wraitii

Mostly I wonder if the "300 of everything" is the best choice. I'd probably prefer to have 300/300/100/100 settings or some such. That being said, this is tangential, but same as we balance for maps, we must balance for the usual game settings (300 pop, standard res, ...)

I think it might help to reduce the starting stone & metal, too. 300 stone covers a lot of ground.

Diffs can be opened for anything, it means little and less. ---- Our current design calls for all resource to be important for all civilisations, in various doses. We could have a setup where some civs don't really need resource X but resource Y instead, but things are really not setup like that right now, and I agree with Thorfinn that the gathering differences aren't interesting enough to justify it. I'm seeing some ideas that I agree with. Now we need to get real concrete and start making some diffs: - Making CCs cost more stone, less metal - Making military buildings cost stone for all civs - we can still make it slightly different depending on the civ, but it ought be balanced. Balancing against wood is likely a poor idea, since wood is much more accessible in general. - Making more buildings cost stone. - Making some techs cost stone ("which" is the question). - ...

Correct, there's a few hotkeys that aren't used by default.

I think you've misread, 'hotkey.camera.down' is S or DownArrow on GitHub too. Maybe you've confused it with 'rotate down'?

Everything is specified here: https://github.com/0ad/0ad/blob/master/binaries/data/config/default.cfg

I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes, since it's also easier to chase units (and efficient kiting would already use formations). That could work, but it could lead to issues: javelineers, with their lower range, will have trouble flanking melee units. If we increase their damage to compensate, they'll become OP from the back. And/or it relegates them to being anti-ranged units. Flanking is mostly a cavalry thing. And how much would it change DPS in combat situation? Archers are already close to being OP, and this could make the more powerful (but it could also be a large nerf). That being said, the anti-kiting potential is interesting. I'm not certain directionality is the way to go, but maybe it'd be a useful addition for this particular setup. I'm not _opposed_ to the idea, as I do see how it could add tactical depth, I'm just quite wary of unintended side effects.

I mean, it's been done. I don't really have a strong handle on how our different resources play together and whether having one more or one less would make a huge difference. But here I'm mostly agreeing with you, I think. If we keep stone, it should probably have a well defined meaning, such as 'military, defensive buildings & CC', and not be civ-dependent unless we completely change it up for a given civilisation. What's the usual starting resources setting for nomad?

It's quite straightforward: is the existing difference in building stone cost meaningful differentiation? Does it make the civilisations unique enough that it's worth keeping and re-balancing instead of just discarding and thinking of something else? It seems to me that it fails to clear the bar. It's kind of a boring difference, and it makes balancing un-necessarily harder since it has indeed a large impact on resources available.

It seems to me that we could just make all civilisations use stone for their buildings.

I don't really have an answer to any of these questions. All I know is that an RTS like 0 A.D. is a complex system, and this looks like it could have a lot of subtle impacts, and I'm not convinced it would actually make the game more _fun_, or even more interesting to play. I'm just not very involved in gameplay at the moment (well, really, since forever), because I'm currently more interested by engine changes (including e.g. pushing, though I recognise it has gameplay impacts). I think the 0 A.D. gameplay is kind of coincidental, and we should mostly focus on improving what we have rather than changing it, because we don't have a very good plan on where to go if we were to do that, but we do have players that enjoy the gameplay right now.

Indeed, as @nwtour wrote, the hotkeys will be translated in A25. Just to hopefully clarify what's going on: the default hotkeys refer to a QWERTY layout, but the game 'converts' that to your local layout in the in-game hotkey editor. So as you can see, it shows [ and ] as being 'ü' and 'Plus' for you (which hopefully are the right keys). The reason for that is that hotkeys tend to be about the position of the keys on the keyboard, and not really about the actual letter, and it's better if the default hotkeys are the same, position-wise, for everyone. To give a simple example, the camera hotkeys are "AWSD", which works well on QWERTY, but on AZERTY it's completely wrong if you use the actual letters and not the letter positions. So that's why we do the latter.

