TheCJ

I'm gonna comment on this before @Emacz does; We added running scouts to those civs in the "historical patch" mod and I believe it did indeed add to the gameplay!

But this is a different point to the one you made before: Is it not? Of course, the impact of "external factors" like stress, sleep deprivation, "mood" etc is much harder to measure than the impact of "internal factors" (and even their impact isnt exactly easy to measure scientifically), which results in both sides of the argument having "the same" leverage; We just dont know if the "mood" will affect performance more or if "macros" will affect performance more, which is why you shouldnt use your opinion regarding this as an argument. And regarding GUI mods not being able to replace player concentration and strategic thinking: This argument falls apart when you consider meta-strategic decisions a desirable part of the game. I'll try to illustrate; RTS games have a plethora of possible actions at any given moment. Each of these actions has strategic implications, some of them very small ones, some very important. In fact, the amount of strategically relevant actions is so great, that you cannot possibly choose the optimal action for every soldier/building at once. A player has thus not only the strategic decisions themselves (Like "which unit to produce" from "which barracks" in "which batch size"), but they additionally have "meta-strategic" decisions (like "which strategic decisions do I think about? Do I spend "brainpower"/concentration on thinking about optimal army compositions early on? Or do I rather focus on economic balancing first?"). For example: While there is a fight going on, I will (most often) choose to concentrate on the fight and accept suboptimal production (just queue anything, as long as the barracks are working). Other players might strategize differently and choose to concentrate more on their production. This meta-strategic decision (of choosing which aspect to think about) will have advantages and disadvantages (like any "normal" strategic decision). But if I had a mod that would always make a "solid" strategic decision in one aspect (Lets say I write a mod [called ECObot™] that automatically realizes when I have too much wood and not enough food and redistributes my workers for me), then I not only give away the strategic decision of economic balancing to my mod (which comes with advantages and disadvantages in and of itself and might thus not be a cheat), I also free myself of the disadvantage of my chosen meta-strategic decision (normally, choosing to focus on your military will result in your own economy suffering from "neglect"; for example suboptimal resource balance since you chose not to think a lot about your economic strategy. But with ECObot™ I don't have this disadvantage). So the meta-strategic decision to focus my attention on my military suddenly got a lot stronger than it would normally be. The mod did not "replace" player concentration, it instead worked in areas the player wouldn't have concentrated on in the first place, which is comparable to an expansion of the players concentration ability/focus.

I expressed myself poorly due to my lack of understanding my own mind/behaviour. My main goal was to give you an (albeit very subjective/singular) example of a player (myself) whose concentration is connected to the amount of meaningful inputs he can give the game, as you claimed those two measures to be generally distinct. It might only be tangential to the main point. I'll try to phrase it more eloquently: In some 4v4 teamgames, the performance drops to single digit fps (mostly during large fights) with additional input delay and stuttering due to network issues with some players. This results in a "stop-and-go" experience, where some things happen, then the game freezes for a moment (it is still possible to move the camara and give out commands), then something happens again, it freezes again... Each "freeze" in this case is of the magnitude of up to 1 second (usually). {This performance issue is a seperate one and is also being addressed already, so we dont have to go into any greater detail here} This "stop-and-go" phenomenon results in the player effectively having "unlimited" (a lot of) time to micro-manage and do many things at once (since you get up to a whole second every other second where nothing happens but you can still give out commands). It is thus compareable to changing the game speed to 0.5x or slower. Now, theoretically this should make it easier to execute any strategy, as you have a lot of time to click all the necessary buttons and a lot of extra time to think about what you should do, But (and the following is only my experience and should not be generalized) what actually happens is, that I have way too much "free time", I stop having to click all the time and stay alert all the time because, well, nothing is happening. And playing at "0.5x speed" (or the lag equivalent) means I only need half as many APM. At this point I get bored and stop thinking about tactics/strategy entirely (atleast thats what I think is happening. As mentioned at the start I do not know why I am unable to keep on playing the game "normally", but I just catch myself zoning out and watching helplessly as I lose the game). The only thing I can say for certain is, that I dont seem to be able to focus/concentrate very well if the game doesnt demand a lot of clicks from me. That's why, atleast in my case, having to click a lot is a necessity for strategically engaging gameplay. That being said, I am the last person to tell anybody how to enjoy 0ad, I just wouldn't want any more automation in the base game.

why? (Fatigue makes me play worse, proGUI also makes me play worse, sounds similar to me ) No for real, both "external factors" that arent connected to the game and "internal factors" like mods can have an impact on how well you play, so atleast in that aspect they can very well be compared. Of course those factors are also sufficiently different in their nature that a comparison will be limited in usefulness.

