real_tabasco_sauce

Just throwing one idea out there: free and instant stone mining tech upon phase up. The civ is quite stone heavy, so this could be nice. Also it could help justify going for late game compositions and not being forced to make mercs to feel competitive.

Is that the biggest obstacle? Honestly, I think all that needs to happen is to come up with a consistent scheme to determine what units are available from captured buildings.

do you have feedback for me @Carltonus @Classic-Burger?

At one time, a mod allowed automating unit teleportation. This meant buildings could be set up like roads across which women could travel extremely quickly. Likewise, barracks could quickly transport soldiers across long distances. This isn't against the "Rules" as you describe, because you could technically do this, maybe if each turn was 10 seconds. Should this be considered cheating?

Its a tad strange that you call this threat "vacuous" and describe your concern for multiplayer when you haven't yet played it, but regardless, but I understand you come from open-source absolutist standpoint, so maybe that's it. I appreciate your interest in 0ad and I hope the multiplayer community is welcoming when you decide to check it out!

as far as I know, they have never been even close to good.

imo there should be an overhaul to add a system dedicated to turning one unit into another. It could address this, as well as the promotion 'hack', and stuff like https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7328

Probably less costs actually, since there would be less frequent range queries in typical fights, but my guess is it wouldn't be very noticeable.

Yeah, I think this is the safest option (least knock-on effects).

Suggest values please I was thinking like 1-2-2 or 2-2-2. I see now that you mean 1-2-3 should be the values (thought you wanted to increase each tech by this much). So, what you suggested might also be fine.

Keep in mind https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/6946, which means some of your retreating units must stop after you give the order. So try to use just one order for your retreat to avoid this. I agree with a more cautious version of one of these. This would throw us partially back into the meat shield meta. I'd like to add a new item to your list of solutions: 5. Infantry speed values. generally, let melee infantry be faster than their ranged unit counterparts (except pikemen). This allows for potentially interesting balance considerations for ranged units This is all stuff that we can play around with in the com mod, but I'd like to try and tackle the capture situation first.

unfortunately, I am not sure if the p2 and p3 mercs would show up in the structure tree.

sounds like the easiest solution is to promote the village merc into town merc with ~2000xp, then promote the town merc into the city merc with another ~2000xp, and then add a modification to set xp required for promotion to 0 to the phase up technologies. you could add villageMerc, townMerc, and cityMerc classes as handles for the different modifications. you could have an infantry p1 merc promote into a cavalryman in p2 with this approach just fine.

this is one of those areas where finding the right balance is good. Its probably not necessary to set in settings, but maybe the visual alert and audio alert can have separate suppression times. I think frequent visual alerts would be less annoying than frequent audio alerts.

you need a sizeable number. Ive seen immortals take them down pretty effectively in the melee mode. Rams are pretty good, you can garrison them for some extra speed. With swords inside, its pretty good. Also, in many games you can take advantage of their extremely slow mobility by cutting losses and attacking other places/players.

Personally, I think campaigns could make up for some of the historical/realism lapses that are needed for good multiplayer gameplay, but the fundamental gameplay should be consistent between basic single player and multiplayer. Ideally, players learning in single player should help prepare them to go up against player opponents. Campaigns could have special campaign-only units or abilities, but I think if someone sets up a single player match it should be the same gameplay as multiplayer.

There's no need. Firstly, as others have said wall turrets shooting arrows was problematic because you could cram so many close together. It was also a bit of a buff for iber and just made for an annoyance even after an iberian player had been fully destroyed. We have towers for arrow shooting, and walls for blocking movement. Let walls be walls and let towers be towers. Trying to blend gameplay mechanics like this is unnecessary and distracts from the actual gameplay purpose of these structures. I'm glad wall turret arrows were removed tbh.

Is this single player, multiplayer? In TGs? How are you controlling for different variables?

My idea recently was to turn it into a repeatedly researchable tech that temporarily reveals the location/vision of one/all of your enemy heroes. So while it might not see use frequently, it still may be relevant in something like regicide.

yeah there are a few items from @Emacz's mod that fit with vanilla 0ad. We could certainly take inspiration from it and try things out. That's the beauty of the CTE approach.

no it won't disrupt work towards a potential re-release.

Ok, I have heard questions about this, so I'll answer here. We will do a community mod for a27, however there will be changes to how it works. In a26, we had issues where the mod would split the multiplayer community into mod players and non-mod players. Also, because the mod fixed a couple of bugs, development on the mod was a constrained by the requirement that each change be a clear improvement. This hampered experimentation. So the main change will be that each community mod version will be a clean slate, no changes from the last version will remain. What this means is that the mod serve the purpose of a "Community Test Environment", or CTE. Essentially, its a way for gameplay-oriented changes to be run by the community before being committed to the development version of 0ad. My hope is that we can make release turnaround fairly quick, and test a lot of ideas. Players can certainly continue to submit PRs, but I'd like to invite developers to submit their gameplay-oriented PRs too. Some stuff I hope to experiment with: capture vs destroy balance walls delete trees 3x cavalry counter added economic unit to address boom = turtle ship balance Improve Han gameplay

It might be a nice touch to enable wedge for infantry. Currently there is a wedge, but its only for cavalry iirc.

With the cavalry speed tech lumped in, skirm cav are 57% faster than skirmishers, and spear cav are 210% faster than spearmen. This basically puts them on another planet in terms of mobility. I don't think they need to be that much faster than infantry. However, by tinkering with melee infantry speed, we may alleviate some of the problem.