vv221

About formations: It seems you see that as a situation to avoid in-game, but this is exactly the kind of thing I would love to encounter in my games: the choice of battlefield having a heavy influence on the battle outcome. Forcing the opponent to follow you where they can not maintain the formation that is giving them the advantage sounds like an interesting tactical choice. Not following a fleeing army when you think they can lead you to an ambush is another interesting choice. If improving formations support in 0 A.D. can be the source of such choices, I’m all in favour of it

I only play occasional games of 0 A.D., against A.I. As with the dozen of other strategy games I play, I tend to assume a lot of things about "standard" buildings and units. The standard here being that you would garrison units in buildings for temporary protection and healing. For some special buildings, like temples, I will read the tooltips if I have not played for a while. But for common ones, barracks included, I have preconceived ideas about what they do and might not always check if I’m missing something. (barracks train soldiers, towers shoot arrows, houses increase population limit, etc.) … I just started a quick game to check, and the experience gain in garrison is obvious from the tooltip. I guess I missed in until then because building a barracks is something I do without really thinking about it, like some other common tasks during early game. Sadly I have no good suggestions about places where this information could be shown to ensure it is not missed. Loading screens and their tips could have been a good place, but here loading times are so short that I do not have the time to read in full what they display. A technology improving the experience gain would of course help in noticing that this is a thing, but this does not sound like enough of a reason to add a new technology.

I actually had no idea this was a thing To be fair I’m back to 0 A.D. after quite a while not following any news about it, so I might have missed this addition.

I won’t be able to help on the Flatpak side of things, but I’m currently building a .deb backport of Alpha 25b for Debian Bullseye (stable), using the source package from Debian Bookworm (testing). If everything works as expected, I’ll share detailed build instructions here. Or if you want to give it an early try, I’m using this wrapper around mmdebstrap to handle the backported packages generation: Debian backports builder --- It might take a bit longer than expected, I stumbled upon some tricky apt bug in the process…

@LienRag, please consider giving a try to a25, feedback on the current version would be a much better base for potential improvements What we all want (well, I guess this is what we all want) is to improve the feeling of uniqueness in the future releases, not that each of us stay "stuck" on a good ol’ build that will no longer evolve.

My remarks on this topic are not limited to 0 A.D., it is my experience with all strategy games allowing both single player (or human vs. AI) and multiplayer (mostly human vs. human) that there will be two distinct groups of people with clashing visions on where the focus should be between: balanced choices (civilization choice should not bring an obvious advantage/disadvantage), symmetrical gameplay, fair games based on skill diverse choices (including "easy mode" and "hard mode" ones), asymmetrical gameplay, game results can rely in part on luck We obviously can’t have both at the exact same time, this is why I tried to suggest options allowing to switch between one approach and the other. Of course I am not saying people are advocating *against* diversity in the civilizations But this lack of diversity is in my understanding a consequence of the push for balance/fairness. Because it is too tedious to balance wild deviations from the civilizations baseline, such deviations will be dropped if we do not think of the more relaxed solo or coop play against AIs. --- EDIT: Just to avoid confusion, I am talking here about *lack* of diversity compared to what 0 A.D. could be, not *loss* of diversity compared to some older release.

This is an option of course, but not a good one in my opinion: I played 0 A.D. for more than 10 years, but learned only recently about the ability to download mods. Keeping in mind that I am what you could call a "technical" user, so I’m at ease with downloading/enabling mods. But more casual players will often be stuck with the vanilla game, with its focus on balance tailored for fair multiplayer games. My case is that the multiplayer players are usually the ones who have the best knowledge of the game and its options, so if there is a switch to flip between diverse/casual and balanced/hardcore it would be in my opinion a good move to set the default to what would be more fun for the casual players.

That’s right, and points out at the core issue: some players favour balance, other favour diversity. I for one would play much more often if there was more diversity between the civilizations, but I understand that other players want (almost) perfect balance. Since we can not have both at the same time, I think there is roughly three choices: (easy choice) Focus on balance, at the cost of diversity (easy choice) Focus on diversity, at the cost of balance (hard choice) Provide both experiences, and allow the player to chose one I am of course all in favour of the hard one, but if I were to chose between the easy ones I would without any hesitation advise cutting the balance in favour of fun original gameplay (I guess you would disagree on this one ). A perfectly balanced game means that I have very low incentive to try multiple civilizations, so it reduces a lot the time I’m willing to spend playing 0 A.D. before switching to something else.

I agree that the civilizations lack a distinct feel outside of graphics. I guess this is because of multiplayer balance that you do not go with more original concepts? I remember that Age of Empires Ⅱ (sorry, not the best example of civilizations diversity outside of a couple exceptions) provided an option for that: by default all civilizations would use their own technology tree, but you could enforce a default tech tree for all players if you wanted to play a very balanced game. Another option would be to provide civilization "sets", a bit like what Battle for Wesnoth proposed through "eras": you can chose to play with a core/balanced set, perfect for multiplayer, or with a full/extended set, including civilizations with more interesting gameplay quirks. I guess what is important to remember is that there are players who have much more fun with imbalanced gameplay. Playing human against AI is imbalanced anyway, and can not be balanced by playing very similar civilizations, so in my opinion the game could be much more engaging in such modes by embracing the imbalance instead of trying to level it.