ShadowOfHassen

Yes it would be exciting to fight. all I'm saying is that if there isn't a lot of information, we can get the battle to be as big as you need for the game. Things in general will need to be adjusted for scale. Quite a few battles had troops in the thousands on both sides, but that won't work with a population cap of even 500, so events will need some adaptation anyway. So have your final battle as big and exciting as you want. :-) (In reason of course)

Sounds like a good plan just don't worry about the size too much. Scale in 0 A.D. isn't exactly 1:1 to real life anyway.

That sounds like a plan we’d just have to design scenario 3 so the player couldn’t conceivably brute force their way to victory without becoming allies but we should be able to figure that out .

Perhaps … we should teach alliances last I remember we were going to just have an allied group help you in one of the scenarios but this could work to as long as @Vantha and @Lion.Kanzen are ok with it

The only thought I have is make the other tribe be the aggressor so in the tutorial the player doesn’t have any moral quandary about attacking

I’m pretty sure @Vanthahad a 4 scenario plan that we had worked out . Or am I getting things confused?

I thought we already had an outline on what we were teaching in each scenario...

Yeah you’re right. we already have a rough list of what we want to teach so we’ve kind of already done that , we’re just keeping the other stuff in mind while be build the maps. what I think both you and @Vantha are touching on is on the story to gameplay slider rts usually focus more on game play and I agree. But we can still do a pretty good story while we’re at it. but obviously with the tutorial gameplay and game mechanics first .

My first RTS was Age of Empires 3 and even know the Knight's of Saint John campaign is probably one of my favorite stories in video games. (Nostalgia mostly, but it was pretty good)

So what if we had a kind of overview when you start the campaign, a section called historical background, then we have a description that shows up in the scenario selection area and during loading and finally there is some dialog/ objective information in game. I mean, in a single scenario you might have multiple objectives I.E. destroy the tower, build a civic center, train 10 hopilites, and you kind of need to get the player to realize they need to do that.

Well yeah, skipping it is useful. If I'm stuck on a mission, I don't want to have to read the beginning of the scenario over and over

In my mind, there are three ways to convey information in a video game (i.e. Plot) The first way is atmospheric story telling. I.E. there's a skeleton right next to a dark cave. The player then gets the impression that something dangerous is there. The second way is lore dumps. This could be a book or terminal in game, or the loading tip. They're nice to know information that flushes out the world. It's not necessary, though, and you can not look for it and ignore it. The final way I think information is given is direct information given to the player that is necessary for them to complete and/or understand the game. I call this dialog, though there could be a better way to say it. Basically, it's the thing that says. "Hey, Player, you need to get these elephants over the alps" Now, of course you could do this different ways. You could have a description before starting the scenario "One day Hannibal decided he wanted to take his elephants to go visit Rome, and to do so he needs to get over the alps" Or you could have direct dialogue (which is how you meant dialogue) like: "Hi Hannibal, what do you want to do today?" "Well, I've been thinking and I kind of want to take my elephants to go see Rome." "Well, first we'll have to get them over the alps" I wrote the examples rather silly, but I think you get the basic point. For scenarios for 0 A.D. We'll often need to make it very clear to the player what they need to do. And in those cases I think direct dialogue would be better. There's a rule in writing that isn't always right called show, don't tell. And I do think showing what is happening in cutscenes and dialogue is better than just telling with a text box that says. "Move the Elephants across the alps" I agree with @Lion.Kanzen with the translation. We wouldn't probably have voice actors, so that would give us a bit more wiggle room if we just have written dialogue to help address at least the silence problem. The only problem is you'd be brought out of the game whenever there's dialogue because you'd have to read it, so we'd probably use it sparingly anyway, mostly at the start and end of the scenarios.

Yeah, at least for the moment... It would take some coding, but it'd be the best thing we can do currently...

Something like that with the text would work, though it might be smart to do something like how Wesnoth has a press space to continue for the dialogue, for slower readers.

I was wondering how we'd do dialogue. We don't exactly have voice actors so the Age fo Empires narrative strategy of cutscene + dialog in game might not work.

Both, please. I don't follow social media other than X and I want to see them

You know we could usually use those screenshots and post them on the social media places. They look really, really good.

I don't know, 0 A.D. does have a mastodon account though

Fair, but some things like game balance or unit name changes could have posts.

That's a great idea. Also the X and mastodon accounts could be a bit more active. You know, post updates on PRs being merged, make funny memes about history, cool screenshots, that sort of thing.

That looks amazing!

I'm going to be honest, if AI starts to be openly used for art and stuff, I'd probably stop helping. I have too many problems with it. I could list them all but a big one is I want to be working alongside of a team not people trying to speed run and see if the game can get done quickly. With all due respect, If someone really wants to see the game out sooner rather than later, instead of suggesting/ using AI. They should do the best they can to help. Well we were talking about just removing the alpha and put it in beta...

Hmmm--- This might require some brainstorming. There's probably another topic for that, but another idea is the game Team Fortress has a kind of premium mode where you get better stuff if you buy a skin or something (Or soI've heard. Again I play very little online) could we do something like that except instead of paying require a forum link of some kind? You can give it a whirl, but you only get special features if you're verified. I don't know what the features would be, but it'd need to incentivize normal people creating a forum account. Another idea is requiring an email for the lobby, just to make it a little harder. I think the cool open source game Veloren was having some problems with bots recently, and that might've fixed it. (Bots are different from smurfs, but it's a little bit of an extra step) We could also talk to administrators for Minetest Servers and other open source games to see what they do. If a lot of them have the same problems, maybe we could pool our the brightest minds, and they could come up with some kind of open source method to help mitigate/ remove the problem. I think the ultimate solution is if we had a TON of players, then if there's one or two bad eggs nobody would notice.

Random idea that might not be possible. Could we somehow link the gitea 0 A.D. forum account and lobby? At the very least, making the online lobby harder to create smurfs would be useful. I don't know how though.

Great! I can help with writing-- I can also help with coding scripting if it's something easy like python or Lua, though some other people might be better qualified.