[Nerfed archer accuracy XML file]

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

[Nerfed archer accuracy XML file]

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.

[New elephant stats proposal]

3 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

Siege towers should be stopped with cavalry and slingers or with catapults(ballista).

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.

4 hours ago, alre said:

ranged units, and skitmishers in particular, are already the best counter for elephants at now. I don't think there's need for a hard bonus. 

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.

[Economy and starting with a worker elephant.]

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.

 

[Unused Building Balancing Ideas]

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.

[Suggestions for 0 A.D.]

4 hours ago, Edwarf said:

Taxes : Every unit gives a metal trickle.

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.

[Blemmye Desert raider identical to javelin cav?]

On 21/04/2021 at 5:11 PM, alre said:

Considering the striking difference in price, simply being an otherwise unavaiable kind of citizen soldiers is not enough of a difference to justify any mercenary unit. I hope mercenaries get a strong rework in a25, at that point having both citizen and mercenary versions of the same unit could actually make real sense.

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.

 

On 19/04/2021 at 11:24 PM, Player of 0AD said:

Why not 1 pyramid, 1 second pyramid, 1 third pyramid and 1 forth pyramid? ; )

Well, stand up and walk to the window. Why don´t the neighbors have 4 pyramids in their backyard? because pyramids are expensive.

[Other strategy games not RTS.]

https://awbw.amarriner.com/

It is based on a turn based game called advance wars.It´s nice game-mode if you like strategically planning every move and the moral is not to play live. So you take your turn, leave the site and you come back to see a few hours or a day later what your opponent has done.

[Mythos_Ruler's Playlist]

I would like to introduce your newest wet dream: Lizzy Hale of Halestorm.

 

[Where are you from?]

On 22/04/2021 at 2:00 PM, Grapjas said:

I'm from the Netherlands  

No. I am from the Netherlands instead.

The name comes from a combination of my favorite AoE2 unit, the monk. Whose use was way more celebrated in the former heydays of the true arena clowns, such as the all mighty king eddy. Converting all your units in arena by using monks gave a real good feeling and I the happiest moment of game-play should be where I defeated a goth player as Britons by mainly making monks, which counters the huskarl. It was great to see my opponent getting frustrated with that game and all the conversions. I am also inspired by a vietnamese player on age of empires, called saymyname, whose name resulted funny casts as you can imagine.

Luckily, 0AD suits me as we still have very good book waving units in the form of the priests.

[Hi. I've got a problem with logging to lobby.]

@Gatot303, the basics of computer science if it does not work, remove and reinstall it. If that does not work either, I could recommend upgrading windows 10 to Linux mint 20. Also you could easily make you system dual bootable if you have a linux mint ISO file.

I have to edit this as the gods themselves want probably me to help you. After making the comment, I wanted to join the lobby and got a similar issue. Since I have been messing with mods lately and knew that I could connect with a modded version, I enabled a mod. Then I disabled it and I could connect again. Maybe that helps for you as well.

[Addition of Han Chinese to 0AD]

18 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

The crossbow cavalry would have used small crossbows. There were semi-automatic designs as well as weapons that shoot 4 projectiles at the same time (rifle vs shotgun). They were not much stronger than a regular bow but had lethal accuracy and range, like a modern gun. 

I know from AoE2 that the repeating crossbow exists, but that does not mean that it was an effective cavalry weapon. A crossbow does not generate energy and all the energy the bolt has needs to be put into it by the users muscles. Actually it is even worse, as crossbows are bad a translating stored energy into the power of the bolt. No matter how you put it, it will never be as effective as a crossbow on foot.

The repeating crossbow seems easy to reload, but that comes with a drawback that it is unlikely through armor. I suspect that padded armor would probably even give good protection against the crossbow shown in the video.

I would gladly believe you if you could provide a reference on ancient (Chinese) crossbow cavalry.

3 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

Where are our balancing advisors?!

A question out of laziness, is the cost increment for ministers implemented and does the unique blacksmith tech work? You need to fix that before serious reviews can be made.

[Addition of Han Chinese to 0AD]

I tried the mod and the most interesting thing I wanted to try out is massing ministers. The mod does currently not increase the price of ministers, but I won´t judge it for that as it is no design flaw but an implication flaw. Some observation about ministers:

0. There idea needs some more detail.

0.1 The stats are off, you get those much reward for low investments.

0.2 The costs do not increase per minister.

1. The multiplicative effect is really strong.

1.1 10 ministers increase productivity by a factor 1.1¹⁰=2.6. So if the ministers support 30 workers, the combined effectiveness will be like 78 workers(Ignoring walking distances). This makes a population of 50 do work similar to 78 workers, freeing up 28 population space.

