stevenlau

After Han captures a Persian CC, a hidden unit becomes available in that CC: Han Cavalry Crossbowman. This unit is never mentioned in Structure Trees.

I have been playing hundreds of games of 1 vs 5 very hard aggressive AI. I think I have reached a bottleneck. I am sharing my findings and see if other players have played similarly with different strategies. Game setting: My civ: Han AI civ: Mauryas (for their archers and champs) AI mode: Very hard, aggressive Map: Mainland normal 1 vs 3 is quite practical. If played well, one can use sword cav to run around the map and kill all units quite quickly. 1 vs 4 is still practical. Use sword cav to kill two of them, use spearman to defend the other two. Boom up and attack with full upgrades + heroes + champ cav. For 1 vs 5, if played really well, one may use sword cav to kill one neighbour. The other four AI will send reinforcements there, and your sword cav can kill them conveniently as well. Use spearmen (with sword cav) to defend the CC. Slowly boom up equally with spearmen and sword cav, and attack with full upgrades + heroes + champ cav. Then I tried the same strategy to play 1 vs 5 Macedonian and I found that sword cav is super weak towards pikemen. When against < 5 spearmen, I can often use 20 sword cav to attack head on. However, when fighting with pikemen, they are like invincible meat shield. What's worse, Macedonian AI seems to attack very early at minute 6 when I have only very few infantry, while Mauryas usually attack after minute 8. On the other hand, playing 1 vs 5 with defensive strategy is super difficult. While you are booming with infantry, 5 armies will attack you. It takes so long to kill the pikemen. They ruin both your army and economy, and you just couldn't recover quick enough. It appears that Han vs 5 Macedonian very hard aggressive AI is impossible. The bottleneck is pikemen. Any good strategies to fight pikemen?

Side tracking a bit. The two replies above mentioned "diminishing returns" and "farm faster". These are based on the rule saying "assigning multiple farmers on a field would make them farm less efficiently". While I do see this description in the in game Structure Tree, in theory all farmers should farm at a rate of 0.5 grain per second. Is the "diminishing return" an actual rule in the game? If so, to be precise how is the diminishing calculated?

Problem: I installed A27 on 2nd Feb using homebrew on macOS M1 and played for 2 days. I didn't install any mod. On 4th Feb, when I launch 0ad it suddenly says "The application is broken. Please move it to Trashbin". Fix: I then downloaded the official A27 .dmg and installed that way. Now it works again.

Problem: As in the new release of A27, the farmstead farming tech upgrade time costs are 40s, 50s and 60s respectively. However, for Han they become 50s, 60s and 70s respectively. This is a disadvantage for Han. Cause: In early revisions of A26, the bonuses for farming tech in Han was +25% (in contrast with +20% for other civs), justifying the extra time cost. However, the bonuses were later standardized to +20%. Consequently, the extra time cost becomes redundant. Relevant commit: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/commit/b4155900d3356bd62af7061b0890e7744332ba5e