LetswaveaBook

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.

I could accept if the regular spear cavalry would be just a raiding unit, but the description of the Seleucid one calls them companions, the Macedonian is referred to as a lancer and the kushite one is called heavy cavalry. Anyway, I think spear cavalry is underpowered compared to sword cavalry and spear cavalry could use +1 pierce attack. Sword cavalry +1 pierce armor, 8.35 hack damage per second. Good vs. siege. Spear cavalry +1 hack armor, 4 hack and 3 pierce damage per second. Good vs. cavalry

Age of Empires was a lot of fun when using fantaztec monks effectively. That was totally ridiculous and it felt even better if the opponent uttered any dislike for mass monks.

@Thorfinn the Shallow MindedCan you explain why swordsmen are an all-rounder? It seems like spearmen are in the same way an all-rounder with a bonus against cavalry.

I agree on many points with you. What I think should be the case is that some spear cavalry should be able to beat some infantry while other can not. So the best equipped for the job are the ones with spears and they are more likely to win, while the swordsmen are worse equipped for the job and are less likely to win the fight. I think if spear cavalry are supposed to win sometimes against infantry, in game logic it should be against sword infantry. Disciplined swordsmen might be able to hold, but a citizen soldier would be less likely and be more prone to routing.

I have stated before that I don´t like the speed diversion. All ranged units have the same speed and that is fine to me. I don´t understand why people only whine about skirmishers and slingers not being able to outspeed and kill archers. There are tons of other units to consider as a counter to archers. There is no reason why someone carrying several javelins and a shield should be faster than an opponent with a bow and a quiver full of arrows. What the real issue for me is that if in reality you have a bow and there is a guy with a big shield storming at you from 70 meter distance, how likely do you think that such a situation is good for the archer? The archer first needs to ready an arrow, get a quick aim and then might in reality get a shot from 50 meter and another one from 10 meter. I guess it is not easy to hit the guys body storming at you. If you do shoot from 10 meter, you are probably unable to draw a sword in time and you are dead. If you only shoot 1 arrow, you are unlikely to win the battle either. So that is how I envision ranged combat. If we look at historical battles, people seem not to used the bow a lot on the battle field and most troops were melee. If ranged units were historically really effective, then ranged combat would be used more often. I do think that ranged infantry should be used as an annoyance to force the enemy to retreat or as an invitation to be draw the opponent to a trap. Also I think cavalry should counter swordsmen infantry. If you have a sword and a cavalrymen storms at you, what are you gonna do? If the swordsmen infantry outnumber the cavalry by a factor 2, they might be able to resist the charge but in equal numbers they should get smashed. Currently in the game a spearman cavalry is equally matched to a swordsman infantry. So I advocate +1 piece attack for the spear cavalry to perform the role is should perform. I think it seems to be realistic that swords are easier to carry on foot than spears and hence the swordsmen infantry seem to deserve to be faster.

I should have mentioned the OS. I am using Linux mint, which is similar to Ubuntu. To be honest, the only way I normally install software is with the software manager, though I can put things in the terminal. I don´t know the commands for using package managers and such. Also the OS has a package installer that I can use if I have a package file on my PC, but I am not a command line wizard.

I failed to instal the SVN

I hope that this will not be in A25. it is historically inaccurate and there is another issue. Siege towers should be weak against infantry swordsmen, but the swordsmen get killed from range so the counter system does not work out. If elephants are supposed to be killed by spear units, then just as the infantry swordsmen, they get killed from range. The pikemen might be useful though most civs do not have pikes. What I think to be the best solution is to increase elephant cost and reduce its crush damage. It should not be an organic ram. But again, this thread is about true siege weapons, not about elephants.