1.2 10 ministers make p3 very cheap as well and quick to research as monastery technologies.

1.3 a group of 20 ministers allow to build forward CCs very quick,

2. The cost increasing idea could give problems

2.1 If you batch train ministers, the game needs to know that the second minister should cost more than the 1st. So a batch of 10 should not be 10 times the cost of 1 minister. Same problem would arise if you train the from multiple government centers.

 

Also please do not add crossbow cavalry and sword cavalry to the game.

Crossbows require a lot of power to load and you would use all the muscles in your body load it, including those in your legs. By the way, you generate way more power with your legs than your arms. On horseback you cannot effectively use the muscles in your legs to aid to loading the crossbows. In addition there are other factors that make reloading a crossbow on a horse very impractical. Mounted crossbowmen(that dismount to reload) are fine to me, but cavalry crossbows are historically inaccurate.

If you are able to afford a horse and a sword, you would also have the wealth to either afford a spear or some javelins. Since the spear is cheaper and more effective than the sword on mounted combat, cavalry always preferred the spear as their main weapon. I would say that cavalry with the sword as their main weapon would be historically inaccurate.

 

[p1 cavalry mod]

39 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Nice idea, but when I loaded your mod an error message appeared: failed to load ptol_camel_archer

The mod works for gauls but didn't work for iberians

I am happy to see that the idea is appreciated. I have not been able to reproduce the bug you mentioned for iberians as they seem to be able to produce spear cav in p1. However I found a mistake in the code for the ptolemy camel archer and reuppload it. There is also an issue with carthaginians but tht does not affect gameplay.

As it shows: I am a noob modder, but that is how we start.

[p1 cavalry mod]

As promised, here is the zip file containing the mod. I have added a readme file with a little extra explanition, which you might need to open with a basic text editing tool.

 

lwb_mod.zip

[Restrict the Mauryan worker elephant to within its own territory?]

I don´t have any experience on earlier alphas that is worth mentioning, so I will not go into history.

 

First of all, we need to consider the worker elephant is a great asset at the start and is a kick starter. I think a setup like 0ad shares similarities of the exponential growth. If one player need 95 seconds to double his population and the other 100, that might not seem to be a lot but after 1000 seconds the economies will differ by a factor of 1.6

Also it is the full packages that Maurya got, a great eco with the worker elephant, good archers, the ability to build elephant stables in p2, strong swordsmen and +10% pop cap. In previous alphas they had similar bonuses, but the other strong civs dropped a lot. On the same time the environment shifted hugely in favour of Mauryas as suddenly archers and elephants used to be a burden on a civ and now these units are a great asset. Also the meta became more defensive which meant that players are more likely to take advantage of the 10% higher pop cap .

[move fields away from the CC]

I would like to debunk an argument which I heard here and bothers me greatly. It is the argument of

 

¨The game is still in alpha.¨

 

To me this argument has some toxic value implying that we can make absurd changes and not bother on whether it benefits the game. As the game is in development, changes will naturally occur. However argument shown before does not give a license to (extraordinary) changes.

I would advocate: Extraordinary conclusions require extraordinary evidence, or applied to here extraordinary changes require extraordinarily strong arguments.

[Inclusion of regional differentiation for Celtic factions]

3 hours ago, Genava55 said:

Does this kind of proposals interesting or am I wasting my time? (I got tired of my monologues)

I think it could be worthwhile. I also booted a game Praetorians with Aedui tribe,who were often allies of the Romans. I also think Helvetii and Arverni might be a good candidate. I especially like the Armorican suggestion

[p1 cavalry mod]

A general complaint in 0ad is that archers (actually it holds for all ranged infantry) are to strong. I think this is not exactly the case, but it holds some truth. The main type of units that should be able to punish ranged infantry is mellee cavalry, which is for most civs unavailable in p1. When you reach p2, there are allready so many ranged units on the field, that the cavalry nearly seems just to be target dummies. From my experience melee cavalry does not work out as an archer(or more generally ranged infantry) counter. On the other hand, even civs like Rome or Macedon that get melee cav in P1 don´t seem to be able to use them effectively in P1.

