real_tabasco_sauce

Im frankly just surprised so many would reject such a large addition of content to the game. Almost nobody would vote no on a new civ, even thought they may not understand all the details on the new civ. @Dizaka did you follow the link provided? https://gitlab.com/0ad/0ad-community-mod-a26/-/merge_requests/25 It is a tech tree, a system, found in the barracks/stable for each unit. Each of these 23 is an upgrade for a particular unit type. among them, there is a level 1 (town phase, costing 100 food, wood, metal) and a level 2 (city phase, costing 200 f,w,m). They do not effect mercenaries. Each civ is allotted 4 to 8 of these upgrades for units which are important to their play style, and also depending on balance. (for instance, I didn't give the skirmish cav upgrade to mauryans). each upgrade is also designed to give differentiating qualities to units (longer pikes, increased pikemen cavalry counter, spearmen prepare time upgrade). The idea is that the upgrades one civ has access to are at least a little different from another, and different advantages/disadvantages come from this. I hope you can see that they all work together as a system and that adding a select few of them wouldn't work well. A lot of you mentioned you like them, but a few things are remain unappealing. What would you personally change about the upgrades? It's hard not to. The fact of the matter is that I put a lot of time into these thinking new content would be widely approved of. For so many people to vote no on the grounds they don't understand it is pretty disappointing.

If you want a better look at the upgrades (all visible in the tech tree), here is the branch made into a mod: unit_upgrades.zip

I think they were almost rejected. I think a lot of voters are not looking on gitlab to see the specifics before voting. Also many might dislike change like @Norse_Harold said.

I would say learning new things is good. If there are more things to learn, that means there is more content to explore. Also Said saying he feels like a newbie is a massive exaggeration, he still plays very well XD. Also, this isn't a balance mod, its for new features too. Again, I think I did a bad job of communicating what the upgrade system involves. Sorry to all the yes voters.

Yeah we did something like that. Unfortunately this means only 5 changes will be actually added, which is a tiny fraction of the work I put in here Hopefully I don't get any blame for the lack of content.

the way things are going, looks like we could get 3 weeks of playtesting for 026.4, also over the holidays. From what I can tell from players, most changes thus far have pretty good feedback.

I would say with 26 votes we could probably call it. Anyone disagree? Looks to me like 1,2,3,4,8, and 10 certainly have enough support, but i'm not sure about 7. Neither cavalry change was supported, we can redesign something for cavalry later as @chrstgtr said. #7 (crush rebalance and hack attack for clubs) is one vote ahead for yes and its actually a fairly minimal change, the main thing is increasing macemen's general effectiveness for fighting. Less crush armor also means catapults will 1 hit more units, which I see as a positive. Does anyone think 7 shouldn't be added even though there are more yes votes? edit: nevermind, I guess the votes keep coming. When should we call it?

so far so good, I haven't found anything broken.

Ok, @LetswaveaBook I fixed the issue you mentioned and updated the tooltips. Maybe after we test these in the next version, we could just allow them to affect all units. It might be too confusing to have them remain non-mercenary upgrades. It would be quite infrequent anyway that the upgrades also effect mercenaries, because there are few redundant mercenaries. One example would be the sacred band cavalry and spearcav mercenaries from the italian embassy for carthage. Im going to go ahead and test all the merge requests together, looks like we have almost enough votes to decide.

Thanks for finding that mistake. I can fix that later today. As for the mercenary part, most civs coincidentally don't have upgrades for their mercenaries because mercenaries are most often unit types that the civ doesn't already have. Since there are exceptions, and also for consistency, I will just say "Non-mercenary soldiers". How does that sound?

Its a good idea, but there is one thing that should be talked about here: In other RTS games, using macros is considered cheating. That being said, if it is implemented into the game, it's definitely not cheating. The question is then are the repeated actions that these macros take care of an important part of the skill gap in 0ad? Are they important for player experience? I would personally say most of them are important, save for very basic things like autoqueue (which can be thought of as a macro no?) So my thoughts are that this might be good as a mod, but not as an addition to the main game.

