LetswaveaBook

I can provide the replay. The problem occur from 6:40 to 7:20 when I sort them out manually. For testing purposes, I should just had them let them be and see if they solved it by themselves, but instead I solved it manually. 2021-06-17_0001.zip

I just wanted to report that units might get stuck. I don't want to call it out as a bug, but it is something to notice. In the image, you see women near the metal that try to get to the wood, but can't find the path. Also graphics look pretty cool, don't they?

This world needs more women like @Yekaterina. If you start a topic about windows, it will be spammed with linux chat.

As a kid I thought Red Alert 2 Yuri's revenge was super cool. After I got into competitive gaming and was used to hotkeys and returned to Red Alert 2, I felt the controls where horrible. With RA3, it was reverse. I felt like how can you do all the things a player ideally wants to do. When returned later and was used to hotkeys, it suddenly felt good. If I think about complex games as Knights&Mercenaries or the stronghold series, where you need to manage your village, because if your food runs out it is trouble. The thing what new players can do, is only focus on the few features which are absolutely needed(getting food and the easiest units) instead of all features.

I installed linux mint 20 several days ago, and it does the same! On the other hand, if you look in the software manager, you see two files and A23 is downloaded from the repositories while you also have the option there to get A24 from play0ad.com. To be honest, I like to be able to use wine. And after installing mint 20, the software manager does not correctly install wine. And all of that in the very moment I was feeling like monk-rushing someone on Voobly.

I played as Seleucids against Britons. I would gladly learn about the best strategies for each faction, but it seems to me Britons have a hard time against Seleucids in A24. Anyone looking at it differently?

Just to list some of my adventures on it. I initially thought that when I saw a program called pyrogenesis.exe, I had to use wine. I also tried to do in the terminal cd 0adsvn/binaries/system/ and then type pyrogenesis, but then on my OS, the pyrogenesis variant did call the 0ad version which is in the mint repositories. What did work was using 0adsvn/binaries/system/pyrogenesis Initially I thought that I probably messed to much with my OS, which results in me now having a brand new Mint 20 installed instead of Mint 19. I wanted to upgrade anyway. I did play the subversion and the graphics look great. I must admit that on the a24 version, I put the graphics on low to boost performance, so I might not do a fair comparison. Age of Empires 4 has been shown on E3 and their fans would be spoiled if only it looked as good as 0AD. The path-finding also seemed good, but on the other hand I did not push it to the limit either. So from my first game, it is big plus for A25. If only mercenaries were well balanced...

I am fine with Yaunā, the Old Persian word for Ionians, Macedonians, and Greeks. We have 3 Greek factions and 2 successor states and on top of that the word also refers to Persians. I couldn't be really bothered myself with thinking about a name, but Yaunā seems cool.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone, I have found some game changing features for you! Don't know if this is the way you want to go either.

First I would like to say, suppose it is solved. Then an opposing unit attacks while chasing a fleeing unit. If the fleeing unit runs all over the map, you would get a lot of attack sounds. That might be annoying.

I support the idea of letting players actively chose which mode they want to play. In A24, people complain how one thing is bad. I don't really understand it, because if it is bad, why not solve it by a mod? Also I think in the lobby it should be convenient to switch mods and try out different things.

For 25 spear cavalry you need 1750 food and 850 food more than you need for 5 cataphracts for which you need 500 metal. I agree that metal is more expensive, but not that expensive. I think a cataphract is something like 2.2-3 times as expensive as a spear cavalry, provided that all things are reasonable. I know there are people that like to trade 100 wood/food for 25 metal at the market, but that does not mean 100 wood/food is worth 25 metal.

Does this rout effect also exist if the archers are put on 'stand ground' mode? Or are they just firing all when on stand ground?

What I would like to see for gameplay is that units unlocked in later phases should be more efficient. When you reach p2, you should get feeling "amazing, now I can use naked fanatics/mercenaries/mounted archers/elephant archers and can use these to deal heavy damage to my opponent". When you reach p3 you should be able to make effective use of melee infantry/cavalry which is currently hardly the case. Currently you make citizen soldiers in p1 and you keep centering your army around these in later phases. I would like to see that the game encourages you to actually use the champion melee infantry/cavalry that the game provides you. I hardly have used champion melee infantry/cavalry in A24 and I think that is not just me. Champion melee infantry/cavalry should be awesome. Currently BreakfastBurrito_007 want seleucids have CS spear cavalry, because in his views the champions die to fast. The CS spear cavalry has 160*1.1 HP while champion cataphract with nisean war horses has 360*1.1 HP and +4 armour levels, so that is 3.3 times the durability. I think players get the idea that cataphracts die to fast comes from the fact that ranged units deal excessive amounts of damage and if the cataphracts die, they are hard to replace(because of training time and metal cost). What I would suggest is all infantry/cavalry champions +1 hack&pierce armour, move 25% of their metal cost to food cost and reduce their training times, such that it would be really cool to use these infantry/cavalry champions. That way if the opponent lingers to long in a lower phase, you can punish him with the units that you have all-ready unlocked after phasing up. In the current A24 meta if the opponents civilization does not have siege towers or elephants (as athens, britions, gauls, romans or spartans, Iberians are a special case with Indibil ) and is in p3, a defending p1 player won't really bother about it as long as the p1 player has superior numbers. Like what are those p3 factions gonna send at you? An outnumbered force of citizen soldiers and a some siege that you can demolish...

My mind was fliting with the idea of an greek umbrella faction with hoplites, the same greek architecture and with subfactions for example ionian(&pegamese), athene, achean and spartan (syracuse and pontus could be added to this). That umbrella faction would be just called greeks or something and then the player can chose to build an athenian council chamber, the spartan barracks or the temples associated with the acheans/ionians. By building build one of these structures, you chose which of the subfaction you want.

