ShadowOfHassen

I don't think the campaign should be that complex, the history Bar should be practically nonexistent, so the player can focus on learning the mechanics. That idea is a good story, but it might be better suited as a normal campaign

I like that outline a few things. I'd add a scenario 0 that covers treasure gathering, moving 101, exploring the map, combat 101, leveling up and pull those objectives partly out of the other lessons. This is partly because I personally remember struggling with RTS's controls, and a lower stake map dedicated to that would be nice. Also if we do this the first scenario can be focused more on economy and less on the person struggling with left-clicking and right-clicking. (It happens and we should account for it. To make it easier to fit with to a story can we gray out upgrades until we want them to do it? A player could accidentally break the tutorial otherwise. I have a simple enough idea how to incorporate the basics of naval warfare If we have a scenario 0 to cover some of the material we can have a dock in scenario one, and we can just have scenario two have boats as well. If there's some really high-tech stratagems I'm missing that might not work, but it might. I can see Athenian colony working here, or an Alexander the Great, if we didn't do boats. Personally, I like the Athenian colony better, but that could be because its my idea.

Yes, but we'd have to build the game for Linux in some format... I like the idea. I really think we should do it, but that would require getting the "team" behind it.

Maybe, I wouldn't hold my breath. It's a storefront like steam, I'd guess no.

So if it would work, what do we need to add it there? We'd want binaries for Windows macOS and Linux (.exe, whatever mac uses, and appimage?)

That could work. It would give us a continuation into history, and we could make Aristotle "Teach" the game mechanics. I like it. Any other thoughts or things I'm missing?

That is a cool idea, and it'd allow us to link it to a coming campaign (Alexander the Great) you could even have Aristotle teaching the game kind of. The one thing is to make sure it's accessible to even beginners for RTS we need (in my opinion) the first campaign cover basic movement, fighting and some basic treasure stuff (NOT a full battle though) Alexander on a hunt??? After that, you need one on economy and a little fighting (economy in RTS is tricky) and finally one that's focused on the military (Ships, rams etc.)

Oops I didn't see the replies after this. Still, my point stands. I kind of like @Genava55's Massalia idea. But would we have to make a new civilization? I think we'd want to keep to an already made Civ A. because it'd be easier and B. the player could hop right into free play/ online and be familiar with a civilization. (We just swap out the hero with a named one.) I think it might be a good idea to use Athens because it's a fairly standard civilization. I see it almost as a "generic" civilization of all the Hellenistic Civs (which are a large part of our civilizations.) But more experienced players can disagree, and they'd be probably right.

Honestly, I'd argue for telling a somewhat Historical Fiction tale about a colony that we know very little about. That way, we can say it's Historical Fiction and don't have to sacrifice history for a solid tutorial campaign. We'd tell them it's how we guess what happened, of course, but real life really doesn't match up to a good tutorial system.

I don't want to insult the intelligence of new users, but I strongly suggest that we don't bog them down with so much history for a tutorial. The Egypt stuff looks pretty cool and all, but it would require a LOT of set up with the history, and if somebody wants to sit down and learn the game for multiplayer there shouldn't be that much. I want to stress that for the Age of Empires games, there was a difference between the tutorial level and the beginning parts of a campaign. The beginning parts of the campaign did have a lot of similar information, but the actual tutorial was something different. This is the AOM tutorial https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorial_(Age_of_Mythology) There is a difference between reminding the player what to do when he needs to do it in a medium stake environment then letting the player get the hang of it in a low stakes environment. I think the Egypt idea is really cool for a campaign, but I think it's history is complex for a tutorial. The player should be focus on learning the mechanics. (If you have a better idea for a tutorial than mine that's OK I don't care, but I do think the History should be at minimum and the campaign story should be REALLY simple.

I absolutely agree. There are some maps with very small bodies of water and I have to train a stinking merchant vessel just to get a shipwreck on the shore, after that the boat is useless. The merchant boat only mechanic is not realistic and it does not make gameplay any better so I vote we kick it.

It’s one short sentence I don’t think think they could bungle it that much. (and let’s NOT use AI for voices, that’s even worse than unprofessional voice acting)

Hey, if we have a translator for that language, I'm sure they can pronounce it.

Long story short, it's about a group of Athenians who want to create a colony in Thrace (the aeaa between modern day Greece and Turkey) The brief Outline is: The year would be around 600 BC ish, I've seen records of colonies created there around then like this one ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neapolis_(Thrace)) I think a made up hero should be created for the campaigns as a sort of POV character for the people to focus on. Scenario 1: A scouting party is trying to look for a good place for a settlement, they fight some wild animals on their way to find a good place. In my mind this scenario would cover basic movement, attacks, treasures and some other tricks. It's sounds simple enough, but we kind of need the tutorial to help the people who've never played an RTS before or it's been a long time since they did. In the end, they find a place for a settlement. In scenario 2 the fledgling colony expands, building farms, working mines and even meeting with the local people (Some kind of Persia/Macidonian civilization that is very basic and doesn't have anything that dates it past the time ) The player would learn resource gathering, resource drop places, building, advancing to the town phase, and finally allies and trading. A few times bandits/ raiders (some civilization I don't know which) would try to attack either the player or their ally at the end there's a big force of men spotted and the player has 5 minutes to prepare and a (fairly) small army comes, they defeat it but decide to go after the bandits Scenario 3 would teach the ins and out of combat with you setting up to attack a bandit camp and building siege engines etc. The campaign would have to be supplemented by more complex tutorials for things, but I think a simple campaign that eases you into the history (You don't have to know a lot, they're just building a colony) and the mechanics will help newcomers to both ancient history and 0 A.D. (and the RTS genre too.)

