real_tabasco_sauce

Well whats weird is that this is on mainland, which is mostly flat. These towers are placed next to ccs and forts which receive no terrain range bonus. Not really a catastrophic bug, but something to get to the bottom of.

has anyone noticed weird inconsistencies with bonus range on buildings? It seems towers, ccs and other buildings with arrows frequently get 13 bonus range even though they are not on a hill.

a26 or svn? I tested a singleplayer stress test and we also did a multiplayer test with quite minor improvements. 10% the current ttk would be disastrous for gameplay. In any case, we are on kind of a tangent, and I think there are other discussions for performance related concerns.

I can. (a26, intel mac) 0 master volume makes everything very quiet but not silent. The tooltip confirms that the volume is 0.00 Also, closing the game and reopening then seems to restore a louder sound overall despite the master volume bar still being set to 0. (at this point, slowly sliding the master volume back up makes the game very quiet again and then progressively louder.) I tried then setting the value to 0.01, which also produced a very quiet sound as expected. Restarting the game faithfully maintained the sound level (compared to 0.00).

I have something made that ticks these boxes: https://gitlab.com/real_tabasco_sauce/0-a-d-community-mod-unit-specific-upgrades/-/compare/main...unit_upgrades?from_project_id=36954588&straight=false I hope people will be more open minded going forward (especially so for the community mod), I have massively simplified these techs.

By the way, I did a mod a while ago (50% slower fire rate, iirc) to test that and I really didn't see an improvement.

I forgot to change ele archers I'll need to change that, probably just for the community mod. No sense to confuse anyone with a quick v3.

sorry. Time to kill. So not as fast as in melee mod v1.

"melee" mod v2: 25% less damage for all units champ spearcav -1 hack armor CS swordcav -0.5 pierce armor melee infantry + 0.5 m/s walkspeed VERSION 2 **************** melee.zip ** **************** I quickly tested and the overall ttk is actually similar to a26 vanilla.

right, so archers deal 2 pierce damage, and take 13 hits to kill 1 25hp woman. Nice idea. I would think the ensuing 8 minute long battles would be more taxing because barracks can retrain faster than units die. If fighting is what makes the game the most laggy, then 300 units fighting a 1v1 for 8 minutes would be pretty bad. I think I will stick to the plan I wrote above.

edit: U NEED VERSION 1 to watch these replays. Here is version 1:melee.zip melee_mod_replays.zip for @chrstgtr and @real_tabasco_sauce unit testing, we also did one in a26 vanilla for comparison: chrst_sauce_test_vanilla.zip

The problem is that melee units are highly armored and do little damage, this results in a lot of different gameplay issues as I previously mentioned. Just reducing ranged damage would help, but it would mean that fights would take forever, especially if melee armor is unchanged. From gameplay and testing the melee mod, its pretty clear to me that the ratio of effectiveness between melee units and ranged units is pretty good. An example result is that there are now cases where sniping enemy ranged units is less effective than the default behavior, which is a good variable. @borg-, reducing all unit damage by 25% should produce a "middle ground" of sorts, so this will be interesting to test.

So you would say its fine that melee units are mainly valued for armor and not for damage? Side note, do ppl want me to post some replays from unit testing and playtesting?

all units, so ranged as well.

I would like to do that, but I think it would take a long time, with more debates along the way. The approach here is to make a big change (which appears to have been partially successful) and then make smaller adjustments to find an ideal balance. Hopefully we can get a good enough set of changes that it can be playtested in community mod for a27.

From general feedback, It seems the proportion of damage/armor is better, but that armies die too fast. Reducing ranged damage to be comparable to melee would mean fights would be extremely long, which is likely worse than too fast. I think i will do the following: reduce swordcav pierce armor from 2.5 to 2 (no more half armor @wowgetoffyourcellphone) reduce spearcav hack armor from 7 to 6 (they beat spearmen too easily) reduce all unit damage by 25 percent. increase "base" melee infantry speed from 9.0 to 9.5 m/s First, I'll do my own unit tests and things so make sure there are no obviously OP units. If all looks good, I will make it a version 2.

Definitely not a factor of 3, but I agree units die too fast now. The main thing is that the armor/damage proportion of melee units is improved, and so far I think we have seen that.

I believe that was a bug and was fixed.

anyone want to set up a couple games on this mod at the moment?

All the changes mentioned here are in the melee mod for a26. The goal is to play test this on a larger scale in the first community mod release for a27.

I mean technically whenever you want, since the mod is posted. Ideally, however, they will get plenty of testing in the community mod for a27. I already did a bunch of tests and concluded that swordcav need -0.5 pierce armor and that champ spearcav need -1 hack armor. Everything else seems pretty well balanced other than those two.

as shown in tests, sniping is not as powerful, because the player has to decide what units if any should be focused. Ie it is not always snipe the ranged units to win.

It can't be fixed by units stats. It is because of unit AI. You could randomly assign unit stats from 1-10000 for damage and armor and it will always be that melee units will die first. there is literally no way around it, we can still improve things.

in a26 this is 6.5 dps, in melee mod, this is 11.6 in a26 this is 9.15, in melee mod, its 11.9. notice they are much more competitive overall, although army A has a lot more armor. Army B wins without a doubt in a26, but army A probably wins in melee mod.

@BreakfastBurrito_007 and I compared sniping scenarios in community mod and "melee" mod. first, we tested the community mod for a sniping scenario of 30 swordsmen +30 archers in the "sniping" army, and 30 swordsmen + 30 archers in the non-sniping army. The sniping army won decisively because swordsmen deal similar damage compared to archers. The non-sniping archers tipped the melee battle in favor of the non-sniping swordsmen. The surviving 10 or so non-sniping swordsmen made it to the 30 sniping archers, but died while only killing about half of them. In the melee mod, the story is quite different. Archers again tip the melee battle in favor of the non-sniping army, and the sniping melee units die quickly to the swordsmen and archers. The remaining swordsmen make it to the sniping archers even while a handful of non-sniping archers still live. The non-sniping swordsmen defeat all the archers quickly, with 8 to 10 remaining. In conclusion, the melee mod introduced a change in the meta, where melee units are valued in army composition.