Atrik

I look at it that way: We want to maximize Strategic skills (or decision-bearing actions). We want to minimize Technical actions (or skills in offsetting the interface and game limitations). Sniping is just you wanting your ranged units to attack enemy ranged units but you can only do it by clicking all enemy units. You are offsetting a game limitations with a technical skill. Flanking, engage/retreat, formations, positioning of small units detachments are on the other hand what the game should be about. These are strategic skills, and it would be even more rewarding to have to choose the right one, to counter the enemy, or to play a specific battle tactic. The fact that formations choice for a engage is made irrelevant (you should go for box every time and start sniping) because of the default AI focus isn't really fun.

Agreed, but keeping battle mechanics all revolving around tricking unit AI to make and avoid overkill is simply lame. Well, it probably still is a 'technical skill'. It's definitely a trainable skill to make the right sequence of clicks and to do it very very fast. But I agree, @Dizaka, 'sniping' is actually the one thing dumbing down this game rn. And I don't know that it is any sexy for new players to come to 0ad and be good at 'sniping'. Only to some players that are used to 'sniping', is this mechanic not obviously ridiculous. You aren't going to make anyone wanting to learn 0ad showing off, the currently battle n°1 battle mechanic: sniping (aka mashing keys).

Yes it definitively does. Currently players are nearly forced to use box formation as only viable formation in big part because sending melee units 1by1 (like it happens when you use box) is the best at exploiting default units focus and overkills. Since this topic was open, I asked a few 1300-1500 players that don't snip what they think about sniping, and it's seemed to me, most of them view sniping as exploiting a bug, or had a very negative view of this meta. Heck I even saw Vali call sniping "dµmb@ss mechanic". It's clear to me that the majority of players (even yourself @real_tabasco_sauce) want this meta to evolve. On the other hand, some are so frightened by the idea of some features like new stances or hotkey, that would change default unit focus. (literally saw 50times + : "this would kill 0ad"). If it came with some unit re-balance (since now ranged units will lose a considerable debuff), it will feel totaly natural. For example, I'm not sure anyone ever wanted to make 'sniping' even less auto, where your archers would still attack rams if it's closer compared to the organic unit just behind it.

I think it's better to have stats in the same theme clustered together. But I wanted to make settings for the minimap for customization including the ability to scale it independently of rest of the gui and opt-out of the bar stats.

I don't know exactly what you had in mind then. But I added an option (in GUI Customization) to display this short-therm kill ratio performance on the top panel. Pros: Get another visual clue if allies are rushed/rushing, or an overview of how is going a battle on the other side of the map as examples. Cons: Add blinky colorful stuff to an already blinky colorful panel There is certainly a way to blind it better in the panel too.

Hi @seeh, The autocivP_default_config.json still contain other mods hotkeys. Together with the autociv_default_config.json that seems to also reassign hotkeys at each game launch. Enabling autocivP for me, means losing all the hotkeys I'm used to. Since they are overwritten, conflicted or broken because of this. I heard from other players that had similar experience, so I just wanted to highlight, once more, the importance of having this problem fixed. I recommend maintaining a single, but curated default_config file that you edit/think separately from your user.cfg. You can let most hotkeys unassigned to avoid conflicts. Here is a example: my hotkey to repair is "J", autocivP assign "J" and "Shift-J" to some selection. Now if I press "Shift-J" with autocivP instead of queuing the order repair, I get a random selection filters I never set, like "wounded females + cavalry". Same from flare "K", and 90% of my hotkeys, they are all broken because you assign them to other things. Hope this helps, cheers!

Definitively! But I wonder what the process to generate them looks like. Are you spending your 401k on generative AIs @wowgetoffyourcellphone?

I don't know why I initially wanted to do this, but seems fun, and make the GUI less empty: You have two new stat bars added that represent your current game performances. Military performance (Red), Eco performance (Yellow) More precisely, the blood bar goes up when your KDr goes up (last 10sec), and the yellow bar increase as your resources income increase (relative to your average income). It's actually nice to have, as you can also have a way to more easily know how is a battle going for you, or how is your global eco health. Stupid?

