TheCJ

4. Ptolemaic Camel Archer Rush. Instead of building a barracks after the 2nd house, you build a stable and start making Camel Archers. In a 4v4 teamgame, your pocket can even send you a bit of food to get even more camels out even faster. With good micro, you will not lose many of your camels, especially if your enemy didnt expect that rush. Then after you annoyed your opponent for 5min, you could add your own barracks at some point and go back to eco-ing while still using your one stable to keep up some pressure on some women somewhere (maybe the enemy pocket or the other flank?). But I like to double down on my rush instead, by adding a second stable and using the cc as a stable aswell. Once you have like, 30-40 camels its gonna be hard for your enemy to do anything, as he doesnt have the stables to make enough counter cavalry. If the game goes on to 2nd phase or further, remember: If you let your camels take damage, you already mis-played... so you don't need any armor upgrades. Only ranged damage. [I like this strategy as I wish to believe I invented it (most likely someone did it before me, but I didnt know about that, so I came up with it myself, okay?!)]

A map of the entire Continent/world of the respective fantasy universes? Seems like a daunting if not outright impossible task. I generally like the idea, but I would rather take a certain area/landmark; maybe a "great ice wall" map where theres only snow on one side and "normal terrain" on the other side. Or a "Gates of Mordor" map, or maybe a Helms Deep/Hornburg map.

...Im confused, do you want eye-candy or not? I can assure you, most players do not pay attention to those counters. They are helpful to spot not-optimally used farms and get an indicator when you could/should start sending cs to gather metal/stone, but they are not affecting the gameplay to any detriment and they especially do not affect the fun (its really easy to ignore them if you dont like em).

@Emacz and I added very significant speed changes to the historical mod, as it seemed somewhat silly/unrealistic how fast cav is compared to infantry. I know our mod does many other things aswell and any "data" we get might not be useful for the base game, but we are aiming to test those changes a bit over the course of the next month, after which I'm hoping we can release the first mod.io version of our mod (and maybe get even more players to test it out and give some feedback).

For a casual game, this will work just fine I think. Even "competitively", I think @Atrik sometimes only has women working in the lategame? He's a fairly skilled player, so you can get pretty far with an economy like this. Obviously, you should not keep any units in a tower that isnt currently shooting at enemies, you can rather attack and keep raiding the opponents economy, that way the advantage he gets from using more effective gatherers can be minimized. This strategy can work because women are so much cheaper than soldiers (and produced faster, especially with Romans).

I agree there are more "urgent" issues (or rather issues with higher priority), but that's not really the point. The point is, there is no general argument why we should never (not even after fixing every bug and all lag problems) think about including an American civ.

Of course there are technical challenges, but I think @Lech was arguing that we shouldn't even try to add any American civs because the very idea of adding them is flawed, which is a different argument, is it not? Indeed, adding any new civ is non-trivial to say the least and should be done with utmost care.

But with this argument, could one not also argue that all Eurasian and African civs should be removed and we should only have American civs? In that case all the civs would be "chain-linked" together again, would they not? I find it hard to see that as an argument against adding a certain civ or "civ group".

In 1v1s, you dont have an ally. In teamgames, he has an ally aswell. If youur ally has to help you, the enemy ally has a boom advantage and their team wins. They are (one of?) the only cav archers in p1. Thats why they're better; they outrange your soldiers (except archers ofc). If you're an cs archer civ, just make more archers and a few towers Making your own cav and going to his base (instead of chasing his cav archers) is also very good, if he loses his food eco he cant make any more cav. With a civ with counter cav you can just rush him before he rushes you, this camel archer tactic is weak against very early pressure.

Hm, are they? Not in the games I play in, but I'll take your word for it. Then the wall situation maybe isnt as bad as it looked to me, sorry.

Is it fine as it is? Walls are currently so irrelevant, most people wouldn't even notice if we removed them. Of course, nobody likes it if "Bunkering"/Turtling becomes "meta", but making walls atleast useable in some situations would not have that effect. Otherwise you make good points!

Palisades are not cheap enough either. They also take too long to build. Closing up your base (or vulnerable parts) just because you think cav might be coming gives you too big of an economic disadvantage. And reacting with palisades after the first raid hitted just means the first raid did even more damage. Also they are paper to anything melee. Is that not what they are currently doing? If I need 100 citizen archers to actually one-shot a champion cavalry unit, Id say each one is doing more of a "harassment" than a "killing". Also, almost all units have armor? If cavalry was 1.5x as quick than infantry, it would still be quicker? Just for reference; the fastest base cav unit in AoE2 (the hussar) is 1.5x as fast as their counter (the halberdier). If it works for them, it might just work for us.

How do you contribute @Classic-Burger? Besides by being confused?

You do know that @Emacz and I are making the historical mod together, right? Historical mod would not be where it is right now without me.