Unless you can provide some evidence supporting this claim, I don't think this will convince many (I for one highly doubt this statement). In my experience, this is not true. In fact, they seem to be interlinked to an astonishing degree. Whenever I play a 4v4 teamgame and it starts to lag, I stop being able to concentrate on many things at once; I literally start waiting for my units to execute the orders I gave them and my APM drops significantly. While playing 1v1 I have no problem micro-managing 3 different armies and my economy simultaneously, because it doesn't lag. Atleast in my case, being able to click fast is a necessity for me to be able to think fast. Accessibility tools in this context are inherently just accepted advantages to mitigate disadvantages a person has that hes not responsible for. So it is a performance tool, otherwise it can't be an accessibility tool (what good would a tool for a disabled person be if it didnt help him?).

Well, the big question is when "early game" ends. Most of the time I already have a barracks when the enemy rush reaches me. Also the difference is ~7%, so like, more than 3 han ministers.

On the contrary, your woodlines are safe, since they are full of soldiers (as soldiers gather wood faster), while your farms are vulnerable, since there are only women there (and cc fire is weak). And having to add new storehouses for woodlines really doesnt affect the long term gain much, because you only have to build like, one storehouse every 2000 wood gathered (10 Trees). I'd advise you to try going for only cavalry once, then you would see how slow food is gathered compared to wood (you need like, 3 times as many women on food than on wood)

Base gather rate for fields is 0.5, Base gather rate for wood is 0.8/0.75 So one woman on a field gives 0.5 food/second, while one woman on wood gives 0.75 wood/second. Also, gathering from fields becomes less effective the more women you put on one field.

Well, you can just take a look at the biomes? Compared to temperate, which is the default in most tgs I played, Aegean-Anatolian has less dense forests and less hunt, Subalpine is pretty similar, Arctic has less dense forests and hunt that fights back, Rhine Valley (Fall) is pretty similar, India has elephants and massive trees, Nubia has no wood, Sahara also has no wood, Sudanian Savanna also has elephants and little wood, Eurasian Steppe has small trees which you can build buildings on. Cant give you percentages though, sorry. I think metal and stone mines are pretty similar in every biome.

Well, we're having these kinds of discussions precisely because we want everybody to have fun playing this game and not just a small set of extremely good players This I would agree with. There are a lot of tactics one can do (or atleast try) in the early game if "normal booming" seems too boring. But normal booming really doesnt take high APM; Just looking at some replays on the replay pallàs, normal APM values are between 20 and 40. For starcraft, an APM of 80 is considered low (afaik, I'm no sc expert though). I don't believe this to be generally true. The game can't be too slow, or it will be boring, even for a casual player. Of course, it can't be too fast either, and the most enjoyable pace for a casual player will be slower than the most enjoyable pace for a very competitive player, that much is true. But I don't think 0ad should be much slower than it already is, even for casual players. But that's... precisely the problem, isn't it? Of course it is theoretically possible to lenghten the training times to your suggested values while still keeping 0ad fun and unique. But in order to do that, we would have to know exactly which other changes are necessary to achieve such a goal. Just changing the train time doesn't work, the players don't like it, it isnt fun. Then we would have to find out why its no fun; do the units die too quickly, so you can't reach high pop, do the buildings take too long, do they not deal enough damage... who knows. And if we did manage to find out what we would have to change aswell, we would still need to tweak the balance. (as an example, lets say we find out long train times dont work because units die too quickly, then we still need to figure out how to make all units die slower without destroying the balance between the units.) Tl;dr: @chrstgtr basically wanted to tell you that it isnt that simple, just changing the train time value will not work, finding out how to make it work is not that easy. Lastly, in addition to such a change being a lot of work, the arguments supporting such a decision are not very conclusive.

This I have to disagree with. I do not think a fast game necessarily means that "the fastest clicks win". Especially because of the batch training mechanic, 0ad is very fast (in that you can get a lot of population in a short amount of time), but doesnt need a lot of clicks (one click every, 35-40 seconds? for groups of five for every barracks?). The only other rts I played (AoE2) is very slow paced in comparison (booming in 0ad means you are full pop before 14:00. Booming in AoE2 starts at ~14:00 when you reach AoE2s phase 3), but needs a lot more clicks.

I would agree with you @Thorfinn the Shallow Minded, if it wasnt for the performance issue in large (4v4) multiplayer. When the game basically runs at half speed, you have 16 irl seconds for a women and 20 irl seconds for a soldier. Also, even in small games, where the lag is not so bad, the batch training makes things a lot easier, because you only have to queue up one batch every 20-40s. Sometimes even an entire minute (when you manage to queue up 10 women). And since you dont have to assign them individually (you can just send them all to wood or all to food), its basically one action every 20s.

