real_tabasco_sauce

yeah I tried to set up a pause between firing rounds, but I couldn't figure it out. I think it would improve readability and the micro options. Anyways thanks everyone for the ideas for improvement. I'll use these ideas to better refine the non-random approach the next time I introduce it sometime in a27.

I was thinking something like this would be an elegant way to achieve this effect:

So is it a realism argument? Missed arrows damage nearby units. To be fair, the accuracy pretty effectively accomplishes this, especially for forts. Also, the natural movement of units often spreads damage over a handful of units, as the "closest unit" changes often. If the player notices this (not easy, to be fair) keeping that unit in motion will dramatically improve its survival and even decrease the effectiveness of the building arrows. So there is ideally a nice back and forth should a player use the manual targeting like this. I suppose a max number of attackers value could be used sort of like something @wowgetoffyourcellphone proposed a while ago. IMO this approach is heavy-handed. One idea I brough up on overkill discussions was this: add a new range query for determining the closest unit with a flexible degree of rounding. In these large scale battles mentioned by @Feldfeld, what is currently "the closest unit" could be 2 to 5 units, or maybe more. @Stan` is there already some sort of tiebreaking mechanism when two targets are exactly the same distance?

AFAIK, ships will currently try and aggro enemy ships. Yeah the only practical difference is that the Building AI is a stream of arrows (or a multi-arrow blast :D) that can be done while moving.

ok so basically unitAI is responsible for just about all the entities, so ships and siege towers have UnitAI. BuildingAI is responsible for the building arrows. in @wowgetoffyourcellphone's work, they no longer have anything to do with buildingAI, and instead behave like infantry, cavalry etc. By default they will target the first enemy they see unless you give a specific target, just like regular units. I think the ship classes do an excellent job on emphasizing ship positioning: Keeping vulnerable ships protected, flanking with ram ships, massing arrow ships together, raiding fish with scout ships. The main thing is that ship gameplay won't be a total snooze fest XD.

not sure what you mean with this. The ships are now like any other unit, (archer, pikeman, etc) in that they don't have buildingAI. So there is no buildingAI to be had. im sure there will plenty of strategies and micro involved.

They are, the rework makes ships behave like proper units rather than water siege towers. And they have classes: scout ship, arrow ship, fire ship, ram ship, siege ship.

Well @wowgetoffyourcellphone has already put together a pretty awesome rework for ships, which goes a lot further. I'll die on the hill that ultimately a non-random system is superior, but I can agree that the implementation of non-random arrows haven't hit the mark I was going for: Manual targeting isn't used much, some buildings are too effective, and others like the fortress are still fairly ineffective. I'll put out an update sometime removing the non-random arrows, which may also help to serve as a negative control. I will bring them back at some point, with improvements for user control, cursors, audio cues, and more careful balance.

When I did the melee/ranged rebalance, I reduced all ranged unit damage. I could apply that same damage reduction to the a26 building arrow values. I think that would be the simplest way to go about it. i won’t have time to make a new version for a while tho.

AOE4 has this with the ninjas and they can damage/destroy buildings and drop smokes and run fast. I don't recommend this kind of mechanic. Now, it might be cool for a civ to have a unit equivalent of the scout tower. I think that would be cool for an american civ.

So that disqualifies me from making points here? What are you talking about? siege towers can attack while moving. Bolts and catapults cannot. That is a masssssssive difference. This was probably historical accuracy. Also, this would be a very simple fix to make them balanced: Keep the low movement speed, adjust damage and accuracy. challenging for the wrong reason: you have to wait 10 sec + (2 sec prepare time) to shoot. They have never been OP because of their mobility and they wouldn't even if the pack time was removed. A better challenge would be to focus on rewarding manual targeting to make the most of passthrough damage by increasing linear splash and decreasing the single unit damage the same amount.

@Atrik both bolts and catapults have been op before, but not because of their pack time. it was because of their damage. What would happen is a ball of 30 or so bolts could be formed that basically became invulnerable but immovable.

