Fabius

Ah I see, so essentially a button that merges a couple units into a ram? Or a single unit into a ram? And then a button with that unit to turn it into a better ram?

So basically just a stat upgrade? For rams?

I like wild ideas I do How hard would it be to code, what about art and how practical would it be game play wise?

In fact I would love to see the Onager as part of the main game in some capacity for Rome. alongside Centurions

I know he has code for field catapult construction, I seen it in DE and I would love to see it as a roman legionary bonus.

Alrighty, that makes sense

Nicely laid out I am curious as to why units have such high crush armour, Is it to prevent one shotting by elephants? Catapults? All civs can already build siege workshops, also making it come from barracks but for Macedonia requires a workshop will weaken it for Macedonia as nearly all players will already have a barracks by default, better that everyone can build a workshop second age if they have this mini ram available.

I know about clubmen, however you need a lot of them to be effective, the cost factor alone keeps them as a gimmick unit. A single ram is worth more and costs less.

Adding a phase 2 ram is not changing half the game and I hardly think creating a stripped down ram model is hard. Going with Aiend on that one. Phase 2 has no meaning currently, unless you are going for merc cavalry as carthage. We need more diversification in phase 2 options.

Very interesting, so in terms of practical gameplay how do you envision that playing out?

That is an interesting observation, definitely a different setup, I rather like it, how exactly would it work?

Alright, that is agreeable simpler ram construction entity in P2 and then a more advanced piece of machinary for P3.

A fair point, I would advocate for the tower mechanism, with the added caveat of focusing organic units over buildings

Yes. At this stage our main objective is to convince as many of the development team to agree to our ideas as we can. General rule of thumb should be short and concise ideas with as much logical foundation as possible.

More seriously, there are only three phases not four. So a light ram in second phase would make it far more meaningful than the current "everyone rush phase 3 as fast they jolly well can" I don't see why everyone should not get a tree trunk hauled by a couple guys. It does not take a rocket scientist to tell a couple guys to pick up a random log and start smacking the local neighbor's door with it. The difference would be much lower pierce lower since they are just a couple guys with a log, so shooting them would be just as effective as smacking them with pointy sticks and swords.

Ram army go brrrrrrrrrrrr

Case in point, one glaring weakness of siege towers is a target rich environment.

It would be a nice idea, but unfortunately i believe there is an issue with turret mechanics currently. I was interested in having wall turrets for catapults and it was mentioned the code was unable to support that. Whether things have changed since then I do not know, one would have to ask the coding team. That being said the other issue is that it is not really efficient as you either have to manually control the archer or have it on auto pilot, neither are particularly useful in the long run.

Sounds good overall I would be inclined to go for increments of 0.25 rather, so rank 1 is 1s, rank 2 is 0.75s and rank 3 is 0.5s. But there is also merit in starting where you have suggested and then if it is found to be to strong then drop it down to the figures I have suggested.

Alright, thats seesm agreeable, i prefer token costs over heavier ones as the game runs so fast already its just annoying having to wait for something when every second counts and having to pay a lot for it into the bargain.

In what manner should the training be different?

Agreed on both counts, The cataphracts and chariots are currently under discussion in a different thread I believe. I noted they had dropped the pierce armour of pikemen by 2 in the changelog for A26.

Lower the experience and increase the health bonus received per level.

Hypothetically if we followed this path it would be ideal to drop ranged damage as well. It wont be necessary either to change the method of recruitment for champions as that will weaken them to much I think. cutting them off from blacksmith upgrades will be sufficient.

I must point out that citizen pikemen already have higher armour than foot champions, so this is not as unreasonable as one might think.