real_tabasco_sauce

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?

champ cav tend to be very strong and frequent team games. Think Celtic chariots, consular bodyguards, seleucid and persian champion spearcav. Infantry champions are trained but not to the same effect. I think firstly there should be some nerf to champion cavalry (melee in particular, consular bodyguards for sure). This is mentioned in the community mod discussion. I think a decrease in cost could be worthwhile because they should be playable in high(ish) numbers. The train time could be reduced along with the research time for unlocking champions (currently 60 seconds)

Honestly, I think this or something simplified could be great. There would certainly be need for balancing adjustments and stuff. I think territory might still be useful for capturing, but it could be greatly reduced compared to other civs. Not sure if the AI would handle a smaller territory any better than none tho.

as someone living in the western hemisphere, this is insulting.

I wonder if some special, more flexible territory requirements can be used for these as well. Not sure if territory should be a universal constant or not.

Why are the mayans considered out of scope?

Thanks so much @Freagarach.

fields have a footprint of 28 and a obstruction of 22, while rice paddies have a footprint of 22 and an obstruction of 20. Because of this, I have seen complains that the Han rice paddies are difficult to place, and this is true because their effective size is only slightly smaller than farms (22 versus 20). I suggest lowering the obstruction value for rice paddies to 18.

This is true @Fabius, however the two units are rarely achievable together. Even when you can get both units in a fight, the different mobility of the consular bodyguards and the centurions makes them fairly incompatible. The centurions have a small aura radius, so you would have to keep the consular bodyguards nearby. Also, all the roman heroes are mounted and you would surely rather have them with your consulars than with your smaller CS army (assuming you have some CS at home on resources), so in that case it would be harder to acquire a centurion. So, thankfully, the design doesn't particularly lend itself to use with consulars. One thing that could be very strong currently, and I have not seen anyone try this, would be to combine CS swordsmen with champion swordsmen to try and get centurions. The melee champions then would be absolutely a force to be reckoned with, probably the strongest in the game. @chrstgtr feel free to try it

I am making a list of simple community mod shortcomings that would need to be addressed if/when it is implemented in a27. Roman Civilization Overview (perhaps specific technologies) should mention ability of rank 3 melee infantry to become centurions, should also be listed on Spearmen and Swordsmen tooltip for romans. Carthage team bonus should say "infantry mercenaries..." instead of "Mercenaries -50% train time" if you have anything else to add, mention it.

Maybe to add to the description: at game start, Berries are visible as far as the starting exploration circle is. Quickly (maybe immediately) after game start, berries which lie outside starting units' line of site disappear. When units can see the berries, they reappear and remain explored.

Fire ships can be trained from captured docks crossbow training can be researched from the stables and mentions crossbow cavalry train time reduction.

In the random map Frontier, you can choose team placement: Could this be done for mainland and some other random maps? I think it would be great!