SDM

Ayakashi: Just wondering, where do you get the sources for Han-style architecture from? There are so few English sources on Han architecture (minus the mingqi potteries) that I'd be happy with reading just about anything related.

That's amazing!

This sounds cool yet broken. If it can be balanced without feeling dumb, I'm all for it.

I'd love to try this out! It looks like this can be used as a standard for designing minifactions.

Oh, I thought it was implemented when near trees like in BMFE2. Since day/night cycle is not scheduled to be in this release, I think stealth near trees would be better (and more faction-specific than stealth when idle at night, which I think should be unit-specific.) Edit: Possibly have it so that Iberians can be stealthed when idle depending on geography may work to emphasize ambush placements. For example, when Iberians are near a mountain or valley or forested terrain, they will be automatically stealthed when not in combat and not moving. Does the terrain store any other information besides height at this point in development?

To add to the idea, why not make it so that a certain civilization (in this case, Iberians) have units that can ghost through trees by ignoring collision detection? Sort of like how Star Craft miners ignore collision. Perhaps that in order to balance this, can only attack when they're not colliding with trees. Another idea would be to borrow from the two most well-known MOBAs. Both League of Legends and DOTA have bushes that grant the players invisibility, which would work well for ambushes (and it's a huge gameplay element). This idea is less faction-specific than the one above, however. Finally, simply have the Iberians be stealthed when near trees. I believe that Warcraft III's Night Elves and LOTR BFME2 Elves did something to this effect. I'm no programmer, but this sounds like the most conservative option available.

Can someone confirm that this can't be done in the current Alpha? I'm hopeful that scripting/tabling will allow this to work without programming. e: If it can't be done at the moment, I'm certain that it will be possible at some point in time. Suicidal Units, Aura Effects, and Damage-Over-Time effects have been a staple of RTS since Warcraft.

Non-German swastika's are exempt from being banned to begin with, so they can be used regardless of any ban. Although yes, I do believe that by attempting to be authentic and historically accurate, the non-German swastikas are also doubly exempt because of this as well.

If we really need to see nudity* and more blood, someone is bound to make an unofficial "Rated M" mod. I'm assuming the game itself is going to be released with a E Rating in mind. *While I don't necessarily believe that nudity for historical accuracy's sake is particularly offensive, I can understand that some people may have some misgivings about nudity in general, and it seems more acceptable to censor nudity in this situation than to allow it in order to allow more people to enjoy the game.

Can it be set as an Ai-specific animal stance/formation?

I'm okay with WFG not reporting what they've done with our money yet if there is no visible progress as long as they're still working on it. And I know they're still working on it. An update every month regarding the status of the funds is not as essential as plowing through technical hurdles. I feel that the lack of transparencies allow for more experimentation and risks, something I'm very okay with. After all, the fund raiser was pretty much an investment opportunity (with the goal of having an an awesome game in return), and not all of our money is going to be spent on value-added services.

Just to make things clear, would it be "easy" to mod a civilization so that they can build roads that increase walking speed of all units? This would be irrespective of path-finding for reasons stated above and unofficial because it conflicts with the design goals for the game. Just in case a modding team wants to mod a Road Micromanagement Mod, for example.

Here's a book that has a transcriptions of Egyptian Hieroglyphics. The e-book itself is only $8, but even the preview seems useful. I don't know whether all or most of the transcriptions are when the Demotic language was spoken, but it's a great source nonetheless. As an example, Lion.Kazen's transliteration of temple is .hw.t-ntr. The transliteration in this book has it spelled He-t for the first part of the word, which is more "pronounceable" than the transliteration. Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=WUppj1LHdJ4C&pg=PR6&dq=temple&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LjuKUu7mCIKiyAGmw4H4Dg&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=temple&f=false

One way to add avert the priests-as-healer trope would be to have physicians as a trainable unit and have them be more effective healers while priests be units that act as general support units. Or just have doctors be more effective priests.

Indeed. I would also argue that geographic barriers can and do split single cultures into many. Unless you can validly prove that the "Celts" and the "Germanics" share the same cultures and languages, I wouldn't consider grouping them together, just like how it wouldn't be fair to group all Amerindian peoples together even as subfactions. Archeological sources and linguistics are the best tools we have, contrary to what one member in this thread may say. I wouldn't rely on genetics as much.

At the moment, I would say all. Manually canceling units from garrisoning should be easier than manually adding units to a garrison, and I don't trust simple heuristics to micromanage my game for me, anyway. On a different tangent, I think it's also more mod-friendly if it's not hard-coded to distinguish female workers from other workers (soft-coding is fine provided the modders can easily change it). For example, mods with only one type of workers or mods where female workers are more proficient in combat.

The concept looks swell! I hope it still retains its beauty when you standardize the model to fit into 0 A.D.

For what it's worth, I agree on having only one alert button with a finite radius. The one alert is to minimize automatic micromanagement as much as possible.

I thought that was algae or moss!

I was wondering if it was possible to do what the thread title says. They tend to distract me from the content of the post, especially if they make up more than two-thirds of the lines in the post.

NoMolester has a point. Being a nation isn't even a criteria to becoming a playable faction to begin with (see Athens and Sparta). If the work required to make a minifaction is equivalent or greater than the work required to create a playable faction, then the minifaction should either be made a playable faction or scrapped. I am not commenting on the specifics of your idea, but this axiom should be a factor in developing a minifaction as opposed to a playable faction. Diversity is a great if it can be implemented in a reasonable fashion. What is considered reasonable is for the content creators to decide. But from a player's perspective, a minifaction that acts exactly like or very similarly to a normal faction but is unplayable is very far from being reasonable. The point of this thread is to discuss/debate the merits of ways to implement minifactions. We should therefore be serious in discussing how minifactions should be implemented; and if we see something we believe to be a bad idea, we should respectfully point it out and explain why the idea is bad. The alternative is groupthink, bad ideas/implementations, and uninteresting monologues.

From reading through the link below, I'm thinking that the icons should be a horn of some sort rather than a bell. http://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/cms/karwansaray/ancient-warfare/about/readmore-aw/13-ancient-warfare/ancient-warfare-issues/45-ancient-warfare-iii-6.html

My mistake. I was paying attention to the spots, and noticed that it wasn't exact and thought it was more of an inspiration than a copy. But since we have other resources, I'm hoping to see a less controversial cheetah.

As long as zentaoaki isn't copying the cheetah exactly, it should be okay. http://painting.about.com/cs/artistscopyright/f/copyrightfaq7.htm EDIT: Clicking other links from that same site, it seems that it should be a free reference to begin with: http://painting.about.com/od/artistreferencephotos/Reference_Photographs_for_Artists.htm leads to http://painting.about.com/od/artistreferencephotos/ig/Reference-Photos--Cheetahs/ And here is About.com's terms of use for their photos: http://painting.about.com/od/artistreferencephotos/f/FAQTermRefPhoto.htm

Just to clarify, you're simply informing us rather than suggesting change, right?