[Economy bonus ideas]

10 minutes ago, ValihrAnt said:

My initial idea is 100 Stone cost, 120 sec build time and 50m Range.

I would like to keep it fairly expensive, to make the decision when to place it difficult. So you would not place it to early and it won't be spammed.

So I would go with 200s,100m and 150 seconds build time. Which means you can place a barracks and a pyramid with their 300 starting stone. Also the 100 metal is just what you have left after doing the wood and farming upgrade. So you get one to place wisely.

Also I would enjoy it if building 1 pyramid, 1 barracks and going to p2 for camel merc rush would be a viable strategy. Maybe make those merc camps cheaper as well?

If you want to boom with 3 barracks, I feel like the pyramid thing should only be a minor bonus.

 

 

[for a better unit movement]

On 17/09/2021 at 12:41 PM, alre said:

Units interpenetrate basically every time you move them. When you have a whole bunch moving together, they form queues so tight that they look like solid worms of people. In some cases, it may be hard to tell how many soldiers there are, making it particularly difficult to predict how a battle is going to go. It is even more difficult to tell how many soldiers are getting killed, because they are so densely packed in the melee that people dying are invisible inside the mob. Rams can sometime interpenetrate so deeply that two of them may look like there is only one, while they are attacking a building.

Choke points are no longer of any real strategic relevance, you have to fit melee units into them to make them effective, and that's usually impossible/unfeasible. And the slightest gap between two buildings allows a whole cavalry army to pour in between in a couple of seconds. Any passage, narrow or large, can fit an army as large as you want.

I think it wasn't necessary to deviate so strongly from how unit movement looked before, the new pathfinder is more andanced and effective, but it went too far on this new road. It is ok if a big mass of units struggles to go trough a narrow passage, that's how things work in reality anyway. And besides that, I think the look of battles is worse now than before, less clear and more hazardous. In any case, unit interpenetration is bad and should be avoided if possible.

I totally agree with this. What I think is probably the worst is that a group of javilineers can now occupy a very condensed space and launch death from a super small area.

[Age of Empires IV]

32 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

The minimap has icons. Nice.

On top of the minimap is an N for north. How is that N useful? It is just a waste of space.

[Age of Empires IV]

Well. that does not really look sweet to me.

 

But I have to admitt that I thought Age of Empires 2: DE would fail because pathfinding initially left something to be desired.

[Thoughts on Heroes.]

6 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:

What you suggest for Agis makes him not much more useful though ; )

Other bad heroes:

Xerxes
Ashoka
Perikles
Hamilkar
Alexander

I don't strife to make them all top heroes, but at least useful. Any suggestions are welcome.

I think some of these heroes are bad from a competitive view, but not from a design point of view. So I would say some of them are underpowered (which can be OK, as not every unit has to be OP) and some could use a buff.

On Xerxes, I think if you position him near your CC, he might increase the gather rate of 40 farmers and 20 miners. So that is 60 units affected by his aura. However I think he might benefit from a bigger range and/or higher gather rate boost.

On Ashoka, I would say that having temples for 75 stone with low construction time are useful. It is not over the top though.

On Perikles, we see some unimpressive auras as well. However if we increase the values of the temple cost reduction to 50%(similar to ashoka) and boost the construction speed bonus to 50% and make it global, he would be a hero that would be worth having after Iphicrates died.

Hamilcar provides a global speed boost, which allows you to outmaneuver the opponent. It means that your opponent can't catch your archers. So I think he is decent, though not the best.

Alexander does make it less ridicule to capture CCs, so without siege a fully garrison CC is no longer extremely difficult to capture but only very difficult. The problem is that you can only capture things if you get rid of the opposing army first and Alexander does not help with that. I also build a theater once and the +20 territory range seemed nice on the minimap. If you can combine that with the territory bonus of Alexander a CC can have an nice territory pull. I think his design is not bad, but he is not fantastic either. However I think Alexanders could also benefit from granting all units +1 capture strength.

[Why do catapults can still attack people if people are invulnerable to them?]

3 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

now no one uses them. 

I think there are uses for them. I heard that someone said that mysticjim recently uploaded a legendary game where the winning player used a catapult.

5 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

Balancing advisors please tell me what you think:

Each unit should have advantages and disadvantages compared to other units. The most logical comparison is the ram. The ram has the disadvantage that is needs to expose itself and enter enemy territory. If a structure has garrisoned swordsmen, we are all familiar with the problem. The advantage of rams is that they destroy things faster. For catapults the story is reversed. The catapult does not deal damage as far but can do so from a safe distance. It would be unfair is the better unit is limited to a few factions and the ram seems to be the best of the two. Does the catapult have use cases? There are certainly moments when you can't approach a CC or fortress and you will choose to use a catapult. So from that perspective it is fine to me.

