real_tabasco_sauce

@wraitiiis busy atm, but I have two merges for the community mod ready for a potential 5th community mod. One is a bunch of gameplay commits from a27, designed to make balance testing of the RC easier. The other is my melee/ranged rebalance. I’d say most balancing stuff is directly in Phabricator along with some discussion here or in PM. These are typically less ambitious changes since it is hard to get much agreement for more ambitious changes. My thoughts are that these more ambitious ideas can be implemented through the community mod for good play testing. I have a few other cool ideas ready for when a27 drops.

Ah see my perspective here would just be to let it come down to opportunity cost. You can only afford so much attention in different areas, so you have to choose (for example between micro techniques, or between managing army or managing eco). When you add automation you also lose some of these choices the player must make on how to spend their attention. I say no need to force a solution when the root cause can be addressed. I expect my rebalance to make sniping useful about 15% of the time compared to about 80% of the time currently.

Well, I would say it is not elegant to implement a stance to do a highly specific action that is only occasionally helpful (assuming proper balance). Especially when that action is just a sum of multiple clicks. It sort of sends us towards a slippery slope of adding more and more 'bells and whistles' that distract from core gameplay mechanics. What happens when the meta changes in the future? Would you want to have a setting to automatically execute that meta? My main argument against this is that automating too many things for the player makes things less fun. For instance automatically targeting the weakest unit is automatically calculating and executing what is currently a fun and exciting part of gameplay. Ex. I have been raided and notice that one retreating cavalry has 1 hp. I pick out the weak one and get a kill. This is a lot less fun if my units were already on a stance to do this for me. I probably wouldn't even notice :l If this stance could actually snipe automatically, It is more fun to snipe manually than to click a button and watch it all happen.

There is a pretty huge difference in elegance. It is logical and sometimes helpful that workers automatically go to near resources after building a new cc, and it is nice that farmers look for empty farms to work at. ProGui and the discussed autosniping feature are not very elegant, as they require additional modes, gui panels and settings to work (all requiring clicks of some kind). ProGui sits on top of 0ad and you have to learn it almost like a separate game. It would definitely feel out of place and overly contrived if it were a vanilla feature.

Well, I hope it can make it into the next alpha, but I wouldn't count on it. It might make its way into a fifth a26 community mod in order to be more effectively play tested.

Yeah, thats why I think the best verdict here is to allow its use as a mod but allow hosts to ban it and consider it cheating in competitive games.

If you are dealing with a turtled enemy, catapults are good because it means their short ranged units have to come to you. Also the fight can take place away from temples forts and towers.

yeah, I think they should be unique in various ways. Ive just put together some cool ideas for the nomads civs in terra magna but there is still plenty of missing art for those civs.

Yes, there are already some units like this. An example is the gaul fanatic unit. It only costs food and wood and is very fast, but they are weak and train from temples. I think it would be nice to start introducing some 'unique' champions.

Yes, I’ve checked for duplicates, but I will look further. the <civ>.json section is empty for both civs, except for where I added the women promoting to maiden infantry civ bonus. so all of the problematic ones are coming from technologies.