1v5, if the swordsmen need to spend a little time surrounding the elephant(like 1 or 2 seconds before they are all attacking). if they start with the elephant surrounded, I think 1 swordsmen survives with a few HP. If you have champion pikemen, it 1v7 and the elephant wins. I just ran a test. 1 asian elephant vs 5 swordsmen and the elephant survives with 5HP

I think this might be the biggest issue for 0AD ballance. Ranged units are OP compared to most other CS. Sword cavalry seems to be the exception. Since CS ranged units are so good, the completely shape the balance. The only melee units that get commonly made are the ones that have a purpose against ranged units( That´s why I made a mod with weaker CS ranged units). However, as christ said, it is of completely topic. @Lion.Kanzen, do you have the power to split the conversation to another thread if applicable?

@Lion.Kanzen, your request has been heard, buy I would first like to know which maps are consider bad and need to be filtered out.

True, but a mercenary rush might be a good option to diversify civs. Civilizations have different units and that inherently makes that some rushes are available to some civilizations while others are not. I think the aim should be to create different rush options and the mercenary rush can be one of them. I also played a game against Yekaterina, who played just as if it was a normal game (also thanks to Yekaterina for trying the mod). I had a very good starting berries, with two fruit trees close to them. 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. 2021-05-30_0005.zip @BreakfastBurrito_007, I understand that I am moving the conversation towards a p2 mercenary rush. If you prefer to stick to the p1 mercenary idea, I would be able to move the p2 mercenary rush to a different topic, such that your ideas of a p1 mercenary rush can be heard. My main question is why not make the required tech be p2?

The main reason why I am not in favor of a tech is the following. Suppose you get to p2 and there is such a tech, you are still limited by the tech. So they are only viable if you make the tech. If you limit them to p2, then it gets useful for nearly everyone, since everyone gets to p2. The second thing I wanted to point out is that I did not aim mercenaries to be viable in p1. I wanted to make them a good option in p2. I think by making them faster to train and cheaper expertise in war, they should be viable as a CS replacement. Only testing can really show if they are viable under these conditions.

High metal cost means spam in p1. If a cavalry merc cost 80 metal and 40 food. Then you mine 20 metal and get 4 cavalry mercenaries for 160 food. If you add some citizen cavalry to that, you will be able to get a very good army. When your opponent only has a few citizen soldiers, 4 extra mercenaries can really make a difference. You did not invest anything substantial. You mined some metal. That is all. Also, advance rank is probably more powerful than you think. I like the advanced rank being locked behind a slight cost. If the embassy trains mercenaries very fast, then why bother training them from barracks?

Thanks for your observations. I think we misunderstood each other. There are a few things I want to highlight. •Mercenaires need 48seconds to train in p1 for infantry and 64 for cavalry. In p2 these times get reduced to 2 seconds and 2.66. So that means once you reach p2, you can train them very fast. In p1, you can train some of them and because of their low numbers, they are only useful for scouting or finding unprotected women or building foundations. I dislike the idea of an upgrade to enable them. I think such an upgrade would be counter productive. First we want to make them more useful and after that we limit them by introducing a technology. I think it is better to put them in p2. Here p2 is the technology required to train them fast. For your final observation I have to notice that the barracks can´t train mercenaries in p1. They are available in the stable(Macedonians), Iberian Embassy and the blemmye camp. The strategy I wanted to enable is the following: A strategy where you only start with 1 barracks and aim click p2 when you have 80 to 110 units. Once you are in p2, you can produce a lot of mercenaries very fast. Then you research expertise in war. Which gives you an army of advanced mercenaries ready to attack.

@Stan` are minor balance changes still possible after the feature freeze?

I would prefer another method. 1. someone has an idea. 2. someone transfers those ideas into a mod. 3. we playtest these mods. 4 We judge it pros can cons. 5. we compare the different aspect of different mods. 6. We optimize on what we have learnt. 7. A patch needs to be made. I think this method has some charm. The biggest issue seems to me that we need to find people who want to do some player vs. player testing.

