Deicide4u

It's getting out of control. Is it possible to do something about it?

There are two (well, three for me) reasons to research Marian Reforms: 1) You are in the lead, and you want to quickly capitalize on that lead by turning all your CS to near-champion level troops. A kind of a "win more" move. The point of Marian Reforms is not to train the new units, but rather convert the existing ones. 2) You are behind, and your only way to somehow survive and counterattack is to get the tech and overwhelm your enemy. A kind of a "last stand gambit" move. Third reason is purely based on fashion. I like the new icons and the unit models, so I research Marian Reforms anyway. They're super cool to look at. Also, you get to train real Legionaries, duh. But, some of your points are valid. Roman basic infantry is strong, even the spearman. Spear cavalry is also great. However, they're not cool

Great suggestions, but this one is too micro intensive. 0 A.D. is not a RPG, players already have a lot to think about during the game. Plus, ranged units already die too fast to cavalry. Roman roads could be a great benefit. Maybe too great, as Romans already got a huge buff in alpha 27. Perhaps, the roads could be made into a neutral structures on some "Roman" maps. Maps with the roman theme will have them. Traps/pits would be a nice addition, and also a good homage to Stronghold. Certain citizen-soldier units could have an option to make them for moderate amount of wood. No need to make them too deadly or too expensive, to avoid abuse.

Romans dominating the Medium AI. Aside from a couple of annoying attacks and 2 siege pushes with rams, the Medium AI was not that difficult to crush.

It wouldn't be slow, just less mechanically intensive. This is primarily a macro game, so better formations could help a player focus on the economy and unit production more. It helps if you know your army won't be decimated by a couple of bolts from bolt shooters and ballistae.

That looks great, @real_tabasco_sauce! Is hero the only one who wears full chain armor? I think I see one armored cavalry unit in the back, but could be just the gray texture.

@WiseKind At this point, you "arguments" start to sound like trolling to me. I'm not reading all of that because you said and they literally can't be compared. The devs are addressing this and it will most likely be fixed in the next release. Can't read everything, sorry.

Are we playing "the philosopher's game" here? I was explicitly talking about the in-game tools. And those should be the same for all players. For multiplayer, at least. I don't care what you do in SP, that's your fun time.

@Seleucids, "llvm" is a binary package in Debian. What you need to check for is llvm-dev https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=llvm-dev "-dev" packages are for building stuff from source.

This is a great bit of info that should definitely be mentioned in the FAQ or some Wiki page. That was my reasoning also, having already experienced how vastly different Age of Empires 2 Easy/Standard and Moderate AIs are. I've tried playing Easy on Defensive expecting some huge losses, but it was still too easy. Guess I should try out Medium now that I'm more accustomed with the game. EDIT: Realized that I'm talking random nonsense, Easy does eventually go P3 because I saw it build Fortresses. You can't build a Fortress in P2. Although it doesn't build a lot of champions, if any. Maybe you never did allow it to build up? @Seleucids

IMHO, the early game ends once you reach the Town phase and build a Market.

Base gather rate for wood is 0.75 for soldiers and 0.70 for women. The difference is almost negligible. Especially in the early game, I want to save as much wood as I can, so using women to gather wood is more than viable.

Any tool, be it GUI mod or any other mod, that helps one player play the game faster than the other player, is cheating. In RTS games, time is a very important factor. It's in the name. If something helps me play faster than you and it's not an official part of the game, then that something is a "cheat" tool. I think this is obvious.

We already have a filter for maps that are "Best for MP". We also have a filter for "Naval Maps" only. Default is just the same as "All Maps", if I'm seeing right. If you install "Community Maps" mod, it adds a filter for them. Add in filters for "Random Naval Map" and "Random Land Map", and it won't be overwhelming. We can just mimic Age of Empires 2 for this, no need to make it complicated.

"Bad" maps can be challenging and the imbalanced design can be viewed as additional fun factor, especially if the map is pretty or "looks cool". Pompeii, for example, is a horrible map. But, it looks cool and the buildable layout provides some challenge to the player. A better criteria would be to either remove or update maps where the AI is broken. No use in keeping a map that's useless for SP.

