real_tabasco_sauce

@borg- has a very awesome differentiating Sparta patch that was committed a bit ago. This makes it far from ‘plain’ https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4736 this addresses a lot of your concerns. Among the other changes, Champ hoplites are available in p1 owing to the huge cultural importance of the spartiates. They will still have mobility issues but this is just a weakness of the civ.

I think they would, but the rank 3 spearman and swordsman are not in the structure tree, so they can't be 'trainer units'

Well the idea there is that with one centurion trained, it makes it a little bit easier to get more.

Basically, when melee CS infantry reach rank 3, they may be upgraded at a smallish cost to centurions, which have an aura for surrounding units. The aura is damage for melee only, and decreased promotion xp for all units in the radius.

I put it in civ bonuses, since its not a technology. https://code.wildfiregames.com/D5083 I would think it much harder to get promotion units in the tech tree. And it might be a little cluttered to then show the promotion of cs units too.

where can I find the warlord icon in the top right? Nevermind haha i just got it off @Yekaterina 's github. I will edit it with an axe and give the current icon to champ spearcav.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone could you do one of an axe-wielding warrior for the xiongnu? Or are these more for menus than icons in the UI?

They are much weaker @Buchi. They have lower armor. Also, while they don't cost metal, they do cost a lot of food and wood.

The xiongnu storehouse crashes the game on the most recent release candidate for a27 (not sure about svn since I can't yet build). It is very reproducible and happens only on placement. Edit: same with the house. Both my changes and terra-magna working version have this crash.

@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.