Atrik

Which is exactly what this patch enables, as said, illustrated, and explained the workings in the opening comments.

Thanks for all your work @Perzival12! Would have been a shame to bury this mod, so you truly did magic here!

Yes it does. This is just "default". Added more details in the opening comments for reference.

Unchanged. At the back, as all units that we don't sort. We could define a position for them if you suggest one / want to make a point, but very likely the current is fine right.

Assuming we always prefer ranged units behind melee in the poll above. Below a formation with Cavarly first then Infantry, you can see Ranged Cavalry will still be behind melee Infantry. For modders you will be able customize formations order using this logic : by editing/adding <SortingClasses> in formation templates. In example above produce the formation in the picture. Where you get Melee Cav THEN Melee Inf THEN Ranged Cav etc...

This poll aim to define what would be community preference for the order the units have by default in a formation. Thanks in advance for your vote or comment. This sorting order will affect the following formations : Close Order Open Order Forced March Column Open Scatter https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8547

I think there is no coding needed to make this. However will not look as good as you imagine: just one boat touching another, and some capture point going down for the victim boat basically.

You didn't win, game crashed.

Cannot reproduce either. Not on a28 either. The replay perform correctly with the changed amounts.

Screencast from 2025-12-20 22-10-37.webm Screencast from 2025-12-20 21-52-26.webm More organic formation movements for 0AD!

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/Release28#gameplay

You also said last time that when fort gave territory root, game was lame because it was forcing a player to spend even more time ramming all of the enemy's base. I'm pretty sure that this desire to have "stronger" defensive buildings is a bias, and that once I will be the case, it be lame and stall games. Defensive strategies should be viable (as is currently), not de-facto guaranteed to all players who built a fort to get their hero in the first place. I already know there is nothing I can do to convince players of theses facts. We'll have to go through a cycle of making defenses op again for some to realize them.

Yes, definitively, more so, stronger and faster units should have also greater weaknesses. Agree with this too. I guess the difficult part is find the right balance to avoid encouraging turtling too much I think players say that because they expect turtling to be : "build a fort then you are safe". Turtling this alpha is a tone of fun and it's balanced. The attacker CAN make progress, and you have to think of your defenses as layers, instead of just relying on just having invested a very low amount of resources that would make you immune forever to attacks. Defending should be dynamic (and this alpha, it kinda was). There would be 0 fun if any players could just set up a base with a fort with swords garrisoned and a couple towers, and be rewarded with immunity without him having to do more. I would point out that defenses are really cheap and currently are already very easy to make worth their cost: A single tower can have 25+ kills over the course a game very easily. A fort with 80+ kills is common. A tower cost 200 resource or 2 CS, a fort 900 resource or 9 CS. Obviously not weak at all.

Snowballing happens when there is no diminishing return on something you can accumulate, like champions. Champions are also more resource efficient then their CS counterpart, as well as population efficient. There are no diminishing return with them, quite the opposite. Fast melee champions units have no counters, and can hardly be "outplayed" because they can pick battles they want, therefor securing an advantage you have with them is easy. Fast units contribute more to map control, therefore it is harder to recover if the enemy can just easily find and crush anything you try to rebuild. There is almost no limit to how much strength you can coil up with champions, as you replace workers / CS with champions, your strength can grow despite the population limit. The players that do play on snowballing don't send their CS to battle, they keep them on eco and replace them (even delete them) with fast units, be it champ cav, or cav. That makes me say that CS as workforce don't contribute to snowballing, instead they often provide an opportunity for defenders to keep eco, while the attacker is losing an opportunity cost of moving his army around. Turtling is often done like this : build forward defenses, force the enemy to move his army and waste time on defenses, while you keep doing eco with most of your population; therefore you can catch up with any economic disadvantage you had.