nomads.zip @wowgetoffyourcellphone @borg- @chrstgtr I made some major gameplay revisions for the two nomadic civilizations in terra magna, Scythians and Xiongnu. Horses can't build buildings must be in own territory nomadic civ bonus where buildings decay 5x slower. Ovoos are a weak but cheap territory root that may be built in neutral territory, available p1. Stone upgrades are back in the storehouse. Scythian women promote to maiden infantry. Maiden cavalry are available from the temple in p2 and are a fast, weak, high damage raiding unit. Skilurius has a cavalry discount and can directly train maiden cavalry. Scythians have p2 access CS javelin infantry and in p3 unlock champion spear infantry using a tech.(with a new mixin merc_inf_champ) xiongnu start with axemen and access swordcav and spearmen in p2. xiongnu yurts can upgrade to royal yurts in p2 which train 3 warlords for each royal yurt. warlords start as high damage, vulnerable axemen that can weopon switch to a cavalry archer which is only slighly slower. Royal yurt limit of 5 means total of 15 possible warlords warlords cost extra food and metal and provide a damage and speed aura for surrounding units Xiongnu can access 'Han diplomacy' from the CC in p2, which allows the construction of the han embassy (academy). In p2, the embassy can train mercenary crossbows. in p3, the technology unlocks catapults and medium warships, as well as allowing champion chariots and spear infantry from the embassy. I think this is a great framework from where we can proceed, but a few things are still needed: Xiongnu 'heavy cavalry' spearcav champ (use icon from warlord, which was a spearcav) Warlord needs a new icon featuring an axe. Royal yurt = bigger yurt with more bling. some really basic ships for xiongnu/scythians. I think even some raft style vessels will suffice, but they have to have some navy. here, I toyed with the concept of a 'mercenary' chinese ship for the xiongnu. The stable needs some structure: some small yurt attached, or a shed-like structure. For the scythians, split the corral from the stable (my opinion) Ideally, they should also have some sort of siege workshop and dock. lastly, figure out what is going on with technologies and civ bonuses. You will see that there are a lot of duplicates in the civ bonuses part of civ overview. I deleted these, but they remain :l I also deleted the special yurt based phase up for xiongnu since it is OP, but this also remains unfazed.

What do ppl think about mercenary champions? Should they be a thing, or should all champions stick to the food/wood/metal cost profile?

no, I just restarted the game. Everything else is updated when I make changes, just not technologies.

Hi, I am curious to see if anyone has experienced this before. I am currently making a proof of concept out of scythians and xiognu so that they can better fit in with the current civs. When I delete a technology, for instance a civ bonus (from civbonuses/) it does not disappear from the civ bonuses section of civ overview and it also keeps affecting the game. The same goes for other technologies, I might remove a technology from the game, but it still works perfectly. These techs are not in vanilla and I do not have the original Terra Magna installed in addition to my modified version. Perhaps these technologies are referenced elsewhere, or maybe there are duplicates somehow?

Yeah I agree with @Dizaka. I think mace don't really need as much a rework as sparta did. I would be happy with something like this, possibly also with either a technology or bolts available in p2.

I guess we have seen no complaints for making a 5th release of the community mod. @wraitii is there still time to do this? would it be possible/good to keep the 4th version on modio in case people want to keep playing that version?

not a fan of the metal trickle idea. The mace team bonus is already fine IMO, maybe just buff it or otherwise tweak it to make things more interesting. P2 siege workshop with either access to bolts or access to a unique siege upgrade would be great. This would be all that is needed to set mace aside as a siege civ. I think storehouses should remain in territory.

Allow the siege workshop to be built in p2. (Perhaps access to bolt shooters in p2??) this would behave somewhat similarly to the ele stable for Maury, and could make for some very interesting builds. in addition it makes the swift early siege push more attractive which seems like a Macedonian hallmark.

Maybe it hasn’t inherited vision range from the parent?

Do you think it is worth it to open a poll? Maybe not, I think most players will be happy to get a preview of some a27 content, but there might be complaints about shaking up the meta. To alleviate those complaints, It would be good to keep 26.4 on mod.io.

I don't want to make too big a side topic, but care to elaborate why?

Ah, well @chrstgtrthe reasoning there is that the Maury heroes are already committed. The idea is to test the current gameplay of the release candidate + those 3 new changes. maury and Han will be the only 2 civs affected by the already committed patches. Fortunately, if we want to just assess the catas, eles, and melee rework without the heroes confounding, all we have to do is play other civs. I left the buildingAI patch off since that probably needs to wait until after a27.

These auras do not stack. The same goes for the centurion aura, and most auras of the same unit or building. I think the Han ministers are an exception.

https://gitlab.com/0ad/0ad-community-mod-a26/-/merge_requests Ok they are there. Let me know if you recommend any last minute changes. Also, not sure why the pipeline is failing. Are they still able to be merged, or do I need to change something @wraitii@Stan`?

on second thought, maybe I will just make a single merge request for all of the a27 gameplay changes + the ones from above. Maybe just the important ones.