Hi, I checked 0 A.D. around 15 years ago, and only lately had another go at it. I found it quite nice, with some interesting ideas. Lots of respect for the volunteers, it's impressive how it looks already. Obviously it still has many rough and suboptimal things, as expected from an unreleased game (and released ones, for that matter). In some ways it’s so good that I feel compelled to say that in other ways I think it risks missing the mark in making itself attractive to new players, for reasons I might tell later on (obviously I don’t mean to be mean). For now I just wanted to mention a few trivial things I noticed (maybe some are actually implemented and I didn’t find them), I hope this is the right place for this:
1) The loading screen with tips goes away too fast for me, it should say “press any key to continue”.
2) Many times I would have wanted that double clicking on the idle worker button would select all of them.
3) Many times I wanted to remove a few units from a selection. I think this could be done with shift+right click on the selection panel icons, removing a unit from the icon clicked, since just right click removes the whole icon from the selection.
4) Continue Campaign should appear only under Single Player, otherwise seems too redundant, and a bit confusing.
5) New Campaigns shouldn’t be allowed to have the same name as a previous one.
6) Many times I just wanted to Restart Scenario, instead of having to set up everything again, or to Load Game from one.
7) It would be nice to have the option to hide health bars, and better, hide full ones only.
8) I know about ctrl+D, but extending a bit zoom range (both in and out) could be a menu option. And I also found myself wanting to look a bit upwards, but it has to be fixed for gameplay since structures that should not be seen become visible.
9) Camera controls could be applied to the minimap if the cursor is placed on top of it.
10) On the left or right of the game speed button there could be a camera button with all the controls, including one to return to default view, which I don’t remember now if it can be easily done.
11) A visual representation that commands indeed were queued would be helpful.
12) As someone posted in this thread long ago: units should not remember where they were when receiving a standard command, and repairing a dropsite shouldn't be an invitation to gather. All these things can be easily instructed if wanted.
13) The way unit information is displayed doesn’t seem the most intuitive, too much text. It wasn’t evident for me which class structures were, to be able to change phase (one has to build almost everything anyway).
14) There’s no limit of Traders or Merchant Ships a given trading route can have, and there should be because those continuous routes look ugly, maybe could be fixed with a time the unit needs to stop for business, to space them out a bit, automatically limiting their useful number.
15) Capture is interesting but seems broken. Buildings are taken too fast, and then suddenly collapse, it’s unrealistic and not fun. I wonder if capture, garrison and occupy turret (which I don’t know what it does yet) could all be combined in one button, or are there situations where more than one is needed for a given target? I see removing the ability of capturing Fortresses has been proposed, but this destroys realism, as the post before mine states, surely better solutions can be reached.
16) Army placement is not good. Maybe something like Rise of Nations or Total War is hard to code? Where by dragging the cursor at the destination one can see and control the final positioning of troops (considering formation limitations).
17) (Un)garrisoning should be gradual, now it looks unrealistic, and could help with landings in small places. One could drag the unit icons on the panel to reorder them, meaning in which order they would disembark. Doing it in or near a port could make things faster.
18) Ships not taking into account the size of units they are transporting is a mechanic a bit dated.
19) The relationship between groups, formations and battalions is quite messed up. I like all these concepts but I don’t think the implementation is right. I have an idea for it but it would take me a few lines to explain, not the purpose of this list.
20) As pointed out recently, the lettering is way too small, it just doesn’t look good, “unplayable” was mentioned. UI scale is buggy, makes quality worse, and windows won’t fit in the screen. One shouldn’t have to install mods to fix something like this.
Regarding that last point and what I said at the beginning, default settings should be friendly for new players. There are many things I can say about that, along with more suggestions (some historical for the Spartans), if this kind of feedback is wanted.
