Deicide4u

I was just frustrated with the broken AI. I don't really care about the icons. Fix the mouse cursor bug, make Fortresses great again and I'll be good. Or just show the AI how to research them champions.

Thanks for the link, I'm glad you're already working on it. That Youtube comment mentioned at the top of the issue is also by me, it's just that I've deleted my channel so it's no longer there. Just wanted to correct myself since I saw your video of the issue. It does exist in A23b, albeit mostly on the top-left corner. On A27, it was on the lower-right corner most of the time. The cursor icon changes to the Windows one, causing the game to "lag" by not reacting to the cursor input. There isn't any performance-related lag, only that the input is not registered by the game. Sorry for the inconvenience. EDIT: Alpha 18 has the same issue. So, the bug is long-standing.

No, no lags with the arrow keys. Just when moving the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen. I'm using Windows 11. Intel UHD card.

I've installed Alpha 23b and it's what I recommend to anyone who has issue with this version. The game still looks great, uses around 50% less resources and plays better overall. I also don't have weird mouse cursor lags when moving it to edges of the screen. This is wrong, see further replies. This will be my harshest critic of the game so far, seeing how it looked and felt to play before. LOL at this. I'm all for improvements, but the development needs to be streamlined and focused on gameplay. Not eye-candy. Eye candy art in a strategy game can often be bad. Sometimes, it can even alienate the players. I'm speaking as someone who played RTS games since childhood, and knows which features are good, and which are bad for the player. Why were resource icons replaced? They look perfectly fine to me in alpha 23. Why did we add worker counters below the resources? Now the player's attention is always on those counters, affecting the gameplay and fun. I want to play a RTS, not look at my worker counters all the time. Who cares, they are fine for quickly checking farms. Why were great hero models removed from unit portraits and replaced with lame images? We don't know, but we have lame hero images as portraits now. Also, we removed a bunch of tech from blacksmiths and replaced some good-looking unit portraits with lame ones. Irrelevant. Why females build everything now? It's just visual clutter, especially in the early game. It also lessened the distinction between pure economy units and CS. Why were champions and siege removed from Fortresses? Among other bad gameplay changes, it broke single-player AI. Now it doesn't train champions in newer versions, except for elephants. Not a single champion unit trained in most games on Alpha 27, even on Hard. My guess is because it doesn't know how to research the unlock tech at Barracks and Stables. It doesn't have to research anything to train the elephants, so it can train them. Nope, it trains champion units just fine. I won't bore you with more details, you get the picture. The game stayed at alpha 23 for nearly 2 and a half years. There was no reason to change the core gameplay and break everything just for "better multiplayer" or whatever. Hopefully you stop with the eye candy and focus more on the gameplay. Cheers.

Thanks. It seems like the default bot can't train champions. It also doesn't upgrade weapons and armor at the Forge. My suspicion is that changes made in Alpha 24 broke the AI. AI used to train champions at the Fortress, now it can't. Maybe, I did not test this. EDIT: Ok, so the AI is definitely broken in Alpha 24 and up. I'm playing a match on Alpha 23 and the AI WITHDREW its forces once it realized he doesn't have enough to beat me. I'm still playing so I'd expect him to come with champions soon.

I will try Alpha 18 and see if the balance back then suits me better. It added the AI saved games and there is no capturing. Also, the tech tree seems to be simpler. EDIT: Loving the change of pace so far. Some things I like at first glance: 1) Champions and siege weapons are trainable in Fortresses, 2) Technology is much more streamlined and it's not overwhelming you with useless stuff, 3) Gaul Fanatics trained at the Tavern, a special building. A lot of other champion units are trainable mostly in their special buildings, 4) I like the older unit portraits better. Purely subjective, though, 5) Less clutter in UI means you are more focused on the game. Options are all on one screen, the game is not bombarding you with choice, 6) No Stables, everything is trained at the Barracks. Stables are historically used to house horses, not to train military, 7) Better performance, no mouse lag while scrolling the edges of the screen. Some things that are maybe bad or not finished: 1) Double cavalry speed bonus tech, 2) No good naval warships in this Alpha. It's ok, I don't like naval combat anyway.

Hi @mod_3d, does your expert AI mod require Volatile markets mod? Or is it separate? Default Petra no longer cuts it for me.

Metal is used in a lot of very important, expensive technologies. Stone is used mostly in siege weapons, production buildings and defensive techs. Slingers are exception to the rule, as they are one of the only "regular" ways to spend your excess of stone (unless you're a turtling player). Metal is also used for traders. If you want to generate resources via trade, you need a lot of metal.

Which is not the case as almost all champions cost a hefty amount of metal. If you include resource rarity as factor, your "Cost" column goes up considerably. If you deny metal to your enemy, he can't train a lot of champions. While you can spam CS ad infinitum to harass him. We can also nerf barter at the Market, to make it more of a utility you'd use sparingly. It mustn't serve as a substitute for not gathering a certain resource. Maybe boost the resource gain from traders a bit, to balance it out. A really good buff would be reducing or removing the metal cost for traders. I shouldn't need to pay 80 metal for a single trader.

