real_tabasco_sauce

Hi all, After my enjoyment of 'hyrcannian shores' which is a nice hybrid (water+land) map, I decided to make something a little similar. Coast Range is a hybrid map with players placed in the middle with forests, food and some small rolling hills. The nearby sea has plenty of fish, but on the other side, a plateau rises from the hills with plenty of metal and stone, but no forests and no food. There is stone and metal among the middle, 'rolling hills' section, but it is only the small stone and metal mines. There's a couple additional things I'd like to do: 1. Make the coast a little more beach-like. 2.Give the plateau a little variation. It looks too straight. Any other suggestions?

Basically, the goal of 0ad is not to simulate. There are other games that do this extremely well. Adding details like the population needing a trickle of food, or buildings needing wood/stone for 'maintenance' is a detail that need not be simulated. In my opinion, this will only result in annoyance and inconsistency. What I mean by inconsistency is if we try our best to simulate some detail like the operational costs of the city, but keep other things abstracted, it results in a contradiction.

admittedly i only watched the last one but the civ design/balance decisions seem very questionable.

Yeah, I already have siege and building's hack armor adjusted to essentially cancel out the 50% increase in melee damage. So the time it takes for melee units to kill buildings and siege is the same.

Also I feel like many modern games would just call what we have a live service and charge a fee for each update.

Its a pretty huge advantage for maury, but it is part of the civ's balance.

essentially, yes. The armor reduction on melee is supposed to roughly match the -25% ranged damage. This way melee units do more damage to melee units + ranged units, but also take more damage from only melee units. The move speed change may or may not be needed.

I wish I was there for that lol

I would be more concerned with losing a lot of consistency and predictability in fights if %HP affected damage. I feel like its one of those details that need not be simulated in a game. To be honest, I think this will not be an issue at all after when melee/range damage is balanced.

So @vinme basically the damage for ranged units is much higher across the board, while to balance this high damage, melee units currently just have a lot of armor so they last longer. The reason they rarely rank up is because they do so little damage. Basically my rebalance patch is as follows: melee units +50% damage ranged units -25% damage melee units less armor (ex 3h 3p instead of 5h 5p for spearman) melee units +.5 m/s walk speed overall, this will push melee units into a more exciting damage-dealing role rather than being more of a damage sponge.

@wraitii If you feel overworked, I'd be happy to head up the community mod. That is if you could show me how to do a few things.

To an extent. However, having too much of a micro creates a huge barrier of entry for new players to be competitive. Do we want to discourage or encourage new players? I think if something can be automated for an unfair advantage it should be considered for a feature included in the game - especially if it can be "silent" and not take away from the experience. Clicking like a madman, imho, takes away from the experience. Lets take the discussion here @alre, @Dizaka. @alre Currently sniping is useful in roughly 80% of large battles. With balance changes, I can make this number about 5% to 10%, allowing for other ways for players to make their battles more fruitful (aka micro). This is a far better solution that removing the ability to control one unit of a selection at a time. @Dizaka it is not important "how much" micro there is, but instead how impactful the micro that is. Basically the core "skill pyramid" might look something like this: Economy: the ability to control your economy and maintain production is a player's bread and butter. This is the most fundamental skill, and just about all middle-tier players should be quite good at this. Very good players still improve here with damage control. Military Composition and Game knowledge: This is where your knowledge of civ strengths and weakness comes in, as well as unit roles, strengths, and weaknesses. If you know the capabilities of the enemy and you have scouted to see what units they are getting, you have a chance to use game knowledge to counter their move. Timing and positioning: Making choices on the 'when' to attack and the 'where' to attack are pretty important, just as the 'when' and 'where' to build a fort or when to age up. Do you charge straight into a very defensible position? do you look for a weaker spot to attack? Do you wait to mass your units, or dive right into a fight? Micro: When in a fight, you want to control units based on unit characteristics. Flanking, retreating wounded units, targeting the weaker enemy units, protecting vulnerable units, encircling units, spreading units out, and formation control are all means for one's micro skills to take effect in a fight. This is the top of the pyramid, as it is the hardest to learn and makes the least difference. @Dizaka in no way is micro a barrier for entry for new players. Getting a feel for the economy and basic strategy is the skill gap for new players. The fact of the matter is it takes a long time to learn how to play 0ad very well, to get all the levels of the pyramid. If a player that has all of these tools at their disposal beats a new player, how is that a barrier for entry? The only way that discourages new players is if those new players think they should expect to win. if you start to remove (aka automate) layers of this pyramid, you have essentially less content. Less decisions to make, less choices, and less tools at your disposal to beat the enemy, no matter how small. In other words the game would be more formulaic and less fun, with the impact of random chance becoming more impactful. I think the area that 0ad stands the most to gain here is level 2. I think more upgrades, civs, and units, we could see more interesting strategy.

Well, it should exist, it just shouldn't be the only worthwhile micro. Instead, it should be a tool in one's skillset that depends on the conditions of a given fight. Balance is the way to fix this.

Well, it all works for a26 at least. If you have time, it probably wouldn't be too hard to update. If not, I'll figure out how to send a pull request your way.

Since the sole role of leadership seems very taxing, I wonder if a leadership 'committee' would be better suited for a project like this. There could be 3 (or more) positions: Engine development lead, Multiplayer and lobby lead, Volunteer organization lead, and/or maybe outreach and public relations lead.

Thank you for all your work over these years Stan! I so appreciate your immense leadership on the project, and always coming in to help out even volunteers with very little experience like myself. You always made everyone feel very welcome and I can't thank you enough for that! Best regards for your future endeavors.

true, but their cavalry can cover so many bases better than swordsmen and slingers. Its just such a strong mid game and late game civ, i'd hesitate to add the additional capabilities.

I think adding catas and bolts would have to come with some kind of nerf because then there would basically be nothing the civ can't do.

Well the balance here, especially for siege is that you will have a lot of units nearby to defend rams and catapults. That being said, a current problem I have noticed for the last couple of alphas is that melee units are very highly armored and that ranged units do much more damage than melee units. So its not just the elite units that are 'unkillable' its really more about the ranged vs melee balance. to address this, I have a patch and a merge request in the community mod (https://gitlab.com/0ad/0ad-community-mod-a26), which may eventually be accessible in the mod downloader for testing.

Well the point here would be to allow changing those files if all players have the same mod, but ensure that they are inaccessible if the checks are disabled. If this can still be fouled, then maybe increase number of files that are off-limits to mods.

I have made a few mods and I have fixed mods. I do not hate contributing with mods. I love that modding 0ad is so easy and I really dislike that you are selfishly trashing the honor system that has worked until you showed up. And people will continue to believe that the earth is flat and that space doesn't exist against any line of actual reasoning.

right, so now all you have to do is package it as a mod and it will be used more frequently. Perhaps going forward, some files should be made impossible to overwrite using a mod when checks are ignored.

Stop saying this. You are gaslighting users that don't know better. I have never seen evidence of players revealing the map, and I have only once seen a player reading allied chat. Revealing the whole map is on the same tier of cheats as having the computer do part of the game for you, aka highly egregious. Furthermore, your mod is threatening because it is packaged nicely and highly distributable and it contains multiple cheats under the guise of a GUI mod. The difficulty of making their own cheats is an obstacle to 99% of would-be cheaters. In most games, cheat developers are the reason for cheating problems, not individual cheaters. The real solution would be for you to own up to your mistake and only use your mod against proGUI players.

I think its also done in age of empire, but I can't confirm.

You forgot: Autoqueue: Acts individually per production building, must be turned on manually. Trainer: Acts globally on production buildings with no user action required for training.