ThePoshBarbarian

Honestly reading through these posts, I would recommend if any of you have total war rome 2, to check out the Divide et Impera mod. Granted TW is a in a completely different ballpark in terms of genre, but the DeI devs have managed to make every unit type unique across the various cultures, sub-cultures, and factions. Take for example some of the celtic and gallic factions, they managed to balance 5 different playable factions (scordisci, boii, nervii, galatia, and arverni) to each have different strengths and weaknesses in terms of roster balance. Managed to steal kindly borrow this chart from the DeI devs. Their reasoning for it was they wanted all the playable celtic/gallic factions to be equal in terms of overall strength, but each are specific in what they're strong/weak in, all represented in the 1-5 relative scale scoring, with 1 being the weakest, and 5 being the strongest in terms of unit strength. For example, the Scordisci have some of the strongest hoplite/phalanx/shieldwall units (weird TW specific term, just refers to units that have access to a phalanx like formation), mostly reasoned because they were in contact (and probably conflict) with the illyrians, dacians/getae, thracians, and greeks. In contrast, the boii, who live in/close to the germanic peoples, do not, but they have far better archers. Granted all of this is purely stat balancing, but that encompasses stuff like weapon stats, shield and/or armour stats, entity stats (aka the actual soldier stats like movement speed, melee attack chance, melee block chance, etc) and other things.

Hey so I've just tried to ue the actor editor, and unfortunately I get an error message. I'm on windows 10, and using a28.

Going to put my own implementation opinion out there, always kinda found it weird how 0ad does it but I've gotten used to it somewhat. Though if we were to take a page out of say a simplified "realism" argument, my implementation for damage types would be: hack = blade edge slashing/hacking (if you'll forgive the lack of better words to describe it) aka mostly good against non-armoured foes. (there's just one unit with falxes iirc, for macedonians, they can be an exception by just giving them a bonus against armour) pierce = spears/javelins/bolts/arrows piercing targets, doesn't struggle against armour, just a good all around option crush = a solid mass hitting another, aka big rock from onager/siege ballista crushing someone, or a getting a mace/club hit to the face. Great at dealing with really heavily armoured targets. Slings could be included in this but that's a can of worms. This is just a little thought experiment I've had, honestly I prefer 0ad's current implementation of the damage mechanics. Thinking about a bit more deeply, the system I've written up has some problems when it come to classifying certain units, eg falxes for when thracian/dacians/getae get implemented, or how slingers work (sling bullets are technically speaking a crushing type of damage, but they are also known to pierce through targets given enough force). To balance armour around this system would be difficult me thinks, I personally would use an armour types system with: non armoured = basically basic clothes, no armour, little to no resistance to any damage types organic = aka leather/linen/whatever material that is not made from bronze/iron, good resistance to slashing, decent to slightly below average resistance to crushing, little to none against piercing metalic = iron or bronze, great resistance to slashing, average to poor restistance against piercing, low resistance to crush. Already I'm having problems describing this armour system because of what little I know about armour materials and the physics behind how they mitiagate certain types of damage makes this way too unimmersive/game-ified to me. Again, this was just a thought theory of an implementation, I still think that 0ad's current damage mechanics work very well for it (and imho, a way better representation than AoE2DE does).

Might this tool be added back into the regular game install again? Seems like a very useful tool to modify actor entities with. Been trying to get into modding myself, the only thing that's been an abolute pain has been editing actor models in plain text.