It was a challenge, but it is viable. Was it efficient? No. The only good part of it is that my elite troops destroyed his first attack without breaking a sweat. I had APM taxing with re-shuffling of Barracks and Stable garrisons whenever my CS finished training in them. Easier to just rally them on some trees or mines and forget about them until an attack comes. You really feel that opportunity cost of not using your CS to work. Half of your population in the early to mid game feels useless. Oh, well. Experiment failed successfully. I'll just stick to making some females to gather food.

How viable are the "women only" economic strategies? I'm thinking about using women to gathet food, wood, stone and metal and treat all other units as your army. With tech upgrades, they should gather stone and metal at an acceptable rate. This ties into one of my previous topics about Citizen soldiers having more of a military role. Also, I'm asking from a more casual perspective, so mostly vs AI. This strategy WILL fall apart in the current economic model where your pure gatherers (women, lol) are severely handicapped when gathering stone and metal. EDIT: As to inevitable "what will your CS do, just sit around in base and do nothing?"....they will stay in towers/walls or train in barracks/stables. Like soldiers in real life would. EDIT2: I have a game playing as Romans going on now, will try this and let you know how it ends. Romans and Spartans should have some advantages here.

Strongly agree. Champions should be available only in Fortresses and special civ-specific buildings. Either that or increase the cost of unlock techs.

Of course they are strong. They are also very expensive to train. Also, your civ has it's own champions. The players that are left alone to boom will naturally dominate the late game. This booming tactic is also much more reliable in team games. Your team needs to figure out who is the boomer, then harras him. On the contrary, capture should be restricted to few normal buildings. You first complain how capture is broken (which it is in vanilla), then you complain how it's not intuitive or default in this version. My opinion is that you shouldn't be able to capture certain key buildings like Fortresses and Civic Centers, but that is another discussion. The Community mod is now available for A27, and it addresses some points you mentioned.

@Genava55 Ancient Egyptians are not the same people as the people that currently live in modern "Egypt".

We can do both? Germans (Cimbri) are almost complete and will most likely be introduced in the next release.

Thanks, but Stan already said that those portraits are only available for few civs. Yes, this is the part that all proponents of modern looking graphics ignore. Real world is messy, and the more you want your game to look like real world, more cruft it will have. A lot of short-sighted people play video games, and they often get lost in little superfluous details, become unable to follow what's happening on the screen.

Sadly, alpha 13 has many issues, one of the game breaking ones being: AI stops working after loading a saved game. Also, had a crash 15 minutes into one game. So, back to Alpha 27 I go! Here's Leonidas with his champions after destroying some Indian people on Death Canyon. I play the game at around average quality and no shadows (because integrated GPU), yet the models still look great.

Well, you would also port any bug fixes and hardware enablement code so that the game would run on modern systems well. I can't share the alpha 27 screenshots as I don't have it installed right now (I have the configs backed up, so it's easy to re-install). But, you should be able to start a game and compare. Here are the Spartans, Oasis 11 scenario. I might share more screens later when I get a chance to build up a town.

I've tried Alpha 13 mainly because of the old damage and armor calculation. However, I was more impressed with the older art style, especially the unit icons and resources. I've got to admit, I prefer the older icons and art style. Spartan unit icons in alpha 13 are superb. It's also much more clearer what is what. If you fork alpha 13, apply some polish to the GUI, fix bugs and rework the balance around that version, you'd get a release-ready game. After you add some new civilizations that were released after, of course.

In my experience in games vs the AI, I don't think it is. On medium and above difficulties, the AI is strong if left unchecked. That said, I'm mostly playing 1vs1 games. Not sure how performant would team games be.

Thanks for the suggestions, they might help others who have the same issue. I've already downloaded the mod manually before posting the thread. @real_tabasco_sauce, Random map Gulf of Bothnia crashes the game when using the mod. Winter biome. Tried Coast Range, arctic biome, and it works. Maybe some other popular maps crash.

I am running alpha 27. When I try to download mods using the mod manager, it errors out: I ended up downloading the mod manually (the fixed Community Mod). Does anyone have the same error?

And where is your ally and what's he/she doing? The complaint is oddly specific. I don't think camels are any better for raids than any other cavalry. In most cases like these, it comes down to micro, APM and resistance to pressure. People under pressure make more mistakes, that's another reason to rush. If the enemy is rushing, he isn't booming. So, it comes down to how much damage he can do to justify his military investment.

That's the purpose of walls. Also, you wall off the most vulnerable positions to force the attacker into a more favorable position for your army. I rarely build walls in any RTS, but I would be very frustrated if my opponent walled off his base. That means I have no viable entry until siege weapons become available. Walls are not built frequently in 0 A. D., and that means they need some changes to make them more affordable. The recent changes to building armor by @real_tabasco_sauce in the Community mod will also make them more desirable.

Thanks, all great and needed changes. Needing siege for every single building, including towers, is just a waste of time. Attack priority change is more of a bug fix, than a change, IMO. Just wanted to ask about it, then I saw this. Thanks. I'll try it, already have community maps mod for a while.