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LienRag

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Posts posted by LienRag

  1. On 18/05/2022 at 10:22 PM, Yekaterina said:

    II. Frontiers

    The cost of building a new town in 0AD is unusually high, requiring 500 wood & metal & stone, a total of 1500, far more than the Office of the Age of Empires, Age of Mythology and Rise of Nations, resulting in a rare player building a second Office in multiplayer games.
    As a result, it is difficult for players to expand their towns to spread out their economic and military facilities and also to spread out their risks, and to build deep lines of defense to hinder enemy attacks, and they can only build the opening town and the only town as a "super city-state" and rely entirely on the army to protect it. Once the town is destroyed or lost, the player will never be able to return, as it will be difficult to rebuild the economy elsewhere, nor to rebuild the military and defense facilities quickly.
    Therefore, to solve the problems caused by frontiers, a decentralized idea is needed to improve them.
    1. lower the cost of the Office and the colony, limit it to 600 and 400 resources (400 wood + 200 stone and 250 wood + 150 stone are recommended), not train soldiers, as a building that simply trains civilians and recycles supplies, reduce HP, attack and frontier influence, and no longer consider it as a fortress-type defense facility.
    2. Granary and depot buildings for gathering natural resources such as beasts, berries, wood and metals, and stones should be able to be built in neutral areas as well as docks. This will first effectively use the rich food sources on the map, without having to bother to start farming in the opening game, and will also facilitate a more decentralized placement of mineral resources on the map, avoiding the collection of one or two rich mines to become close to a de facto "infinite".
    3. Arrow towers, forts and walls for security and defense should be built in neutral areas, with forts maintaining a certain frontier area of influence. This way, players can block the passages between mountains and forests with few stones through the walls, avoiding the embarrassment of "surrounding one's town with a large circle of walls", and also weakening the role of carts and cavalry and increasing the role of stone throwers. It is also possible to build a "fortress zone" with well-defended and military training facilities, which can be attacked and defended, to improve the role of the fortress, so that the situation does not fluctuate greatly with the army fighting downwind & upwind.
    4. Military facilities and temples, which are theoretically occupied, will not get out of control due to the loss of offices and forts, avoiding speculative tactics caused by "office decapitation".

     

    Well, the part about the cost of "town centers" may be right.

    Maybe fragile town centers with the same food&wood cost but only 100 Stone cost could be an idea ? With less area generated, like Kleroukies.

     

    The part about building granaries, ... in neutral territory is maybe not stupid, but contradicts the fundamentals options of 0ad. If the guy wants to play AoE in 0ad, let him build a AoE mod for 0ad...

    That doesn't mean that no solution to allow gathering in neutral territory should ever be created (Maurya elephants are interesting for that an not really overpowered since they are slow and vulnerable), just that they should have real constraints and impose a committed strategy, so that they would not become the default way of doing things.

     

    Building defenses in neutral territory is again a bad way of addressing the problem (especially since Athenians and Romans already can do that, so why remove their specificity ?).

    But it's true that it's very frustrating to have the perfect defensive position on the map and not being able to use it because it's a few inches too far from your area of control...

    Maybe things more varied than outposts could be added to the game ? Like a tower that cost a lot more but has its own root control area ? So it's possible to have a couple where they'll be really useful, but still not viable to spam them on the map.

     

    Not sure about the 4th point. Office decapitation as he writes is an important strategy, but maybe it should be a little less "all or nothing" ?
    No idea how to do it though. Maybe keep the ability to build inside the area even when the root is gone ?

  2. Yeah, I think that I've read your post long ago and that influenced my proposal here (sorry I didn't quote you, I knew it was not an entirely original idea but didn't remember who wrote it initially).

    Note that what I wrote is a bit different from your idea : basically it keeps only the "first tier" that would be balanced with each other, the other civs would not have to be necessarily balanced between themselves.

    So it's more splitting the problem in two, one of balance for the first tier (much easier to fix since there would be 3-5 civilizations in that group) where it is agreed that uniqueness, while good, takes second position towards balance; and the second of uniqueness where it's easier to be creative when relieved of the necessity to keep balance with everyone (not to say that these civs would need to be unbalanced, but balance can take second position).

    Also, it's more a provisional situation, as when the game reaches 1.0 it can be possible to be more thorough both about balance and unicity.

     

    But there's no point in trying to do the very difficult task of keeping 13 or more civilizations both unique and balanced multiple times as each new release shatters the very-hard-to-reach equilibrium.

  3. On 13/06/2022 at 7:02 PM, Lion.Kanzen said:

    we need to vote on this option once and for all. i'm tired of all civs playing the same way.

    ("this option" being Civ unicity)

    The real question is "when".

    It's probably possible to balance very different civilizations once the game is ready for a somehow freeze of new features, it's an entirely different thing to keep them balanced when they occur frequent changes as the game evolves.

    One compromise would be (while waiting for the perfected game) to have a few civs balanced for competitive multiplayer, even if they're not that unique, and have very differently playable civs for the rest of the game, even if they're not that balanced (of course if unbalanced, they shouldn't be more powerful than the first batch).

     

     

    • Like 1
  4. 2 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

    Sorry I don't know what Magic key is...

    If you want to kill 0ad, try 

    sudo killall 0ad

    Or 

    sudo killall pyrogenesis

    You can exit full screen with alt+enter so that you can reach the terminal.

     

    Magic SysRq is described above. I haven't tried it.
    I guess a Magic Key would be one that prevents any error in the terminal ? Would be nice to have...