But thats because most heros are recruited in the fort. If they were recruited in the wonder, everyone would build wonders. Well, Fort+Will to Fight is 1500/1800/2100/1500 while a Wonder+Glorious Expansion is 2000/4000/2000/1500, so its really only more expensive regarding wood (and a bit food I guess). The real problem is this; The wonder takes way too long to be built. 1000s?? More than twice the time of a fort (450s)?? Insane.

The current bonus is already much stronger than Will to Fight, as 20% more pop means 20% bigger armies, which means your army deals ~20% more damage and has ~20% more hp. And you also get the resource trickle. 50% more pop is ludicrous.

This is true. If we can loot enemy buildings, why not our own buildings that we dont use anymore? Also, there have been many cases in history where the stones of some older buildings were used in the construction of new ones, afaik.

As long as the construction was not finished, you get back a portion of the resources, depending on how far the building process has proceeded. So if you place a foundation and instantly delete it, you have built 0% of the building and get back 100% of the resources. If you only notice you want to delete the building, after it has been 70% completed, you only get back 30% of the resources. It does not even matter if an enemy destroyed the foundation or you deleted it; If you place a foundation in the direction of your enemy and he destroys it instantly (e.g. with his scout), you get back 100% of the resources.

now this, this is beautiful. Make stone walls cheaper, faster to build, a little smaller and with less hp and the "cav problem" is gone. Because the cav cant realistically engage the actual enemy army (which consists of up to 100 spearman) without heavy losses and with more useful walls, they cant really disrupt your economy (if you prepare sufficiently).

How would you do that? Just like you can't make recruiting a one-button choice, since you might want certain barracks at certain positions producing certain units and other barracks producing other units, I want some of my ranged units to attack certain enemy units and some of them to attack other units (or even buildings when they're currently under construction, to delay the building being done). I just don't see how a single button even could do that.

Choosing which units to prioritize targeting is a strategic choice. One that might require a decent amount of inputs, but nevertheless a strategic choice. Regarding champs from fortresses/special buildings; in historical mod, the only champ that is recruited in a base production building is the Persian Immortal. All others got their own building or come from the fortress. This has indeed helped with champion spam.

If you dont intend to use it, just remove the hotkey? I was under the impression they would add an option for that? This kind of is a proposed improvement to attack-move. Although your proposal is also interesting.

I agree that this does not need immediate improvement, it works good enough. But an icon when hovering over fields (like when hovering over buildings while having a unit selected and holding the garrison button) would be a nice quality of life improvement, as I wouldnt have to click through all my farms to find the one farm that only has 4 women working on it.

Clicking on twelve trees is not that hard. And if you want to build a wall through an entire forest, maybe you should reconsider. Thats 6 clicks. Not very many for the start of the game where nothing is happening. Also this would mostly just be a bad decision, since paying 100wood at the start of the game to queue up building a farm after they will be done with the berries minutes later is not a very good economic decision. Same goes for basically every other situation, if the selection box targeting was added for economy aswell. I guess thats also what @Atrik was alluding to when he compared the military benefit of this targeting method to "manual sniping", just that selection box targeting would be even less useful economically (as far as I can see). That being said, I dont really care if selection box targeting gets added, neither for military nor economy, as I can just choose to not use it if I dont like it. Thus I endorse adding this to a potential a27 community mod or a28 release.

Do they? I could just not use them (like the current vanilla autoqueue). So its just as easy to pick up and play. We all agree on that one. But that will always be the case as long as its a strategy game. Because the better strategy thats being executed well will always beat a poor strategy. Or find some likeminded individuals and play with them, that's always fun! Especially if you can speak with them in voicechat while playing. I agree, but not everyone will and not everyone has to. I mean, the problem this thread is trying to discuss is whether the "reflex-oriented" part of the gameplay is so essential that we should try to inhibit modifications that reduce the amount of necessary inputs in any way, is it not? And when two people (or more) have a different opinion on what this game should "focus" on, we need to either talk with each other until we find common ground or decide in one way and risk losing some members of the community. @WiseKind (for example) believes we should not have any "reflex-oriented" gameplay, being able to "click fast" should not matter. @real_tabasco_sauce and I (for example) disagree. But this thread is for discussing why we disagree and bringing forth arguments for our "sides". @WiseKind argues that the challenge should never be a mechanical one, the game should be purely won by strategic decisions (or did I get that wrong?). But my question is... why? The importance of APM has been an aspect of all rts games (I know of) so far, so much so that it has become a core trait of the genre itself. I think most rts players enjoy this aspect of the game. Of course, 0ad does not have to "do the same" as any other rts, it could become the first rts where APM truly doesnt matter. But if you argue for such a strong deviation from the norm (which works very well for other titles of this genre), you have to make a sufficiently strong argument.