real_tabasco_sauce

no chicken rush is 11 cav at 1:30 or so I wonder if It would be good to half the number of chickens at game start for random maps?

no, its not actually false for the following reasons: all cavalry do more damage than infantry (ex. 16 pierce vs 18 pierce for jav cav), javelin cavalry have double the health of javelin infantry, (not double for melee, but almost), javelin cav have +2 armor compared to infantry javelins (other cav has more armor too) all in all, you need much more infantry than your opponents cavalry if you expect to win. This is hard to do in the early game when the limiting resource is usually wood, not food. Importantly, you are often unlikely even to get kills on cavalry in an early game situation due to how tanky they are (and their speed). This is why cav are often needed to defend from a "chicken" rush.

@eTrey If I recall correctly same warning on older operating systems just said something to the effect of "this application isn't signed, it could have malware, are you sure you want to open?" I presume they make the warning sound dangerous so it is harder for users to make use of applications they don't make money off of.

Well currently, the reason all in "chicken" rushes are so effective is because a small number of cav can pretty easily beat a larger group of infantry and because you can get the extra food required for cav very fast. Instead, success in these rushes should be earned by the skill of the player, so thats why the cav have less HP. The use case of the unit should really be its mobility, not because of its innate strength compared to infantry. Don't get me wrong, cavalry will still be stronger than infantry (because they can't gather every res) but they will be less tanky, less forgiving when mistakes happen like running into spearmen. The expectation I have is that you could instead see aggression with infantry as well, which would be more interesting. Currently you only see this if two players are very close. I imagine we will play version three for at least a month. I just put those out there so you guys can give feedback to me, so I might change things.

By the way, if you are curious, I updated the cavalry balance fork to also effect champions. https://gitlab.com/real_tabasco_sauce/0-a-d-community-mod-unit-specific-upgrades/-/compare/main...cavalry_balance Also, a crossbow nerf: https://gitlab.com/real_tabasco_sauce/0-a-d-community-mod-unit-specific-upgrades/-/compare/main...crossbow_nerf and a 15% increase in spear cavalry acceleration to improve chasing (even without upgrades). https://gitlab.com/real_tabasco_sauce/0-a-d-community-mod-unit-specific-upgrades/-/compare/main...spearcav_accel?from_project_id=36954588&straight=false

yeah I think its good practice to make patches as concise as possible. So ptolemy nerf and iphicrates nerf probably should have been two patches. its generally good practice, but where to draw the line is debatable. For example, I have both Themistocles and Pericles in the same merge request because they are both weak athenian heroes, and they go together. However, it might have been better off as two patches.

I think the pipeline failing is just because we wait for the merge requests to be approved. I could be wrong here tho. I already have a branch made for balancing cav vs infantry and I'll add it once the next version of the mod releases. You can see the details here: https://gitlab.com/real_tabasco_sauce/0-a-d-community-mod-unit-specific-upgrades/-/commit/e33bc27f79c7e5f3d94ea83c363e711272d33f42 It basically makes reconfigures cavalry balance from scratch: Cav damage equals their infantry counterparts, cav get a 40% health bonus compared to inf (melee: 140hp, ranged: 70hp), infantry +0.5 walkspeed (effects skirms a little more, pikes a little less). I know this is a huge hit to cavalry, but this is intended on being a starting point for balance. We may need to adjust counter-cavalry damage multipliers and perhaps melee cavalry damage. (I could see a 20% or so "mount bonus" being worthwhile for melee cav). Notice that instead of making cav slower, I made infantry faster.

Congratulations @Freagarach!!

Oh yes ur right. I'm not sure how actually "building" the upgrade would work, but it could be nice. Another option would be increase upgrade time, so you have more time to try to deny it.

Another option would be to increase build time of the wood tower. Yes, I agree this shouldn't be possible.

yes, joining gives the error "service unavailable"

nice, a second round just in time for the next community mod release with some balance changes.

ok, so a "transport class" ship could use pretty much the same model as a normal trireme or equivalent ship for gauls, britons, etc. Or at least some slight modifications.