 

 

5 hours ago, maroder said:

they shouldn't be extremely vulnerable to archers

All the factions that get catapults do get means to defend them against archers, so I don't see the problem here.

Now on the organic units, I think this is not a catapult problem, but a crush damage problem. Crush damage is basically anti-building damage and organic units resist it very much. Macemen are not good in combat, simply because they do crush damage. I think organic units have to much crush armor. A catapult can destroy a sentry tower with 4 hits, wheres you need the same amount of hits to kill a melee cavalry. If I had to do a suggestion it would be: ranged citizen soldier to have 6 crush armor, melee citizen soldiers and ranged champions to get 9 and champion melee units to get 11. When the crush armor is reduced, other units also need to be re-balanced, most notably the elephants.

8 minutes ago, Dizaka said:

Additionally, if a catapult-ball were to shatter on impact and soldiers were nearby no reason why soldiers should be immune to such damage.

Did they shatter?

[Economy bonus ideas]

First of all, I think it is a pity if the game would become like age of empires 2, where each faction is expected to have an economy bonus and civilizations become very much their economy bonus. That would also make balancing more difficult as we would not only be bothered with tech tree, but also with economy bonusses for balancing. I prefer to create something that really suits the faction identity and make current ones more explicit. So I would toss the following ideas:

Celtic factions: For me, celtic factions seem to be more about fast development than about a strong lategame. They have the wooden construction bonus, which makes building 20% faster to build, but have 20% less hit points and capture points. It might be a nice idea to double down on this identity and also give the celtic faction on top of that -20 stone cost for building.
Persians: Put the levy upgrades in  p1 for a quantity over quality approach. It makes your soldiers being trained faster at the cost of 300 food. The additional cost is of course that in the 40 seconds it is researched, no units can be trained.
Kushites: The kushites have their iconic pyramids and I like to double down on that in order to distinguish the faction more from others. So I would suggest making the small pyramid available in p1, giving Kushites a boost to the economy in p1, but it needs to be strategically placed. Also, since the pyramids are associated with their culture we could make turn it into an extra research location for culture/spiritual related technologies, such as archery tradition,archery training, monumental architecture, conscription and will to fight.

 

[Thoughts on Heroes.]

I would like to open the discussion on the auras of heroes. Some of them have uninteresting auras and I think that is a shame. I would just open this topic to suggest a few changes:

The first thing I dislike is the +20 attack for champions aura. Not in all games it is viable to go for large numbers of champions. So I really feel like that is makes the aura disapointing. So I would suggest

Boudica of the Britons - She affects champions and Britons have two variations of them, the chariot and the swordsmen. I think it suits the Briton identity to rely more on the chariot than on the swordsmen. So I would like to change the aura to affecting javilineers. I also like the aura to affect more than only champions.
Philip of Macedon - Instead of affecting champions, he gives +20% HP and a capture bonus to all melee units. Philip was known for reforming the army, especially for adding the pikes and the companion cavalry. So these melee champions will still be affected and mostly the bonus becomes thus stronger. It is a disappointment for me that Macedon does not have an advantage for pikemen.
Amaniremas the Kushite warrior queen - For me it is fine that she keeps affecting champions. The kushites have 5 different champions and some have other advantages going for them, so it suits their identity and supports their strong points. Champion axemen have the advantage to be trainable as soon as you reach p3 and the champion elephant is 20% cheaper. The champion swordsmen is also accessible and you only need a big temple to unlock them. You want to have the big temple probably anyway for the elite healers it trains and on top of that is can function as a place to heal and being able to train champions there is just a nice extra. Furthermore I think the champion archer and cavalry are also useful units.

There are also a number of heroes that do not have any auras and it would be fair to give then some. Because I do not like to change things massively and suddenly make them the top heroes, so I prefer to go for smaller bonuses.

