LienRag
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Posts posted by LienRag
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On 01/11/2023 at 8:28 AM, man_s_our said:
I think the best approach is to reduce sword damage against walls for significant amount and make the infantry prefer targeting units over structure.
Yes. Taking down walls with infantry should not be doable if the walls are manned, but still doable if there's nobody around.
Would it be possible to reduce damage to near zero when attacking from only one side, but to multiply it drastically when the wall is attacked from both sides ?
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On 01/11/2023 at 12:38 AM, real_tabasco_sauce said:
Potentially one option could be to restrict certain attack types over stone walls for any player, but even then there would be so many cases to take care of: would you make projectiles collide with the walls so that harmless arrows don't hit their targets? Would you make ranged units try to path around the wall when tasked to attack a unit inside? Would you make units within the walls unavailable for units to attack? It is intricate for sure.
Yes, making walls block entirely missile attacks is the way to go. With exception for units that are placed above the wall (like in a watchtower, a fortress, a siege tower, whatever).
Units inside a fully walled area should indeed not be targetable by enemy missiles.
If there is a hole somewhere on the wall, ranged units would try to path around the wall to get line of sight/fire (there should be a visual cue for that when hovering the enemy unit to click on it to target it).
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On 22/10/2023 at 5:08 PM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
Possible/probable future civs which will have Storage Carts: Cimbri, Scythians, Xiongnu
If well balanced and specific to some civs, why not.
But not a general thing.
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On 26/10/2023 at 10:59 AM, panda said:
What about Roman road technology? This tech would make Roman army and its allies move more quickly.
Would be nice to have road allow for quicker movement...
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The problems are multi-fold¹ :
1 - The AI is so bad that the player is forced to micromanage everything, leading to multi-pronged attacks or small raids (which would allow for real tactical diversity and/or actual strategy) being much more difficult to manage than just sending one big army towards the enemy.
2 - Defense is unbalanced : Town Centers are extremely good defenses especially in early game, which is a good thing as "zerg rushes" are imho unfun; but also means that it's nearly impossible to attack before the third age (and siege weapons) beyond small cavalry raids.
For most defenses, once they're garrisonned, it's all-or-nothing : either you come with siege weapons and you've basically won, or you can't do anything.3 - We don't have siege weapons, we have artillery : They have a way too long range (especially, compared to range of vision for buildings) and they are way too powerful and too strong against melee units. To destroy an enemy siege weapon, you need a sizable force : historically, just getting a melee unit near an enemy siege weapon usually meant that the siege weapon was toast².
4 - Terrain has very little effect (and the little effect it has is poorly documented - basically I don't know which effect it has, even though I've been playing for years³).
5 - There are very little secondary objectives. You can put most of your production around your town center, so there is very little for the enemy to do beyond a full-scale attack.
6 - The territory system is all-or-nothing. If (at high cost) you can extend your territory to some place in the map, then you can build a huge defense system there and exploit all the resources. If you can't (and possibility to do so comes only at second age) then they're nearly nothing you can do.
¹ Note that I don't play MP, so please tell me if I'm wrong.
² With exception for some very specific ones, like the Persians' I believe
³ Yes I'm not the best player nor that dedicated to the game, but if one has to explore all the forums and sub-forum to understand such a basic concept, it's a clear documentation problem.
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On 10/07/2023 at 2:38 PM, vajei said:
In the game as it is today, the main disadvantage, in my opinion, is that it lacks dynamics.
The game more or less goes like this: each side develops as fast as it can, then when it has a siege weapon it simply makes a general attack of the whole army, whoever developed faster wins.
It takes all the strategy and thinking out of the game, you just have to learn how to develop quickly and not waste people and time, and that's almost the whole game.Well, yes and no.
Technically, that's not the only possible play.
Raiding the enemy's economy is a way to gain advantage over him.
The problem is, to raid the enemy's economy without taking more losses than him you need to pay constant attention to your units, which means that you can't develop properly your own economy in the meantime, which means that players tend to rather rush for siege and then devast the enemy.
So yes, there's a problem, but not one that is that easy to solve.