Indeed, that strategy sounds like a solid basis. A few additions: I normally delete some women to make siege, and heros dont take up population space. I'd advise you against that in a normal mainland teamgame, as traders are too slow and defensive structures too weak, so even 3-4 cavalry can take out basically all trade.

Well @Deicide4u, according to my experience, the strategy that works most often is just making as many citizen soldiers as possible, until you reach 200 pop for the first time, then you can start "sprinkling in" champions (as many as possible) and fill "the rest" of your pop with citizen soldiers (if your units die fighting and you cant replace them entirely with champs). That works pretty well in games with up to decent players. You wont win against real pros with that, and I have no idea about the AI, though

@Classic-Burger The historical mod has three main goals; - Being more historical (some units should not be in the civs they are in) - Differentiating the civs more (you cant play the same strategy with every civ in the historical mod) - Being more balanced

what do you mean by that? Sorry, english is not my first language. Google says "riven by" means something like "split apart"? Do you have the impression that our community is falling apart because of cheating?

I cannot fathom how you come to that conclusion, given that every pro in this game seems to agree that champion cavalry spearman are overpowered.

All of this essentially just means "Dont change anything"... ... except maybe add a convenience feature, that lets hosts list what mods they allow. I have no idea how you would add the "automatically honor those policies", as that is literally the same as adding some anti-cheat system, no? If the host declares "no mods" and you somehow force all clients that join to honor this policy, thats an anti-cheat system. Ah, btw, I agree with @WiseKind. I believe that at this point in time, there is no change needed to address "cheating" in any way. Any energy spent on that would be better spent on improving the balance and performance, adding to the content (through maps, scenarios, civs) or just... playing the game.

darn, @WiseKind got time on his hands and a fire in his heart. If you were to become a programmer for 0ad, you could have such a positive impact on this project (not saying you aren't having a positive impact right now). My good fella @WiseKind, I gotta say, we ain't gettin nowhere. This thread's lookin productive to ya? Must be cause' its yer first. The main problem is precisely that we can not agree on what is cheating and what is not. You are truly correct with what you said about us not having to subscribe to any specific notion of what constitutes cheating. Indeed, we can make up what cheating is to 0ad. But to actually create a definition of "cheating in 0ad", atleast the core team would have to agree on that issue (and since they seem to listen to us lowly players, we all would have to agree). That will not happen, because we all like different aspects of the game and we all have different believes of what this game should become and different backgrounds, under which we interact with the game and its community. The one thing we do agree about (even @WiseKind, the total freedom representative) is that cheating should not become widespread. @WiseKind says only "stuff like revealing the map" (I know thats a sloppy phrase, you know what I mean) is a cheat and the best way to suppress that is by programming a different networking system, (with the goal of making "cheating" simply impossible). Other people say that even extensive GUI changes (without any sort of automation) can be cheating, as it makes the game unfair. Obviously, "cheating" like that cannot be stopped entirely and a suppression needs certain measures, whose use @WiseKind disagrees with (saying the measures would inherently stop the game from being open source). I imagine there are also some people that think GUIs are fine, as long as they do not train any units for you/build any buildings for you or smt similar (Im not talking about proGUI here, btw). The measures against this kind of "cheating" would again differ from the other two. But to actually determine which measures should be taken (if any), we need to precisely formulate the issue (and agree that it is indeed an issue). In so far this thread was a little helpful, as we got a pretty precise look into what @WiseKind believes is cheating and what should be done about that. (For @WiseKind this thread was even more valuable, as he got to hear each of our standpoints.) Now, to move on: How would we decide on what "cheating" is in 0ad? In essence, when somebody talks about cheating, they mean any kind of modification that works against the concept of fair, competitive play, or would anybody disagree with that description? If we agree that the competitive challenge of 0ad should truly only be "in your head", meaning that the only relevant part of the game is in your decisions, and not at all in the execution of those decisions, then any GUI mod can never be cheating (up to the point where you let a script make decisions for you). If we agree that the competitive challenge of 0ad should include not only the decisions, but also their execution ("micro"), (as is the case in every other RTS), then any GUI mod that reduces the amount of inputs you have to give for the same result is cheating.

