Fabius

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.

An interesting idea. Fortresses though don't train champions anymore anyway, so no issue there. Removing the affect of blacksmith on champions is an interesting idea, it would shake up things, I am just uncertain how beneficial that shaking will be. under current circumstances you will have citizen spear and sword infantry with 2 more armour than champions, the big difference being much less health. Even the attack might be higher, uncertain here. Therefore the question becomes how much does this reduce the usefulness of the champion overall. Cataphracts are just beefed up lancers. Chariots are simply beefed up skirmisher or archer cav. The only true unique champion units we have are foot axemen for Kush and elephants

The experience cost was already lowered in A24 or A25, I cannot recall. Lowering ranged damage is a reasonable idea. The one problem is that champions will become even more overwhelming. That also goes for the blacksmith. You will need technologies aimed specifically at citizen soldiers else champions will become stronger. At this stage the whole champion concept seems broken, were they intended as unique units or simply a troop that civ did really well in.

Fair observations. Thing is though, those experience levels are still largely unused on account of melee never surviving long enough to make any meaningful use of it. A possible solution could be to add extra armour technologies for melee troops, like we had in A23 before they unified them into single technologies.

A good idea if you intend to use experience as a resource that can be used to upgrade troops, but not for specific individuals unless you feel like doing micro on last hits, and we doing RTS not Dota last I checked

I want to see new features and a breaking of the status quo. The only way forward is to bite the proverbial bullet and assume you cannot please everyone. Whats more, there ought to be more cohesion and unification around progress, eg if an idea is put forward discuss and if it is reasonable accept it and pass it on to whoever has the coding skill to make it happen. You can't all do your own merry thing and expect your game to survive. lists, discussions, action, progress is what you need. And a unification of vision

The reason they get armour is because in this era the more elite soldiers could afford to buy their own gear and so it is reasonable that they get better armour the more experienced they get. Currently it is excruciatingly hard to make meaningful use of that experience bonus unless you are a Greek state with hoplite tradition or have idle troops in a barracks for 4 minutes.

True, I had forgotten that. Well how about the Senate house for Rome then? And other factions too if they happen to have a building of sorts for such things

Every Carthaginian players dream map

This is one very nice thing about Selucids and Ptolomies, you can immediately have a hero to lead your forces to battle, whats more they have an elephant hero that can level a civic center by itself if properly protected. Every other civ has to build a silly fort which costs a lot and takes an age. At least the Spartans, Athenians and Gauls have an easier time of things with unique buildings, I think Mauryas as well. But the others are stuck building forts

I believe the traction trebuchet originated in Asia and then made its way down to middle east and the eastern Romans who adopted it in part i think because it proved more reliable. The Romans liked using them for field battles among other things. Then later on it became the counterweight trebuchet.

Yes, Torsion weapons were generally a lot more complicated to build and maintain, and traction trebuchets and the later counterweight trebuchet proved much more useful and easier to build, and they could also be built larger so as to threaten previously impregnable fortifications.