Atrik

From your video, we can see that that javs are wasting time bumping into each others, while slingers continuously attack. If you make the same test with both groups locked in formation, the outcome should be favorable to javs (because formation allow units the almost ignore hitboxs of other units in their formation, therefor no more bumping).

There is a warning iirc that suggest to new players to start with Petra "sandbox" before "very easy".

Someone needs to make a PR. Meanwhile: standalone mod to get this tooltip : garrisonedInfoTooltip.zip Already in Moderngui too.

Why not? The data is available you just need to display it.

Interesting work. However you are starting to edit areas already modded in ModernGUI (its lobby page also adds buttons, including 'option') and therefor it is breaking the historical compatibility/complementarity of the two mods.

It's a powerful tech/unit. But it's hard to adapt eco to it as you are now forced to send any new recruit into battle. Also it's competing with other metal hungry options, even more powerful like champs...

Use "call to arm" when bringing CS to fights.

This wouldn't apply to the case above, knight, that doesn't try to hide quickstart mod. He even often host, so it's not really hidden that he use quickstart. However using this detectors in hosts that doesn't have rule against this mod isn't going to make the game more enjoyable for anyone. Worse case if you didn't know he use this mod, he have a headstart of 7 resources* that's not worth even mentioning. I already had a discussion with @real_tabasco_sauce over why quickstart is such a good mod for game enjoyably however, I could write my points down if ever someone is interested. *from my own testing, without mp lag. Probably with lags it's even less, feel free to try it yourself.

I'll be glad to explain why I do it, and give some general build order ideas! I. Cheap/fast economy! Females as much for resource efficient woodcutters then CS and they train a little faster. They don't cost resources (wood) that you can invest elsewhere. Theses reasons are obvious, and are why most players will start the game making females for the first minutes. At some point, most players switch producing CS instead of females, because they will have enough/excess wood! And I don't! Won't I get too much wood? My first military buildings are very rarely to produce woodcutters. They are either : Stables that can produce cavs to hunt (hunting gather a very good boost to your eco) and harass. The extra good thing is that cavs consume lot of food so they will eat up their own fast food production, and when it's your 1rst production building, it happens also when food is cheap from berries gathering. Barracks to produce minerals gatherers only. In that case, some civilizations are better then others to consume minerals, but a lot of them can consume metal very fast in p2 (on mercs mostly, like ptol, mace, athen, carth, kushs...). Even for civ that don't have mercs, gathering minerals only with CS can help you advance to phase 3 fast, then consume minerals with upgrades and p3 stuff. In Team Games, you often have to think about which players will be in trouble, and which ones will have to be winning over nearby opponent ASAP in order to win the game. therefor going for some cav harassing, or early mercenaries attack provides a initiative advantage. As well, you can help allies with resources. Because of this, swift/cheap economy feels like so much likely to provides you the opportunities to maximize your game impact. II. Resilience to rush? So now, you probably think that the drawback is that you can be so much more easily rushed. but remember, most players also make females until they have 60, you just keep on producing them a little longer. Consider it that way : this create a growing feminization gap between you and an opponent often from minute 6 to 11. So at minute 6-9, you don't have that much of a gap. minute 9-11, you now have so much females, that even if you opponent come and kills some, it's only him killing workers that you would be replacing/deleting yourself soon! Doomed if you rush, doomed if you don't? Of course rushes might hurt you but they need to make much more kills to be effective. 10-20 deaths is just what you would have replaced anyways. III. Late game economy management with females. Surely in late game, having 100+ females is never useful. Wrong! In late game females, (from fertility festival, or just from CC) can be a key variable to keep your economy at a great level in all circumstance. They only need to be alive a bit more then a minute to gather what they cost you, and if trained from houses, are so great to keep your population (and therefor your economy) maxed out. It's much, much better to have 200 pop with 100 females then 150 pop with only 50 obviously! If the fighting stalls, then you can always replace some females and grow your forces. IV. More interesting meta There are other topics talking about this and indeed (booming=turtling), often rushing is made hard on players that have tones of infantry on multiple woodlines, all around their base. Making any rush very easy to defend. If you have woodlines full of females, then you now have the woodlines having to be defended. I feel like it does make both attacking and defending more interesting. TLDR: Females are the best economic unit.

Transparency would be a feature to display player's mods, this is something else.

@leopard you did a great job with this mod. You can't be mad at people for no reasons like this thoughts.

You could check instead g_IsObserver or GetEntityState(id).visibility if you have some entity id.

It reveal position of players in FOW. Which is preeeetty odd. Appreciate the efforts thoughts, but clearly we have very diverging opinion on what's acceptable modifications. Maybe an oversight too. I know by doing it for moderngui that making sure no information is revealed that shouldn't, is actually extra thoughts and efforts.

