TheCJ

That can totally be the case. But in this specific game, he could most likely have achieved the same (or more) by going cav. Just because they worked in one game, doesnt mean they are broken. He just chose a good strategy for this one game.

Well, fanatics do lose against sufficient infantry. But that doesnt mean its not a very strong tactic. For one, as reza mentioned, the rushing player will often head for the food economy first, as women cant defend themselves very well. And for that use case, having more power in fewer units is very strong, as a larger force gets noticed sooner and suffers more from blocking each other/pathing issues. Also, while it is definitely defendable when you pull together some troops, you have to consider two problems: 1. When the fanatic rusher has massed about ~20 fanatics, they can take on any soldiers you put on any extra metal/stone or a small woodline. And given their speed, you cant really get your main force, thats working somewhere else, to help in time. 2. There are major economic implications in fighting with all your cs. Of course, he invested a lot of resources to make the fanatics aswell, but if you are chasing 20 fanatics with 40 cs and fight them for like, 30s, you already lost 40•30•0.75=900 wood just by not using them to gather. That being said, fanatic rushes are not as easy to pull off as reza implies. They are quite costly and its not as easy to micro as cav (since they are still slower). Its a strategy that needs a lot of investment and skill and has potentially massive reward. Such strategies are very good for a video game and the fanatics shouldnt be touched at all imho.

true and thanks, but that also comes at a cost, since the fanatic player doesnt have to get the metal upgrades at all, while the normal champ player has to. Of course thats a one-time investment, but it will still matter since games dont go that long anyways. (Also arent gauls the ones with the extra food upgrade)

Also metal is gathered just as quickly as food. 120f 100w takes 240s+133s=373s to gather. 80f 60w 80m takes 160s+80s+160s=400s to gather. So the ratio is pretty much that you can get the resources for 13 normal champ infantry in the time you can get the resources for 14 fanatics. 14 fanatics get decimated by 13 normal champs.

Because they have 3 hack and 4 pierce resistance less? So for every 1 pierce dmg (which is by far the most relevant type) a normal champion spearman takes, the fanatic takes 1.5 ...

capturing also got way too easy with a27... Thing is, if you wanted to raze a city, youd breach the wall and lay a fire. And burning down a house is very easy, but in 0ad only very few units use fire, unlike in reallife, where basically every soldier could start a fire. This results in spearman infantry and ranged infantry being very bad at razing building from the outside, which is why I capture>delete.

yea, but thats why i like vanillas system; you dont get the stats on your screen all the time, but you can hover over the icon and read them all if you want

Well, the art is nice. But we could remove every number (resistance, percentage, gather rate) from the players view and it would not matter too much

What is much more desireable is a short description of their role in combat (if there isnt one already? Would the encyclopedia contain smt like this? I dont know tbh). Like "The Spearman is a versatile melee unit especially strong against cavalry, but weak against siege units.", "The pikeman is a heavily armoured melee unit with relatively low damage but long range.", "The Swordsman is an offensive melee unit with high damage but a short range. It excels at taking out siege." Much more useful for new players.

Do new players need to know? And do you think not knowing about the hack damage of halbs made the veteran play worse?

I like the way vanilla does it. You dont need to know any damage or resistance numbers, really. Atleast not of your own units while playing. Either you know how to use your units, then that knowledge is way more useful than a damage stat, or you dont, in which case the stat wont really help you. And you shouldnt see your enemies upgrades anyway. If anything, you should find out about them by doing some sort of spy tech. So not showing the units stats at all is perfectly fine, and having the option to look at a breakdown of all stats is useful if you want to strategy-craft, make balance-change mods or just calculate stuff for fun.

You dont need any metal if you arent exploiting for metal. I am also willing to believe that Jagsus actually bartered in the wrong direction on mistake, I made that error multiple times myself. @ffm2 I understand that such moments can be heated ingame, but if what Jagsus says about what you said ingame is true, please try to be a bit "nicer". Same goes for @Arup of course. Its "just" a game, so long as there is a possibility that Jagsus made a mistake, you are all still on the "same side", trying to have fun playing this great game together. Also @Arup , maybe just dont use the bartering system at all as long as it remains broken? The exploit makes it obvious, but even normal bartering is probably unfair is some cases.

@Arup ? Even a child should know thats not okay. Or do you have anything to say for yourself?

If the trees from AoE2:DE as seen in the screenshot you provided are your measure of pretty, sure. I think most people would agree that realistic trees are prettier, though?

Well, pretty trees have bigger treetops than trunks. So unless I understood you wrongly, you cant have pretty trees that dont block the view?

@Seleucids got a mod for you

My go-to is 1. Ranged Damage Upgrade 2. Pierce Resistance Upgrade 3. Hack Resistance Upgrade 4. Melee Damage Upgrade but it does depend on which units you are planning to go for; with athens/sparta, you might opt for melee first, against rome you might make the hack resistance upgrade first.

Of course. But as long as we dont have a button to jump to the next idle building, the same cant be said about buildings, which is why a graph with the cumulative building idle time would be nice.

