krt0143

Sure, but "realistic expectations" doesn't mean "it's great so far, so let's rest on our laurels now" either, does it... In other words, I'm expecting nothing, I'm just suggesting which parts IMHO need work. (Yes, yes, development is in the doldrums, I know. But I'm assuming development will eventually resume). I know, but I didn't start it. I just adapt. Yes, but while it must be trivial to tell the engine to have rams do more damage if the target is a wall gate (given this is a specific entity), there are no real gates in towers and fortresses, so where would you aim your ram at? As for catapults, the problem is not all civilizations have them. Many just have rams, others have the whole lineup, rams, bolt shooters, stone throwers, towers, you name it. It's one of those cases where (relative) realism goes against gameplay richness. AoE chose to give everyone everything, no matter how strange, 0 A.D. has decided that there is a lowest common denominator (rams) and lots of exclusive extras. I'm undecided if that was the better choice: As a player I regret it, as a history buff I find it okay. Anyway, the siege part (just like the rest BTW) could be extremely rich (from a single player perspective). Example: Some civilizations have fire arrows, and fire should do quite some damage to wooden siege engines. Means your siege engines have no chance against those civilizations? Not at all, just develop the "Wet Hides" technology, and their fire won't do any damage anymore. (Needless to say you don't have to develop it if your adversary doesn't use fire.) Now somebody will come and tell this will break the balance, because you'll need to spend some additional time developing that technology, putting you at an disadvantage compared to an adversary not needing it. Sure, that's why I specified "single player", where richness of gameplay is the only important thing, and civilizations don't need to be perfectly balanced (you know what you're facing when you're a primitive/poor civilization going against the mighty ones...). (BTW, thanks for fixing my bug! I was wondering indeed, but given I don't know where this is processed I left the defaults)

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/6873

True. The AI is (and will be for the foreseeable future) kind of stupid, and needs some adaptations to be a worthy opponent. That been said there is another aspect to it too: A single player AI would not be anyway similar to a multiplayer bot AI. The requirements are totally different, and it would/should proceed completely different. That is my beef with the current AI: It's more of a multiplayer bot AI. Yes, because I was expecting the rams to be roughly similar to the AoE ones, i.e. vulnerable. 0 A.D. rams are terminator-like behemoths, especially when you play a civilization with few swordsmen (Brits only have a champion swordsman) and you do not know (because obviously no documentation) that only blades affect rams... Throw as many spearmen at them as you want, nothing happens. The second chapter was when I tried rams myself and, due to their near-invulnerability (and probably the fact I was playing at (very?) easy difficulty back then), I could easily win the game just by building one arsenal and flooding the AI with rams. No need to train any soldiers, just build some fortifications to mop up incoming enemy raids. No, apparently the AI knows how to cope with them quite well, but it obviously doesn't know how to cope with the crazy ideas of a human, like flooding it with dozens of rams. At standard difficulties rams kind of work right now, but they're (IMHO) far from perfect yet: Attack timing needs improvement and their pathfinding is quite perfectible too, given they can remain blocked by 1-2 trees for a while till they find how to get around them. Actually pathfinding is their biggest weakness: Put any unit in front of them, even a non-combatant one, and they're stuck... Anyway, my point earlier is that Rams shouldn't be some kind of medieval tanks, they should be a very specialized tool for a very specific task (breaking doors actually, but okay, let them breach walls too, else it becomes too complicated/realistic). They should actually be very easy to destroy in melee (not ranged), and you shouldn't be able to send them all the way across the continent: Ideally you should build them (like all other siege units) in the immediate vicinity of the target, and discard them after use because of their extremely limited mobility. 0 A.D. has chosen the AoE way of having a "siege engineer" building, I would had created a special unit ("siege engineer", veeery expensive!) who builds siege units locally, like you would build a house. Obviously you would have to protect those units as they would be a prime target for the adversary. Okay, that's just my opinion, feel free to disregard. This is not a demand. It's food for thought, if you guys want to think about it. If not, it's just wasted time on my part.

At last someone calm and reasonable! Thank you! I am fully conscious that my postings set things in motion, and that was indeed my intent: Make (general) you think about the game, beyond your little habits and compromises. Because I am assuming you want to improve it, eventually, am I wrong? As I said repeatedly further up, while I don't make any claims for myself, chances are other people will be put off by the lack of single player features, and will lack my capacity to learn a new game engine in a week and adapt the game to my liking. Now if that's a reason to attack me personally, I'm out of here, I'm too old to frequent school yards. I was assuming I was among adults. I almost noticed...