I would say just high risk. Its pretty rare to get them in a position you actually get the rewards (because they are so clunky). Yeah, they are rarely seen in TGs and almost never in 1v1s (except for when vali pulls some wizardry).

yes and I have these set to nothing. Can you successfully make batches? hold shift -> press 1111111111

hmm, using shift+1,2,3 etc? I can use the numbers to queue single units, but not batches. You mean restarting the game, or uninstalling and reinstalling?

ok so since this is a general siege discussion, I would like to post about siege pack times. Currently catapults and bolt shooters take 10 seconds to convert between packed and unpacked. I think this is a needlessly long conversion time and it basically makes the use of catapults and bolt shooters highly clunky and annoying. Also, it massively reduces the surprise factor, which is important in 0ad. Often I see players prefer to use rams even when up against turtled civs that heavily counter rams like iberians. Lastly, pushing a player with siege ends up taking too much time for most games. in team games at least, the rest of your team may have lost the game before your catapults have made progress. I'd like to reduce the pack time to 5 seconds and the pack time upgrade to -50% prepare time, so they come up to 2.5 seconds.

on "officer" type units, I don't really see the need to simulate these except for civ - specific reasons, like the centurions. Other than for special cases, there is really no point in simulating officers and lower level military leadership. It just seems like a complication that may as well be baked into the soldiers anyway.

Well I unassigned the control group hotkeys, and this is also something you can do on mac. Now that I am on windows I am surprised this is different.

no i mean more like a civic equivalent of the heroes we have. The ministers are more like an economic version of the trumpeters.

@Vantha yes but it seems using numbers like this does not work and produces some strange behavior, like not being able to click. Can anyone else on windows confirm?

well, coming from someone who has -tried- to balance civs and design new features, the team bonuses can be limiting. Ie, I am thinking of some civ bonus and I realize that basically the same thing is already a team bonus from another civ. If those bonuses double up, then you have super OP combos of civs, which is not intended. Then in essence, every team bonus for 1 civ restricts the civ bonus possibilities for all the other civs. Then as you start to add new civs, this task gets harder and harder.

I don't know about that. For one, heroes have super strong stats and could be used for very cheesy stuff early on. I suppose we are introducing a p2 hero (kind of a B tier hero) in a27 for Athenians, so we will see how strong that is. @wowgetoffyourcellphone what about this: instead of selecting a hero, you select a ruler. This would be a purely infantry unit without much fighting stats, but some bonus or aura, potentially you could use existing civ bonuses for this too. I don't really like doing it at the start of the game, because it becomes a 1 click strategy: your choice would determine your follow up moves. It could be interesting to make this available from the cc once you reach p2: Click an icon in the cc called "Take rule" or something, and it pulls up the dialogue to make the selection. Then these ruler units could be used for regicide. idk, just a thought.

I agree, I think the 25 wood cost especially has made them much less worthwhile. However, lowering the cost back to 100 or 80 wood and keeping them weak (-50% garrison dmg), makes them a bit more spammy (too easy to cover a large area), which is kind of what happened in 26.6. I would rather keep the cost as is, but add a single default arrow to make the 125 wood more worthwhile. I think it is good design to make scout towers something you get if needed when you can't fight off rushes. For example in aoe2, they talk about "forcing a tower" basically applying enough pressure to make the opponent invest in a tower for defense, therefore that money isn't invested in eco.

imo the roman heroes are very bland. Somewhere there is a version of a roman hero (DE maybe?) that slows enemy units among a couple of other things, and I think that one sounds super fun (not for the enemy ofc).

I like multiple civ bonuses, but as for team bonuses I think there should only be one. I agree some team bonuses are very lacking (looking at you britons). The reason for my take is pretty much for simplicity: When you are teaming up with three allies, it is less to keep track of knowing only 3 bonuses may affect you. Also, by allowing only 1 team bonus, you run less risk in accidentally introducing OP civ stacks.