raynor

How can one register for the tournament?

eheh that might be connected to the advance technique section :D. Another useful one I forgot: Select units then "Shift + 1" to add current units selection to control group 1

Hello, I am not posting much here but I read the forum from times to times, and you may have seen me in TGs lately . I simply wanted to share some tricks that I use every game, hoping it can help other players . I am going to assume people already use controls groups (grouping units with ctrl + 1/2/3). - Shift + select unit -> add unit to selection group, useful when creating control groups. - Ctrl + left click on unit group -> remove from unit group from current selection, useful when creating control groups. - Shift + right click/order -> queue order, that's surely the basics of any RTS, but never hurts to remind. Use cases: to queue buildings constructions (e.g houses), make a unit scout the map by shift right clicking several locations. - Alt + right click -> very useful to dispatch workers/units. Use cases: dispatch workers on wood line (easily alt right click multiple trees to dispatch them), send one soldier to scout. - Alt + left click + ctrl -> Advanced use case use to snipe enemy ranged units. Select own ranged units and make them focus enemy ranged units (using alt and clicking different enemy units obviously ). Please share other useful tricks, cheers!

Won't that just make the game even more slow paced? I dont understand in which regards it would make the game less spammy. More generally, I think per design, macro and eco will always have a prominent part in any RTS. What about playing on map with sparse resource and lower pop? By definition, spamming would not be an option.

Thanks, I will happily test it this week end

Scouting is part of any RTS. Why would someone want to automate this? It comes down to using shift key and paying attention to mini-map... edit: At least it would be good to be able to disable this from game settings IMHO edit2: Just realised the patch is quite old, I hope this idea is now gone

Not sure I really understand this point. In my view, you can still have close range damage to a reasonable value, so that it is not too overpowered. Maybe you can elaborate a bit more on this? What I like with @Yekaterina proposal is that it still feels like "unique" approach to projectile in RTS, while solving dancing/turn rate issues. Constant damage independently of distance, I am afraid this is again a recipe for hard balancing between ranged units . Also, having decreased damage when distance increase will also counter balance the fact that archer are too good at turtling, without having to touch their mobility. WDYT?

I like this idea, not to make them bullet speed but faster

dancing_hero_a24.mp4 Another one, the hero is backed by priest rank3 so this is not pure dancing. But still, for me it feels more like an exploit than micro (I wanted to flank him 1v2 with the remaining iber troops I had, I was enraging seeing this :x)

So an exploit is micro for you? very interesting concept.. This dancing is done using formations. It is now only possible like this because we changed turn rate speed. And on the dancing specifically, there is no way to counter-act, hence all my point here Imagine you do the same with front-line hero and some priest, how fun is this going to be? I am pretty sure I also have a replay from the same player doing that, I could look it up if needed At larger battle scale, the micro required to counter this dancing is absurd imo. Partially incorrect. I did plain attack move, but I bring back the two camels chasing women and then redo attack move. Then, because the cavalries are first line, they soak most of the damage. At the end of the video I focus one archer that instantly dies. Moreover, I would like to add that most of camels were rank2 as this player was pocket player and I had already harassed the border player. If you wish, I can upload the full replay

Remembering of something that felt a bit of dancing abuse, I looked into my A24 replays and I found something interesting. In the below video, I am engaging with 10 camels, my opponent is defending with 3 skirmisher cavalries and 7 archers. You can see how much damage my opponent cavalries are soaking. Again, not trying to push my original solution but I want to feature that current way projectile work might still be problematic in some cases Disclaimer: I micro extremely poorly in this video, because I basically do 0 micro, simple attack move. Also, my opponent whom I won't name, is to my knowledge the greatest 0AD dancer of all time dancing_a24.mp4

@GrapjasI would rather play the normal game, and I already like A24 a lot. Again, that was an idea I wanted to put on paper but based on multiple comments I now believe it is not the ideal solution. I can also see that it would remove some of the uniqueness of 0AD , so it seems that we need to find another angle to tackle this

I am putting a graph here for more context, as I also believe it is easier to reason about: I view randomness as uncertainty, which I believe it is never gonna be ideal for competitive gaming. However I agree with your point that in average it flattens out. Still, it could have a small impact for a unlucky player on a Bo1. Agree there In any case, my original post was about the fact that removing the randomness/spread remove the dancing and turning rate all together, not so much about the competitiveness. As of now, I do not see a solution that can clear out both these issues. However, since my initial approach does not seem very popular I believe this is not the right way to go.

It is however not true for smaller group, and this also indirectly rewards turtling because smaller groups attack will most likely be less successful, since randomness will play a higher role in this case (basing my self on your analysis on archer spread). I am pushing it a bit, I have to admit ;). Removing simulation projection in favour of something like SC2 might be not the right solution then. But I still don't see any way to avoid either long turn rates or dancing with current approach.

Another idea to mitigate people abusing palisades for path finder would be to prevent people stacking them, like tower. For instance, it would still be possible to circle your base with palissade but not possible to stack 2/3 palissades walls next to each other. Not sure if I am super clear

Why do you think this would be bad in term of gameplay? From a competitive aspect of the game, it would make more sense imo. As I see things, the more randomness, the less competitive the game is. Moreover, as we saw in a24 turn time has a significant part in making rush hard to execute, no turning time implies dancing etc so this randomness leads to other gameplay issues. But I also realise that I am really biased by my previous SC/SC2 gaming experience, so glad to hear other opinions like yours

@Grapjas @LetswaveaBook I think friendly fire for all units would be insane, and would force people into pure ranged vs ranged units which would be a drama imo. But for the sake of keeping things into scope, please let's open another thread for this topic

I was under post limitations policy but @Stan` just bailed me out :D. @Yekaterina Thanks for the mod, I forgot to say but I am away from home until end of next week most likely, so I won't be able to test it before that time, however I am fully trusting @Dakara I definitely understand that my proposal is less realistic but the dancing or current options to mitigate it are terrible gameplay downside in my opinion, and a SC2-like projectile mechanics would kill dancing without any other compromises. I understand now that my original idea is actually to remove the projectile simulation, not only removing the spread. I also like @Dakara idea of decreasing damage over range, but it seems to me that might be more work. Would it be possible to simply remove the simulation and make projectiles always land with a mod, or do we need to touch the cpp engine to do so?

@Yekaterina I would be down for you to do a mod, and I think I will also start looking into modding. For sure in this case we would need to nerf ranged units damage, and/or buff melee damage/pierce armour @ChronA honestly I am out of my depth, but yes I was thinking of a SC/SC2 system where we would remove the ballistic projectile simulation. I understand this might be controversial, but it seems to me that it could solve several issues at once (dancing and turn speed) at the coast of something less realistic for sure. Still, dancing is very toxic imo and turn speed has shown very problematic in A24

In the light of the complains about increased turn rates that prevent dancing, I would like to understand if we considered simply removing spread for ranged units. It seems to me that in that case dancing would not be an issue, and we could consequently go back to normal turn speed. In my opinion, it would also reward better micro management of units.

Hello, new on the forum but no so new on 0AD. I was thinking that it might help to keep some sort of glossary/overview of currently discussed patches in a pinned-post, if we decide to keep discussions about patches in here