On 10/07/2023 at 2:38 PM, vajei said:For example, if one decides to send 20% of the force to make a surprise raid, and they succeed, and destroy the opponent's economy, it does not help because his 100% will crush your 80%, you will be left with 0% and he will be left with about 50%. He will conquer all of your part, and you at best will conquer his part only to lose later to the large army he still has left.
As I wrote above, that really depends how you play it (and especially at what time you send your raid).
But yes, though war in the ancient world was often decided by tactics and strategy rather than by sheer numbers, in 0ad it is very often the numbers that count.
On 10/07/2023 at 2:38 PM, vajei said:My suggestions on the matter: 1. Fortresses and watchtowers are stronger
I agree that fortresses should not be that easily destroyed by siege engines - the goal of the enemy should be to bypass them, not go straight through them.
Of course if fortresses are meant to interdict an area to the enemy, there need to be a way to prevent a player to put fortresses everywhere, so s/he has to choose where to put them to maximize tactical effectiveness.
Watchtowers are good as they are imho, though. Their role is to prevent small raids and to alert to enemy attacks, they're not supposed to resist siege engines for long.
On 10/07/2023 at 2:38 PM, vajei said:The control power of the soldiers will be smaller as they move away from their area, so that it will be necessary to conquer step by step, and not simply go straight to the opponent's base and finish the game.
That's an interesting idea, but it needs to be carefully balanced.
Going straight to the opponent's base is a valid strategy, the problem now is that it's basically the only one.
What should be is that it would be doable if the enemy doesn't fortify well (basically, if you find a way through his defenses, for example if you can trick him by a false attack elsewhere).
And not possible if the enemy prepared adequately for your attack. -
On 03/02/2023 at 4:12 PM, Akira Kurosawa said:
It is unpleasant when 50 enemy units come out of almost captured barracks at a one time.
I'd say that it's probably very pleasant to your enemy...
If the enemy is able to play that well, then it should indeed be rewarded.
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I meant more a food resource for enemy units.
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No, I mean as a source of food for soldiers.
(not the house itself of course, except if you have a termite army, but the food which is in it)
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8 hours ago, man_s_our said:
any resource related to food is considered food. that includes the animals, the fruits/grains and the food stocks that you can store it in your granary or send it to the battlefield to make a supply chain for your attacking troops.
Nice !
You probably should also include houses, though.
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On 26/10/2023 at 7:57 PM, zozio32 said:
The point is that I like to specificity of the citizen soldier, and we loose a bit this aspect at later stage in the game when the big powerful unit can be acquired. Having a mechanism that penalize a big ratio of unproductive unit over productive unit is therefore appealing and works towards the specificity of 0 A.D.
This I can agree with.
Note that the Champion units already cost a lot, so it's sort of an abstraction for that penalization.
You'd have to design your OPEX mechanism to do sufficiently better so as to make the complexification worth it.
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3 hours ago, man_s_our said:
in my mod, when a unit gets very hungry it will start looking for food. but if can't gather food. it will simply start losing health.
Foraging was of great strategic importance¹, so it's very nice to have that simulated.
How do you do so in your mod ? What do they consider "food" ?
¹ Basically, that's the reason for fortresses, as Brett Devereaux explains : most fortress are easy to bypass, but then they have a standing force able to interdict foraging (because it's strong enough to attack and destroy any foraging party, because to forage you have to disperse your units) and that's something no army of the time could afford.
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4 hours ago, zozio32 said:
Could i ask why? I mean, building do need maintenance otherwise they decay in the real world, and why citizen soldiers being military active should not have a cost to be sustained by the community? my suggestions is not very definite, but I am interested in what motivate your point of view
Because that would make a different game, while affecting only mercenaries/champions would make these units more distinct (adding variety to the game) while keeping the main gameplay similar.
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2 hours ago, zozio32 said:
You can maybe destroy some unit/building to rebalance the economy...
Buildings shoudn't cost maintenance, with (maybe) some rare exceptions.
Also it would need something more historical/logical than "destroying" units.
2 hours ago, zozio32 said:If the citizen soldier is mobilised, i.e. is not working, then its cost should be accounted for as for any other proffesional units.
I would be against your proposition if it asks for maintenance for citizen-soldiers.
