guerringuerrin

Thanks for working on this, @manowar. Those are great features,. Specially game templates

Surrounding the CC with fields is obviously gameplay inherited from AoE 2. It’s not realistic, but from a gameplay perspective it’s the safest way to protect your farms from enemy raids, especially in the early game, where your defensive capabilities are more limited. Of course, you can adapt the gameplay to your own preferences. Normally, it’s not recommended to advance to Town Phase before minute 8. You can even delay it until minute 9 or 10 depending on your strategy. Advancing to Town Phase requires a huge amount of wood and food that is usually better invested into increasing your population, constructing key buildings (barracks, stables, houses), and researching important economic technologies to gather resources faster. The larger your population, the faster your economy will grow. Ideally, you should aim to have 100 population by minute 7. A fairly common MP build order for civilizations with expensive houses (150 wood): As soon as the match starts: Constantly produce Civilians at the CC. Send the first 4 civilians to berries; the fifth civilian builds the Farmstead and then stays on berries as well (remember: 1 civilian per berry bush). One soldier builds a house near your chosen woodline. The remaining 3 soldiers build a Storehouse and start gathering wood. Every civilian produced from this point onward goes to chop wood at that Storehouse. Minute 2: Research wood gathering level 1. Build a house using 3 workers. Minute 3: Assign 3 woodcutters to build a barracks. Build another house using 3 workers. Start building fields gradually. Don’t place them all at once, expand them as you fill them up until you reach 5 fields. Alternate between building fields and building houses. Never stop building houses with those 3 civilians. As soon as the barracks is completed, start producing soldiers. Minute 6: Second barracks. Aim to have 30 workers on fields and 30 workers on wood. After the second barracks, you should already have those 30 workers on wood, allowing you to establish another woodline in a different forest. At that point, you should also begin assigning workers to gather stone and metal — 6 workers is a good starting number.

There is also an alternative that might help prevent some of those suggestions from getting lost, which is creating Issues for the ones that seem more concrete, feasible, or broadly supported.

@Thalatta I think polls can certainly help foster discussion around certain proposals, but at the same time, 0 A.D. doesn’t really work as a democracy where changes are decided by majority opinion. It’s also very hard to get participation that is truly representative enough to justify implementing something simply because “most people voted for it”. Your intention to improve aspects of the game is genuinely valuable, and I think that kind of feedback will always be appreciated. That said, personally, I don’t think posting 20 suggestions at once is the most effective strategy if the goal is to eventually see some of them materialize as actual PRs in the repository. I think there’s also an important aspect of the development dynamics that’s easy to underestimate from the outside. All official developers and contributors are working on the game in their free time. There’s an enormous amount of work to do, many competing priorities, and far more ideas than available hands. I can’t really speak on behalf of the official developers since I’m still a relatively recent contributor myself, but in my own experience, the most effective path is usually either: working directly on a PR yourself, or getting the attention of another contributor/developer who becomes interested enough in the proposal to implement it. Always keep in mind that submitting a PR does not guarantee that it will be merged. For what it’s worth, I do think some of your suggestions are interesting, and I’d personally love to spend time on some of them eventually. For example, the last one you mentioned about being able to deselect specific units from the current selection sounds genuinely useful to me. And above all, don’t get frustrated. Some ideas will work out, become PRs, and eventually get merged and others won’t. That’s just part of how open-source development tends to work (at least here). What really matters is maintaining a constructive attitude and trying to filter, among all the things one would personally love to improve in this beautiful game, which ones are realistic and feasible enough to actually move forward and become reality.

In MP, some say it's always recommended. I do it if I have at least one extra fruit tree or berry patch. It's always recommended to assign only one gatherer per berry bush. On 5-berry patches, you'll get: Without Wicker Baskets: ~150 extra food With Wicker Baskets: ~100 extra food. (There are 40 seconds without Wicker Baskets while the technology is being researched.) You can easily distribute the gatherers using the "Order one unit" command. My conclusion is that it's always best to spread out the gatherers. After that, the choice is whether you want food faster or more food in the long run. That's a good practice. You'll save quite a bit of wood that can instead be used for buildings and technologies. Just make sure to have a smooth transition: anticipate when the berries will run out and start researching Iron Plow (the first farm upgrade) before or during farm construction, so the farms start producing at maximum efficiency right away. Depending on the playstyle you choose, if you want to go for early cavalry, it's best to scout the map to see whether there's plenty of hunt or not before deciding; otherwise, you'll run into food problems. If you're going for late cavalry, aim to have 10–12 farms and your food income should be enough.

@kheeva @Thalatta Implementing some kind of rating decay or reset seems quite appropriate to me. There are players who have had the same rating without playing a single 1v1 rated game for many years . Perhaps instead of getting tangled up in intricate calculations, “seasons” could be implemented. Basically, with each new release, all ratings would be reset and everyone would start over. It’s a fairly common mechanism.