I think ashoka is great. He allows you to get a few extra temples and allows you to get the healer techs that are normally to expensive to get. Also as a chariot archer he is a nice unit to have.

It would not be the metal problem of a25. It is in my view the metal problem of the map.

On this forum I see frequently people mentioning metal shortages in 4v4s and negative game effects. I don´t understand why people call it a problem, since I see it as a choice. People decide to play a map&game mode which is short of metal. There is no difficulty in creating a mod that adds an extra metal mine near the starting position of your CC. For me it seems that the people who play these4v4 settings, chose the map to be such that there is a metal shortage. So I wonder, if everyone dislikes those metal shortages, why did nobody made a mainland map where there are 2 starting metal mines? Why do people consider metal shortages as a balance issue instead of a map issue? These are the things I don´t understand about 4v4 players. I also added a mod that adds an extra starting metal mine near the CC on mainland. Honestly that is a mod that everyone could construct and I don´t know why I even post it. MoreMetalMainland.zip

I created a mod a while ago to test some ideas about game balancing and I would like to put some results here. The original description is I also played game with Yekaterina and Valihrant to test if it is viable while not OP. The game I would like to mention against Yekaterina went according to plan. I was playing Seleucids against Ptolemies and at minute 10:30 I had allready a military colony at her door and 25 advanced mercenary archers were getting their first kills. On the flip side, she collected 16815 resources while I had 14000 at that point. The game ended in p2 with a successful mercenary rush. The game I would like to mention against Valihrant went different, where I played as Carthage and he as Sparta. I made some mistakes in execution. If you rush, you are putting yourself behind in workers for the opportunity to do damage. the rush did not do significant damage. With superior number Valihrant was able to beat me in p3. Valihrant showed two concerns about the mod. The first one is that the rusher falls behind to much in population, which the recording disproved. The rusher falls behind, but not overly. The second concern was that quick mercenaries might be used not to rush but at a later stage as a quick reïnforcement for panic defence and thus increasing the capability to turtle. This second concern was not being tested. The replay leads me to think that if the strategy for a p2 rush is well executed, it can be a proper strategy, while Valirhant showed that the defender is able to resist. Again thanks to Yekaterina and Valihrant for trying to test this mod. I also linked the game with Valirhant and if there is any desire for it, I can do a commentary on the game on my youtube channel to show how viable the strategy is under the conditions of the mod. 2021-06-08_0002.zip

I have done some wikipedia reading and the perioikoi were a free class, associated more with trade than with war. Sparta does have the perioikoi trader. If I am correct, the class of neodamodes is represents warfare activities better than perioikoi. My naïve suggestion would thus be to rename perioikoi hoplites to neodamodes hoplites. Is there any reason to use the term perioikoi hoplites?

I think there is no need to require that. If people want to build 3 blacksmiths that is fine by me. By the way: If you are talking about top players, Staratt and boredrusher are on the forum too and they are probably better than me.

A few weeks ago when discussing auras, Stan´ meantioned https://github.com/0ad/0ad/blob/e68daa4f75488bdbdd9b0f58979430ce5e9898fc/source/simulation2/components/CCmpRangeManager.cpp I noticed that file contained a lot of divisions, mainly of the form Z / LOS_TILE_SIZE Now my suggestion is to introduce a dummy variable INV_LOS_TILE_SIZE=1/ LOS_TILE_SIZE. That way, we can do a multiplication instead of a division and the lines would read Z*INV_LOS_TILE_SIZE, which is cheaper if you need to do a lot of divisions. Wraitii suggested that I would make a differential to test if it makes the game faster. I made an account on phabricator to try to make a differential, but I did not know how to make a differential. Can anyone explain which steps would be needed to be done to publish such a simple differential? I do unsterstand some C# code, but I don´t know what steps are next. Do I have to download/upload something or can it be done in the browser?

They can be useful, but in my opinion they are too expensive for the core of your army.

I have played them more than twice. I would suggest the following strategy for 1v1s. What seems to be a decent opening is to create 2-3 extra starting cavalry and run around the opposing territory to see what he is doing and get some kills and idle times. It is important to keep them alive. These cavalry are not very strong, as 6 skirmishers could beat 4 spear cav. You can use the intel to play more defensive than your opponent with some good tower placement. Playing defensive is a good advice since your opponent probably has a better boom, but if you manage the cavalry well, you know what is coming and can be prepared. In p3, I think you hardly need more than 1 siege tower. That siege tower fires only 10 arrows at most and hence you don´t need to garrison more than 10 men. The siege tower is mainly to get free damage on opposing ranged troops and force the opponent to react. What the real killer should be are bolt shooters. An army with a few deployed bolt shooters is a very dangerous army, especially with Demetrios. For pike/skirm ratio, I think 50/50 is the best ratio and that would be the ideal ratio in a model where one unit is a glass cannon and the other a target dummy. You need a reserve of some melee units other than pikes to defend against rams or use your own. I would say that crossbowmen and mercenary archers can be used, if you have surplus metal, but you should make only a few of them and keep them alive as good as possible.

I dislike this idea. It means that it is more difficult to switch to another type of unit, since you lack the upgrades for it. Part of the strategy aspect is to react to what your opponent does, while giving unit specific upgrades means that you are locked in on a particular type of unit. I would advocate that there is 1 single attack upgrade in p2, which gives an attack bonus to all types of soldiers instead of just one type. Currently players probably get ranged attack first because ranged units deal more damage than melee. When players get the ranged attack upgrade, that difference is amplified and there is even less reason to make melee units, since you do not even have the upgrade for melee. This contributes to melee units having a role of target dummies. If the melee units and ranged units benefit from the same p2 attack upgrade, they are more able to deal actual damage.