Thanks, really appreciate it. A Settlers-like? Sounds interesting, I will definitely give it a try. It definitely doesn't know how to use them optimally. On Easy it always sends a single ram, long after the main attack has been crushed, allowing the human player to easily get rid of it, even with a single axeman: You know it will be coming, and it will be all alone. Sometimes, later on in the game, there are two or three, but still no challenge unless you don't notice the (inconsistent) attack alarm. On "Normal" difficulty it sends more rams, but I haven't tested the even higher difficulties to see if it uses the utterly cheesy tactics of flooding the opponent with two dozen rams at once...

Your question made me wonder, and I've tried it in a quick test scenario: Indeed, while a group of first age units will form a consistent melee/archer formation, a group of champion units (Kushites have both melee and archer champions) will not properly sort melee and archers, just like in my example above. In other words, "Close Order" doesn't work with champions, even standard ones. So, it's a bug?

Thanks, but I don't have no problems with rams myself. It's the AI which has problems, when I just send 20-30 rams into its town and let them raze everything... Anyway, as I said earlier, I've solved the my problem by editing the rams to be slower and the fortifications to be way more resistant (for all civs). I really wonder why everyone assumes I get regularly beaten by the AI. I did indeed get beaten in the beginning, in my very first skirmishes. I've progressed a little since...

Could you please be so kind to point me to where I do this? Balance for PvP. And I'm sure it's great, except it doesn't really concern me, given I'm only interested in Player vs. AI games, where the situation is totally different: What is marvelously balanced when two humans face each other, is totally unbalanced when you replace one of those players with an AI. Why don't you people get it?... There are two totally different aspects of the game: Human vs. Human and Human vs. AI. The first is (I'm sure) great and perfectly well balanced, the second (the one I care for) is much less so. That's all I'm saying. That does not mean the first one is bad or shouldn't be, no, it only, exclusively, means the second is underdeveloped. It also means that no matter what your Great Old Ones of multiplayer do or think, single player isn't (yet) what it should be. Jeez guys, I'm aware English isn't the first language of most of us here (I'm German, for instance), but I have rarely seen such a difficulty of getting a point across.

Here we go again with the "you're too stupid to realize our genius"... First of all you know nothing about my level, you're just making assumptions to support your certitudes. Second you're clearly unable to understand I don't care about PvP. Not in the slightest. It's irrelevant to me. I sure hope my PvP "skill" won't ever "improve" in any way. In other words, your glorious fine-tuning for PvP is totally irrelevant to me and will remain so forever and ever: I'm a single player player. That's only valid for your current level. 0 A.D.'s single player AI isn't perfect, but already way better than that of the big classic hits (Warcraft and AoE 1&2, to quote those I know really well), so I'd say "adequate". The weaknesses of 0 A.D. are elsewhere and quite obvious too. Please don't start telling me about how this is because I'm a clueless noob. There was a long exposé here on what I think can be improved, exposé I've removed to spare your superior intellect the aggravation. See, I can be taught. Nothing to do with the AI. The reason is first and foremost that people don't know about it, and depending on what they hope to find in this game, they might be slightly disappointed by the lack of single player features. Don't flatter yourself. The AI is correct, nothing more. What newcomers struggle with (I'm well placed to know) are: a. Undocumented features (Why do my units do this now? How do I do this?) b. Quirks (I tend to call them bugs, I've been told they are features... ) c. Undocumented quirky features (like the wall repair thing, or the formations, etc.) The biggest usability problem with 0 A.D. are IMHO the rough edges. It's a really nice, good-looking game, it works well at 99%, but the remaining 1% tends to spoil a little the experience. Also, at the risk of repeating myself, it totally lacks single player features: Just click on "Campaign", it's the first thing a new player will try after having gone through the tutorial... IMHO, YMMV and all that.

Both: Custom, champion level units. For the archers the "VisibleClasses" datatype is "Ranged Archer" For the pikemen the "VisibleClasses" datatype is "Melee Pikeman" For the axemen the "VisibleClasses" datatype is "Melee Axeman" (Actually, to prevent forgetting/omitting some parts I don't know yet is important, I just copy existing units of similar type and edit them. Often the only change is to change civilization and name...)

Mean me? Because I feel a definite hostility from (some) people (see earlier this thread). You're not one of them, you stay matter-of-facts and that's really great, thanks. I'm here to get information (due to the lack of documentation) and talk about the game, period. Neither to belittle said game (it's great, but it's a fact it still needs some work), nor to harass other forum users (or their favorite way of playing). I'd like people to understand that at last.

Two can play at this... Close Order: Note the red arrows. Archers on the front line, and yet there are melee units in the back.

Say what?... If you mean "Close Order" is what I'm looking for, no, unfortunately there is almost always at least an archer (or even healer) in the front line, usually somewhere in the middle. And I'm talking about groups with more melee units than archers. But I agree it's the one which (strangely) comes closest to what I'm looking for. Close, but no cigar. I've tried them all, there aren't that many formations anyway. My formation is usually around 24 melee, 15 archers and 6 healers. And I don't want to see a single archer or healer in the front lines (and conversely no melee unit in the back). Shouldn't be that difficult, AoE did it all on its own.