Maurya Elephant hero - He was known for having for having an good elephant force. So I would think about him giving a global aura to train elephants even  faster on top of the maurya bonus by reducing the batch training modifier to 0.5. If my math is correct that means that a batch of 9 elephants train in 84 seconds. For normall factions that would take 186 seconds and for mauryas it currently takes 130 seconds. For a perspective:  3 stables of a normal faction can train 9 elephants in 86 seconds. It means you get the elephants fast, but you still need the resources. This would also help to make Mauryans elephants archers become more viable.
Themistokles of Athens - He does not provide a bonus on land maps and I think that is a pity. Another pity is that the Athenians can only train their marineers at when docks can be build. So if we combine them I come to suggest that marines should be allowed to be trained in the council hall once Themistocles is trained (maybe it could be more strict and demand him to be alive).
Agis III of sparta - There a 3 things worth of mention about what I found on Wikipedia on him. Under his rule Spartan interest on Creta was secured. He also led an army consisting of 8000 mercenaries (and other troops). The third point is that he was an enemy of Macedon. So that would give me 2 suggestions for auras. The first one is reducing the HP of opposing pikemen by 10%, the signature unit of Macedon. The second suggestion is allowing Spartans to train Cretan mercenary archers once Agis III is trained (maybe it could be more strict and demand him to be alive). Agis III has been criticized before, but I think it would be nice to see the Spartans having a hero for each of their different enemies, namely the Athenians, the Persians and Macedon.

Of course there are a number of heroes who have auras that could use re-balancing, but for brevity I skip that topic. Are there any heroes that you dislike for their auras? Let me and the community know your thoughts.

 

[Sword cav OP?]

12 hours ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

Do you mean that it should remain the way it is? or are you commenting about how powerful they are this alpha?

I mean they always seemed weird to me from a design perspective. Rome was not known for its powerful cavalry, yet it gets the most powerful cavalry unit. Also they are significantly more powerful than the champion spear cavalry.

 

13 hours ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

Do you think it is reasonable to drop 1 armor for both hack and pierce off of all champion melee cavalry and then 1 extra for consular bodyguard?

For reference most melee champion infantry get double the HP and attack and +3 armor. I think champion spear cavalry follows the same trend as them getting double the attack, but get +4 armor and 300 instead of 320 hp. That +1 armor effectively is about the same as 333 HP, so there is not that much of a difference. I could agree if people because of aesthetics suggested to make it +3 armor and 320 HP.

The fact is citizen infantry can gather resources and champions can't. If you have an citizen army, and decide to replace a certain group of the army, the obvious choice seems to replace the part of your army that can't work efficient: Cavalry. I think that is part of the reason why it is so popular to replace your citizen cavalry with champion cavalry as it does not affect the work force.

Also, I think we should view the entire situation and not just adjust one unit because we had bad experiences with it. The idea that only 1 unit(spear cavalry champion) is problematic seems an oversimplification to me. We need to look at the bigger picture.

On 16/09/2021 at 11:56 AM, Yekaterina said:

Well, on more than 1 occasions, reza-math came to my base with 50 sword cav, went straight for cc, leaving most other units unharmed. This is often the case when I have taken all units out of my base to hit his other allies.

I think player need to adjust to the new reality. If all your units are out of your base, it does not matter if it are 60 mauryan sword cavalry or 40 champion spear cavalry. In a world where these strategies are employed, you could employ these strategies yourself as well or build a big stone wall around your base.

Maybe it is easy to say this from a sideline, but suppose a game with player 1-4 on team 1 against player 5-8 you are a spartan pocket(Lets call you player 2). Then in a world like this (200 pop game), the opposing pocket (Lets call him player 6) goes for 40 champion cavalry. I am assuming both flank players (player 1&5) are fighting a full war with each other and cannot afford to distribute resources to . Both pocket players should probably keep 150 units at your base. The other allied pocket player (Lets call him player 3,) on your team probably needs 40 champion cavalry. The Spartan player should create 50 champions to help your his player. So now the opposing flank is in trouble and player 6 needs to help him. If player 6 sends a large body of citizen infantry, that should be noted by the team and player 3 should see that as an invitation to wreck base of players 6. So that is not the best option. Helping player 5 with 40 champion cavalry against 50 spear champions is not an advisable strategy for player 6 either. So that means player 6 would need to counter. Either player 6 needs to attack player 1 or 2. Player 2 is the spartan player that has 150 units at home. Killing a 50 women of players 1 is possible, but then we would get in a situation where player 2 has 150 working units at home and he could easily send lots of resources towards player 1. If the women are killed and player 1 get enough resources, it only means player 1 has some free population space and can now field a larger army. So player 5 now need to worry about 160 units that player 1 is sending his way and the 50 champions of player 6. Off course, games probably wont go as you would predict on paper. This scenaria is purely fictional, but there is I have not seen any ideas why it would or wouldn't work. The big question is if there is no counter or whether people just did not adapt to the new balance. I think the if pocket players would adapt to the idea that you need to have units to defend your base, the cavalry threat can be dealt with. Also I suppose each team needs 1 player to go cavalry to be able to punish any opponent neglecting his defenses.

