real_tabasco_sauce

I recognize its not ideal for one's champs to be downgraded to swords. We will find a good reskin for the extraordinarius.

Promotion is the best means for a tech to convert a unit into another unit. U can see this with the mace silver shields. In this case, since the champ swords are supposed to be unavailable after the tech for historical reasons, they convert to legionaries. however, I think for the final version of the Marian reforms, it would be better to do a reskin approach like what is done for the CS cavalry units.

Well, in general, i think the community mod has been good for a26, especially since it fixed a couple of issues with the base game such as the han farm techs not working. However, because of the division it created, I'd like to suggest a bit of a different approach for the next alpha: Each version should be a clean slate. This way each version is an opportunity to test some new ideas or balance, and the successes of one version do not become pressure on the subsequent versions to be perfectly balanced. I expect this will result in less regular use of the community mod, which means players will mainly play together on the base game, resulting in less division. This approach is also more friendly to more experimental ideas, which are currently somewhat avoided in order to avoid "ruining" the com mod. Some of my experimental ideas are an infantry balance where melee units are generally faster than ranged units, with exceptions, and the introduction of a laborer economic unit to tackle the booming = turtle topic.

Yes, to an extent. However, the situation where melee infantry units die first is still present.

Well somewhere in the gui, it’s looking for the literal name “Default” to be the default map filter. the new categories result in “Demo” being the default for both skirmish and random maps, so I tried to fix that for an hour. In doing so I mistakenly reset, losing my uncommitted changes. upon realizing what it would take to re do everything, I realized that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. im much better off getting my 3 new maps out the door and then doing spot checks on a few high potential maps (improving wood, balance, ie sryia, Persian highlands)

Yeah trade is awkward. On most maps, it’s not worth it, but on maps where trade is good, it’s almost guaranteed that the better or faster trade wins the game. It might be good to make them a bit easier to take down if they do end up getting buffed.

What about utilizing stone cost for the forge? something like 200 wood, 50 or 100 stone. i think this could be interesting as it brings a bit more opportunity cost into the picture since mining techs, production buildings, and clicking up also cost stone. It would also make the no stone build for Gauls less strong.

Ok, it looks like I have to keep the "Default" category name because it is baked into the gui setup defaults for random maps AND skirmish maps. ^makes me want to vomit. So basically I will rename "Favorites" to "Default". Actually, because of this, it is not worth my time. I think we have a good idea of the way forward though. In the mean time, I will do some miscellaneous improvements to several maps, especially looking at wood resources. In that patch I'll delete kerala.

i did all of this for each and every map and accidentally did git reset --hard

thoughts on stronghold? Now that there are placement options that include stronghold placement in many maps, I am beginning to see this map as a worse version of ambush with stronghold placement.

Oh i meant a multiplayer favorites category, so the most balanced, "best for MP" maps. This will include maps that have good potential. Although i see that this category could be confused with user defined favorite maps, which might be a good idea. I think in addition to the categories I listed earlier, I will add "Map Experiences", or maybe call it "Novelty Maps", these include geo-realistic maps and maps like snowflake searocks and lions den, where the gamplay is centered around the map. I support removing Kerala, especially since hyrcanian shores has biomes already.

"Coast Range" players are placed between a long, crescent shaped mountain range and a long, crescent shaped coastline. The mountain range contains lots of metal and stone while the coastline has plenty of fish. The main body of the map has hunt and some scattered stone and metal, but these are small. The mountain range has lots of metal and stone, but lacks wood. The map also supports three placement options, which provide variety and support a wider range of strategies.

Hey com mod players, What do you all think of the "Foothills" map with the new improvements to the woodlines? I have a patch to add it to the regular random maps: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/7155 If there are suggestions for the map, I'd love to hear then and I can add them to the pull request.

I find that is less effective/prevalent as compared to the base game. Still however, units like the han crossbowman are much better with sniping because you avoid overkill. For instance, if more than 3 Han crossbows hit a ranged unit, each additional hit is a waste. My patch that @Atrik linked is an attempt to fix this aspect of it.

I see the point, but i'd argue that the ideal balance here is if spearmen are a resource counter to champ cav. They are champions after all. As a resource counter, they might lose with equal numbers or even outnumbering the champ cav slightly, they win decisively when resources are matched.

It’s more than just speed. CS spear inf also get destroyed when fighting head on. Maybe it would make sense to give CS spears a slight additional bonus against champ cav to prevent the use of champ cav as a meat shield against CS units a couple com mod versions back, the spearman counter was decreased from 3x to 2.5x.

Aye, I was making an aside on mobility in general.

We should have a discussion on this in the com mod topic. I had complaints that spearmen were too good especially vs melee cav, but now that its back to 2.5x I think its maybe not enough. On champ cav, the main thing is the mobility. Being able to be super selective on your fights and rarely getting trapped is such a huge factor. It means its very easy to avoid losing the cav. Mobility in general is super strong. It might be interesting to consider a cav capture debuff vs buildings, or rather a relative infantry advantage versus buildings, which is the case in aoe2. I think it makes sense for the counter to mobility to be defenses like forts. <- this is also why non-random building ai is important.

well, we have 80-something random maps, so with better organization, the clutter won't be such a big issue. I'd rather do that first than have to delete any maps. This way we don't any players in this situation: Currently, we have these options as "filters" how about this set of categories: Favorites (replaces default with a larger selection of the "Best for MP" maps.) Water Maps (naval maps + water/land hybrid maps) Dynamic Maps (Player vs enemy maps (Trigger maps) + evolution maps like Extinct Volcano) All Maps Demo Maps (maybe we should eventually just group all the demo/testing maps regardless of whether they are random or skirmish or scenario) Some other ideas could be "open maps", "closed maps", and "Madness Maps" with only the really crazy ones.

I think they are just in skirmish maps and scenarios. They are designed to test gameplay and performance, so I think its important that they are in the game and not atlas.

Yes, we have this, but I think we can do a better job of organizing.

I'll start with river archipelago. Ship pathing up and down the rivers is pretty terrible, the rivers make the flanks of the map much less accessible which would be ok if only they provided an advantage.

Hello random map players, There are new some random maps in the works, but we want to avoid cluttering the random maps menu with too many maps. So the idea is we should add good maps but also remove some of the very worst maps. I think we should have pretty substantial agreement to fully remove a random map. Lastly, I'd like to float the idea of adding a new random map category where players can find some of the more crazy random maps that are overlooked but loved by few. I think an example of this would be snowflake sea rocks. Perhaps the name could be "Random Map Experiences", or something like that. So, please comment a random map or two, maybe with a screenshot and a couple arguments why you don't like it.

It can't move while the animation is ending anyways, right? Does it need to know its destination frames in advance to move on time? I bet what you are referring to as "the animation finishes" is actually the unit going on to finish a new attack. Currently, animations will be cut short if need be.

@Philip the Swaggerless sure its simple, but its limited. <<<<<%>>>>>>>>>>>>!<<<<<<<<<<<<<%>>>>>>>>>>>>!<<<<<<<<<<< ..........O------------------|-----------------O-------------------|----------------|O In the above (for pikemen) if you don't check immediately after the attack (|), the unit must wait a whole second before it realizes it needs to move to attack the unit again. This would be really bad. Have you played it yet? The pikemen really don't look bad at all, its spearcav and swordcav chasing that look a bit weird. There can certainly be improvements to try and fit the animation better, but timing it perfectly would be tough as all units have differing animations, repeat times, and prepare times. You would end up doing some crazy mathematical gymnastics to try and get it to work! Up to a point, it would be easier to tweak animations and audio (except I haven't done that yet XD).