LetswaveaBook

I like this suggestion for sake of realism. However I wouldn't like if your ranged units target an enemy automatically and then automatically decide to inflict more damage to your own troops than to the opposing troops.

On the topic of bow range, if you shoot an arrow for a very long distance, I guess it will lose a considerable amount of its energy to air resistance. So that means its effective range might not be that high. I like the spread feature as a gameplay balance. Spread means that archers can shoot far, but at large distance melee troops are fairly safe from them because archers are more likely to miss. I think it hurts gameplay if substantial damage can be done at long range and therefore I like inaccuracy at long range to be in the game.

I would like to show this post once more: Even though archers beat them, it is not like skirmishers are underpowered...

In 1v1s if your opponent focuses eco upgrades and on building barracks early and does not spend wood for citizen soldiers, that opens very realistically a possibility to rush with infantry. I agree with @alre, sentry towers in P1 are not the main problem, except that they are build to fast for my liking. With most civilizations, a player needs to decide if they prefer 2 sentries or a barracks (assuming you have the stone to start with). I think the main problem is that they can be upgraded conveniently in p2. https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/25133 removes them being part of the phase up requirement. Also I think that sentries should not be able to fire arrows while the upgrade is in process. Oh, there is an enemy? Let me upgrade the tower right under their noses! Oh, there is an enemy and I have no tower? Let me quickly build a sentry with 40 seconds of build time and upgrade the tower right under their noses!

When it comes to elite rank soldiers, I would like to remind you of how strong they can be. Even without micro, elite javelin cavalry can beat spear cavalry. Elite sword cavalry has a base of 6 pierce armor and 250 HP and good DPS, making it a very good units against ranged units and siege. When the Elite sword cavalry is compared to the champion spear cavalry, the Elite sword cavalry is surprisingly good considering its costs. Furthermore elite swordsmen are comparable to skiritai commandos while the mercenary probably will be cheaper. I think that is something people should keep in mind.

The most important question is what makes a civ weak in A24? I think the answer seems to be: Lacking all of these features 1. no good heroes 2. no good siege 3. no elephants 4. not having archery tradition, horse archers or pikemen. I think there is a core element in the meta that is causing them to be considered weak. In the current meta, there is a real benefit of good siege or elephants. I think we should implement changes that affect the meta, instead of considering these civilizations flawed. Personally I feel like these civilizations have something going for them, but I can understand that they are considered weak in the current meta. Also there is: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/25338

I didn´t mean to do it literally that way, but I would rather say it was in the same spirit. We could for example say that fields generated by a granary are a different type of crops, which is gathered 10% faster and where only 2 citizens can gather per field. In that case it would seriously impact city layout as you cannot place 40 citizens around your CC with this method. If you combine it with giving CCs positive auras for buildings, you would give players reasons to do things differently. Ideas for that would be markets near CCs get 5% barter price and blacksmiths near CCs give citizen soldiers produced from the CC a small bonus. That way every player probably wants to build the market and blacksmith near the CC and scarify some farming space. I think we need an entire arsenal of tools to supply a change of city layout if we want to do it an a soft way, since placing farms around CCs makes a lot of gameplay sense. Recap: I am in favor of adding a second way so players get to chose whether they want to use the granaries or the original fields.

I doubt if it is OP. CCs are expensive but useful can be useful. More territory also means more territory to defend and in that view a second CC also makes you vulnerable.

What do people think of the Empire Earth way to do it? In that game you build a granary and 8 fields spawn around it. That would be different from placing it around the CC. We could have a feature were you could place fields individually or for a reduced price with a granary. The transparent grey building in the middle of the fields is the granary.

I think Yekaterina has said some helpful things, but I suppose execution is your problem. When you start the game, be as quick as you can to select your Civic center and train some units. U can use the hotkey z for training women. Then put all your units to work. When you have done so, select your Civic center and press ctrl+1, now you can access your CC by pressing 1 on your keyboard. It is important to play with one hand on the keyboard and pressing 1 often to see if your CC is idle. Also, as mentioned use batch training. In order to do so, select a building and press the shift button. Now you can train units in groups, which is faster. By using the mouse wheel you can vary the batch sizes. Pro tip: Don't be a girl who forgets eco upgrades. Don't know where I heard that before.

That is a good question. I always thought you had to order them manually to get fighting en masse. If you don't order them to fight, I suppose they are just collecting resources unless the unit itself is attacked. I don't know that for sure to be honest.

The big difference between most games is the citizen soldier concept. As ValirhAnt said, booming equals turtling. What 0ad in my view lacks is units that specialize in either booming, rushing or turtling. Currently citizen soldier infantry fit all of these roles. They are best used for booming, so that is more or less what everyone does. And then there is citizen cavalry. They are fast but lack the strength to go toe-to-toe with a good infantry force. If you commit to a cavalry rush and it doesn't work out, you need to pump resources in something that does not work out or give up on all the resources that you invested in your cavalry rush. If you do not want to be confronted with such a dilemma, it is wise not to spend too much resources on your cavalry rush. I think that explains why cavalry rushes are most often limited in number.