It's about unit formations. I'm looking for a formation which surprisingly doesn't seem to exist: All melee units up front, all archers in the back. The "Battle Line" formation, which would be a prime candidate for this, has all archers in the middle and melee units on both sides. I want all my heavily armored melee units up front, and all my unarmored, vulnerable archers in the back, protected by the melee units. Yes, I'm strange like that. So, I've found \simulation\templates\special\formations, but the files there don't seem to contain anything useful to me: For instance "Close Order" only says "MinColumns"=3 and "WidthDepthRatio"=4! WTF, is this a parade? Now some formations do have a promising "SortingClasses" and "SortingOrder" setting, but what are my options here?

Didn't say it does, but I do suspect that the current system suffers from the same fallacy as tree chopping: When its opponent is dead, the defensive unit will turn to the closest enemy, which most of the time will pull it a little further away (given they come from the opposite direction), till eventually it ends up really far, alone and thus dead. It shouldn't, on "defensive" it should have a hard limit of how far it will venture forward. Note I'm not totally sure about that, but I sure have noticed that left to their own devices, facing a steady stream of adversaries, my "defensive" defenders will eventually end up real far from the point they were supposed to defend. They definitely shouldn't, the whole plan is to let the enemy come to them, under a steady stream of arrows. --- Edited to add proof: Note the unit at the red arrow. This unit has decided to chase enemies, despite being on defensive (Situation: Enemies come from behind the camera. Main combat action is on the bottom left (where the pile of dead horses are). Some enemies run past the combat because rams are attacking a fortress of theirs, some way behind (top right).)

Sure, and I don't say PvP shouldn't exist, I just said that the single-player game is a little "underprivileged": 0 A.D. is clearly a PvP game. Now please, before we start round 2 of shadowboxing, I have solved the problem for me, in a way satisfactory for me, and will keep improving it for me, changing stuff and adding units and buildings till I'm happy with it, meaning I do not make any demands. I've just stated an opinion.

Interesting. Any link? Due to the pretty generic name, a search finds all kind of stuff. Which one do you mean? Sure, I've weakened all rams by making them even slower, twice as long to repair (affects me, the AI doesn't repair), and by upping all fortress/tower resistances from their initial Hack:20, Pierce:35, Crush:3 to a more serious Hack:55, Pierce:55, Crush:10. This gives the defender more time to do something about rams. Previously, if no ram-busting unit was already very near the attacked structure, there was no time to do anything, the structure was doomed: 3-4 seconds and the mighty fortress was rubble... Penalizing the civilizations which have few sword units, like the Brits I usually play (they only have a champion sword unit). I didn't change the rams' attack values, because they should remain deadly against other targets (civil buildings, wooden structures, etc.). They should just be less efficient against stone structures which historically were totally impervious to rams. Now I'm happy with them, mostly. They are now the only real means of destroying the fortifications the enemy builds: Hacking at them with your puny swords and spears doesn't do a thing (as it should). But also, sending a group of 15-20 rams into the enemy's town and then just sending in the cavalry to mop up the survivors doesn't work anymore: You have to protect them if you want some of them to reach their target...

Well, why does the wall building feature do such a bad job?... We're talking about a wall entirely built in-game, not about something created in the editor. Also, why doesn't this issue prevent the initial building of the wall, but only prevents the repair? That been said I don't think this is the problem, because it usually does accept to start a new wall from that tower, but that new wall can't be laid where the old wall had been (shows red). You can lay it in another direction if you like. It's like the destroyed wall segment had left something behind preventing a wall to be rebuilt at that place, unless you also destroy the remaining part and rebuild from scratch. It sounds like it is tripping over the terrain conditions for building the wall, often giving me the "can't build over an existing building or resource" message, despite the fact there is neither resource nor building (except the ghost of the old wall), and the fact that if I delete the remaining wall and rebuild the whole thing from scratch, there are suddenly no problems anymore. --Edited to add: Which is particularly ridiculous, since it doesn't mind building a new, independent wall all over the old wall! You can have two walls running over the same spot, no problem there, but you can't have a wall segment rebuilt...

Even building from towers doesn't always work: I've immediately noticed that the walls were tower-centric, and have thus tried deleting a orphaned wall segment so I could try rebuilding from the next tower. Doesn't always work, as I said previously, especially in difficult terrain. You could, no you can't. Somehow the destroyed wall part seems to leave the terrain unfit for wall construction. You can build other buildings there though, that's why I said further up that the Wall Building Authority is extremely finicky. You should be able to build walls in places you can't build houses, not the other way round.