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1 hour ago, zozio32 said:
get an OPEX cost:
(...) --> impact on gameplay: reduce the possibility to create large group of non productive units. You just can't keep xx elephants for example, it will give more importance to worker / citizen / soldier unit, which I think ties uite well with the historical context.
Interesting indeed...
I'd be adamantly opposed to maintenance cost for citizen-soldiers, but getting one for professional units is indeed quite historical and could allow for a more varied gameplay.
Especially if we differentiate between soldiers and mercenaries...
The option to disband mercenaries, with disbanded mercenaries being added to a pool that can be recruited instantly by anybody (including Gaia as raiders) would make for some real strategic options.
The main concern with any maintenance system is what happens when the resource drops to zero.
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I'd say that Han administration is particular enough (both historically and in the game) that it's better to avoid making false copycats of them...
Basically, leave the Archon units to the Protoss...
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It's not really a question of aggressiveness, but of strategy/timing imho.
Will the AI try to snipe your workers ? Will it try to prevent you from extending ? Will it use its first expansion to develop its economy or to block your/prepare an attack ? Will it attack your town center as soon as it has a ram of wait until it has a serious siege force ?
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On 22/10/2023 at 5:18 PM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
I personally dislike how easy it is to garrison a structure and make it 100% uncapturable.
"How easy" is actually two-fold :
- The player planned for the attack and garrisoned the structure in advance, before the attack.
To me this is a situation where making the building uncapturable is fine : you want to attack a fortified and prepared enemy, you get siege weapons (or you try dismantling the building with axes first).- You launch a well-planned raid on the enemy but even though you're locally very superior to him militarily, he's still able to skip units through your lines and garrison them in the structure you're besieging, making it uncapturable.
This is indeed very frustrating, but I believe that the formations/orders I suggested above can fix that.-
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On 30/09/2023 at 8:45 AM, hyperion said:
https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Atlas_Manual
If you notice something is missing, please add it yourself, this is a community driven project.
Well, for starters the "terain tab" subsection doesn't say a thing about elevations...
(which is what would have interested me as I tried to make some on a map, and wasn't able to understand what makes them buildable upon or not)
I can certainly not fix the manual for a part I don't understand, but I could report an issue is there's a git somewhere (I mean, not a Microsoft-owned one, of course).
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2 hours ago, alre said:
this means that if units are fighting they will be turning indipendently anyway.
That's... not how a Phalanx is supposed to work, to say the least.
And to pick just one example.Thanks for the info anyway.
Is the "units turning at a whim" behavior fixable ?
That units turn to face their threat is not a problem, but there should be some consistency in their facing... -
On 06/03/2023 at 5:47 PM, Yekaterina said:
Please explain. I can't understand why a single cavalry hero unit is as strong as 5 champion units.
I guess because the personal guard of a leader is usually 20-50 people strong ? Each of them elite, BTW.
(au doigt mouillé, as we say in France)
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On 07/03/2023 at 12:55 AM, AIEND said:
Hero units don't need to be more powerful than champion units of the same kind, because the role of hero units should be to provide some buffs as leaders, not to exert individual prowess.
Ever heard of Alexander and Gaugameles ?
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Posting just to add that which building have their own territory roots and which do not should be explicit.
Gaia buildings are way more useful if they have roots...
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On 30/04/2023 at 9:41 AM, Vantha said:
berry bushes regenerating (this feature doesn't meet any of the three point you mentioned):
Berry bushes regenerates ? How so ? Since when ?
Concerning your building destruction idea, I think that it's fine flavor-like but like other pointed, it would create too much problems.
If you can include it in some mod and test it thoroughly, maybe you can come back here and try to convince people again, now that you'd have evidence for it.
Suggestions for 0 A.D.
in Gameplay Discussion
Posted
Possible solutions :
1 - I believe the fundamental way of solving it is by enforcing the formation systems.
Units should be (as it was historically the case) basically unable to fight (except against soft targets like women, or when outrageously outnumbering the enemy) if not in formation.
I suggested "formation trees" elsewhere; that would make choosing a formation for a group of units a real tactical choice, with consequences, as changing formations out of the current branch would generate penalties.