@wowgetoffyourcellphone would you give me hack tips? Wouldn't it be fun to add some useless GUI features that reminds me of another thing completely unrelated too, like Diablo's GUI I experimented with having a kind of blood thermometer that fill up based on last ~10sec kd, it's ofc ugly rn. I may try to integrate it into the minimap picture (and on it's left side) but how would you go about making the liquid look liquid and glowing? Any hacks you can think of for a lazy cat?

Yes i don't know much about jitsi, less so how is the process to integrate it. 8x8 is also the web interface provider that I think is most used. You can see it in the footpage. https://meet.jit.si/ I guess they rent components that may ease integration or something. Most infos on the service are behind a log wall. You could find resources on how to do everything yourself maybe it's not that hard, just didn't checked that out.

This default config file (you have multiple, which is also not ideal) https://github.com/sl5net/autocivP/blob/master/moddata/autocivP_default_config.json contain your hotkeys for boonGUI, proGUI, macros and reset-queue mods. For Individuals it's free. If you want to integrate it in the game, maybe could cost money idk https://jaas.8x8.vc/#/. I must dig into this to be able to tel. But I'm lazy. Yes but default settings should try to accommodate most users, same for not assigning anything to super key because I think most people would not like that.

Yes, so looking at the 4 comments you posted on this forum, seems you already got answered. I could write down what I know of how this would been achievable and the challenges in making something at least more then trivial to defeat. So for now it's understandably a declarative system. But you aren't too interested in reading if I understand... This would also help to prevent things like what this player was doing when he was accusing me of cheating and started to reply to a comment I typed in my allied chat. Also probably a good thing we don't have such auth/signature feature in the game at the stage else some people would visibly try to use it to normalize players mods.

A lot of nice work here. I already recommended to not dump your personals settings into default_config, you have some hotkeys assigned for others mods in it, this is messing up with me when I test your mod. Please also do not use the "super" key modifier at all for any hotkey. Some features are cool, but the mod switching tab doesn't seems to save me brain calories or clicks at all compared to the normal mod selector. Didn't understood how to configure it, but if I need to go into user.config it complicated. My experience: I don't use LocalRating, but I do use FieldManager, and some other good mods from mentula. Now this feature is totally not working for me because you made it for your setup. It's also nice you decided to put proGUI or boonGUI as defaults but you shouldn't, since to date, the majority of people don't use these mods. I'm trying to say you should try to accommodate the most users with this mod, that would be interested in the value proposition. Talking about value proposition my advise (or just personal personal opinion, maybe I'm wrong) would be also in general to refocus yourself and define better the value proposition of the mod. It's true autociv 'does a bit of everything' and from reading the forum I guess it was also because @nani wanted to lift the game that was very very poor in features in earlier alphas. But for autocivP, I think it's best you define one goal like helping team chats. Reading autociv thread I see he also removed features when didn't make sens. Ideas that I think if you manage to achieve will be powerful and make your mod succeed, where you are already half way of achieving: -In game voice chat based on Jitsi (ok maybe not jitsi since is paid plan over 25 users if you do an integration, so maybe some matrix based solutions exist) -Auto-host, where host can afk and users can type commands and votes to start a game I know it's easy to suggest, harder to put in the work and find the solutions, so feel free to ignore, i just wanted to write a long comment in here

@Yekaterina is probably having fun since @Norse_Harold is putting effort into tracking him down. As @alre said it's really hard to enforce a perma-ban so he's picking a fight he can't win anyway. We can just call to Yeka's intelligence to stop doing assh0les things like spamming the lobby. What's the point of doing this anyway? He pretend to not want authority enforcement, but do things that make it more a necessity.