[Attack move not working]

I also had troubles with that. I thought maybe it was because I did not fully understand and putting units on defensive was the problem.

However that you experience the same troubles convinces me that something else might be at play. I just tested and patrolling into opposing units works as intended, which can be a workaround for the current problem.

[Sword cav OP?]

By the way: I just tested and a consular body guard defeats a champion pikeman.

But remember consular body guard is special.

[Sword cav OP?]

2 hours ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

In my opinion, even champion melee cav should certainly lose to 25% more spearmen.

On one side we have an elite fighter costing 330 resources and the other side consist of amateurs worth 100 resources. I think melee camp cav deserve to do well against them, even if slightly outnumbered. What I could agree with is that higher level spear/pikemen get a larger attack multiplier against cavalry.

3 hours ago, Angen said:

But you get 100 food and 40 wood (generally) easier compared to 70 metal

The problem with this reasoning is that (first of all it is not true): it speaks only "generally". I would accept that if metal is more common than wood on particular maps, then mercenaries should dominate. However if there is an abundance of all resources to collect, the units should be well balanced. In my views we should not take scarcity of resources into consideration for balance. Also even if the cost of the units was comparable, one is still significantly better than the other.

[Sword cav OP?]

5 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:

Are sword cav op? Or are mercenary sword cav op?

I think sword cav are good and being a mercenary is good. So those two combined are OP in my view. I think normal sword cavalry is not problematic and other mercenaries aren't as problematic either.

If we look at the stats, we see that a regular sword cavalry costs  100 food, 40 wood and 10 metal. A mercenary cavalry costs 80 metal and is significantly stronger. They are to cheap for what they offer. Do you think it is a good idea to have a unit at 2/3rd of the cost being 25% stronger? Do you think it is a balanced that a basic sword cavalry has preferable defenses and a DPS of 8.67 while spear cavalry has 5.6 (9.8 against cavalry).

 

I think the numbers give a clue on what to expect.

[what about snowballing]

12 hours ago, alre said:

Of course Letswaveabook was also playing very well

You were asking for opinions and I agree with this one.

 

12 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

But I wish we could see more champions and ranged siege.

I have seen some games of borg- and he seems to use champions more than I do. borg- certainly knows what he is doing and it is a legitimate style. My approach is getting good numbers with siege and p3 upgrades early and then advance and see what the enemy has. Such an approach doesn't suit waiting 60 seconds to unlock champions and then training them.

[Peak RTS gameplay.]

In the past, I used to play age of empires 2 competitively and I enjoyed to go yolo with monks. Here I found another fantastic game. I wonder if there are other people who can tell about their love for monks, as I know that many 0ad players mention the game on the forum and Valihr has even some youtube uploads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMuY6FMsyCU

[Which Units Are Best For Combating Elephants?]

12 hours ago, Thales said:

Interesting from the Fadom Wiki page:

That wiki is hopelessly outdated and for current game information you can ignore it.

12 hours ago, Thales said:

I did not see any (Athenian) particular unit being described as effective in combating elephants.

Currently the game is supposed to have a soft counter system. That means most units do not get a bonus against each other. Elephants have a weakness, namely their pierce armor is low. Also ranged units have an easier time hitting big targets and Elephants being slow does not help either. So ranged units are your best bet.

[more citizen infantry variety]

I think if we can justify is, it would be nice to introduce melee infantry that is not a spearman, swordsman or pikemen.

 

I ran into a story of an axe being used and it tells that it is not super rare or pure fantasy, but it does not tell much else either.  The Athenian Cynaegirus had as the story goes his hand chopped off by an axe when trying to board a Persian ship. I could see axes being used by pirates or crew members of ships (similar as the vikings did), but that would need more verification.

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynaegirus

[Age of Empires IV]

1 hour ago, smiley said:

Also, Holy Roman Empire has nothing to do with Romans.

That is largely true.

 

1 hour ago, smiley said:

They just called themselves that to sound cool.

That is not entirely the truth. The pope bestowed the title of Roman emperor on Charlemagne because he wanted to see a powerful state in the west that could harbor Christianity. Charlemagnes empire broke into pieces and later Otto 1 ruled over both Germany and Italy and received the title of Roman emperor. During history, Italy was sometimes part of this empire and sometimes it broke off. However tradition prescribed that the emperor had to be crowned by the roman pope.