I think Seleucids would be the best for beginners. I consider rushing not a strategy suited to beginners, so I would recommend a civ that has the tools to crack a defense. Seleucids seem to be the best for that. They have pikemen, cavalry archers, cataphracts with more HP, good siege&elephants and their military colonies are nice too. The thing why I would recommend them over Ptolemies is their champion swordsmen which prevents a weakness to rams.

Seems like a really ambitious project. It would be cool to see how it looks on release.

In my logic, if units move faster then the time spent traveling to your opponent is less and that would reduce to economic cost of being away from work for some time. I think the main issue is not the speed, rather it is that the unit with most range(=area it can control) is also the most useful. Reducing archer speed to 9.0 will not make a big difference in my view. I do think the strength of defenses is an issue. Without p3 there is no realistic way to take a garrisoned opposing tower.

If you want to proof that the gamma function for factorials actually works, you will not only get an integral by parts after doing partial integration, but you will even apply a proof by induction on it. So those who were think ¨Ah, @#$%¨ actually are a bunch of pussies.

I think that this touches the key to the problem. More specifically, ranged infantry is the best military unit and they are good for your boom. If two players are evenly matched, the defender would have the same production and type of units as the attacker, which leaves the defender with an advantage. Going for a major infantry attack is costly on the economy and that´s why in a citizen soldier concept it has no place. I think the solution is not boosting gathering rate of women, but rather there needs to be a better rock-paper-scissor system. Generally speaking, I think the strength of ranged units is a problem in all phases and it results in simplified strategy: which unit should you make early on? Ranged infantry. I believe this offers no options to outstrategize your opponent, as the counters to ranged units all have their limitations. If melee cavalry could defeat ranged infantry, I think the problem would be solved for the civilizations that get melee cavalry in p1 (which is the reason for:) Because of some recent events, I have to admit that cavalry rushes can be executed effectively if the rushing playing is the better player. But in 1v1s I feel that cavalry rushes only work out if there is a skill difference between the players. Women cost only 50 food and can be produced from houses with fertility festival and collect wood at almost the same rate, which makes women better for booming in my view.

This is me trying out if spear-men cavalry can perform as a good counter against skirmishers and can deal with superior numbers of cheaper infantry.

I ran some tests to learn something about the effect of the spread statistic. I measured the performance of 6 units. The first one is a camel archer at short range. The second one is a archer at short range. The third one is a archer at short range firing at multiple opponents. The fourth one is a camel archer at long range. The fifth one is a archer at long range. The sixth one is a archer at long range firing at multiple opponents. The camel archer is the control group with static stats. For the archers I tweaked the spread statistic. I made the following table where the numbers in it represent the experience which is correlated to the damage dealt and shots landed. In the brackets, I mentioned the % of damage it dealt compared to the long range variant (so the 38% in the bottom right corner means that archer at long range vs multiple targets did 38% as much damage as the archer at short range vs multiple targets). For the camel this value is always around 0.6 as the spread of camels was left constant. spread 0.1 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 Camel short 126 133 140 155 133 144 archer short 125 108 102 96 67 66 archer short, multiple targets 125 125 125 125 100 100 Camel long 78 80 84 94 80 84 archer long 123(98.4%) 49(45.4%) 42(42.2%) 38(38.6%) 24(35.8%) 20(30.3%) archer long, multiple targets 123(98.4%) 75(60%) 62(49.6%) 57(45.6%) 43(43%) 38(38%) The first observation is that camels(2.0 spread) at short range are fairly close to near 0.1 spread archers. In reality they are archers with 2.0 spread and +5% damage, so the shift in spread of 2.0 to 0.1 is equivalent to about 4% damage for the short range. The second observation is that archers at long range seem to drop of more compared to the short version if the spread increases. The third observation is that if the spread increases, the relative advantage of the archer with multiple targets also increased compared to the archer shooting on only 1. I hope that some players will be able to make some other insightful observations, but I will leave it at that. Now I will explain what I think should be good for the game. I think at long range, ranged units should be mainly a nuisance and bad at targeting individual units. So for the option of 4.5 spread, this means that it drops in 30% in terms of effective DPS on short range. To counter such, the Archer could be given 20% more pierce damage. This would mean that if archers now deal 100*1.2 damage in the same period as the camel (similar to the archer with 0.1 spread ) deals 144. So at short range it is a 15% nerf (provided that the archers are shooting at multiple targets.). On long range it would seem like a nerf of 47% (compared to the long camel shooting at multiple targets, this statistic is not in the table). If we chose a spread of 2.5 and no additional attack increase, we would get a short range nerf of about 5% provided the archer shoots at multiple opponents. For the long range the nerf will be 6.5% (compared to the camel shooting at multiple targets, this statistic is not in the table) To be honest. I messed up my test results by having the short archer firing at multiple opponents was advanced rank and had better accuracy than the others. I will need to update the table, but I will do so tomorrow. 88121138_speadtestforspread4_0.63801cc4ff25c1802139df3e418b4344

I think archers are the best civilian ranged infantry. However I think the gap is not as big as you might think. With a 10% decrease in damage output they could be fine, that is what I am thinking. On top of that I would like to see a buff for spear cavalry so they can function as a counter to ranged unit. The main advantage is that archers have long range. If the spread would be increased such that their damage at max range is reduced, I think that would help balance. That would create a situation where you can do damage from a safe distance, but it won´t be much unless the enemy decides to get close.