Hence I have been working on a mod, whose purpose is not to be peak gameplay, but rather a test on how the gameplay would shift after small changes. I expect that there will be a lot of people who will be voicing concerns, but rather I am looking for 1300+ rated players to test with/against me how it affects gamplay and what can be concluded from these results. If you would like to try it out and see what new meta it would create, please leave a comment here. Also the idea is more about getting generic balance right and less about specific civs.

The mod is still a little work in progress(I will publish it soon) and I have implemented some features:

Carthage, Gaul, Iberians, Persian, Seleucids get access to a second melee(exception sele who get cav archer) cavalry unit in P1 at the stable/Iberian embassy. For Carthage I did some changes to get the Ib. embassy  in P1.

Melee Spear/Sword Cavalry get +1 pierce armor and +1 pierce attack for spear and +1 hack for sword.

Citizen archers get +10% spread(inaccuracy).

Infantry swordsmen get +1 pierce armor and +10% speed.

Towers take 50 seconds longer to build, but are 25 wood cheaper in compensation. This prevents panic defenses or situations were people build towers right in front of your army, which seems ridiculous to me. Also garrisoned infantry contribute less to the arrow fire of towers.

Finally all buildings(Including towers) get less of a loyalty regen bonus per garrisoned infantry after advancing.

 

My main goal is to create a system with melee cav>infantry swordsmen>infantry spearmen triangle, where players are encouraged to do aggressive strategies and build a good mix of melee and ranged units. If A24 units would be perfectly balanced, I would hypothesize a mod like suggested would totally break the game in favour of the cavalry and sentence ranged infantry to death. I hope you would like to give the mod(I´ll upload it soon) a competitive try and we see if the hypothesis of the unit balance holds true.

[Differentiating civilizations by economic structures]

49 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:

The game is already great, so changing the mechanics can be anti-productive - as we've seen in A24.

I think we need to answer in the spirit of wierd jokes. The point is that if there are constantly rigorous changes, we might never reach a sweet spot.

I think we should take just minor steps at a time and just tweak the stats a little bit to move 0ad in the right direction. However I would support the idea of dropping meat in corrals(and making them a little cheaper than farmsteads) so they finally can get a competitive purpose.

[Getting started.]

Thanks for your replies, even though they were not the answer to the specific problem, the were still insightful.

2 hours ago, Nescio said:

No additional steps are necessary:

That was exactly what I needed to know that I was heading in the right direction, so that a good thing to know.

In the end (after messing with root access with the command line), the issue was that I should have had /mods/lwb_mod/simulation/ while I had /mods/lwb_mod/lwb_mod/simulation/

[Restrict the Mauryan worker elephant to within its own territory?]

20 minutes ago, Grapjas said:

I'd say that really depends on the map. Anyway, if you snipe that elephant you would've taken away their advantage until p2

That comment honestly makes no sense.

Having a worker elephant is always an advantage, it saves you from building a drop-site and you can nicely put it right next to the berries for an early eco boost. Secondly, in a practical game, it is not so easy to snipe the elephant. Even if you snipe the elephant, the Maurya player has still been able to use it for a good amount of time.

[move fields away from the CC]

6 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:

If you want players to farm in more exposed areas simply reduce the amount of farmers per field and appropriately reduce field cost.

Remind: the original idea was to make towns look more like a city instead of CCs being surrounded with fields. So it was more a question about aesthetics than gameplay.

[Sparta Rework]

3 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

A meagre increase of ten is a bit lackluster

after loom it is 20. Also they get 70 HP and 3 hack after that while costing like only half of a citizen soldier. So they aren´t really bad considering that 2 of them can take down a spearman.

[Restrict the Mauryan worker elephant to within its own territory?]

18 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

The Mauryans are currently too OP, mostly because of their worker elephant.

I agree with this statement. The Maurya tech tree is wide (good archer,good swordsman and good elephant) and their eco is unparalleled. The starting elephant is really good and lets you run away with an eco advantage. However limiting the worker elephant to its own territory takes away its uniqueness and that hurts the diversity.

 

7 hours ago, Grapjas said:

The ele is quite easily killed and really slow though, so it cant really escape

The maurya have an early eco advantage. That means that they can fuel an early army and if there is such an army, killing it will not be so easy.

Once again, my side is the one of wierd jokes. I also think that Maurya should not start with a worker elephant and that their cost should be increased (It´s an elephant, isn´t it?). You are in this case still able to do the same strategies, except that you need to pay an (increased) price to get the elephant.