LetswaveaBook

If you start with 4 infantry, 2 women en 2 cavalry, then you can recruit 3 batches of 4 women and reach 20 population after 73 seconds. For the regular start, you recruit two batches of 4 women and a batch of 3 and reach 20 population at 68 seconds.

@chrstgtr, I have an inconvenient truth for you: Either there is no such simple test to show the time difference at which the Persian player reaches 20 population, or you are incapable to perform this simple test.

@Stan`@borg- It would be nice to add some features to Persians for the first release candidate. So I would like to get some indication on when and what is happening. I think @real_tabasco_sauce has put forward a bold approach on differentiating the axe cavalry. My suggestion would be that @borg- creates a patch that does not conflict with @real_tabasco_sauce axe cavalry. I think it is fair to accept the proposal of @real_tabasco_sauce as an essential part of a community project is respecting the proposals of other people. I would like to ask borg- what his plans are for his patch on RC1. Finally: Stan` can you give a deadline for patches to be shaped and accepted for the first release candidate?

I agree with this. They are useful, but not ideal for being the main force of ranged output. The main issue is that 3 out of 4 archer factions don't get a CS slinger or skirmisher and thus are nearly forced to use archers as the main force of ranged output..

There is still chaos. The only thing is that you have beocme accustomed to this type of chaos.

Currently the archer is the ranged unit with the least damage and it moves 1.5 m/s slower than the javelineer. This means that the archer can't fight a charging mob of javelineers and their slow speed means they receive a lot of damage on the retreat or get completely annihilated. Currently the speed for the Ranged units are 11.4, 10.8 and 9.9 m/s. I would consider it an improvement if the weaker unit has a better chance to escape. So I would suggest 11.1 m/s speed for the skirmisher and 10.5 m/s speed for the archer.

Before you claim that such a thing is easy to do, I recommend making a mod a trying it out.

I would consider this attitude on the impolite side of things. If you can't be bothered to give your opinion on a proposal, you might be in the balancing team, but not in an advisor role. At least you can say that you disagree with the fact and for an advisor it wouldn't be bad to express what you think of a certain feature that is currently in the game, which is in this case axe cavalry. I hope you have an opinion worth sharing on axe cav yourself. Rather than the negatives, we should look for the positives. If there are negatives, we should look for ways to address for the negatives or argue that how the positives can outweigh the negatives. Also in all the posts on the tread, I see some positive things mentioned about the patch. So I don't agree with your view about the skepticism the patch received.

I wouldn't be a fan of moving all good stuff from p2 to p1. I would like it if p2 offered useful and unique advantages instead of being the roadblock on your way to p3 that it currently seems to be.

I see that you removed some of your ideas that you posted. I would have preferred that you didn't delete them those ideas from your post. Not neccesary because they are good, but rather to encourage people to think about all possibilities and inspire creativity. The more ideas we toss in the tread, the more combinations of applicable patches we could make. So I would like to toss in some ideas: 1) The Persians have a truly unique technology and it is named after them. Sadly, this technology does little to define their identity. My suggestion would be to give the Persian architecture tech the additional bonus of providing buildings with +20% territory control. Achaemenid Persia was a big state, so allowing them to gain more territory seems fair. 2) The Achaemenid empire had lots of inhabitants. An population bonus wouldn't be bad, even though they allready have one. An interesting bonus could be that Persians start with +10 population space, which allows some interesting openings for rushes. Since it is a one time bonus, its late game effects would tend to slowly fade away. This would make Persia a good faction for an early rush, but it wouldn't change it (infantry) weaknesses in the late game (for 1v1s). I think this could add to the identity of the faction. Assuming that advancements in phases means advancement through the ages, this bonus suits Achaemenid history: powerful in classical times but overpowered in the Hellenistic age. Also I posted some ideas on Persians a while ago that I wanted to repeat in case anyone is interested: I also discussed created a differential a while back which can be found in this post:

I think this represents the core problem of the balancing team.

I would suppose that it would be fairly balanced. Against (ranged) units it deals about 55% more damage than sword cavalry, but it has -2 pierce armor. So that would mean it would deal about 1,55*-0.9^2=1.26 times as much damage before dying (or losing a set amount of HP) against range units while it costs +25 metal. Using that same method, we would expect mercenary swordsmen to deal 1.2*1.25/0.9=1.67 times as much damage before dying (compared to a CS sword cav). The proposed axe cav moves faster than the sword cavalry and is better at eliminating buildings, but it has the disadvantage that it can't serve that well as a meat shield and it can't promote. Furthermore, since it is a rank 3 cavalry unit, your opponents units will promote fairly quickly when they are fighting against it. So I would suppose it is balanced better than A25 sword merc cav.