Being forced into a particular strategy by your opponent is one of the most normal things in RTS games. It's up to your skill to avoid or reverse that situation and force your opponent to react instead. If my opponent is massing sword cavalry and I stubbornly insist on producing only javelin infantry, then I'm most likely going to lose. And, in fact, every civilization can go for a pikes + jav cav build and, when used properly, it can be quite effective. It's just that with civs that have very strong infantry, like Spartans or Athenians, it often feels like a waste to opt for it instead. Come on, Alex. This is not really a trend. It's a small group of players who found a way to beat each other. Personally, whenever I see them play in higher-level matches, they usually perform quite poorly. People often believe they have found the key to making the game successful and, frankly, I highly doubt that over nerfing melee options from Athens is it. I'd say that having solid single-player content is far more urgent and effective for long-term engagement than trying to neutralize a marginal tactic.

Hi, @Satevis. Welcome to 0 A.D.! I'll try to answer some of your questions.: 1. What is the advantage, if any, of raising livestock in a Corral vs building more Fields? Economically, Fields are still generally more efficient than Corrals. However, Corrals have a harder-to-measure advantage: they allow you to replace some Civilians with Cavalry, since cavalry gathers food faster while also giving you defensive units in your base that can help protect against raids. In addition, you can garrison livestock inside Corrals and get a small constant food trickle. At competitive level, the standard is usually around 45 to 60 Civilians distributed across 9 to 12 Fields. A strategy that is becoming increasingly common is replacing around 20–25 of those Civilians with Cavalry. 3. How much better do my units perform given the different formations? The repositioning that @Deicide4u mentioned is key. An army deployed in a proper formation will have a much better chance of winning than a disorganized army attacking in a straight line or with ranged units (which are weaker) exposed on the front line. Units also run while repositioning, which gives you a mobility advantage that can be enormous if used correctly. In addition, units in formation can overlap slightly more. This allows melee units to attack enemies without needing to move around to find an empty spot. 4. How does the Trader unit affect prices on the Market? Traders are only used to establish trade routes between Markets. Every time a Trader reaches or leaves its destination, you receive some amount of the resource you selected. They are especially useful on maps where certain resources are scarce. 5. Are walls important for defensive play as Romans? Walls are not used very often because of their weakness and high cost. If used properly they can still help with defense, although many players consider them too weak at the moment. 6. How do I handle extremely long ranged archers (vs Seleucid?)? Spear cavalry is probably the best option. They are faster and have a damage multiplier against cavalry. Gaul Naked Fanatics are also an excellent option against all kinds of cavalry. As for struggling against the AI, I recommend watching this video. It explains the basics of economy management while also giving many valuable insights that can help you improve your gameplay. ValhirAnt is one of the best — if not the best — 0 A.D. players. I highly recommend watching many of his videos, from beginner guides on beating the AI to highly competitive 1v1 matches against top players.

Like any other RTS, the game keeps evolving as players discover tactics and strategies to exploit the strengths and weaknesses of different units and civilization mechanics. Maintaining good balance throughout each release is a very difficult task, carried out by very few people who dedicate a great deal of time and effort to it. It would be useful to properly identify what the actual problem is and why the unit is considered broken. Perhaps the issue is the capture system itself, which allows a ball of hoplites to steamroll everything and capture your base. Perhaps it is the Hoplite Tradition technology rather than the unit itself. Or perhaps there is also a lack of skill involved in dealing with a ball of hoplites, which are actually easy to micro against due to their slow speed. The frustration is completely understandable. Balance issues happen and will continue to happen. Contributing ideas to solve a potential problem is always welcome, but ranting about the supposed motivations of the person responsible for the unit’s design does not contribute anything at all.

The PR to make capturing more difficult is already done and, hopefully, it can be reviewed and merged for the next release. I think the capture mechanic is interesting. I wouldn't sacrifice it just to repeat what other RTS games do, where everything boils down to destroying buildings. I think it just needs further polishing and balancing. I think it's strange to see a stone building fall to sword attacks. One could instead imagine it being set on fire, which would make more sense especially for wooden buildings, which are already weaker by default. I think it's good for macemen to keep this role of being effective against buildings. They're weak against units, so the player has a meaningful choice to make, with an associated cost; that adds an interesting layer to the gameplay. I mostly agree with this, finding the right balance is complicated but desirable, so the game doesn't end up excessively favoring turtling either.

I think I found the code related to this behavior. Value seems to be hardcoded. It should probably be exposed as a configurable value so it can be adjusted more easily. Check this line: // If Health is lower we are more susceptible to capture attacks. const cmpHealth = Engine.QueryInterface(target, IID_Health); if (cmpHealth) total /= 0.1 + 0.9 * cmpHealth.GetHitpoints() / cmpHealth.GetMaxHitpoints(); This is in simulation/helpers/Attack.js

Makes sense. With less resistance, capture points drop faster than they regenerate, creating an optical illusion in the capture bar.

No idea about the technical values, but I’ve tested it and at first glance I can see that the capture bar doesn’t recover as much when the building has lower HP. So I assumed its capture regeneration decreases.

A damaged building currently has fewer capture regeneration points. So this behavior is more or less already present.

Hi @razieve, this is a common issue among some players. The most common solutions are: Enabling UPnP on your router. Setting up port forwarding for UDP port 20595. Disabling the router’s/operating system firewall. Using a VPN. Note: in some cases, it may be necessary to restart the router for the changes to take effect properly. Here are some links with guides that will help you with these options: What shall I do when joining multiplayer matches fails with an error message? Setting up your network How open ports for 0AD multiplayer match?