We can discuss the matter, but the only real way to test how things balance the meta is to test it out with a mod. So I made a mod. I think the tech should cost 500 food and 500 wood, if you can´t guess its name, you can check the mod below. I do consider the starting metal as a problem for p1 mercenaries, so therefore they should be limited by some tech. I agree with you on the fact that a tech to unlock mercenaries could be useful. I added some things to the mod to support aggression. Features of the mod: •wood gather rate reduced by 0.10, food gather rate reduced by 0.10 (This means women/cavalry get ¨cheaper¨ and citizen soldiers stay at about the same ¨cost¨, which should encourage people to make more women/cavalry and that would favor aggression). •speed upgrade for cavalry is reduced in cost to 200f,100m. This might be useful for cavalry rushes. From an economic viewpoint it means that 10% speed is about +10% gather rates at long distances. The 100m is left over after doing the p1 wood/food techs. So the speed upgrade tech seems to be worth it if you have around 15 cavalry. •I like the concept of age of empires 2, where you getting to the next phase means a significant step in military power. Therefore I added +10%attack/health to all soldiers once p2 is reached. •Mercenaires need 48seconds to train in p1 for infantry and 64 for cavalry. In p2 these times get reduced to 2 seconds and 2.66. • Infantry mercenaries cost 35 food and 45 metal and cavalry mercenaires cost 60 metal and 60 food. •Expertise in war costs 250 metal and need 20 seconds to research. It now triples the train time (This means that you can train mercenaries very fast, until you decide you want to scarify train rate for military power). • civ specific changes about mercenaries(Athens: +10% metal gather rate in p2, Carthage: can build an Iberian embassy and mercenaries in p1&expertise in war, Kush: can build an Blemmye camp and mercenaries in p1, Macedon: Suited for cavalry rushed and can train mercenary cavalry in p1, Ptolemies: Fantastic eco and Ptolemy 1, Seleucids: start now with an extra mercenary swordsmen and military colony is as fast at producing mercenaries 2 times and researching expertise in war). •Misc: archers have 2.5 spread and Persian axe cavalry in p1. I also reduced the metal cost of p2/p3 eco and blacksmith techs to make them more accessible and to provide more metal to the players. I did test the mod in 1v1s and it seems that for Carthage and Kush, you can get about 20 mercenaries out before minute 10. From my tests, I tend to conclude that these changes allow you to get sufficient numbers of mercenaries to deal a really good blow as at this point the opponent seems to have 40-50 citizen soldier scatter around his base. What I tested was a strategy where you only produce 1 barracks and aim click p2 when you have 80 to 110 units. Once you are in p2, you can produce a lot of mercenaries very fast. Then you research expertise in war, which gives coupled with the +10% attack/health bonus some very strong units. I suppose it really allows for a deadly early p2 attack when you opponent is late to p2. (Also I played a 4v4 last night from the pocket position as Britons. I rushed the opposing flank with cavalry and 12 slingers which was effective and it seems show that passive pockets could get to see their allies destroyed. I have to remark that one player was 1700+ and the receiving end was mid 1300s) Each of these modded mercenary civilizations will affect the meta in different ways. I would like if there would be some players that try these features in player vs player. Any test results would be appreciated. mercenary_mod.zip

and still people use Cleopatra a lot. I think getting p3 early and then using ptolemy I to get a lot of advanced mercenaries is a valid strategy.

I was talking about Ptolemy 1, which can be trained from the CC for extra comfort. Ptolemy 1 still has that bonus and it also affects food cost. The only downside is that those mercenary cavalry can only be trained from the military colony.

The best cavalry hero is the one that makes them 35% cheaper

If I may do a suggestion, such a tech might also allow military colonies, Carthagian embassies, temples to heal your wounded units, blacksmiths, a market to trade some extra metal, melee citizen cavalry and some extra upgrades. It would be good that after this tech you could train mercenaries very fast, like in 4 seconds and overwhelm an unsuspecting opponent. If we only could think of a name and cost for such a tech...