No

If you compare resource efficiency of archer immortals relative to CS archers, they are the single most OP champ of the game. However, they are still archers, so they take a little more time (you need a lot of them) to really be a problem. From my calculations : immortals archers are way OP, but spears are only slightly weak. Now, because they can switch from one mode to the other, this make them extremely op, because they are archers... that can counter archer's counters : cavs. It's a fun mechanic, and I wish they were more dual weapon units. However their balancing is failed, as they should have instead of being strongest archer of the game (in resource efficiency therm, once again) be weaker, to balance dual weapon. Also idk why archer and melee stance have the same hp, probably transform.js bug or lag if you rescale hp too often but pretty sure it's supposed to handle hp rescales. @real_tabasco_sauce

Just realized that the Seleucids spears actor hold javelins, is it on purpose? Looks a bit weird. https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/branch/main/binaries/data/mods/public/art/actors/units/seleucids/infantry_spearman_b.xml

Anyways... Just me thinking now how a framework for balancing unit could be better then using solely gut feelings. Obviously unit relative powers don't define alone, if a unit is broken or not, as utility stats (movement, attack range, attack delay, counter...) aren't taken into account. Melee cavs are considered the most broken over ranged ones even if they aren't as over powered because melee cavs counter everything for example. It does help however describe one component of why one unit feel "broken". In a27 mercs seems very op if you know how to optimize eco for them you can easily have a great army min 11, immortals are extremely op, and champ cavs are out of this world. Which could be predicted comparing stats and thinking of counters.

Idk what you think of as "resource rarity". If you consider that minerals are slower to gather then wood, then consider this : Champ cavs and CS Slingers have in common that they have ~30% of their cost in minerals. Yet it's rarely the case that the stone cost of slinger are viewed to be costly, or scarce. Stone and metal have the same gather rate, so you see now that thinking that metal is making champs so much costlier isn't true at all.

Power Cost Res Efficiency Example Melee Champ cav 4.50 2.20 2.05 Mace spear cav Ranged Champ cav 5.52 2.20 2.51 Pers cav archer Melee Champ inf 4.80 2.20 2.18 Iber sword Melee Merc inf 1.51 0.60 2.52 Carth Melee Merc cav 1.51 0.67 2.27 Carth Ranged Immortal 4.68 1.30 3.60 Pers Melee Immortal 2.55 1.30 1.96 Pers Melee Champ cav Pers/Sele 4.84 2.27 2.14 Pers/Sele I've calculated the resource efficiency out of curiosity for a few more units that i share above. Note that the power number: Is a multiplier of relative power to CS equivalent of a unit. In theory it should predict/indicate how much CS unit (fighting them one after the other) it can defeat before dying. In practice, damage dealing isn't continuous, the CS unit might die at 50% of it's attack animation vs the champ, so it end up being more. Doesn't take into account accuracy for ranged units. Doesn't include any techs at all. Costs also consider all resources as valuable.

They are 4.8x as strong as their cs counterparts but only cost 2.2x. Champs are the cheapest units of the game, relative to their fighting efficiency. Even more so for some special champions, like Pers and Sele champ cavs.... For infantry, its the same ratio but they can't eco, so they don't feel as broken. Also one player in a team game can make them at the expense of letting an ally die but it's much easier for the other team to coordinate and engage a infantry champion army together; while champion cavalry can always pick fights, and ruin the economies of any player very fast. I don't think it's totally bad to have champions being the most resource efficient (/cheapest) units of the game, as long as they get weaknesses. Currently, melee champ cavs counter everything but themselves have no (serious) counters.

What tech do you do last would maybe be more interesting to know. Since as I imagine, SP players mostly play just to build the most developed city possible with no constraint on trying to optimize anything.

I would like to take an example of very nice improvements that emerged in a27: defenses buildings. Now they better balanced in each phase, and in p3, are generally much stronger. Especially forts. However they've been added some weaknesses like easier to capture, and min range for forts, so overall they feel like successfully balanced and fun to me.

x3 was known to work in some a26 com mod version. Champ cavs where countered more like one would expect by spears. If this is too much early on against cs melee cavs, we could instead add a tech with this +50% (+x0.5) dps against cav bonus? Melee cavs are quite strong early game anyways so could be either way.

Would solve the main problem that champ cavs currently can slam into infantry formations, meat-shield, and even melt them by their own, which is prob what most people think is broken right now. Slowing heavy cav movement speed will mean they no longer counter ranged light cavs? Or at least ranged light cavs can escape them pretty easy? Could make sens for realism but this might have a lot of consequences balance wise.

Yes, almost. But the games in which champion cavalry feels the most unfair is when you were active and team-working from early on in the game, that you took out 2 players, but one single enemy was left unchecked, made champ cavs, and now vaporize all your teams armies, even if they are regrouped. Champions cavalry are: Cheap (VERY resource efficient) Strong (EXTREMELY population efficient) Fast (mobility is good both in fights AND on map control) Counter everything (hack dps for melees) Don't have serious counter (Spears champs have x2.5 dps, BUT less base dps, x0.6 hp x0.5 movement speed, most civ require special building.) The accumulation of perks, and lack of any counters is what makes them feel so unbalanced. That being said, I don't think we should over-nerf them. Just give them 1 real weakness as should strong units have, and/or make them a little less cheap.