It's sounding very smart to me. I especially think this is, sadly, maybe true. Starting with battle mechanics that are very poor right now (because the one thing to do is sniping). Unfortunately the desire to address this is inhibited by biases (because it has been named "sniping" then a feature that help with this is necessarily a "sniping aim-bot" right?, in reality would be just another attack/movement modifier or stance, witch the game has already have good ones like "call to arm"). I agree with all the rest too, but I don't have sufficient EQ to understand how @Norse_Harold and @Yekaterina came down to start playing mouse and cat so seriously.

Stop calling for bans. The problem to solve is very obvious. A noob playing archers civs won't even understand why even against AI, archers feel very weak. Sniping is making a technical but very repetitive sequence of clicks just to achieve a simple none-strategic task because of a lack of feature. Some unit re-balance could remove the urge of having such feature, agreed, but still the game would be in my opinion more enjoyable if you had one of these example feature: A special Stance where units attack weaker (or another criteria like class) units in there current attack range. A shortcut/Button to order current selection to attack a selectable group of enemy units. A shortcut/Button to order current selection to attack a type of units in range (you could hover one enemy unit and have all nearby units of the same class glowing to indicate which units are in range of your currently selected units, and that will be attacked). I'm sure one could propose better feature with in mind ease of use. The feature could be more or less optimized to account or not for current hp, overkill etc, but in any case, the goal is to shift player focus and battle outcomes on more interesting metrics then cps. Also you can see that all feature described require players engagement, speed, and for the stance one, some technical skills to reposition units in battle. They compress the spamming of 80 clicks down to a few one. Right now, if you play archers civs and forgot to put your hero or another unit on the correct stance of target, the famous "opportunity cost" is to let it suicide else you may lose 2sec of sniping that will seal the outcome of the battle. Leading to easier unrewarding scenarios. Since it seems proGUI is named on 50% of this topic posts, I can once again precise that my attempt with this mod was to remove the unrewarding limitations of the current GUI. It never felt rewarding to me to have to check manually which military building has stopped auto-queuing units for arguably arbitrary reasons. So ProGUI suggest two approach to make it less painful: Idle production buildings have clickable icons that you can use to view and reassign production. This is totally not "auto" and still you can use it to boom much better then if you add all barracks to a control group to queue units regardless of current production queue. I already advocated to think of an equivalent to implement in vanilla UI, because it's very useful. Auto-train (production controllable from a panel), where you control production variable for buildings to output exactly what you want them to, with the ability to task buildings to alternate unit production to make a specific unit composition. The basic usage of it is very easy, and late games are funnier when you have production you can handle easier by a overlay panel. As expected, removing unrewarding tasks (such looking for the barracks where auto-queue broke) from the game made it more enjoyable for me not less. The mod has a reaction time of 0.6 - 1.2sec and can't even make more then one order in that time-span, so it's probably not improving players gameplay because it's doing anything super-fast. The game is subjected to possible improvements and improvements are very often new features. On a open-source game you can kinda expect that mods experiment new features, that may or not inspire changes in main game. There aren't that much stakes at play in a 0ad game, AND the mod is available to all anyway.

I'm not sure anyone knows what @Langbart is planing about BoonGUI. This project brought a very refreshing UI to 0ad. I decided to introduce in ProGUI the original BoonGUI panel. You can easily choose to switch between ProGUI and BoonGUI, and have one of them preset for Spectating and when Playing. You could already switch between mods automatically using @seeh's autocivP, but I also wanted to add the option here. BoonGUI overlay: ProGUI overlay: I disabled by default the panel to control the features such as the Trainer and Auto-Tribute. Some players were just using the overlay but the features were still draining some performance. Option page, you can define when to use BoonGUI or ProGUI, and you can enable the additional panel with ProFeatures: If you used previous ProGUI versions, and the advanced features, you may enjoy being able to customize the panels even more: I would probably also help maintaining a BoonGUI representation. I'm not as op dev as @Langbart but I'll still do it. I'll try to get this new version published on the mod downloader so that the classical BoonGUI overlay is also downloadable from it. Shame it wasn't already but I know it was a @Langbart choice not to. Since he didn't say anything, I'll assume I can/should do this. Git Repo: https://gitlab.com/4trik/proGUI/ Mod.io: https://mod.io/g/0ad/m/progui (not always updated)