We use words to convey meaning. But we do not define what the words mean. Because we want to be understood. So we have to use the words according to how they will be understood. Even if you clarify that you will use your own definition for a word, it will be confusing if that definition differs too much from what the general population believes the meaning of that phrase is. Thus I use wikipedia for definitions, as it is the place where most people first learn of specific words/concepts. Therefore I maximise the probability that the person I talk with will understand me. So you think 0ad is doing a good job staying true to its vision? @Seleucids already thinks his army evaporates too fast on 1x speed, when fighting against multiple enemies in a mp game. And, to be honest, if it werent for the notorious lag, 0ad would be the fastest paced RTS I know. (I heard SC2 averages on 11-13 min for high level 1v1s, I believe 0ad is on par, if not faster. And AoE2 takes like, 20-120 mins, especially for 4v4 tgs. Even the longest 0ad games dont often exceed 1h ingame time) Therefore, if you reach top level in 0ad, you will meet some APM restrictions.

I believe that it is impossible to enforce such a rule without making 0 A.D. at least partially nonfree, something I gather we are not going to do any time soon Well, what does "enforcing" mean, here? If I host a multiplayer game, and I do not want my players to use any GUI mods, I will ask them when they join my game "Do you use any GUI mods?". If they say "yes, I use xy", I'll (politely) tell them that I do not want to play with them and they should turn the mods off if they want to play with me. If they say "no" and dont lie, we play together. If they say "no" and lie, we still play together, but if I realize during the game that they lied to me, I ban them. Also, if I realize they lied to me, I wont play with them again. If they say "I do not want to disclose this information", then thats their right, but I will still tell them "then you cant play with me" By doing this, I am "enforcing" that players I my game do not use GUI mods (that can be detected through gameplay). But I did not need to change anything about 0ad code for that "enforcement". I understand your sentiment. But you see, I do not have the time to take a proper look at proGUI, as all the time I do have for 0ad goes to the few games I play with my friends and helping Leif with the historical patch (which is getting better by the day, you should check it out). I'd wager others are in a similar position, they do not wish to invest their time into checking out proGUI, as they already believe it is not a mod they would enjoy/endorse. The different opinions based on whether the auto-trainer is a strategic decision by you or the mod comes from different perspectives, as I understood it; If you believe the choice, in which barracks to produce units in which size is a direct strategic decision, then proGUI is taking that decision for you (or is it not?). If you believe that the choice where to produce how many units is just a means to a higher strategic decision, and the actual decision is still taken by the player, as he defines the ratio (ranged-melee) which proGUI should try to match, then proGUI is not taking any decision fot you.

You are correct. I was neither precise nor vague enough. The best definition might just be the one from wikipedia. "Advantage beyond normal gameplay is vague enough to be interpreted correctly in many different areas. For 0ad, the interpretation might be "Any advantage that could not be obtained by changing "normal" parameters, like setup, connection or settings and necessitates a modification". Thus, any change you make to alleviate "cheap" hardware or a certain disability would not be considered cheating, but any macro, that lets you execute 2 orders with one click would still be cheating.

again, this is correct. You make solid points, just not any that counter the fact that those mods are cheating. Like, autociv is brilliant for its lobby changes (automatically assigning civs, pressing tab to cycle through all different names that start with the same letter, pingall restrictions and /link), its building hotkeys should probably be added to the base game, as should the panel that shows all spectators. But as good as the mod and its impact on the "0ad ecosystem" are, it's still a cheat. You cant just say "Mod xy is good for 0ad, thus it cant be a cheat". Also, cheating isnt even bad. Like, ive cheated in so many singleplayer games and casual multiplayer games its uncountable. If I look at my siblings screen while playing AoE2 FFA, thats cheating. But who cares, its fun. The only argument why autociv might not qualify as cheating while proGUI does, is precisely that so many people use it. If it becomes the norm, then, according to wikipedia, it ceases to be cheating: "Cheating in video games involves a video game player using various methods to create an advantage beyond normal gameplay," Huh. I guess I did not think about that. It sounds reasonable, considering many people like to have a very "clean" image and expressing interest in a cheat sounds bad if you come from more competitive games... That leaves me in a bit of a precarious situation, as I dont like to lie/whitewash something I truly believe to be a cheat, but also dont want to stop anybody from using autociv or proGUI. What would you call a mod that is not suitable for competitive play, but acceptable in a more casual environment? Just "uncompetitive mod"?

I can also allow mods while still knowing that they are cheats in the strict sense. And yes, autociv is a cheat aswell, of course.

are they, though? Atrik argues, that proGUI is and that but these are not arguments why it is not a cheat. These might be arguments that it should be (atleast in parts) added to vanilla 0ad. In fact, both of these arguments actually make proGUI more of a cheat, if anything. As an improvement to the GUI (in the sense Atrik describes) is by definition an advantage (easier to use, quick to wrap your head around, many more meaningful buttons). And more displayed stats are pretty obviously an advantage. And any advantage you get over others by a mod is unfair, thus cheating. (I still dont have a problem with proGUI btw)