Yes, I have experienced this. Actually the current "when finished, return home, wherever this is" should only work in non-combat situations (and even then, only on demand). In combat situations we need a simple "there is a circle with a small radius around the place you were when combat started, and you can't leave it. If no enemy is inside the permitted movement circle, immediately go back to its center". Note it's defined as a range around a fixed place and thus immutable unless you give new orders. No "there was an enemy near the one I killed, then there was another near that one, so I eventually ended in Australia"... A pack of infantry defending a point should have some limited mobility, so it can intercept passing enemies, but should not be able to wander away. IMHO.

By "workers" I mean soldiers doing gathering/building work, and (un)fortunately they definitely do have a home point, although they don't consistently keep going back to it. I've yet to understand how/why this is. Sometimes it works marvelously well, but just as often it's utterly annoying: The expression "herding cats" comes to mind (although I love cats). That's useful, thanks! Still, my biggest annoyance is when a lone (eyewateringly expensive) archer goes off to face the whole enemy army all on its own, only because it has seen an enemy on the horizon, or when melee troops, instead of remaining under the cover of their artillery (ranged units/forts), just rush forward, and forward, and forward. I didn't ask for berserkers... I've finally edited my unit templates so ranged infantry units default to "Stand Ground" (they're cover, not shock troops), and melee units to "Defensive", so they will give some chase, but not all the way to the enemy's lair! And especially they will stay under the protective cover of the ranged units unless I tell them otherwise. It's no fun trying to implement a strategy with a bunch of stubborn hotheads.

Well, I sure hope that's not that. Even if it was true, setting arbitrarily a "home" point at the moment you switch them is well, let's just call it "suboptimal"*. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the "automatic return after mission end" feature, it would had been really helpful for worker management if it worked consistently*, but it is a double-edged blade, like when your units just kill one single enemy unit, and then call it a day and start going back... And no, I can't have all my units all the time on "aggressive" (especially not when they cost 100 food/400 metal apiece!). There are times for blindly attacking, and there are times for patiently waiting for the right moment. For me at least. "Aggressive" only makes sense when you set your barracks/arsenal rally point somewhere far into the enemy territory, and hit "batch create as many units as the queue can handle" ... For the rest you'd prefer your fragile ranged units to stay put and let the enemy come to them, and your melee units to wait till the ranged units have softened up the enemy before finishing it. That's at least how I play, and I'm expecting to be told that I'm totally wrong and haven't understood anything about this game... The only realization dawning so far is that this game is not for me. * Setting that "home" point is always a little problematic: Sometimes they simply refuse top change point of origin, and you have to run after them as they invariably start wandering back all the way across a "huge" map, despite being desperately needed where you sent them. Sometimes for some reason most units in a group accept the change, but a few don't, resulting in annoying "WTF" moments ("Weren't there 20 units? Why are there only 18 of them now?") -- till you find the lone rebels loitering somewhere far back in the hinterland...

Real simple and straightforward, easy to reproduce: If you change a unit's stance ("aggressive", "defensive" and so on), it also creates a new origin point (don't know what your technical term is, I mean the point the unit will go back to after having finished its task) at the location it was when you made that change, making it wanting to go back to that point. To illustrate and reproduce: Take any barracks far from action, set its "rally point" (destination new units move to) to some distance, and click 3-4 times on some unit, to create several. Now as those new units quit the barracks and head towards their rally point, select them, and just change their stance (to "defensive" for instance). Then deselect them. Remember where the unit was when you did that. Do it at different locations for each unit. You'll see those units continue to their rally point, but instead of staying there, they will immediately go back to the point they were when you changed their stance! The simple stance change also creates an unwanted new "must go back to" location setting...

Okay, so there is no repairing walls. Thanks. That patch suggestion goes back 5 years ago, so I guess it's unfortunately dead.

Let's say I've built a stretch of wall with several segments (wall stretches and their towers). Now the enemy attacked and destroyed some segments. Obviously after the attack is over, I'd like to rebuild the missing parts. Literally more often than not, especially on difficult terrain (slope or near water), the game will refuse to do so (wall to rebuild shows red). Why? I was able to build a wall there previously, why can't I (re)build it now? And if I build a new piece of wall (starting from the other side), I can't reconnect it to the still existing parts, especially if there is no tower left at the end. It's usually easier to build a second wall right over the old wall (!) than try to rebuild its missing parts. Bug, or did I miss some specific command? The game's Wall Building Authority is very finicky BTW, sometimes you have to fish for the one and only pixel which allows you to get your permit... That's not right IMHO, walls have been successfully built on almost impossible terrains (think Great Wall of China or the Wall of Hadrian), normally you should be able to freely build a wall anywhere a human can walk, including in chest-deep water.