Fabius

A Cretan merc archer would be apppealing

A valid point, but I will posit that armed eco is much more useful than unarmed, especially if you want to push an opponents territory and strip-mine his resources. A possible alternative solution has come to mind, give citizen soldiers an alternate form for gathering resources that you can automatically toggle when telling them to gather resources, then a combat mode when you tell them to attack something. This at least simulates the need to drop what you doing, grab weapons etc etc. Makes it necessary to improve your vision to avoid surprise attacks too.

Adding a male villager would water down the value of citizen soldiers and potentially make turtling stronger due to smaller armies. However those armies will likely be champions as they are still overall better value, especially cavalry and elephants, so now the value of jobless citizen soldiers must be evaluated against the superior champions.

That basically makes first age redundant and simply forces you to go Second Age asap. Which ironically is already a stopgap by in large for Third Age. We only have 3 ages and only one truly matters as of now. I presumed the point was to spread things fairly evenly across the ages to avoid this sort of thing. And again this is something that differentiates 0 AD from Age of empires, first age is not some mediocre barebones entity that is just a stop gap for second age. we have a bunch of options to play around with and do early game mischief or do an outright early war and end the game in second age by annihilation.

I don't like the idea of removing gathering as an option from citizen soldiers, its one of those mechanics that feels unique to 0 AD and keeps it apart from Age of Empires. Not to mention is a lot more engaging. There is already an eco differential based on movement speed of ranged units, archers are slowest and skirmishers fastest. The speed of the ladies is consistent, and the distinctions are such that they farm better, chop wood at roughly the same rate as the men, and are half as good at mining as the latter. Its entirely intuitive as to who will do what in any given match Seems reasonable enough as it stands, why is it necessary to break and recreate the system?

Not sure where to ask this, but when is the expected release date for A27?

Ah I see, well one can only test and see how things play out

so phase 1 would be 30s Phase 2 could be 20s Phase 3 could be 15s

why not instead add a bonus for phasing to second and third age that reduces the training time of Spartan Hoplites back to their normal time of 20s, or even make them train faster in third phase?

Vulcan lives!

that is a really nice icon looking forward to the in-game unit

I have a question, was it intentional that melee cavalry get buffed by centurions? Cause that does juice Consular up even more lol

So when do we call an end to the voting and move into the consolidation phase?

I like the unit upgrades and definitely think they should be tested and added, but how exactly are we going to test them effectively if the player community doesn't want to be helpful and let it go in the community mod? Seems to me the only option will be to override the player base for their own good.

what exactly are you referring to when you say you are afraid of there being to much micro? I am not seeing how you need much micro for centurions. you aren't going to really micro them on the battlefield and there are only 8 of them that you can have at any one time. The most micro you might have is setting up the initial acquisition and thats just getting some rank 2 troops and popping them into the barracks for 2 minutes to reach rank 3.

If you look at the model up close in the editor you can see that the fellow is wearing the classic Imperial Gallic helmet

The marian legionaries were still using Coolus style helmets and the montefortino style helmets, they haven't adopted the traditional Gallic helmet that we all associate with Imperial Romans yet.

well until we have something better we just keep using it

there are two models it seems, both look nice, but the helmets are completely wrong for the time frame

Ok, are those from the scenario editor?

I believe there are two swordsmen technologies included in the merge requests that increase the durability of swordsmen for Rome among others, so that has already been partly covered I think

What unit model are you using for the centurion? Wowgetofyourcellphone has some very nice republic centurion models, we could ask if we can use them for this project

Ok, fair point. I think then keeping it to Hastati will be enough.

A Triari centurion would be awesome. As you say we do get second rank infantry from the army camp which speeds up the process considerably. One could then stick some in a barracks for 2 minutes and you are sorted. Here is an idea though, if you garrison a centurion in a barracks then the XP trickle is increased to show that the centurion is drilling the men to be better lol.

Only taking 5 changes is a bit tight fisted, may as well keep with the community mod then. Frankly the simple solution is to have one big poll and ask the player base what they want included in the Main AD game from the community mod. Then you don't have to worry.