LienRag

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).

If well balanced and specific to some civs, why not. But not a general thing.

Would be nice to have road allow for quicker movement...

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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

I meant more a food resource for enemy units.

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)

Nice ! You probably should also include houses, though.

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.

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.

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.

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 ?