As I already wrote many times, formations will really thrive once we have a moral system, but it's still possible to make do in the meantime.
If the AI use simple formations and knows not to change from one branch to another (except when reorganizing behind its own lines) it should be able to be good enough to keep the game playable (it's always a nice experience to outsmart the AI, as long as it's not suicidal).
2 - It would be probably good to introduce basic rams (tree trunk carried by a few men, without protection, and no garrison possibility) in P2. These would be vulnerable to arrows, so they won't be an option against heavily fortified enemy, but still a way to make a quick and devastating raid.
It would be nice if shielded units protected units behind them when the shooter isn't on a higher ground, too. Both in general and to make these unprotected rams both usable and vulnerable, depending on the tactical skill of each player.
3 - Range of siege engines should never be superior to the range of vision of military units or buildings.
Long-range siege weapons should have few hit points, normal armor against arrows, and basically no armor against melee.
Protected rams should keep their armor against arrows, but have much less against melee units (I mean, not only swordsmen or axemen).
Basically, if you can't protect your rams all the way to the enemy fortification, your offensive should fail.
Note that this suppose another thing : that some formations could be given orders to block passage of enemy units, and some other formations could be ordered to try to break a blocus.
As of now, it's quite easy to slip a few cavalryman through the enemy lines, without the defending player being able to prevent it except through extreme micromanagement.
So, we want to have a few cavalrymen (or any melee unit, actually) to quickly destroy a siege engine, but we want that result to be achieved by good tactics, not by AI failure.
4 - Terrain should be highly strategic : heavy units hindered in swamps or shallow water, higher ground giving multiple advantages, forest hindering tight formations, ...
Line of sight should be a factor, so strategic placement of watchtowers and outposts would be of the utmost importance (and blinding the enemy by taking out some of its outposts, too).
5 - This is harder to tackle. One way would of course to have more treasures on the map, but these should be tactical objectives, not random boni to the first one who gets to them.
That the first one to get to them gets an advantage in exploiting them is good, that he gets all for nearly nothing (except the cost of exploration) isn't.
Another could be to have less resources just around the Town Center, so the player would have to carefully balance risks and rewards of expanding.
Maybe give just enough stone and metal in the base territory to build another (or two other) Town Centers ? With some little surplus so that losing one extension would not mean total defeat ?
This while making P1 techs not cost any metal nor stone.
Also, make farms host fewer workers ? As of now it's possible to have 8 farms around your Town Center, so 40 women, which is nearly enough to provide food for most of your needs.
Or have farms' yield depend on soil fertility, and make the soil around the town center moderately fertile.
Or (combining the two ideas above) make the number of workers on a farm depend on the soil's fertility.
And have only a small berry patch in range of the town center, with one (or two) more farther away, near the frontier : that would allow for more devastating disruption raids.
6 - That is even harder to tackle. There are a lot of propositions on the various subforums, most of them resulting in basically removing the interest of territory...
Would a tiered territory aura be possible ? The core aura would work as of now, the second tier would allow for watchtowers and resource buildings, the third one would allow for non-decaying outposts (and maybe fortresses in P3).
Basically, what we want is to make possible for a player to make a move early towards some strategic point of the map, while making it possible for the other player to counter it.
This without removing the distinction between inside and outside territory...
Maybe more varied out-of-territory defenses ?
Someone proposed a maintenance cost for buildings, I'm against this idea inside territory, but it could be interesting to implement it for buildings outside of the territory...
Especially if the maintenance cost is exponential with the number of each of these defense buildings.
Basically, these defenses would need to :
- Warn early about an enemy attack
- Fend off the enemy for long enough to bring in reinforcements from workers nearby (but not from the main town center, if it's too far)
- Give a tactical advantage to the defenders once the reinforcements are in
- Help concentrate on the tactical level of the battle (i.e, limit the micromanagement of the defense by creating choke points/ taking out single units that were trying to slip through)
- But be vulnerable to a well-planned attack with superior forces
Also, could it be possible to have roads/lanes where movement of units is quicker ? That would allow for counterattacks and a more strategic game (as of now, if you try to counterattack, by the time you're there the enemy has usually reconstructed its defenses).