real_tabasco_sauce

epic, good ideas.

Probably wise to hold off on that, however, because there are some huge changes to eles: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/27391 This will make them less effective against buildings and much more effective against units.

1. check that your forge techs have been researched. Your enemy may have had a substantial advantage due to researching upgrades. 2. Don't commit the fight to only the elephants. If too much of your army is only attacking the 12 elephants, then the enemy can easily defeat your army. After this, they are down 12 elephants, but your entire army has been defeated. So, If they are not an immediate threat to important buildings like a fort or a civic center, you should focus on killing the army accompanying the elephants. Then once you have an advantage, then go after the eles. 3. when using eles, you need a sizeable force to accompany them. There are also heroes that effect eles such as Seleucus Nikator of the seleucids that provide valuable bonuses to elephants. Elephants can also be strong versus infantry because they can 1 hit depending on the upgrades and hero auras available. general tips for fighting (under the current balance of the game): do not attack an enemy with a long, strung out army. Say if you task your army to attack something far away, your ranged units will arrive first one by one and get melted. It is easy to lose a fight even with a massive number advantage like this. generally prioritize ranged attack upgrades and pierce armor, as ranged units are generally more powerful and influential in fights than melee units. if you see enemy defenses (temple, fort, etc), this a good indication of where not to attack, just go a little bit past them and make the fight awkward for your enemy. Likewise, don't spend time putting up tons of defenses in one area, just for your enemy to walk around. Don't take a fight you are not very confident in.

Make technology bonus global: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4943 Add attack rate and move speed bonuses to "elephant tradition" civ bonus. https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4944

Well since there is no hero currently that affects eles, it could be a civ bonus. The only issue would be we would have to avoid giving an aura to chandragupta that might stack too much with the civ bonus.

He was a prime minister as well and importantly wrote chapter 32 which is all about the training of elephants. Its new and different to give a non ele hero an ele bonus. My thoughts are that the ele hero (chanragupta maurya) should have a more "general purpose" aura affecting soldiers (and elephants as well) in some radius. The issue with the existing auras is that the technology discount was tedious to use (garrison in each building), while also being incompatible with his healing abilities.

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4942 I have had several players ask me to propose a hero with some elephant bonus for Mauryas. Because of the historical sources I found, and because of the contradiction of the existing auras (garrison for discount vs healing), I think chanakya is a suitable hero for the first global elephant bonus: 15% faster attack rate, 10% faster movement speed for elephant units. If we want to restore the technology discount aura, it is much more logical that this aura should be attributed to ashoka. This will be an interesting hero: the healing is powerful as it is for maintaining a large infantry army the global ele aura allows for more effective ele attacks and may be distant from the hero and the aformentioned infantry (contrast this with the sele ele hero). Giving a little extra speed to elephants improves effectiveness and survivability especially for ele archers. good synergy with elephant archers by combining healing (to preserve ranked ele archers) and the new elephant bonus. I hope there is time for this aura as well as the minor fix for two other civs I just wrote: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4941

perhaps the resource could be blown up a little to the top right, with the symbol shifted a little to the bottom left. This way the overlap is skewed, kind of like in the following I "made" a while ago: The idea would be to make the resource the more important subject, with the symbol serving as context.

Good idea, I'm good with it gameplay wise. Imo the coin icon is fine. The unlock should either be fairly cheap with a slower trickle or more expensive with a moderate trickle.

almost Seleucids, just missing slingers. Champion skirms were great, I wouldn't be opposed to giving sparta a champ skirmisher. Might be super OP with brasidas.

My thoughts on that old discussion are that the meat shield phenomena is mainly because of the high armor, low damage disposition of melee units. It is better to fix it outright than try and introduce a mechanic to work around it. I think it can still be done and could be a nice mechanic, but it wouldn't help with the above.

Yeah I think its a good idea.

Oh ok, Maybe it wasn't for me because my config was carried over from earlier alphas.

Hi @Helicity, While other issues you mentioned may still be present, you can use "Attack-move (Units Only)" This option is unbound by default in the hotkeys, so I just swapped it for "Attack-move". The units only version is much better to be honest, and I think it should be probably be bound by default.

I would say the quality part seems to be a bigger concern. Recently, balancing efforts have been pretty smooth and successful.

Are there any more opinions on this?