I have doubts about directional attacks so long as then engine doesn't really care about rotation for units (and it doesn't, for the most part). That being said, perhaps I'm a bit pessimistic on this. I won't lie, I'll finish that sentence with "and it works very well for them". ---- Realistically, I don't think we'll get to directional damage in A25, and I am unconvinced (and have been for years) by talks of more advanced formation combat and such. 0 A.D. has a fundamental economic aspect and any fight system will suffer from the 'continuous reinforcement' effect, which is _completely_ unrealistic and breaks down any comparison with history or indeed games like Total War. And I personally don't particularly care to try and change it. I like Age of Empires a lot. Making retreating harder will simply make the fights even more snow-bally than they already are, and I fear that's not a great direction to go in right now.

Hey, thanks for checking it out I will counter that by saying that you actually need some strategy to hit your enemy on retreat, e.g. putting some units in their path, instead of just getting freebies because the pathfinding is bad. I can see how you could dislike the change, but I think ultimately it's just different, not better or worse. And as you noted formations already allowed this smooth movement, so this is just straightening things out. Yes, that is a bigger concern. I am not certain that it makes them OP, though. There is a limit on the distance at which units push each other, as things start behaving really badly if the numbers get too high, but there's probably room for improvement. The one constraint the system has right now is that static units cannot push moving units, and so no, it can't fix the rams. That is there because otherwise things start going awry quickly, and i've not found a great solution. I am considering reducing the ram and formation "size" for A25 though, since there is a bit of overlap anyways, because I'm generally thinking better movement > some overlap. ---- I think I'll give another look at the numbers when we get closer to the release.

Oh, right. Yes then those get removed, unfortunately.

They only get removed if they're empty.

No, that's not really doable at the moment. The region stays explored. The feature as described above cannot be toggled in the options - could be a game setting option however. I'm reading some people that would rather have an indicator that "something" is firing in FoW. That's doable also. Note that yes, this will mostly only affect: women who have a short vision range structures that may get attacked by long-range artillery. In general other units will see their attacker, making the feature redundant.

Hello everyone, this is a quick poll to raise attention towards D3492. That diff enables Age of Empires-like "reveal attackers in the fog of war" capability. I'd like to confirm that this is desirable.

I'm implementing this at http://code.wildfiregames.com/D3769

Change is from rP24070 following rP24044. I have to agree, it's a bit unfortunate to have _only_ the subtype when both 'ore' and 'rock' are super generic, and "stone_rock" and "metal_ore" wouldn't have hurt much.

The wall_tower errors are now fixed.

I reproduced your setup, and indeed on A24 I got a lag spike now and then. It's the Pathfinder this time, in one case I got a single pathfinding call for a single unit that took 8.5 seconds. It seems to be caused mostly by AI units trying to go to their garrison ship. I've investigated, and it's a bug (really, more like 'bad logic/unexpected edge case', that creates nonsensical requests. I'll fix it for A25. Edit: unfortunately I don't see an easy way to avoid the issue on A24. You can play smaller maps or avoid islands (since I think ship transport is basically the only situation in which it really happens), or just use A23 for these type of games, or just endure the lag. It'll be long, but occasional.

I imagine you invest a lot of your time in 0 A.D. content, and likewise we invest a lot of our time in 0 A.D.. it's easy to let things get a bit personal in these cases I think this thread has been quite productive overall. ---- I would second Freagarach - reach out to Sundiata (who I believe is quite busy lately) & see.

I believe the holdup is that the maintainer lacks time. I'm not entirely if someone else can provide an update.

There is a bias, in that just because _you_ didn't see announcements doesn't mean there weren't. We posted some things on Facebook and Instagram - admittedly, if I recall, quite shortly before the release. The 'name thread' was closed a couple weeks earlier. On the forums there were also posts about 'release candidates', quite regularly. We didn't share those on social media, I believe, because we feared users might think they are the actual alpha, and then run into bugs, and drop off the map. So there were a few things. There wasn't an "announcement", so to speak, but we can't possibly reach everyone - even with the official announcement. Consider also that we pushed the release a lot in the latest days, because we discovered new bugs. Any date we picked might be pushed back. To feel safe about the release, we could only announce it at _most_ 3-4 days in advance, which just isn't enough time. If we announced a date 15 days in the future, we'd have to stall development even further, after already a solid month where not much happened. It gets annoying. For A25, we strive to maintain Alpha25 on the wiki up to date, too, which is probably more relevant.