Vantha

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?

Cardia's not bad, but I would prefer something historically more significant. Imagine if we can inspire players to do research about the colony they heard about in the game. They should be able to find more than just a short Wikipedia entry, no?

But what specific colony? Or do you want to make one up?

In my opinion, the story has to include... - a single-stranded, easy-to-follow plot. No time or place jumps. - any element that new players can recognize right at the beginning. Could a person, a place, or a civilization. - one clear protagonist (a hero) throughout the entire campaign. Could be the founder of the colony. - one clear enemy (a group of people) fought against throughout the entire campaign. That could be bandits, a tribe, a city, a civilization, etc. And (at least to a large extent) only require units and civilizations that we already have in the game. Unless I'm missing something, the best concrete ideas so far are: Cyrene (or Naukratis), Syracusae, Alexander the Great. I think they could all work out in some way, but we need to come to an agreement and pick one of them.

That's a good point. Maybe controlling a handful of units, leading them across the map, collecting some treasures, building a camp, and fighting off somd wild animals? Something like that? Yes, that is possible. And I agree that it is necessary. I know I'm repeating myself, but I like the idea of a building up a colony as well, Cyrene could work well, as long as we keep the story simple. The only problem I see is that most colonies were founded before 500 BC which means they technically fall out of 0ad's time frame. I'm not sure if that's something to worry about. But I'd also be fine with doing Alexander the Great.

Any features you would include/remove? What do you think of the length of the individual learning blocks? Their number of 3 is not set into stone at all, it just conveniently aligns with the three phases. If you think the learning content is too concentrated at the moment, the three blocks could be split up further. And the other way around too. @ShadowOfHassen @Lion.Kanzen @Genava55 There have been some really good concepts in this thread so far...

Here's the outline I was able to come up with. (I deliberately left out ships and naval warfare for now as I feel like all that should probably be taught in a seperate, fourth scenario.) (Core concepts (marked with a *) need more detailed (skippable) explanations for player new to the genre.) As already planned, the guided tutorial section encompasses three scenarios, the first one focusing on the Village Phase, the second one the Town Phase, and the third one on the City Phase. It is possible to set custom victory conditions from scenario scripts and my idea is to make it the winning goal of the first scenario to reach Town Phase, and of the second one to reach City Phase. And to let them build on each other, so at the beginning of the second and third one to just tell the player "Do what you did before." and start guiding again when the player has reached point they haven't been to before. For technologies, I would not individually order the player to research every single important one, but rather tell the player "This structure has important technologies. Periodically check for available one here and research them as soon as you comfortably can." and remind them to do so if they forget about it. Any criticism/suggestion? Any ideas how to embed the story?

Thanks for the corrections and suggestions. The source I used was this research paper: https://www.academia.edu/1406230/Efficacy_of_the_Ankyle_in_Increasing_the_Distance_of_the_Ancient_Greek_Javelin_Throw. It (among others) mentions the sources you referenced but also conducts an experiment (of a larger sample size) resulting in, to be precise, +27% in speed and +58% in range. I probably did wrong not pointing out the discrepancies between different experiments and should have provided the source. I made a commit addressing all your points. See: https://github.com/indoptogopt/GUI-page-for-0ads-encyclopedia/commit/d24f182841cb14be2de5ee79a1a65eff8d2713f8

This is fully possible in scenario scripts already.

I was able to resolve it, thanks.

I'm trying to bring my clone's main branch up-to-date with the upstream repository. I usually run (after fetching): git pull upstream main or git merge upstream/main But that recently started exclusively throwing the following error: Downloading binaries/data/mods/public/art/meshes/props/sele_wonder_statue.dae (664 KB) Error downloading object: binaries/data/mods/public/art/meshes/props/sele_wonder_statue.dae (52000ef): Smudge error: Error downloading binaries/data/mods/public/art/meshes/props/sele_wonder_statue.dae (52000ef25c318ba5d223843759b9cc4589858851db0e4aedbe2cad86b799abb9): [52000ef25c318ba5d223843759b9cc4589858851db0e4aedbe2cad86b799abb9] Not Found: [404] Not Found