As repetitive as these kind of threads are, I think these ideas are great and we should definitely consider implementing them; (This alone would fix a big part of the problem; sure, there might be some who will hide it, but by doing so they become openly dishonest and it becomes clear that they do (try to) cheat (as in "gain an unfair advantage") and they wont have any real leverage to argue why they shouldnt be banned from any future games by the host (if people noticed their cheating (attempt))) (maybe even unit idle time, while we're at it. But that doesnt really have anything to do with the cheats so its a bit off-topic.) (And if possible we could also draw the structure idle time as a graph at the end? makes it easier to find mistakes in my own gameplay and get better.)

Well, that makes me look like a big ol' fool. I take that back and apologize; I actually totally forgot about the market exploit, please forgive me. ...But talking about how the other side doesnt even want to have a real discussion is certainly not shifting the topic, right? Alright, but as long as 0ad is open source, you cant enforce anything really. If a cheater really wants to cheat, he can build the game with some of his own code injected. Now, making it so you would atleast have to do that "injection", to be able to cheat, would still be an effective deterrent for many cheaters, but if done wrongly, could also hurt the developement of "non-cheat"-mods, like GUI changes (even if they are just resizing buttons, you change the simulation folder afaik, so youd be flagged incompatible by the current modio rulings? So if we somehow made it impossible to play with mods flagged incompatible in modio, I couldnt make any changes to my gui, as harmless as they may be, without injecting it before building the game, which would be a significant detriment to the modding aspect of the game) [tl;dr: Restricting mods further hurts modding.] So enforcing a consensus (if we could reach one) is quite a challenge, isnt it? I agree with you. I would consider using autostart to be pretty embarrassing. Good thing the only cheat I use is autociv, which seems to be generally accepted. I was not trying to defend people using autostart (they shouldnt), but rather trying to lay out why I dont care whether they do. Some people take games too seriously and try to get any advantage they can, be it fair or not. Thats embarrassing for them, but as an opponent, I dont really care if its at the level of autostart (or proGUI), since the advantage they gain is so insignificant that it doesnt actually affect me at all. Now, if you dont use autostart or proGUI to gain an advantage, but rather to change how the game feels to you and maximise your fun, it even ceases to be embarrassing. This is an assumption that one player makes about 7 others. And when they find out they lost because someone was cheating, the answer is "chill out its just a game". Awesome argument guys. Ripping my comment about autostart out of context to make it appear like I was talking about all cheats doesnt make it look like you are actually... (The difference is, you have never lost because of autostart, while it is possible you lost because of other cheats. And thats why I wouldnt say "nobody cares" about the other cheats.) This is a very interesting argument. May I ask on what grounds you say that 1. Most players that encounter players with "cheats" (e.g. proGUI, autostart, autociv) are unaware of the cheats 2. The people that are aware of the cheats cant grasp the magnitude of advantage [because I think almost all of the consistent long-term players know about proGUI, autostart and ofc autociv. And I dont know any user of those cheats that likes to play against newbies that dont know about them. And that the autotrainer function provides any statistically relevant advantage still remains to be proven.]

I like the car analogy. The first analogy I came up with was shoes; when you play soccer (or any other sport during which you run around a lot) with your friends, neighbours or acquaintances, there are no rules for which shoes you use. And the shoes are how you interact with the ball and the game, so they're like a GUI. If you want to, you can play in high heels and make it extra hard on yourself. Or you play normally, with general sports shoes. Or you are very competitive and you get yourself special soccer shoes. Only when you start playing your sport professionally, youll begin to encounter rules regarding your footwear. And autostart is like cheating in a race by starting 0.5s too early; in a professional setting, youll get punished for that, but when you're just running around with your friends nobody cares.

well, you are claiming its undisclosed and at the same time, whenever this comes up everyone seems to know who the "cheaters" are. Which one is it now? Between map randomness, fluctuation in player performance due to outside factors, hardware used, time spent playing the game before this round, there is no "fair gameplay". That the autotrainer provides any statistically significant advantage remains to be proven. well, I cant speak for everyone, but I am not. I am trying to have fun and improve.

So the short answer is: There is nothing to repent. Trying to have fun when playing a video game is not a sin.

If its so obvious who cheats and you have such a big problem with it, why do you play with them? Does anybody force you to play with the "cheaters"? And before you say anything, thats entirely different to as you can still play with like, 80%+ of the players who dont use anything remotely "cheaty". Also, god forbid people play a casual game in a way that brings them joy... Like, I play mainly with the historical patch cause I dont like certain imbalances in vanilla. Likewise, players that use an auto trainer probably do so because they dont like the clickyness of vanilla. I see no problem with that. 0ad has no real cheating, as cheating would be something like a "violation of competitive integrity by usage of undisclosed or unallowed modification", but there is not competitive integrity, since the game is not competitive (unless youre talking about 1v1s, which could be considered competitive, but in that case just dont play against the "cheaters"). If you want a teamgame you participate in to feel "competitive", talk to the people in the lobby, manage the players expectations until everyone agrees what this round means to them and then youll have a good time.

Oh sweetie, thank you for being so cute. And you're welcome!