My idea would be to reduce the experience to promote to rank 2 to 50. That means that if you put the unit in a barracks/stable for 50 seconds, you have a unit that is better than the sword cavalry in combat and has the crush damage to take out buildings. That would also give people a chance to think about the experience gain that barracks and stable provide. So it introduces a new way of thinking. Also I think they could benefit from having +1 hack armor

Congratulations on making your first differential. I think it is reasonable to change Hyrcanian cavalry. However I see a disadvantage of the proposed patch. The unit in game currently uses 3 different art models for rank 1, rank 2 and rank 3. In your patch only 1 art model will be used in game. So regardless of whether it is a balance improvement, for me it seems a downgrade from an artistic point of view.

Tom 0AD is back and I hope that with his 2.3k subscribers he can bring back some people that have lost attention for 0ad.

Whether something is a solution, depends on the problem. If the problem is that walls are never used, then the solution is to think about changing the role of walls. If the problem is that merc cav are OP, then walls won´t fully solve that.

currently you can easily stack 30 infantry in a very tight space, so only having 8 on a wall segment would be very limiting.

Some want walls to be easier to build, while others like strong but expensive walls. We don´t need to compromise as we can have both. However we can do both and allready have both. Celts build them 20% faster and have 20% less HP, Mauryas have the wooden walls faction bonus. While Carthaginians have the triple walls civ bonus. If opinions differ on how walls should function, we could differentiate factions by walls. Similar as we have big house and small house factions, for the next alpha I would suggest that some factions get cheaper but weaker walls(-50% HP, cost and build time) and other have stronger walls (+50% HP).

I think you should try to accelerate the development of the game, because that means we need more developers. More developers mean more cool features. Some people have a practical mindset, some people are geniuses. Though be wary: Some people are just trolls.

That is just the cherry on top of the pie. Even if a civ in AoE2 has no relevant civ power spike to speak off, then the age up timings still totally change the flavor of the game.

No expert RTS player will say that the cost of CS soldiers is the cause for players floating spare metal. Because any expert player will not waste energy to collect any resources that are not being spent. What age of empires 2 does better than 0ad is the following: When a player reaches the next age, the timing difference between you and your opponent is hugely important. important crucial timing difference is not a single moment in the game, but it happens when players reach both castle age and imperial age. Only after these important timings have passed away, players are able to think about unlocking their full arsenal. So age of empires has 2 very important moments in the game before you can start working on unlocking your full arsenal (getting all the relevant technologies of the so called post imperial age). In 0ad for comparison often see the following: there are 0 import stages of the game before unlocking your full arsenal and players cruise nearly mindlessly the position to unlock their full arsenal (p3 with all relevant forge technologies).

I was referring to balance update, not engine updates. If balancing is meant to be a thing that helps to define more dynamic gameplay, then we need to dare to make more changes. If the game is supposed to have a better engine in 2025, then leave engine development to the developers. The balancing team should create a balance such that there is enough strategical diversity, regardless of the engine. In my view it is important to see both how they are related, but also to acknowledge that they are very much their own thing (e.g. multiplying food gathering rate by 1.5 and wood gathering rate by 0.67 would do way more for balance that any reasonable engine upgrade could do).

Both Vali and I (and possibly some others) have created some mods to change the flow of the game, But it is difficult to convince players to try these modification. Even if you get players to play the mod, then it did not have a lasting effect: It still takes considerable effort to find players to join a game with modded settings. 95% of the players in the lobby are unlikely to try any mods. Vali and I have tried to pushed to try some lobby games with mods, but both of us had trouble to find enough people that wanted to try something different. As long as that mentality doesn´t change offering lobby players the option to download a mod won´t result in anything. I uploaded a mod on mod.io that allows you to research tier 2 forge upgrades in phase 2. Since it is on mod.io, it is super easy to install and can be done when you go to setting>mod selection>download mods in the game menu. As easy as that. No need to go to the forum, download the correct file and unpack it in the right folder. However I failed to get more than a few responses on the mod. In the end I think it is a bad thing: we don´t know if something is an improvement or not and we don´t get any experiences about what changes would improve the dynamic of the game. If you want the lobby to try changes to the game as @wraitii suggested, then I would say that you would need to create a ¨(semi) progressive mod¨ for A26 that features changes and make it the standard. Then players that do nothing use and test the new changes. Then also give players the option to use a conservative mod that allows people to play A26 in a way that is closer to A25. I think even some minor changes to technologies and templates could improve the flow of the game significantly.

Any of these suggestions has math that might be intuitive in some situations. Any sentence used to describe the system does not provide a good intuitive way to judge statistics. When it is impossible to explain the entire story in one sentence, the best might be to use a few extra ones. What I would suggest is that if you look is to give more information in the structure tree when selecting the armor upgrades. Example:

I might not be entirely up to date about the woke movement, but calling data misogynistic seems on the woke side of things IMHO. Women make different decisions as men. That is reflected in some data. I would say it is a difficult philosophical question such a recruitment engine should be considered misogynistic.