krt0143

I was complaining that there were no infantry axemen for north European civilizations, so I just made me a Briton axeman this morning. Making the templates is easy (just need to find in which files all the different parts of information are scattered), but there was no actual mesh for an infantry axeman I could see (and scavenge!) in "art/units", and that's the most difficult part... Until I noticed that those "art" .xml files describe some sort of "action figure" you can actually clothe and equip to your liking! And so I built myself a Celtic heavy axeman, and it works! Great system guys! Kudos! No to pat myself in the back, but not bad for somebody who installed 0 A.D. for the first time 8 days ago...

Thanks, but I think I'll stick to Windows for the time being. Linux for work, Windows for games...

Larger range is alright, but being able to do things through supposedly impassable structures is only okay as long as everything is yours... The enemy being able to ignore your painstakingly erected walls and go straight through them is definitely a bug!

Uh. I posted something similar here. In both case it's probably due to the collision bounding box being tiny, and the active point being in front of it, some distance in front of the bounding box. As a result, bigger units (ships, but apparently also elephants) can do things on the other side of otherwise impenetrable obstacles, like houses or walls or just anything actually... Needs to be fixed, because it breaks gameplay: If you build an obstacle, you don't expect some units to simply be able to stick their noses through it and do their thing like nothing happened...

Of course the elegant solution would be to not use small, round bounding boxes. It would also prevent those long, narrow ships to constantly do the clock hand thing while they try to decide in which direction they should go... But I admit I don't know what that entails and how impossible difficult this is. It would certainly lead to more ships getting stuck, for instance when entering a space narrower than their lengths and wanting to turn around.

Didn't solve the "Instant Warship" mystery, but I noticed something quite annoying: The game ignores walls when you embark/debark ships. (Works for both players and all kind of ships.) Backstory: Still on my overrun coast, there are some low cliffs I was hoping would be steep enough to prevent landing, but they weren't. So I built palisades on top. And observed Carthaginian ships arriving, pointing their nose through the cliff and the wall, and injecting their load of soldiers on top of the cliff, on the other side of the palisade! Yikes. ...Already walls and fortifications are just a minor annoyance in 0 A.D, and now ships ignore them totally! I'd rank that "needs to be fixed ASAP", it is beyond ridiculous for a game which prides itself on being historically accurate: Teleporting to shore was invented in 1966 with Star Trek... Serious now, from what I see, the problem is that collision is determined by a smallish circle in the ships center, while the loading/unloading point is somewhere far on their long noses. Noses which are far outside the bounding box, and thus can pass through anything... I guess the only solution besides changing bounding boxes' shapes, would be to put the loading/unloading point smack in the center of the ship.

Okay thanks, did that!

Unrelated but won't spam the forum with new threads: It worked, I got my little palisade fort, and asked it to train a unit. It spawned an error like "WARNING: Trainer without Production Queue found: 13699." but apparently still started training that unit (according to the icon on top right of the screen). There is no queue shown for the building though. This is the relevant tag in the building.xml: <Trainer> <Entities datatype="tokens"> units/{civ}/infantry_spearman_b units/{civ}/infantry_pikeman_b units/{civ}/infantry_maceman_b units/{civ}/infantry_axeman_b units/{civ}/infantry_swordsman_b units/{civ}/infantry_javelineer_b units/{civ}/infantry_slinger_b units/{civ}/infantry_archer_b units/{civ}/cavalry_javelineer_b </Entities> </Trainer> Pretty much vanilla, I don't see why it bugs.

Thank you for the quick reply! !!! How could I have missed it?... Yes, that sounds better for this specific case. Thanks, I'm back modding...

Where does 0 A.D. define what structures units can build - or not? (for instance the fact champion units don't build anything, others do?) I've looked and looked and didn't find anything, yet it has to be somewhere... I've made a brand new structure (copy of the roman Army Camp), and it works just fine in the game (if I place it in a map using the editor), but my builder units don't know how to build it: It doesn't appear in their list. I guess I have to declare it somewhere as "buildable" first, isn't it. Where? (I've put a "<Civ>brit</Civ>" line inside the structure's "<Identity>" tag, that's all I could think of, but apparently this isn't enough.)

No, it's definitely not a rights issue since the game doesn't have a problem writing logs and cache. I think I recall having disabled replays because I've never ever bothered viewing one (what for? I was there...), so they are just useless clutter. That been said, my test scenario (the one I'm using to test my civ mod in) is that same giant Corsica/Sardinia scenario, so I'll have many occasions to check that out. At some point I'll be able to time how long the AI needs to build a unit.

Sure, but the actual question here is rather "where did that ship come from?". As I said I don't know when that dock started building, but I definitely know it shouldn't have the time to train a quinquereme!... Unfortunately this will remain a mystery, because for some reason my "replays" list is totally empty. Go figure. Oh well, I've moved on, I've better things to do, like for instance re-balance the (IMHO pretty useless) fortifications, so you can't just destroy a tower with a dozen foot soldiers. There was a reason they had to invent siege weapons back then...

Thanks, great, will do that.

Not necessarily: The opposite of "aggressive" can also be "apathetic" or "conflict averse" (fleeing if attacked). Just saying. About tuning the AI, I'd love to be able to slow down its actions, not by depriving it of resources, but simply by introducing almost human second-long pauses between each action. My fingers don't move at 4.7 GHz...

