wraitii

Likewise on auras. Hero auras are fine, they make some kind of sense (you see the hero, you're motivated). Women auras though… Kinda hard to wrap my head around. Not a big fan. Personally, I think we should reset all unit speeds to 8/9 for foot units and 13 for cavalry or something along those lines. The splits between archer, skirms, pikemen, swordsmen and spearmen don't make a ton of sense.

I think I added the gatherer count limit back then, and I'm fairly sure I picked 8 at the time because about 8 units fit around a tree. Re your concerns: yes, I don't want to necessarily change the overall amount of wood, but on the "natural aesthetic" <---> "gameplay" slider, I think most of our maps are too far on the left. In general, even on sparse maps, I would suggest grouping trees more. Re 3 I meant "not too randomly", basically.

change our RMs to generate better forests and fewer stragglers across the board reduce the max number of workers per tree from 8 to 3/4 make sure Rms place wood in sane way (hard to do though) bump wood on all trees a little bit, even if that means having fewer per forests (not incompatible with the above) if possible, increase carrying capacity for wood only (might not be necessary if all of the above implemented).

I don't think this should be tied to batch sizes, tbh, because units automatically go to the nearest resources anyway. I would actually rather set batch size to 3, because it's easier to batch by 3 than 5, since that takes less resources, and you can always double-batch to get a batch of 6, which is close enough to 5 (or 7) imo. But that's another discussion. I've added a poll.

Again: this is not about reducing the number of workers necessary for an eco. The OP would induce almost no changes to the number of gatherers required. If you want to discuss reducing the number of gatherers for an economy, please find another thread and if there are none feel free to start one. @wowgetoffyourcellphone: mh. I see your point, but I also don't like that batch size is 5 (I've personally reduced it to 3 which I find far more manageable). Then again 4 or 5 isn't a huge difference. The grove of trees idea is interesting, but I don't think we necessarily need to go there.

There's generally little reason for spearmen to be slower than skirmishers and/or archers.

I hid a few posts that were starting to drift off-topic. @Imarok @DarcReaver Let's keep this on feedback towards the OP, feel free to open another thread.

This has been the case for a while, and I've internally already suggested changing it, but I'm making a formal complain here : the way we gather wood from trees is really annoying. This is a collusion of various factors, so I'm just going to lay them all down: Trees tend to be all over the place and forests not large enough, which is annoying to place good dropsites. Trees can be worked on by up to 8 workers, which is imo far too much (should be like 3). Forests are either too sparse (units get inside and start bumping into each other) or not enough. Trees imo don't have enough wood individually. Returning with 10 wood is annoying because of all the above factors, this would be better if wood was gathered in batches of 20/30 by default. But iirc we don't have different carrying capacity for different resources. So we should: change our RMs to generate better forests and fewer stragglers across the board reduce the max number of workers per tree from 8 to 3/4 make sure Rms place wood in sane way (hard to do though) bump wood on all trees a little bit, even if that means having fewer per forests (not incompatible with the above) if possible, increase carrying capacity for wood only (might not be necessary if all of the above implemented). Edit: to clarify what I want: I'm asking for general input in view of actually making a patch on this.

Have to say I agree… It also feels extremely game mechanic-y and not like something natural and rewarding.

AH, we read the same link I've found it remarkably interesting, particularly how many ideas they tried and ended giving up, particularly since a few of them we've had too. I really like how they intended to do capturing by having buildings become disabled when below 20%, and then whoever repaired them would gain control. I feel like that's far less intrusive, more realistic, and just better than our current system overall…

I definitely agree that we need some kind of system like that, but it's actually tricky to do correctly… Perhaps we could show which existing building the new building would be connected-with when you place a foundation?

This doesn't really add much complexity, all you need to know is that farms are only good if you keep them busy, so you need to try and keep them busy and keeping them not-busy is more rewarding.

Could you state why here? This is the topic for it after all

Hm, as I understood it, D227 is a go. You've had 3 explicit OKs in the ticket, I'm adding mine here. Getting 5 people to agree on anything is already a miracle so imo you should go right ahead with that feature.

