Vantha

I mean - after more than 20 years of development - no matter the idea, there's a pretty good chance someone has already thought of it in the past By the way, I recall someone suggesting the feature of buildable streets that boost unit movement speeds over them a while ago. I don't remember in which exact thread, but it's an interesting concept.

Alright, here is what I envision for scenario 0: Scenario 0 will neither to last the length of a full game nor feel like it. Instead, it is only supposed to introduce players to the basic controls and UI. The map more or less covers the following area: The player starts in the southwestern/bottom-left corner with a couple of soldiers, women, and the hero, but no structures, and is told to scout the land for a suitable place to build the colony. Because there are no ships yet, the player is indirectly forced to make their way counter-clockwise around the map. On the way, two things happen: Firstly, the player finds a treasure and collects it. He is then told to collect enough treasures more from around the map to afford a civic center. Secondly, a few wild animals attack some of his units, and the player learns the basics of combat. Eventually, he will find his way onto the target peninsula and is ordered to construct a civic center here. The player "wins" the game as soon as the construction of this civic center is finished. What do you think?

Some references for the terrain and topography around Carthago Nova:

Sounds a good job for @Vantha Well, I can't do everything at once, but I like the idea. Will keep it in mind for the future. Is there a ticket/issue for it yet? I can only agree. It shows that you don't have to stuff in twenty different buttons and labels to create an appealing page. Would be cool have something similiar for our campaigns.

If no one objects, let's move forward with this idea. First thing we need is maps. @Lion.Kanzen@wowgetoffyourcellphone You said you could create some?

Animals need this tag too, but won't be affected by this change. What we do is edit the tag in template_unit_ship, the new value will automatically be inherited by all its children templates, their children templates, and so on (i.e. exclusively all ships). And then we only need to disable the tag for some specific types of ships.

Yeah, that's pretty much everything there is to say. Full wysiwyg editing is not possible. But adding and modifying basic GUI elements becomes a quick process once you get the hang of it. Let me know when you need anything in this regard.

I researched for more ideas, but didn't find anything promising. My pick remains Carthago Nova. It's as good of an option as we're gonna find in my opinion. What do you all think? @ShadowOfHassen My problem with Athenian colonies in Thrace is that we lack the Thracians as a civilization in the vanilla game. And, in the grand scope, most of those colonies were rather insignificant.

Sorry for the late answer, but, yes, that is possible. Look for the "typeCountsByClass" in the playerstates (part of the simulation state). It stores how many units of each template a player currently controls.

I removed the World Population checkbox in the game setup and replaced it with a dropdown for selecting the Population Cap Type ("Player Population", "Team Population", or "World Population"). Here is what that looks like: Nothing spectacular, but it works. Generally, you simply need to transfer the changes you see in the PR to your own mod (i.e. going through the affected files and making the same changes to the corresponding files in your repo, by using a diff file for example). Unfortunately, however, this specific patch here builds on changes made after the release of A26 and not applied in the community mod (which your mod is based on, correct?). This means, if you try to do the above you will find that some files in your mod differ from the original files in the PR and you won't be able to transfer the changes. You would have to backtrack more and more commits affecting a larger and larger number of files and eventually you very nasty conflicts. All in all, unfortunately, it's not feasible to pack these changes into an A26 mod. I guess you'll have to wait until A27 for it.

This idea has a lot of potential in my opinion. While not comparable to Alexandria or Syracuse, Carthago Nova (modern-day Cartagena) still offers considerable historical significance. The required civs are the Carthaginians (the founders) and the Iberians (enemies) both of which are already fully playable in the vanilla version. The hero of the story would be Hasdrubal the Fair - whom we don't have yet, but besides him no new game content would need to be created at all. Additionally, many people, even if not particularly into history, have heard of Hannibal, Carthage, and the Punic Wars before. Mostly from the Roman side, though, so this campaign could open a new, interesting perspective on the conflict.

I still believe this would be useful and I made a patch for it: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/7161 As always, any ideas and suggestions are welcomed.

Sure. This would definitely be worth it (assuming we can collect a reasonable number of secondary images). I'll see what I can do.

What about Alexandria Eschate ? It was the most remote colony founded by Alexander, in the very northeastern corner of the empire. Some conflicts with the Scythians are recorded in its early days. Most interestingly, though, they also fought (and lost) a large war against the Han Chinese - yes, the War of the Heavenly Horses. An incredibly fascinating piece of history. I mean, ancient Greeks meeting and fighting the ancient Chinese, how cool is that? There are some issues with this idea too, though, as said war took place more than a century after the foundation, when Alexandria Eschate was already part of the (also really interesting) Greco-Bactrian kingdom. So, it would require a significant time jump; I'm already breaking my own principles...

New idea: What about colonies established by Alexander the Great? They were founded in the correct time frame. Plus, we have the Macedonians as a civ, and several they fought against. Of course, Alexandria (in Egypt) would be the obvious pick, but there are some other interesting ones as well.

Yeah, in the worst case we could resort to something like that. But I really hope we find some suitable history instead.

Massalia would be cool, but it has the same issues as Cyrene, Syracuse, and Tarentum: We don't have the involved civilizations in the game. I know, there is the option of creating entirely new units and buildings just for the campaign. But, firstly, I don't think that would be worth the effort. And, secondly, the tutorial should not only introduce the players to the gameplay, but also the content the game offers. Wouldn't you find it odd if you played through the whole campaign as the "Phocaeans" only to find out afterwards that they're not not even a playable civilization in the rest of the game?

The point is, it's not possible to teach players all basic aspects of gameplay in a single match. That's why we want to spread the content across an entire, dedicated campaign (so, sadly nothing for experienced players). A good tutorial campaign like this would render the current tutorial match rather pointless. Possible, but suboptimal in my opinion. There are so many possibilities, I'm sure we can find one that only (or mainly) includes "our" civilizations. Is this meant as an idea for this tutorial campaign? Or for future campaigns in general?

Yes. There already is a basic framework in place used for the existing tutorial. There's also the idea of adding a "coach" for more relaxed practice matches who only every now and then reminds players if they forgot to do something. Yes, let's make a poll. What are the current options?

That's a certainly good way to connect the different scenarios. But does it provide a logical reason/explanation for why one has to start all over each time? I mean, in a real world situation like this, one would construct a single base and then conduct all expeditions from there. Or is this "flaw" just something to accept in RTS campaigns?

I think this can be used on all UI pages, really. Handling UI scaling on lower screen resolutions is such a hassle and this is a very elegant solution to it. I will also use scrollpanels for the encyclopedia page as soon as the PR gets merged. Great work.

Hmm, in a campaign, players start each game from zero (more or less); they need to develop a base and an army completely from scratch. I know, technically, that doesn't have to be the case, but the tutorial should teach how to play entire games, from start to finish. On the other hand, in the process of establishing a colony there are no such "resets", the city is only build up once. Any ideas to work make that work with the story? How do other campaigns deal with that?

Me too. We should structure our first tutorial scenario very similarly.

To my knowledge, Sparta has turned out as quite an exceptional civ in terms of gameplay. But we can align it to the average civilization by blocking some uncommon structures and technologies. Aeneas, hmmm... more of a mythological character. Though, he lived before 1000 BC which I'm afraid is too early. How much new content can we realistically afford and get for this campaign? For the idea with Tarentum, we'd need at least several completly new units and buildings for the antagonistic South Italic tribes.

What about Tarentum? See https://www.worldhistory.org/tarentum/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Taranto They are also known to have had some bloody conflicts with local tribes. Though, I'm not sure where we'd get units and buildings for those. Maybe we can take something from Delenda Est?