Haha you're right, I am all too familiar since I am allergic to many things. The point remains tho, that the whole system brings more benefit than individual components may bring harm.

this is just opportunity cost. This is actually a benefit.

They are not available all to one civ. Each civ has a small selection of them depending on their unit roster. The upgrades are much more situational than the forge techs, because they are not just damage and armor. Also, they are researched in the barracks and stable because they apply to units trained there.

Try the burger, if you don't like pickles just take them off, burger is still good no? Idk, I just most players voting no are just afraid of change. The main thing is the mod has much higher turnaround than an alpha release, so we should try new things.

Yes, but these were OP due to their inherent stats, not due to upgrades. in a24, all units were slower so there was no way to escape the range of archers. Also, you should consider that other units (spear cav, slingers, skirms, pikemen, spearmen etc ) also get as powerful if not more powerful upgrades. This is what I mean when I say u should consider the whole system, not just one or 2 upgrades.

each unit gets their own tree. All the upgrades play a role in unit (and civ) differentiation. It doesn't make sense to overlook an upgrade for a unit type, that would be inconsistent. I think you are still assuming a lot. For instance, the javelin cavalry upgrade is not available in p1, where prepare time and accuracy would be the most problematic. Also, civs that already have strong jav cav for some other reason do not recieve this upgrade. See? Very easily modified as needed. The objective part is the content added, not balance because we can't predict the future meta (at least very easily). Its like rejecting the entire hamburger just because you don't like pickles.

Maybe it's exaggerating to call it an arms race, but these upgrades would just improve on the diversity of gameplay options. Thats a positive. ... No, it's definitely a system. It is commonly referred to as a tech tree. This is no grand overhaul. It's just content. Maybe I am doing a bad job of explaining this. Why would you rather throw the entire proposal out the window than allow the possibility of 1 or 2 (slightly more) OP units in an experimental mod?

also, keep in mind that these upgrades replace the rather boring cavalry_health and cavalry_speed upgrades. These upgrades currently serve as a blanket buff for all cavalry at a very low price. You are drawing too many assumptions on individual technologies instead of looking at the system as a whole.

not all 23 technologies are active at the same time. Each civ gets 4 to 8 of them. Sure, some particular upgrades may be imbalanced for particular situations. I get that. But why would you rather miss out on all of this content on the grounds that some things may be imbalanced? Remember this is an experimental mod. These techs are extremely easy to adjust, so in other words the "specific things" you find concerning could be fixed effortlessly if they pose a problem. I also don't understand what is complicated too: its literally just a tech tree for each unit type. Of course it's going to seem complicated at first, as is everything the first time you see it. I disagree here, all the patch does is add content. Balance is a secondary objective. I have simply designed them to avoid being OP as best I can. currently, military upgrades are basically an arms race, with very little strategy involved. Unique upgrades like 'archery tradition' and 'hoplite tradition' are the exception, and the improvement to gameplay these techs bring inspired me to make a larger group of techs. The strategic aspect these upgrades add to the mod outweighs the risks (some things could be OP).

Just curious: what are some reasons to vote against number 3, unit specific upgrades? I would have expected more popularity due to the amount of content included.

I see, yeah 5 hack is too much, I think this might be an older version of the branch because I also seem to have left off the champion macemen here too (yoddahs). In any case, it is unintended. The idea is that they should at least be usable in normal combat. I would say 4 sounds more appropriate. In this case, the CS macemen do 3.5 hack and the champs 7 hack. edit: I split the middle, also this way they do half as much hack as crush.

I see. Well, we can revert jav cav health if it seems they are too weak. It is a small change overall, with the biggest change for champs anyway. Shouldn't be a big concern, as they look poorly supported anyway.

@chrstgtr you seem to go back and forth on your opinions here. How about we stick with the merge request as is, and revert certain things later? If things turn out well, fine. If not, we can revert certain items.

in that case, I think we just chose whichever gets more votes than the other. I would also say both might be overkill.