I think we have enough votes to conclude that the ram change and the ptolemy, Iphicrates nerfs do not have enough support. @wraitii does a November 1 release of the next version sound feasible/ideal? Seems like the second round of the tournament will happen soon, so it would be nice to release in time.

https://gitlab.com/0ad/0ad-community-mod-a26/-/commits/main

haha yes, some kind of boarding mechanism would be an awesome feature in 0ad. But I am sure it would be very, very difficult to make that happen, especially considering the animations required. Also, I imagine even giving ships turret points would be difficult task, as in that case you have to make compromises in terms of the ship's size compared to the units occupying the turrets. now, one way to simplify the above task to fit 0ad's scope could be to give whatever ship does the "boarding" a capture attack, with some constraints. Even in that case, you already have plenty of conditions/concerns: Does capture attack depend on units garrisoned? should capture be a "recharge" ability? What ships can capture, what civs have access to this ability? How do you stop both ships? Will this be frustrating to players? (likely yes) one concern is that "boarding" could gamble on what units the enemy's ship has garrisoned. I am not sure if this would be good or bad. Don't get me wrong, I do not dislike the idea, it is just that the implementation and balancing both sound difficult.

so you are suggesting training ships on a basic level, light, heavy, scout etcetera, but they can be upgraded individually into other forms of the ship? ex. trireme -> ramming trireme or bireme -> fire ship? interesting suggestion.

yes, I am familiar with the AOE ship system. Fire ships basically serve as melee units in AOE naval battles, the system is simple but entertaining enough to make water fights interesting. The problem is I can't think of an appropriate close-range ship in the 0ad timeframe. Also, it may not be necessary to try something like that.

any ideas @Lion.Kanzen for a couple other "special" ships, I thought about some kind of bolt shooter ship, a variant of the siege ship with a little more speed and bolt shooter style attack.

right, but wouldn't there need to be a way for a player to know if they are up against ramming triremes or non-ramming triremes.

ok, if we did a "ram attack," one could make ram damage proportional (by some function to balance) to the speed of the ship. I think it would also have to be in the form of an technology for some mediterranean civs (which imparts an added metal cost). I think it should also only be possible for certain ship classes, perhaps only triremes, ie ships of the "heavy" class for the following reasons. 1) biremes would probably be too light to ram well, 2)siege ships are too valuable to use this way, 3) most importantly, players need to be able to anticipate what ships can ram them. Unfortunately, that probably means the ships that have access to rams would need a version of the model with a visible ram. <- maybe its not worth it, idk.

yes, I think a naval overhaul in general should be in the works for a27, probably starting with some ship classes instead of just bigger = better. Ideally naval combat should be more diverse (different ships with different qualities), easier to handle like @Philip the Swaggerless said. light, heavy, siege, transport, special where special includes the fireship and maybe the ptol juggernaut. from there we could balance things, add a couple new "special" ships, and maybe implement some ship mechanics of interest.

This could be good, but I think we should avoid adding too many UI buttons/mass action hotkeys. For example, there was also a discussion for some button to garrison all barracks evenly. There is a pretty simple way to do this with the alt or option hotkey, ordering one unit at a time out of a selection to do something. So select 30 or so units, hold option/alt and click each boat that should be garrisoned until no more units are in the selection. (similar to sniping method). I think would it be ideal to decrease the garrison space of fighting boats to 10-20 depending on the ship, and add a dedicated transport ship. This way you would only need to garrison a few units for effective ship battles

oh, also, what are your thoughts on the contribution of the cavalry health and cavalry speed upgrades. In my eyes these are basically blanket buffs to cavalry as a whole. (I already am working on a much better replacement anyway)

yes, I also find that it takes painfully long to get infantry armies where they need to be. Ok, I could start to put these ideas into a branch, which could be a merge request for later.