Nubtrik

The game has enough examples of actions you could divide in more clicks. Auto-gathering after building was one, units are continuously queuing actions that you could divide. If you wanted to be very lame you could want gatherers to not automatically queue an order to gather next resource once he depleted the one he was assigned to. Fair point, you'll lose this. Main misconception, if this stance 'snipe automatically' in unit's range , then instead of letting pathfinder and enemy units define your unit positions, you now have control over it precisely. You have more time to maneuver melee and all units. You would do more interesting micro overall then just being tasked with spamming alt-clicks.

This is why I think I already admited said that progui's trainer would never make sens in vanilla. ProGUI is off-topic anyway. But "elegance" here is purely subjective, my view is that having to click 80times to sort out some arrays is not elegant. It doesn't empower the user, and it's faster cps win. Just like it's obvious to you that: "it's logical and sometimes helpful that workers automatically go to near resources after building" Why "it's logical and sometimes helpful that soldiers focus weaker unit first." sounds any less reasonable? Nope, anything that would change attack from closest unit, is too "auto" and "will kill the game". Anyway now it's very sure 0ad will never see any better battles where players are just rushing to hit the best cps. There is no room for improvements like some units ability (charges, maybe other abilities...) if 100% of the fights is already taken by players having to sort arrays manually. I hope at least your meta @real_tabasco_sauce would pass and would really make attacking closest unit reasonable in most situations as we are kinda in a dead end with this topic. Can't make a mod, because it would be too op and break unit balance in general, and devs aren't going to do anything especially not if it's controversial. However dumb the controversy is.

Northgard is a RTS example where units are assigned to gather resources at the beginning. Also this is off-topic. But now I wonder: would you advocate to remove auto-assignment of units when a drop-site building like a colony is built? Very probably not. Any "auto" feature that currently exist doesn't feel weird. If new features where introduced, including "auto-sniping", it would just appear to be a very normal feature to have.

^ Some players, even JC, don't spend the battle sniping. Don't think the game feels dead to him because he don't. And he does still micro, just not sniping. If you had a way to reduce 80clicks required to order units to focus weaker units in vanilla game, It would just look obvious feature and no one will think about removing it. It could be as simple as the ability to switch between focusing the closest unit <-> weakest unit in current range. Making such feature as a mod would cause balance problems and this is the reason why nobody made/released this mod to this date. FPS games are about aiming, RTS strategy. Sniping in 0ad is about clicking compulsively very very fast. The fact that this game-play meta shouldn't evolve is merely a debate, @real_tabasco_sauce work's accounted for next alpha's unit balancing. ... ProGUI is another topic. I won't be worried about this mod impact on balance, it has been around and fair people don't cry about it. Even the "trainer" feature that is so controversial is just doing vanilla auto-queue's job differently. Much more concerned by the stat: 30% of players revealing enemy chat and stats found by a player's testing.

Would not trigger on players with 'custom rating', it should now be patched.

Few times ago vincel called me all sort of name, and he was trying to be offensive, in lobby chat. I'm glad he wasn't banned for this cause he's still a player you can choose or not to join game with. I could have choose to mute him and that would have been it. I didn't because his insults where just hilarious anyway, he was calling me underdog or alike for not sharing floating resources in a game I sent him 23k. When a noob get insulted, in case he is a kid, I do my duty to indicate how he can mute the offender, so problem can be solved without the need of some kind of Safe Space enforcement.

I'll never advocate against that. I don't see why it would be opposed to having a Safe Space. I don't see that much abusive language excepted from an handful of known players or spammers. Use /mute, no drama needed.