing team should solve that while keeping the feature intact.

I played the first round against Berhudar and congratulations to Berhudar who will play against the winner of game between @Player of 0AD and @ValihrAnt Berhudar vs. LetswaveaBook.zip

One thing that deserves discussion is the Iberian team bonus. This is not just a useful team bonus, but it is huge and dominant. A skirmisher faction without the bonus simply does not compare to a faction having the bonus. So I wonder if the strength of the bonus feels acceptable to you or whether it disrupts balance to much.

With 10 pages, I suppose the document is a serious attempt on explaining the matter. To make it more complete you could mention Athenians,Britons and Persians who are the only ones not being mentioned. The nbr. 1 rule for RTS games deserves special attention: Spent your resources. You can spend your resources to do thing to win the game, but if those resources spent them then you fail to take advantage of them. This is probably the most important rule and I think it does deserve special attention. MysticJim uploaded a video recently where a player on the losing side, there was an player that had over 10k food and 5k wood in the bank that weren't being used. If she had sent those resources to her two weaker allies, then these allies would love her very much and they would be able to spend these resources each recruit 50 women and 50 infantry for a total of 200 extra units on the team. The 3rd tip in CH4 is not highlighted in bold letters. I disagree with the 5th tip in CH4. Hack armor technologies can be ignored in some cases. Neither do I think the p3 mining upgrades are extremely useful, especially the stone mining technology. That technology cost 900 resources and it is not like you will be mining a lot of stone. Finally the last rule: Break all previous rules whenever it suits you.

LetswaveaBook is not a weirdjockes' smurf! Your statement was obviously untrue. Microsoft probably didn't want to sponsor the tournament, so I had to think about something else. I couldn't invite everyone and I am to lazy to manage a 16 player tournament. Also I think I invited Fpre&Rauls and they refused IIRC. Father is aka known as JC, is JC still banned?

@Player of 0AD I am aiming at some standardized settings, which we will discuss privately. So 300 pop, low res, conquest, start with CC, aegean-anatolian biome and maybe I am missing something.

I am creating this post to announce possibly the biggest 0ad tournament of 2021! There is no need to get overexcited, after all there are few contenders. The tournament is invitation only and currently all the spots have been given away. So this tread is mainly interesting if you would like to follow the tournament. I have decided for an 8 player invitational tournament, because it is easier to organize than a bigger one and with fewer players the skill difference between the players is hopefully less extreme. I hope that this tournament can create some interest for 1v1s and that it helps @derekO with organizing his tournament. Finally I hope this tournament provides a repository for high level gameplay. The tournament is a double elimination without repeated final and each round is a best of 3 played on balanced mainland. Every matchup starts with faction A vs. faction B and in the second game the factions are reversed, meaning that in the second game the participants will play the faction that their opponent previously played. This means that we hope that either one player shows his dominance or both players show which faction comes out on top. In this format, if you have a weaker faction in the first game, then it hurts your opponent in the second game as he gets that faction in the second game. I hope this means that also some weaker factions are seeing action. If you manage to pull back the score after a loss, then the 3rd and deciding game will be a mirror match. When players have equal number of won series, the factions in these mirror matches will be determined (pseudo) random (Luck has decided that this will be Athenians for 3 out 4 games). Since it is a random faction, I hope a more diverse set of factions gets some action. When one player has won series in the winner bracket than his opponent, then that player gets an advantage: Namely he can choose what faction will be played in the mirror matchup. Seedings are done (pseudo) random and the brackets are in the attachment. I will try to cover some of these series and I aim to make a playlist of that on youtube. I would love if there would be other youtube content creators and who can help with making a complete playlist of the tournament. Participants are @chrstgtr@Dakara Dakeyras @felixix (Berhudar) @LetswaveaBook @Player of 0AD (Weirdjokes) @ValihrAnt and @vinme. When series are finished, one of the participants should post the replay files in this tread so the result can be verified and others can watch some high level approaches to the game. The players should contact their opponents in the brackets and can then plan their games. Anyone that would like to cover some of the 14 series would be invited to contact me. Finally, I have thought about a great opportunity for the participants of this tournament. If you participate in the tournament, you will have the opportunity to upgrade your current version of windows entirely for free to fedora 35, provided you have fitting hardware. Windows users should want to miss out on that opportunity, should they? brackets.pdf

Huh? You build towers and a fortress? My view is that if you don't want to deal with overwhelming attacks, don't spend resources on towers or fortesses. When I build a fortress, most often I only do so because I need it for a hero. When I am outnumbered, I tend to order my farmers near the CC to build a temple and retreat my troops to that position.

@Reyhan You could look at some things differently. If you are attacked and are 3v1, you are not being bullied by your enemies. The bullies are your allies, they should made it a 3v3. I think TG meta is entirely wrong. You should always rush and any team mate should contribute to that. Booming is a strategic mistake, because if you boom you cant prevent your ally from being attacked. At least that is my view.

I agree that such an idea is better suited for a mod. The main issue I see with the idea is that some factions have more diversity than others, so that causes some balance issues.

So here is an example in less than a minute of effective use of the extra range of polearms.

When enemies do that, the attacker can easily spot his units capturing the buildings and order them to attack. For Elephant archers and bolt shooters it is very difficult to see what they are targeting. conquoring is fine. attacking buildings/fields with pierce attack is not.

You are right, but it is behaviour that is more undesirable than soldiers who try to capture. That is indeed also some defealt behaviour that is undesirable. I think that this also needs to be addressed.

There is something wrong with elephant archers and bolt shooters. If there are no enemy units around, they will attack nearby enemy building and do not change focus unless the building is destroyed or the player orders them to do something different. In gameplay that is hugely annoying, since these units do little damage to buildings. I don't complain about them attacking buildings, what bothers me more is that they don't automatically switch targets when an organic unit appears.

The game is limitless in its ''features''.

In the scenario editor there is still an artillery and bolt tower for Carthage. So if you want to make a scenario, they are available.

There was an AoE4 tournament and the finals are on youtube. The game does not seem to be like my taste.

A raider is also called a plunderer, which you can translate to German by writhing it with a capital letter and putting an umlaut on the first U.

Hey CJ, you know, This is an OG gangsta gaming community from Grove Streat. What's up with OG Loc, is he still rappin'?

I think it is not because people hated them, unit pushing was the culprit. If you put your archers in box formation, they would move fairly smoothly, and units without a formation had path-finding issues. Not only is the path finding superior, also the fact that units can stack has been disadvantageous to archers. In A24, when the front row of skirmishers attacked the archers, the ones behind needed to path around their allies to find a spot from which they could shoot. In A24 you would never get all your skirmishers shooting at the enemy in a smooth motion. First of all, no matter how creative the solution is, archers seem to suffer from a material disadvantage in their stats. I think A24 mainly had good archers because turn rates made pathfinding awkward. Sometimes if you have the material disadvantage, there is not much you can do except getting better material. I ran some tests in the scenario editor with 10 basic pikes+10 basic skirms against 10 advanced spears+10 basic skrims, the side with the pikes won. If you do the same test with a weaker ranged unit, the advanced units get the win (which they deserve). Also the attack-ground(or attack group) would be a nice feature, but it does not solve the pike issue. All pike factions do have access to skirmishers and archers of some kind. Anyway, this is not about AoE4, whereas the OP wanted to talk about AoE4.