I think siege towers don't need to be stopped. Siege towers often were very slow if not stationary. In game we use siege towers on the battlefield as a mobile archer carrier and I think that is the core of the problem, especially the mobile part. If they were very slow, we could use siege(rams) against them. However this tread is about elephants. Even though ranged units are the best option, they are still not great. If we compare an Asian elephant to champion infantry, we see that they elephant has less than 3 times the cost and pop requirement. In return you get 3 times the hack damage and a ton of crush damage. On the defensive side you get over 4 times the hit points and better armor, totaling at about 5 times the durability. I think that the elephant seems to be the better deal in that regard and it should be priced accordingly.

In this topic I would solely discuss the simple economic effect of starting with a worker elephant. Once we understand this fully we can expand to discussing more complex matters. There was a topic earlier were worker elephants were criticized. I ran a few test to compare Maurya(M) boom with Seleucid(S) boom. To reduce randomness, I imposed a few rules to play by: 1. Don't use extra berries, extra hunt(only chickens) or wicker baskets technology. 2. Start by building a farmstead and a house. 3. Aim to get fertility festival early. 4. Don't build a second worker elephant. 5. Map mainland, biome autumn. 6. Aim to start training infantry at the CC around minute 5, before that make only women. 7. Only collect only food/wood 8: End the game after 11 minutes(In practice this was most often a few seconds later) Note that several of these rules benefit Sele more than Maurya. Here are my results the games played first are on top, civ (trained units) (trained infantry) (food collected) (wood collected) M 147 45 8501 8836 S 158 14 9286 8426 S 139 38 8153 8805 S 154 56 8905 9849 M 145 35 8390 9915 M 169 31 10009 10223 M 168 44 9175 10239 M 155 46 8663 9061 M 163 35 9553 9063 M 152 35 9045 9405 S 151 52 8368 9325 S 138 42 7979 9011 (I blame this result on unfavourable map gen.) S 151 48 9348 9050 I am rated around 1700 and the results show that I was unable to get the first 3 trials right. The fist Maurya boom was an under-performance(getting fertility festival to early) and I have figured out what the issue is. In the fist Sele trial I mode only women, which is not representative. And the second one was an under-performance(getting fertility festival to early) again, since I was unfamiliar with Seleucid. The 12th game seems like an under-performance, but I think it had to do with unfavourable map gen(starting wood far from the CC). I think it is a fair point to say that with a worker elephant maurya are better to at dealing with unfavourable map gens. The conclusions are that Maurya seem to collect a little more. On the other hand these results might seem the cause because I tend to get more cheap units (women) as Maurya and less expensive units(Infantry). This seems natural as Maurya have the small houses and Sele gets the barracks for 200 wood. In most games I would not get the ability to place a 4th barracks foundation before 9 minutes, so running out of stone was not an issue for these results. It should be mentioned that at the end of the trials, Maurya still had their stone, while Sele spend theirs. My initial hypothesis was that Maurya would completely outboom Sele. Considering the results, in most cases, the difference seems to be rather moderate. I don't think the starting elephant is the reason why Maurya is considered OP, rather I think it is one of the contributing factors. There are some tests I would like to : namely see what Maurya would be if you start without an elephant(i.e. deleting it at the start) and then training one or more during the game. I would also like to try to get results on the Maurya boom without the restrictions imposed here.

I like the idea that you come with suggestions as the buildings really help to make civilization unique. I have to would like to see the change for the Cothon. The pillar of akhoska seems fairly situational anyway For the Lighthouse I think it is enough to give them speed only for merchant and fishing ships. For military ships it might be to much. For the Theatron my suggestion is: Reduce stone cost to 200, make them available in p2 and give them territory root. I once opened a tread on the apartment building and trying out the polling system. However that suggestion was disliked without giving any explanation in the comment of the dislikes.

Hmm, champion units are already at your militairy service and instead of getting paid, they pay taxes. Citizen soldiers spent all day chopping wood and give all wood they chop to their overlord and in addition to that they are expected to pay taxes. I knew there should have been some cruel tyrants though... If this game was like the stronghold series, where peasants would spawn for free, eat your food, drink your beer and pray at your churches then taxes would be justified.

I hope that they don´t give them automatic rank 2, since that would be a hell of a difference. +1 armor (equivalent to +10%HP),+25% HP and +20% attack. I would hope that instead the are given a smaller bonus like only +20% HP instead of promotion. Well, stand up and walk to the window. Why don´t the neighbors have 4 pyramids in their backyard? because pyramids are expensive.