I like it. You can put it in whatever unit structure in the <History> tag, and we can worry about where exactly to put it when we get there.

Well, this might be better on the encyclopedia forum, but from my point of view the biggest thing that is holding it up is merging the UI. I really don't want to push any more articles until the UI is exactly the way we want it, mostly because we already are going to have to go back and spruce up the old articles with images and everything and I don't want to have to redo a ton of work. Also because we're kind of moving from articles linked to every unit to in depth articles about things in civilization, you and I @Vantha might want to have a talk about what we want to cover in the articles and what should be in shorter descriptions/history bits in the units. For example, we do not need the history bits I wrote for the treasures to be in an encyclopedia page because that would be kind of boring and kind of pointless. I think it would be perfect to see it in game, so players can learn about it, but it doesn't need to be in the encyclopedia. Just as the 4-paragraph articles we've written on siege engines probably doesn't need to be the first thing somebody sees in game about the battering ram. Going forward though, after all that the encyclopedia will sadly be really slow, other than the Romans and maybe the Celtic tribes we're getting to the more niche civilizations and to make sure we're not spreading misinformation we'll need to do a lot of research. It also doesn't help that search is showing up more bad websites for me. Anyway that's a long way of saying, yeah the encyclopedia is going to be some time and we're going to have to work some things through, and starting on a campaign might be fun. I do have an idea of an introductory story campaign (maybe not a tutorial, but a campaign) about Athens setting up a colony on the cost of Turkey (I think that's where it is?) I think that might be a good place to start. It'd be like 1-4 scenarios, and need dialog and some kind of cinematic overviews, and some scripting. I can elaborate if anybody wants.

Well it’s not that much, we talked about keeping track of good historical periods to make campaigns about, and at least in my mind we had the rough idea of starting working on that after the encyclopedia, I’m not sure if @Vantha was on the complete same page, however. i have a plan for a story based introductory campaign/ tutorial , though I like the idea of individual scenarios that can be done played in any order too. i also had some narrative choices I kind of wanted to implement nothing hard fast or anything though, I’m willing to work on writing / design for campaigns but I can’t do map stuff or scripting or anything like that.

@Vanthaand I talked about it a few times, nothing conclusive, I do have some ideas.

He has a point. I understand there are different ways to manage open source. If we're going to do a benevolent dictatorship, that's OK, or even benevolent Illuminati. But I would kind of like to know what's going on. Stan supposedly stepped down a year ago, yet in the meantime we've decided to move to Gittea. The migration was a good idea and love it, but who made the decision? What's going on? If what Norse_Harold says is true, why does a single dev get to make a decision by himself? And maybe he does have a shadowy Illuminati who gave him their blessing, but who are they? The only was open source projects work is through transparency and community. I think it's very unfair to expect contributors to help row the ship (0 A.D.) if they don't know who's steering the thing. I don't have any idea what's going on with moderation, though I do applaud you, @Norse_Harold, for what you've done. One of the hardest things I can imagine doing is take something you thought fun (0 A.D.) and turn it into a job (moderating). Thank you for your work.

That's fair, I get that.

You have no idea how excited that is to me. Of course, we're not 100% done (only half the civilizations about), but the stuff we have is in my opinion shippable and things like images and art can be added as we go on.

Hmm, to be honest, I think both are alright as they are right now, but yes, there might still be some more room for improvements. I will note down your suggestions for now; I plan to make another tips-related PR eventually anyway. @Vantha, "huge tracks of land" is a reference from Monty Python's Holy Grail, which is why @Gurken Khan suggested it. It's up to you, but it's a one word change for a reference that's actually if you watch the show.

Well, I assume we need to do this: https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/submission#someone-else-has-put-my-app-on-flathubwhat-do-i-do Then make me, and a few other people as maintainers, at least someone else (just in case I go evil someone can stop me). I would then make sure I understand how the flatpak works, fix the OP's errors, and then we just need flatpak verified. https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/verification Then we'd be good. We can mark flatpak as not as high supported as binaries, just getting it verified would be nice.

I think Flatpak requires you to use GitHub for the manifest it has to be in the flatpak organization for it to work, I think (https://github.com/flathub/com.play0ad.zeroad) But yeah, I'm willing to help maintain it. If we can get control of it and get it officially verified in flatpak. Some distro's like Linux Mint now by default only show verified flatpak apps for flathub. But yeah, I might have to learn some things, but you can count me as a flatpak maintainer I'm already helping to maintain this guy: https://flathub.org/apps/org.feichtmeier.Musicpod

Flatpak maintainer here (not of 0 A.D. but other app) Don't worry about it, the app should still work, it just means the 0 A.D. flatpak runtimes should be updated to a new version. Yeah, don't do that. It's not a flatpak issue. They're just depreciating something. It would be a problem with the flatpak manifest if anything I'm also going to use this and get on my Soapbox, Wildfire Games, take control of the 0 A.D. flatpak, people use Flatpak a lot, (some systems now even only do flatpak), and we might as well give it official support. Wildfire Games takes over the flatpak, I'll be more than happy to help set up maintenance of it and if people don't want top deal with another build system I should be able to tell it to just steal the snap package and turn it into the flatpak. (Though I still don't understand why we support snap and not the wider used flatpak)