    Note than none of your solutions worked on my two crashes, as described on my first and last post.

  5. On 26/09/2021 at 3:44 PM, LienRag said:

    "O + Left Drag over units on map: Only select wounded units. "

    I tried to do that (on KenWood) but it didn't work...

    How should it be done ?

    Should I left drag first then press 0 ? Press 0 first then left drag ? Keep 0 pressed then left drag (not possible on a laptop without a numeric pad) ?

  6. I had a new occurrence of the same problem, this time testing the Terra Magna mod (still on KenWood).

    Also, this time (since I had less things running in the background) the RAM was way less used (around 4 Gb on a total of 16 Gb).

    I tried the "ps -ef| grep /usr/games" command but it brought me nothing save the grep process itself.

    pstree didn't show anything remotely looking like 0ad nor pyrogenesis.

    I had not configured the different workspaces nor the Magic SysRq.

    Since I didn't have unsaved work on the other windows this time, I just restarted the game from the F1 console.

  7. Zeugma ?

    Zen ? (if there are less flame wars about what is OP and not in this alpha)

    Zis-game-is-ze-best ? (yes, I'm French)

    Zorglub ?

    Zebigboss (briton leader) ?

    Zeitgeist ?

    Zimbabwé ? (not sure that the historical kingdom fits in the time period, though)

    Zun Tsu ?

    Zargos ?

    Z world war ?

    Zombie ? the game is still not dead...

    Zorrino ? the cute and faithful little game...

    Zowie ?

    Z for Zendetta ?

     

  8. On a unrelated topic to my earlier messages, it would be nice if announcement pages for a release linked to installation instructions for this precise release and not only to generic instructions for installation of 0ad which do not lead to installing the aforementioned release...

    apt install 0ad is a very fine way of installing 0ad, but it installs a23.

  9. On 18/05/2021 at 12:58 AM, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

    Archers start firing with low accuracy (maybe the same as skirmisher), but over 4 shots linearly increase to their maximum accuracy value and keep it until they either move or are told to shoot something else.

    I like that !

    Both realistic(-ish, at least enough to be intuitive) and gives them a double-edged difference with other units.

    Also allow heavy infantry some leeway while facing archers.

  10. 15 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

     I just felt it made more sense to have male and female variants of civilian citizens, aka "villagers."

    But in Greek and early Roman civilizations at least (less sure about the others, though I'm quite convinced that's also true for Gauls and the like) these male citizens would go to war as soldiers when needed.

    It's afaik a core feature of these societies, so removing the way that 0ad pictures them accurately doesn't make any sense.

    If that's not true for Egyptians (it's not real historical knowledge, but I'm under the impression that the peasant class in Egyptian society wasn't composed of citizen-soldiers, but you really better check rather that believe me at face value) then by all means yes, go for including male villagers in their civilization !
    Ditto of course for any civilization that would have free villagers unable/unexpected to fight in wars.

  11. Well, to me the idea that we can correct the misogyny of most of the depicted ancient societies is preposterous and bordering on delirium.

    That by making them appear less misogynous than they were we would be doing anything good is also imho a completely perverse way of thinking and certainly not "progressive" in any manner.

    What we can do (and that's what I'm advocating) is correct the misogyny of historical representations of these ancient societies.

    So imho it can be a good thing to highlight in-game any aspect of ancient society that actually empowered women of these societies, and to also highlight any ancient society that was less misogynistic than the others (so as to pinpoint that misogyny isn't "the natural order" nor "what people did at the time" but a political, social and cultural choice that some people/societies made and some others refused), in order to avoid reproducing usual prejudices that people may have about ancient cultures after a XIX° century of male historians projecting their chauvinistic and misogynistic prejudices on their study subject.

    This work to debunk historical misogynistic misinterpretations by providing historical accuracy in-game (as long as it keeps the game fun and strategic) is endangered imho by the introduction of "antisexist" historical inacurracies in the name of "making girl players happy", so I deeply object to any attempt to do so.

  12. On 18/04/2021 at 9:02 PM, alre said:

     it could be confusing for players switching civ often.

    Not if it's made clear that playing a different Civilization means learning the game anew (and if the tutorial is made to learn at least two civilizations with their differences and explicitly warns to check for the Civilization's specificity when playing a new one.

     

    On 18/04/2021 at 12:58 PM, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

     Alternatively I could also see some civilisations having cavalry have the ability to build a hunting lodge as a resource dropsite.

    Certainly an interesting idea but very unbalanced if it's used for something else than food (I mean, if it's buildable in neutral territory).

     

    On 18/04/2021 at 5:50 PM, Yekaterina said:

    The Egyptians did travel far into the desert and set up mining camps, so to reflect this perhaps we can have a storehouse for food, a storehouse for wood and a separate storehouse for metal and stone.

    That would be a huge differentiation factor if those storehouses for metal and stone were buildable in neutral territory (like KenWood's outposts) but that would need careful balancing.

    Also it would be very bad in games with scattered trees...

  13. The more I think of it, the more I believe that the upkeep in metal could be only when they fight and/or are wounded; the rest of the time an upkeep in food may be sufficient.

    Also, instead of having to hire all of them at once, a limit to how many mercenaries one can hire on promised pay could be set. As long as this limit has not been reached, it's possible to hire new ones before having settled the debt.

    This limit could rise with some techs and also with the loot acquired (mercenaries able to loot are happy mercenaries)...

    Needs very careful balancing, but could be really fun to play.

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