@LienRag, one option could be to move access to Battering Rams to the Town phase. No Catapults and Bolt shooters, just rams. This would allow more military options, earlier. Reasoning is that in all "Age of" games, players have access to siege weapons in the second-to-last age. Weak reasoning, I know. Here's a better one: no more only "boom and turtle to win" strategies. No need to do it in the next release, though. EDIT: Also off-topic, so regard the above thought as just me thinking out-loud.

@TheCJ while that may be true, food is much easier to gather. I can have 30-35 women on 6-7 fields around my starting CC and farmstead and have near infinite food as long as I keep them safe. However, I'm forced to expand once my initial supply of wood runs dry. My wood gatherers are also more vulnerable to enemy raids. I also need to keep building storehouses next to the forest as my workers chop it down, to reduce the drop-off time. Which ironically costs me more wood.

Also, women are useless in a fight while soldiers can at least defend your town. Another aspect to consider.

Spartans defeating the Persian "Empire" on the ash-covered Pompeii. I barely had room to build anything here, so I had to rush. Luckily, Spartans have some great early champions Those 5 workers on food are from just one farm. I had 4 fishing boats that were AFK.

Snap is universally hated in the Linux world, so your data is a bit...inadequate. I'd think most players will either use their distro's package, or just download and play on their Windows PC. Also, Debian has backports and Ubuntu has PPA's if new versions are wanted. Either way, if the increased training times would cause another rift within the "pro" community, then you'd better not do that. The game needs good players to guide others. EDIT: Increased training times, not decreased.

Which version of Kubuntu do you use? Either way, you can use a Snap package to install it, or use a PPA if you're allergic to Canonical. Link to the official instructions: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/GettingTheUnixRelease#snap

Spoiler, it's a lot of fun. Now that I've spoiled the entire premise of this post, I wanted to thank the development and art team for making something truly unique. I've been following 0 A.D. since I got interested in Linux (around 7-8 years ago), because it was the first package listed in Synaptic, the old GUI package manager. I couldn't play it at the time, my computer barely ran Windows 7, let alone an RTS game full of eye-candy detail. Well, now I can, and the feeling of finally being able to play THAT ONE FREE GAME I've always wanted to play is phenomenal. The fact that this game is free (as in freedom!) is a miracle. I can't even fathom how much work went into this game. Technically, it feels the most like Age of Mythology, while gameplay is most similar to Age of Empires 2. The choice of civilizations is at first daunting, but each one plays similarly enough that you could just pick any and learn as you go. One feature stands out, and it's not intuitive at first. Citizen Soldiers (CS) are both your workers and your basic soldiers. They cost Wood in addition to Food, and some of the swordsmen types can even cost Metal. They might be weak, but they're easy to mass. You would use them primarily to gather Stone and Metal, with few of them on Wood (females gather Wood only slightly slower than males). Since females will be your primary gatherers in the early game, you should avoid making too many of CS in the Village phase. The game begins in earnest in the Town phase, when more of your soldiers become available. Most champion units are still locked behind City phase. More importantly, siege engines can also only be built in this phase (baring a few civs), so your options at storming the enemy towns are limited until the City phase. This might be my only complaint so far. In Age of Empires 2 or Age of Mythology, you get access to siege weapons in the 3rd phase. In addition, 20 Knights can level the Town Center alone, if it's not defended. In 0 A.D., attacking a Civic Center with 20 Town phase cavalry units will likely result in utter failure, wasting resources. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe not. It depends on what kind of player you are. But players should get an option that is not simply "move to the City phase ASAP". Other than that, I had a blast playing Romans, Athenians and Persians so far. I'll try some other civilizations (SPARTAAAAANS! READY!) and ultimately decide on my "goto" civ. This is really a fun game to play on a relaxing rainy day. Absolute chill when compared to the APM madness in StarCraft. And I love it. Thank you so much.

@Seleucids, I can't see the images.

Text about the wolf warriors. Seems like it could be possible that some ferocious German warriors in ancient times would dress themselves in wolf skins. Especially as a way to "summon" the strength of mythological or religious wolf totem. I don't think that the wolf skin would be very effective as a suit of armor, though. Maybe add them as very brutal, very aggressive melee glass cannon shock troops?

Yes, please. I don't want to wait forever for my infantry or rams to catch up to the rest of the army. And I surely don't want to wait forever for my buildings to complete. Not sure if I'd like this change, but I'm not a pro. I suck at this game, so I'll let better players argue with this.