real_tabasco_sauce

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.

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.

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.

@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?

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.

the scaling is just the recording (i think). These were things i did on mac but now cant on windows. (use numbers to shift queue batches). i havent tried cmd and ctrl, should that be done before or with the other keys?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni-I

Ok, not sure what is wrong with the video format, but it shows what is happening in my windows experience on 0ad. 1st (not exactly related to the video): I can't use 1,2,3,4 to queue units with shift, only queueing single units by pressing 1 without shift. 2nd: in a game I played yesterday, I would occasionally notice a batch of a few units I tried to train with shift+clicking the icon a few times. This batch would not train, and clicking the icon again would add 1 unit of that type to the queue. Also the batch number would disappear back to normal. Now about the video, this is what happens if I let 'queue first unit' be shift+1, in an attempt to be able to shift queue with the numbers. 1st: I train a few units without batching, this is fine. 2nd: I use shift+1 multiple times to make a batch of 6. 3rd: this batch isn't produced. Instead, a single unit is queued and the number 6 is stuck over the unit icon. 4th: Now I can't click anything except the icons in the barracks menu. 5th: I click the unit icon with 6, and a single unit is queued, 6 remains on the unit icon. 6th: I press shift again and the 6 units are queued and train, I can click now. Pretty weird, can any windows users replicate this? 581462794_0A.D.2024-05-1608-49-52.mp4

You might just think you have reached peak performance. I think seeing someone else's gameplay can help a lot with this, so I'd also recommend you look at @ValihrAnt's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ValihrAnt/videos

What I would suggest is this: let each civ train more 'generic' champions (those that are the same or very similar as the template) from the barracks/stable with the unlock champ tech. Then, for 1 or 2 champs for each civ, diversify them additionally and let them go in either the fort or the champ building, depending on their strength. Then the unit stats could also be adjusted if they are going to a building that is more expensive. I would recommend this once we get enough ideas for cool unique units for each civ. I suppose the centurion, persian immortal, and the fire cav are already sufficiently unique.

So ive grown used to the adjusted minimap icon sizes that I specified in my config, and now that I am back to the full size icons, I really think they are too large by default. I think they should be about 1/2 the area they currently take up at least.

we shouldn't sort players for circle placement in rmgen 2. Players are used to just alternating the teams in game setup to produce alternating team placement.

This is a good watch for those familiar with the automation debate. Ok so maybe its a different game from 0ad, but many points on automation are valid across RTS games. Maybe the most important is the division of attention between fighting and economy. The controversy of this farm auto-placement puts into start contrast the motion to automize unit and technology production like in proGUI. In 0ad, we already have some things heavily automated like autoqueue. Admittedly, autoqueue is more justified in 0ad given the citizen soldier mechanics, but I heavily advocate against further automation. Some say 0ad is too hard, but I say let it be hard. Learning how to do hard things and winning for your efforts is rewarding and exciting. To improve the experience of new players, focus should instead be placed on improving the ui, ranked games, and matchmaking/finding. Obviously, we don't have any kind of matchmaking, but it is important that new players get a few games with players of roughly equal skill so they can experience more than just village phase. Excessive automation makes RTS games easier sure, but also shallow, and shallow games are not fun for long. One of the main issues with aoe4 is that where aoe2 is deep, aoe4 is shallow (homing bullets, 1-click strategies). We can make 0ad more deep by increasing the amount of player-controlled features, adding more technologies (unique and/or unit-specific), and diversifying unit stats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushan_Empire This civ could accompany the two nomad civs as a regional package. Even right in the wikipedia page, there are some really cool ruins for structure inspiration.

There are a lot of changes coming to sparta in a27, maybe you will be interested: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Alpha27 There is a section for "Differentiating Sparta," I might have missed a couple things btw, but these are the most impactful.

Well, I didn't mean that. I just wanted to set the record straight when I hear people call economy management "meaningless" and "unnecessary." There is absolutely a reason for it, even if some ppl don't like it. And sure, that is just my opinion, but it is a well informed one, since fully automating eco (including houses and tasking) would basically remove a solid percentage of the game's total content.

It wasn't factored into the original math that training a batch allows the next group of units to be trained sooner than 1x1.

Ok, maybe you two consider these things trivial, but I would expect the majority of multiplayer users would consider them not trivial. Sure the game would be "easier" if many economy tasks are done for you, but I guarantee the game would be less fun. If you take away unit production from the user, like in atrik's mod, what is next? You could also automate deciding where your gatherers go to have perfectly balanced resources, and automatically build houses when needed. At some point, you may as well not simulate economy and just place buildings on resources to get a trickle of food, wood, metal and stone. That way there is no clicks needed for economy and you can focus on strategy. For single player though, it doesn't really matter, you can mod it however you like. And like @0 calories said, multiplayer is fine as long as others are playing on the same level.

@SKAcz The opinion of myself and plenty of other players is that while economy management tasks can be repetitive, they are an important part of the game. Namely that a player must decide where to allocate their attention when they are under pressure or applying pressure. The autoqueue we currently have is simple so that you still have to manage economy. Learning how to multitask well is a (probably the) key skillset in RTS games, and overly automating the economy would ruin that part. Also just be aware that its widely considered cheating to use progui in multiplayer.