real_tabasco_sauce

In other words, the innate properties of the units (armor, speed, dps, cost, range) should be enough for unit differentiation. I like the idea of adding some bonuses/debuffs to the current matchup between units, like cav debuff for palisades, or catapult buff to fortress, but I dislike rock-paper-scissors balance.

some of this is good. I would say the roles for inf spears, archers, swords and javelins are good (and somewhat similar to their current roles) Im not sure about slingers, and the number of auras involved in these changes. Also, why do swordcav counter cavalry? I would have thought spearcav would fulfill this role, with swordcav being strong against infantry. I would say the pop costs for most units should be left alone. Overall, I think the rock-paper-scissors approach seems kind of forced. Currently, the different characteristics of the units differentiate without the need for rock-paper-scissors style counters. For example: archers have less dps than skirms, but their range is a strength, that can be utilized differently. In the case where the archers are far away from the skirms, they do in fact counter skirms. Conversely, when skirms are able to close the gap, they counter archers with higher DPS. I am fine with this. Essentially, what we need to steer clear of is if a skirm does 20 percent more damage just because it is attacking an archer.

unit differentiation. Having units with different roles and strengths is beneficial for gameplay. ?

The gameplay right now is pretty awesome actually. There is an amount of abstraction in video games. look at age of empires, other games too. If you want to simulate reality, you will find this is an impossible task. you poke with these weapons

there is a third: keep damage types the same. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. If changes need to be made to slingers (to remove crush if desired) or to clubs, they should be done under the current system and on a case by case basis, and perhaps with bonuses as @wowgetoffyourcellphone said. There is no need for these large-scale changes. So far, I still don't see how this simplification (or the refinement) would improve gameplay. Change for change's sake?

sure, I agree. But do we really need another 3 damage types for these changes?

why not? Thats why a catapult does over 210 crush, and a slinger does 1.1 crush. There is no need to overcomplicate these damage types because in both cases the type is a crushing effect, one is just a lot more than the other. In other words, I don't know why you would want to call the slinger's damage "thump." I just don't understand what the change in terminology achieves. Yes I agree, but I was talking about the changed relevance of aforementioned units that do a little crush.

this should depend on unit type. Crush is used by club/maces, axe cav, and slingers as well.

yes it might not be necessary, but if units had a some more variance in crush armor, units like clubs could prove more useful than just siege. But how is having pierce spears and pikes an issue?

I see. This could make sense to separate units and buildings from seige attacks, but what about units like clubmen and axe cav? In the a27 suggestion topic, @BreakfastBurrito_007 suggested some variation of crush armor between organic units.

I guess this is already the huge crush values for siege units, but you mean this should just be a 1 hit damage type? (for soldiers)

This was in another discussion, but it should go here too: Economy score rework: Economy score = resources gathered resources spent separate statistic in summary screen: Value ratio = military score / economy score (shows player skill, if some units are super OP like merc cav, player unit composition, overall effectiveness) Also, the latter value would show how impactful a rush is in the early game with the same weight (since an early game ratio and a late game ratio are still each ratios) Thoughts on this change?

Seems like ranged units have 10, spears and pikes have 15, and champs have 20, heroes 25. I think some more variety here could be worth considering perhaps between pikes and spears. Maybe an overall reduction to some of these values as well could be an improvement, since crush is almost irrelevant to soldiers, except for eles. ^perhaps pikes should have less crush armor than spears and swords(no shield) Also, perhaps skirms should have a little more than archers and slingers. Also there should be some crush armor differentiation between cav,inf,ranged,melee champs.

I thought it was just pierce, hack, and crush no? IMO the different combinations of these make sense for the most part. I guess there is also fire and poison, but these are not the core damage types. Spears are fine to have both hack and pierce damage, as this speaks to their versatility. However, some more asymmetry between these values might be worth considering. To have just 'melee' and 'ranged' damage types would oversimplify the game, and especially make melee fights less interesting. For example, what would then distinguish swords and spears other than their armor? Their armor would also be more simplified because in the blacksmith, the only armors available would then be "increase melee attack armor" and "increase ranged attack armor." I think these values are actually in a pretty good spot at the moment, and I don't think adding many more damage types would be worthwhile either.

I don't like the super hard counters.

this can be balanced accordingly. Siege tower doom stacks occur too, but they are so expensive nobody really tries. I still think this is a more interesting role than quasi-rams

since all civs have rams, what if eles were made a less effective against buildings (not as good as rams, accounting for cost), but gain a small semicircle (or triangle?) of hack splash damage, not enough to 1 hit most units, but enough to do a lot of damage. I think this would further differentiate eles from rams, making them more of a "shock unit." How best to deal the damage to multiple enemies, however, is unclear.

no but it is massively important. Siege and eles are a leverage you can use to force enemies to come to your army. Thats why they are rarely effective by themselves.

Now this is a good thought. Perhaps destroying your own buildings using delete should take some time. A constant fire damage would work fine, 100 or 200 hp/sec. Maybe in theory, the buildings could be captured and then repaired if you were really quick. I think it satisfies the issues with capture-delete in an elegant and unique fashion.

I could see this being more favorable than capturing and deleting houses, but only as a visual change. In other words, the time to destroy a house with torches should be the same as if you were capturing. However, it doesn't make sense for CCs, Forts and towers. Overall, I would consider this feature not worthwhile.

sounds like a good idea to me.

i would love to see a couple more skiritai-esq units. One of which could be axe cav, especially since this unit is unique to the Persians. Hyrcannian cav are currently worse than swordcav, with less hack/sec and 2 less pierce armor. Their best use is for crush against buildings. Since they seem to be a "light" cavalry, I think it would be cool if they could become a more costly, more powerful rank 3 unit like skiritai. Specifically, this should be the fastest cavalry in the game, keeping the light armor, but additional hack dmg. The specifics of these could be honed obviously for balance, but I think a fast and light, high damage unit would be exciting.

I would also be interested in maybe a couple other units for other civs in the skiritai "class," more expensive, powerful CS with less eco value. IMO a contender could be axe cav.

Instead of not firing, what if they just chose targets without nearby friendly soldiers? in general, Im not sure how smoothly this would work in practice. In short, I am in favor of more directly player-controlled features, but this could be a good behavior solution.

@Philip the Swaggerless when ranged units are able to use their full range, much more damage is unlocked, especially with higher ranged units like archers. Currently this damage is largely unused because it's 1: all sent to the meat shield unless you manually intervene and 2: lost to overkill. Getting rid of these losses would make all ranged units much stronger, with archers receiving the biggest benefit. The great thing about attack-ground is that it should fit pretty well into the balance of 0ad. The benefit of a volley would be: use full range, damage multiple enemies, with the costs being the proportion of arrows missed, or the whole volley missed due to user error. The attack group feature would basically just be more effective, and likely easier to implement. I would expect both of these features to increase the importance of melee, owing to more dynamic battles, and more melee surviving since they would be less targeted by ranged units. I imagine after testing these features, some units will be more OP than others using these tactics, but I hope the game won't need to be balanced around either of these features. I will say attack ground is pretty realistic, basically implementing volleys, but I like both.