 

Also the empire was German and if it is the same as in the Dutch language, being called Roman does (always) not link to being associated with the city of Rome, but can also refer being associated with the Roman (Catholic) faith. I can't really speak for German (which has words ), but I know that in Dutch there are two words, rooms and Romeins (Note that the latter is always written with a capital, it's not an error ;P), and the first refers to being from the roman faith and the latter refers to the city. In Dutch we describe the holy Roman empire as rooms and I think this is a suggestion to think as Roman referring to the Roman faith. I did some internet search and German uses the word römisch and also romanisch (which seems to has fallen somewhat out of use) and I can not say if they have similar views.

 

[[Feature Request] More control over garrisoned units]

13 hours ago, Ceres said:

Or is this far away from your thoughts?

I was thinking about two hotkeys, lets say they are on A and S. You have a number of units garrisoned. You can see how much HP the one has that is ungarrisoned first. If you want to ungarrison is, you press A. If you want to toggle to the next you press S.

12 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

I don't actually care too much about the specifics now, as I feel anything showing more details than currently will be an improvement.

That was also the way I viewed it and maybe a ungarrison healthy only hotkey is as good or better.

[[Feature Request] More control over garrisoned units]

What I was thinking about: Show how much HP the unit has that you ungarrison first. So you could decide if you want to ungarrison it.

Then if you do not want to ungarrison it, there should be something like ungarrison-and-regarrison hotkey. If a unit is regarrisoned, there is another unit that would be ungarrisoned first afterwards. Then you can decide if you want to ungarrison that unit or if you want to toggle to the next one.

1 hour ago, Ceres said:

Maybe the CC icon could get a toggle to ungarrison only healed units or not. (the amount of HP% for "healed" can already be set in the game settings)

A hotkey that only ungarrisoned healthy units would also be nice.

[[Feature Request] More control over garrisoned units]

One thing which makes ideal play more difficult is that there is limited control over garrisoned units. If we garrison cavalry in the CC, we might want to ungarrison the ones that are fully recovered. Currently, if you have 10 cavalry garrisoned in the CC and want to send only a particular unit with full HP out, you run in 2 problems.

1. You don't know the HP of the unit that you ungarrison, so you can't judge if you need to send it out.

2. You can't change the unit that you send out.

I tested how ungarrisoning works and it is a first in, first out principle. The only thing you can do is ungarrisoning all your units and then click on each individual unit and put them back in. I know there is a wounded hotkey, but I would like to manage my units from within the CC/barracks.

[Where are you from?]

7 hours ago, MoLAoS said:

I'm from Misery. Erm, Missouri sorry.

Is that in texas?

[what about snowballing]

2 hours ago, Ceres said:

If I may chime in: It seems that loot is a "hot" topic.  Maybe it's possible (and worth?) keeping look but allowing users to toggle it on/off on the map etc. selection screen before the game starts? I don't know whether this helps to find out if and how much loot contributes to a snowballing effect, but in the end, you could let players decide what they like more. Again, I don't know if this is technically easy to accomplish and whether it would add any value, but maybe this is something to consider instead of thinking binary, only.

It would be fairly easy (but time consuming) to make a mod that sets all loot of building/units to 0. Another solution might be looking at some hero's with loot bonusses and use that to multiply all loot by 0

[Afghanistan]

11 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

In Germany everyone who doesn't say 'Hooray!' to NATO is considered to be an extremist and/or idiot.

In  the Netherlands, this is not the case and you can soundly dislike NATO. However unlike Germany, we do have an unpleasant history with Srebrenica. I can imagine that the French aren't big fans after the things thrown their way after not joining in Iraq.

 

3 hours ago, Thales said:

I've been reading second hand accounts that European leaders are less than pleased with Biden's leadership. I would be interested in knowing what the perception is from Europe.

Biden is a seasoned politician. In Europe we are not affected so much by Trumps(or some republicans) views of him being stupid or senile. Clearly things did not go sweet. However in the Netherlands, we mainly are looking at our own incapability of evacuating our civilian personnel, which is something the French did a lot better.

Probably in Europe it seems fair to hold the opinion that if you do not spend that 2% budget on military, you can't get an optimal military or relation with NATO. Also in the Netherlands it is accepted that the Dutch followed NATO to Afghanistan without a proper plan.

[[Solved] Ranged Infantry & Hellenistic Defense Tower]

Also it needs to be said that if towers fire multiple arrows, they don't focus them on a single target. Which means that instead of killing 2 out of 3, all might escape and be healed from their injuries.