Oh interesting. They are actually quite different side by side. When I played xiongnu after playing scythians, the difference wasn't very apparent and I actually thought they were the same (perhaps thats just on my tiny laptop tho). I think it might be good to make the xiongnu yurt texture a little warmer (kind of like in the discussion of gauls vs suebians) Im not sure about the autobuild feature. In general, you usually want to make use of your investments (the foundation) fairly quickly, while not tasking so many units to build that you waste eco. Because of this balance (between delayed return on investment vs building efficiency), it seems like it would either amount to a build rate buff, or it would be OP (just relying on the autobuild while committing everything to eco). I think a middle ground would be to just make the female horse archer basically just a mobile woman with higher build rate and stats for self defense. This way the remaining cavalry would behave as expected compared to the other civs, and the Scythians get a special eco unit.

I would say some color change to the fabric of the yurts would be good. A more beige color vs white. I have not heard of this. What is Auto-build?

I just checked out the Scythians and Xiongnu. They are very cool and I like the nomadic implementation. Building anywhere is good, and the wagon<-> house/storehouse feature is great. @wowgetoffyourcellphone do you plan on adjusting their structures so that they appear a little more distinct? Im not sure how well the cavalry able to build feature would work out. On one hand, I would rather cavalry conform to the rest of the civs as a consistency measure, but on the other hand, I think their ability to build could allow for very fun aggressive gameplay. Perhaps a middle ground would be to just allow the women cavalry units to build. This is quite a lot of differentiation between the nomadic civs and the current ones. I am thinking this level of differentiation would welcome @borg-'s sparta patch, which I have reworked into a git branch for the community mod.

yes, unique techs, civ bonuses, and team bonuses will probably be doing some heavy lifting.

Thanks for making a fresh topic. with regard to your concerns: 1. I agree, the evidence will be a little more obscure, however I think this leads to a justifiable degree of flexibility. There is information, but definitely less when compared to the current civs. There is often a grey area between rulers/heroes and deities. 2. I think going a little over 1AD is fine, Boudica's revolt was well after 1ad. I think up to 100AD could be allowable. 3. rarities, gemstones, and actual metal can be justifiably lumped in with "metal" as a resource for things like technologies and champions, as in these cases I would say it represents pay or wealth. A civ bonus can replace their forge tech's metal costs with stone, they can have a class (1 melee unit, 1 ranged perhaps) of fast infantry to partially take the role as cavalry as well as the ability to train cavalry from captured stables. Overall, I think if the art and civ structure are ready, the we can put together some good solutions that are both balanced for multiplayer as well as at least semi-realistic.

That doesn't matter, as they can still be balanced.

Nobody ever said anything about assuming history. Even if we did, I don't personally see anything wrong with that. This is a videogame, not a historical simulation, which would be very boring and unbalanced. Now here is the situation: In gameplay, a mesoamerican civ is in close proximity to civs with horses. It would be a nice feature that the civ can utilize the horses after capture. What is so unrealistic about this? It is a convenient and interesting gameplay mechanic. Now, if this is deemed inaccurate, there are still means to compensate for the lack of cavalry, but I still see no issue with training cav from captured stables, which would be a rarity in most games. Yes, but it is still metal, and it could be used for trade/currency, which can explain metal costs for things that are not directly made of metal. Alternatively, other precious items like gemstones could be used as more abstract stand-ins for metal costs. The mayans wrote with glyphs, with the earliest known example apparently from 300 bc. I am not familiar with mayan oral history but this also constitutes history, at least for many native American societies.

I would say there is certainly enough historical knowledge, it just has to be researched. We don't need to know exactly how many troops were at X battle at Y time, just that fighting occurred. Weaponry is well understood. I am not sure about the particular civs we are talking about, but it is often the case that real historical events are recorded in folklore Cavalry can be trained with a limit from captured stables. It is a straightforward and logical mechanic. Economy can be fairly simple but strong with less emphasis on metal (on that note, perhaps a civ bonus could be less metal cost for blacksmith techs, but increased research time. Another option would be replace metal costs here with stone). To say they used no metal is wrong, there seems to be plenty of metal usage, just not casting iron swords and the like as seen in Eurasian and African civs.

Not to make this a community mod discussion, but I don't think the community mod should be a balanced version of the game for competitive games. This would solidify the existing division it has created in the community. I think the mod is better off as a testing ground for balance changes and some content additions (ie centurions). In an alternative plan to @Yekaterina's, new civs could be added to a release (hopefully in a fairly well balanced state, Han was an example although their balance is still questioned by some). After release, community mod efforts could include live balance patches for the new civs. In a26, there were no balance patches to Han, only a bugfix, however one was attempted for crossbows.