LienRag

Buildings shoudn't cost maintenance, with (maybe) some rare exceptions. Also it would need something more historical/logical than "destroying" units. I would be against your proposition if it asks for maintenance for citizen-soldiers.

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.

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...

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 ?

"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.

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).

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...

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)

Ever heard of Alexander and Gaugameles ?

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...

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.

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.

Having combat heavily dependent on formation is the only way to ever have a combat system vaguely resembling what happened historically. As of now, switching from a formation to another takes a lot of time and makes many units do very unproductive moves, making it a problem in combat. It's not entirely unhistorical, as getting soldiers in formation could indeed be a real hassle and take a lot of time. There's a least one battle won because one side took too much time to get in formation and the enemy were able to charge them before they were ready. (no, I don't remember which battle) But there were also formations that were supposed to be easily switched from one to the other in the battlefield. So, shouldn't we have something like a "formation tree" where switching from one "branch" to the other takes a lot of time and shouldn't be done under enemy fire, while switching from one formation to another in the same "branch" is quick and painless ?

Well, that's the point of fighting near your barracks... It may be a bit overpowered, I can't say, but fighting in a situation that you prepared for should indeed give quite a good advantage.

That is exactly why it shouldn't exist. Not only hunting I mean but collecting resources outside your territory. A cart which only collects treasures (with treasures then needing to be carried) could be interesting, I've proposed it elsewhere.

Nice idea. Needs to be balanced though (law of diminishing returns).

The idea that you can make a palisade in no man's land but not control it is an important game feature.

Garrisoning is a tad micro-heavy, but it could be fixed by specific orders : "interdiction" (for the attacker), to prevent anyone to enter the building, and "breach" for the defender, in order to have a formation break the enemy lines in order to garrison. Garrisoning in itself is extremely important strategically, as it means that it's possible with good tactics to storm an unprepared enemy while making impossible to take out enemy defenses without siege engines if he actually took care to defend.

Yes, something like that is sorely needed. Endgames are a PITA sometimes, for no reason. Also, there should be an option on the minimap to show only enemies (buildings and units).

BTW, is there a reason for this temple to not have any territory effect ?

Historically very accurate, but how would you do this without adding to the burden of micro-management ? Also, auras for the altars are not how sacrifices worked historically. It would be more like a morale boost (but again, we'd need to have morale for it to work).

That seems to be a problem of implementation. Easy fix would be to remove this shield bonus when on "no formation" and make sure that all formations prevent turning at a whim (which most formations actually does AFAIK). Or if some formations do allow turning at a whim, remove the shield bonus for them (and make that clear in the hover-text !).

Another idea, but not sure if it's technically doable : have damage from archers to units with shields being greatly reduced by shields, that is from the front (with the shielded moving to face the greatest threat when at rest, if shot upon). That should have huge (and very interesting) tactical consequences.

I'm not good enough at 0ad to talk numbers, so I didn't read past the few posts at the beginning. But though I understand the concern, my take is that the main difference between ranged and melee units being armor is quite accurate historically. That doesn't mean that melee units shouldn't hack quickly through unarmored ranged units if they can catch them, though. As I wrote many times, we won't have anything like historical battles as long as we don't have morale, but it doesn't prevent trying to do a not-too-bad balance in the meantime. Well-armored melee should be extremely hard to kill for archers, and only vulnerable to slingers (take a stone to the helmet, yes it won't crush your skull, but you'll still feel it hard). To approximate the historical role of harassment by archers, could it be possible to have damage diminish when the health diminish ? Once archers have already wounded the weakly armored parts of the body, the armored part is quite immune to arrows... Also, good balance (and historical accuracy, see Devereaux's blog post on kiting) would be to have ranged damage heavily dependent on, well, range : if you want to be efficient, you shoot at close range (which would make steep cliffs so much more of a strategic asset), if you just want to harass, you shot at long range. We need a specific formation for melee units that allows for a short charge, as that's the way historically that hoplites were able to destroy ranged units (which are usually quicker). Turning around (to run in the opposite direction) should take some time (for everyone, but here it's important for the ranged units, so as to make them unable to dance too easily). I guess that's the good balance would be to make the "turning around" time take as much time as the short charge, so when the charge starts it's too late to turn around. And if ranged units still "dance" by turning around before the enemy is close enough to charge, well it's (more or less) how they were used historically.

I understand how it would weaken an already weakened army to remove that cheat, but could it still be an option at game start (set by default, with a big caveat if one opts out of it "the AI is already weak as it is, it would weaken it more") ? Obviously it would first require some minimal scouting code, but I don't believe that systematic scouting is very hard to implement... Scouting and counter-scouting is a very important part of an RTS game, and a quite fun one.