real_tabasco_sauce

People use walls and defenses much more in team games than in 1v1s. A very common strategy especially with Iberians is for the edge player to turtle up and take the 2v1 while the player’s pocket helps the other side or goes for cav. While it is largely dependent on circumstances, this level of team play is great. the pace of the game is good, age of empires games take 30 minutes to an hour even with 1v1s. Being able to quickly play a game is a great feature. I think the biggest reason players don’t use walls is how long it takes to build them, not really the cost. You can almost never build them in time for the attack they are supposed to delay.

Nice work @vladislavbelov, thank you! Will MacOS support be ready in time for the first release candidate? Or will this take longer?

@wowgetoffyourcellphone how about this for a ramming ship implementation: Either make ram damage a function (maybe sigmoidal) of speed, or require a particular speed the boat should be going for the ram attack to be successful. In either case, the ram "charge up" is the ship's acceleration, which I think is a neat approach since we already have it in the game.

I'm just thinking a core structure to ship classes based on size would be helpful

Yes, reducing their size would be great, and I think slowing their top speed and reducing vision could allow for more strategy and could make waterways seem larger.

I'd say you put it right, it dilutes the concept. I think the player should instead use some ranged boats for sheltering melee boats from pursuing vessels. The system we are devising here should work well with a combination of ships.

I like what we have going here: I'd say a couple things: first, I think there should't be a building AI arrow count. If a ship has an attack that is player controlled, I don't see the point of adding a buildingAI arrow count. It would be best to keep that part simple. also, I am not sure of the garrison effects. I would prefer that the ships are fully functional "out of the box" and that garrisoning should be a transport concern, but I am open minded to trying these effects out. I think these classes you bring up could fit into parent classes based on ship size (light,medium,heavy) with the following characteristics: light: less health, more speed, acceleration medium: medium health, speed, acceleration heavy: more health, less speed, less acceleration scout and light warships could belong to light; ramming ships, boarding ships, and medium warships belong to medium; and siege ships belong to heavy. Each ship would have its own abilities while still belonging to a parent class. This way, I could go ahead and make the core light, medium, and heavy classes playable in the community mod for brainstorming while art and gameplay mechanic developments allow for the specialized ships to be introduced.

yeah overall slower gameplay too

I would be happy with this to be honest. Then the carthage team bonus could be changed. Maybe this would be something to experiment with in the community mod as well.

Well, yeah I agree on principle, but they are technically related as they are all in the community mod and were highly supported. IMO better to increase melee damage than decrease ranged damage. But I guess they have similar outcomes.

How could you say that? That makes no sense. Stop with the negativity at least until you see the gitlab branch.

All other civs have it in the forge. I am unsure why its in the barracks/stable.

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4877 the rest of the community mod features.

Well consider this: since ranged units account for between 70 to 95 percent of the damage from a given army, and they target the closest unit by default, then without any sniping, melee units will always die first even if they have 100 pierce armor. If melee units dealt more damage, their survival would now depend on both the enemy melee units as well as ranged units. Should a player invest in some stronger melee units and get melee upgrades, their more rapid success against the weaker enemy melee units will force the exposed ranged units to retreat. So basically the rationale is this: give melee units a much improved share of impact in terms of determining the outcome of a fight, and balance them accordingly by reducing the armor a little.

I think this would partially invalidate the value of infantry mercenaries. I would rather melee inf be more impactful in the first place (not just meatshield, but actually dealing damage). I have an idea for this and I will make a MR for it in the a27 community mod.

yeah, one of the improvements in the aforementioned patch is that all spearmen and swordsmen will have a tooltip explaining that rank 3 units can be promoted to centurions. This way you can see this information when you actually go to train them.

@real_tabasco_sauce

You actually already can in the community mod

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4875 https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4874 https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4873 I have nothing for crossbows yet. I think their prepare time should be increased. This is because for the first 3.6 seconds (.6 sec prepare time + reload of 3 sec) of a fight they do 28+28 pierce = 56 pierce or close to 19 DPS which is very high compared to skirmishers. making prepare time 1000 ms would reduce this value to 14 which is more reasonable. Sniping would still be effective here (not OP), and this would only be further resolved by my plans to address the meat shield meta in the community mod.

@borg- https://trac.wildfiregames.com/log/ps?action=stop_on_copy&mode=stop_on_copy&rev=27385&stop_rev=&limit=100&verbose=on&sfp_email=&sfph_mail=# plenty of Art improvements, seems to be a couple of performance improvements, bug fixes, and @vv221 is working on patches to include community mod content.

Coming from a gameplay perspective, I would say a big issue with naval battles (other than their size/pathfinding troubles) is garrisoning for effectiveness. Overall, this makes boats essentially siege towers, which isn't very fun. Also, the firepower of each boat depends on garrisoning which introduces probability into boat fights. Garrisoning individual boats for effectiveness is tedious (made worse by size and pathfinding). After doing this, you then have much less pop to fight with on land. I think ships should be dedicated fighters with garrisoning only used for transportation. They should use unitAI instead of building AI. From here, you can introduce ship classes: light (or scout), medium, siege, and special. Instead of bigger = better, they should have different ranges, speeds, and unit characteristics. Fireships can go in special, along with new additions to this category mentioned above. Some kind of capturing ship would be good, but it should be clear it is for capturing so you can avoid it. I will put together something like this in the community mod after a27 is released, and once those are play tested we could try adding new abilities like ramming, special ships, technologies etc.

After the currently voted Scythians & Xiongnu, in theory another "combo" of two American civs would be nice. It doesn't seem these people did much fighting tho. Zapotecs and maya are good contenders, I don't think we have to only consider civs at their "peak", this is an unnecessary limitation imo. Just because one typically thinks of the maya in later time periods doesn't mean they didn't exist in any significance at 0 A.D. Teotihuacan was apparently founded before 0 a.d. and grew a lot through 250AD, which seems to be a period of urbanization. IDK if this fight is outside the timeframe, but these two cultural centers seem to be as much city-states as greek ones we have in game: https://www.science.org/content/article/astounding-new-finds-suggest-ancient-empire-may-be-hiding-plain-sight However, it is science reporting which tends to be flawed.

What an edge case XD. good observation. I would say it is more likely to be the colonization tech since I rarely use it, but it is hard to say since I also can't say I have used exactly the required amount to build a colony before. My bet is it has to do with rounding and/or datatype conversion.

Yeah, I really haven't heard any complaints on the things that were added, so I think everything should be added. I would say there are a few areas that need polish as you mentioned: tooltips, spelling, etc.

How should the community mod features be handled? A patch for each merged item?