Indeed. The dock seems to have been built rather quickly, but I don't know how long it was building before it finished, all I know is that the time I first saw it there only was a rope circle, next thing the dock was ready. Now I've never played the Carthaginians, I'm not familiar with their dock-building animation, so I'm tempted to give it the benefit of the doubt. The ship on the other hand came right from nowhere. Unless they can teleport, it couldn't have arrived, enter the dock and leave the dock, there wasn't the time. As I said my own ship (short, stubby one) had only traveled one single ship's length in that time. Yes, more or less: First time I spotted the dock I had a good look at it because I had never seen this rope circle before. Then, a very short time later, the rope circle had turned into a dock + a quinquereme. As I said just above, that quinquereme can't have arrived from elsewhere given the time frames involved. Anyway: What about replay, can you freely watch any place on the map? Can you change time like in the game? I don't want to wait for an hour...

I've played a Corsica vs. Sardinia map, myself as Britons, the AI as Carthaginians (yes, yes, it went badly. Needless to say, the Briton's best (and only) warships, even full with units, are no match for a quinquereme, and even less for several of them (also full of units)). But that's not why I started this thread. At some point (at turtle speed) I called my last ship remaining to put it out of danger, and while it was sloooowly passing one of those small beaches, I noticed a rope circle, the AI was building a dock. I momentarily focused on other, more pressing issues, but when an instant later I went back to my lone warship (which was still crossing that beach), the enemy dock was finished, and a fresh quinquereme was besides it! Remember, everything was at turtle speed: My warship had traveled less than one ship's length since that dock was still a rope enclosure, and in what would had been 1-2 seconds in normal time, that dock had had the time to finish being built and to produce a heavy warship! How fast do those Carthaginians build those heavy warships? To put it in perspective, at turtle speed building one of my medium warships took an eternity, 3-4 minutes of play time (yes, fully upgraded dock)! Any explanation? Does the AI get instant unit generation, or is "Instant Heavy Warship" (just add water) a Carthaginians' perk?

Okay, mea culpa, me culpa, mea maxima culpa. On "normal" difficulty the AI does indeed use ships to transport troops, and it does it fast. (I had just reached the second age.) Partly good news, since it means I can play those sea maps I like, partly bad news since I'll get my backside handed to me by most civilizations (Britons aren't a seafaring civilization...). In my test I played against the Carthaginians (rich idea!), who immediately built a dock, then a second, which immediately built a quinquereme, then a second, and then started the incessant charter flights to my shore... There was no way I could stop them with my "medium warship" ("medium" standing for "mediocre" I guess), even after filling it with slingers. As for towers, they don't even bother my frail little warship, so I guess the catapult-tooting quinqueremes would have them for appetizers. I was toast. My, the AI is fast, very fast. I don't mind it to be efficient or ruthless, that's actually good, but I sure mind it to be lightning fast. As said elsewhere I'm past my prime, and need to catch my breath every now and then.

Depends on the size of the map, I play on big maps... Also, when my rams plow through the enemy city, men fight but the women scatter, sometimes they run across the whole map (usually they try to build a new town center, if they have the resources). If for some reason I didn't see in which direction everyone left, I need to sift through the whole map... Anyway, my point is, I vote for surrender. AoE had it, and it sure sped things up. At some point the AI knows it has no real chance of survival anymore, in this case it should give up (but not too soon either, or you should have the option to refuse).

No, that wasn't the case. I checked before razing everything because I was curious what the AI had been doing all that time, and I'm sorry to say "not much". But then again I was on "easy" setting, so that might change something. Oh well, I''ll try later this afternoon on "normal" difficulty.

Definitely not! If I was able to change the game, I would make rams an absolute pain to build and use. Probably in the way detailed above (i.e. they hardly move, so you have to build them very close to the structure you want to attack). And ships wouldn't be able to carry them at all. I wouldn't have arsenals at all, I would have a very expensive unit ("siege engineer"), who is the only one able to build those weapons (with the help of standard workers, but you need a siege engineer for the building to progress). So the enemy would try to kill your siege engineer, and you would need to protect him, despite him needing to be on the front lines to build those siege weapons close enough to their target. This would make ram rushes impossible, or at least totally impractical.

Happens to me all the time: I spend 10 (real) minutes sending cavalry units all across the map hunting for the last woman hiding under a tree... I'd really appreciate if the AI gracefully surrendered in those cases...

I was hoping someone would... All right, I'm game (pun intended): I'll try a Corsica/Sardinia map and watch what the AI will do. In this map (as far as I have understood) you're both on opposite sides of a large straight of water, so if the AI doesn't use ships it won't ever become a threat. (I'll try it later today, right now Real Life calls)

I see! Thanks.

I'd really like to! But given the AI's (lack of) capacity to handle ships, they don't risk anything. The AI builds towers along its coastlines, but given ships' and rams' resistance to arrows they could as well build houses, it would be just as threatening. That been said, I tried it, and discovered that units inside a unit count towards the ships capacity, so a ram with 10 infantry soldiers counts as 11 units. That's fortunate, although it doesn't change the "40 rams on a dead man's chest" issue...

So, for a skirmish map I need to use those. Got it. Thank you! A wild female? And why would the house-trained (no pun intended!) female be any different??? I'm confused.