Berries are a staple of AOE (to the point that AOE 3 joked on it), where they occupy the niche between collecting treasures/sheep and being able to farm because you have enough wood. This is a little irrelevant in 0 A.D. because our starting resources and units would allow us to have enough wood from the get-go to make farms (and we don't even have hunting). So I'd rather we just go into farms directly. Furthermore, berries made lore sense in AOE ½ because you start in the prehistoric/dark age, basically as hunter-gatherers. That's not really the case in 0 A.D. But mostly I find them annoying because they're bloody hard to see

Disagreed. The meta-play here would be capturing the animals before the enemy does it, and then keeping control of the animals. This wouldn't be entirely unlike the relics or the sheep of AoE, as wow said. And it would be a completely different thing from farming. If we added mechanic such as shepherds having to guide the sheep instead of capturing them a-la AOE, and we allowed laming the shepherd and/or the sheep, we could even have an interesting, high skill-ceiling early gameplay just based on capturing the sheep. It shouldn't be a huge food income but give you a definite edge as the game drags on, making it worth it but not absolutely terrible if you don't do well. Obviously this is only worth it if we seriously slow down the early game. Regarding corrals, I'm really not a fan of how they are implemented now because they just seem to be extraordinarily "game mechanic"-y. Anyhow, I think hunting is not working properly and probably never will, and I think berries are a bad idea given our usual starts and we should either reduce the starting resources and the starting pop or remove berries from our RM.

I'm all for removing stupid features, and could name a few (corral, imo capturing, I'd do away with anything that's not some type of farms for food, tbh…) , but I feel like you're getting it wrong on citizen soldiers. First: the point of citizen soldier is, first and foremost, the historical goodie. If we were to remove something, it should be the women, not the fact that military units can gather. I'd like to add that departing from the classic RTS formula isn't necessarily a bad thing, AoM had military units that could make buildings and that was a refreshing change. Your point about resource explosion is a little silly. Units can either gather OR attack, and that doesn't change from other RTS, so I don't see why it'd explode any more than another game. It's the fact that we start games with a farcical number of units and fast gather rates, as well as units being fast to recruit, that leads to apparent "explosiveness". Now, your calculation makes it sound like attacking is not worth it. But the math could be inverted rather simply if we lower gather rates and raise unit costs (including training time). If your attack takes 10 guys away from your eco (let's say for 120 food/minute, which would be far less than we get now, admittedly) and you manage to kill 3 enemy units (let's say each cost 50 food), then you're coming out on top by attacking. Other things must be factored in (buildings efficiency, how easy it is to garrison in 0 A.D. - imo by far the poorest design choice), but it's nothing structurally broken like you make it seem. Likewise, progress from weak to strong units has nothing to do with citizen soldiers and everything to do with how we (haven't) implemented technologies correctly.

Feel like there's absolutely no point having that in-game, but I would be okay with it for scenarios and whatnot however. Edit: that or the complete opposite of the above: I think it would be interesting to remove all other sources of food but farms, with mimo's changes in that patch, and offer a few different types of farms good at a few different things. For example a slow but steady gold source farm (say, peppers?), a fast-but-needs-a-ton-of-space-and-hard-to-defend type of farm (wheat?) and a slower-but-takes-less-space-and-you-can-have-several-villagers-per-farm type of farm (potato or whatever else ). edit: ah wait I forgot we don't have gold as a resource, nevermind that one then

Yeah that's a real issue for 0 A.D. (I find bushes can be particularly easy to miss), but imo not really the one described above.

This isn't a real problem, to an extent. Sufficiently skilled players will not get into mosh-pit engagements, because that's not really efficient, and will hotkey/select their units by types to micro them even if they don't know where exactly they are. Targeting the enemy unit can take more than 100ms since you'll need to think about it anyways. This is obvious when you see AoE 2 expert players. It's also always easier to count your units by selecting them all and seeing the number the game gives you than trying to count them (likewise with health and health bars). If your games has formation fighting, it's basically irrelevant because you don't need to recognise units instantly, it's not a MOBA. Finally, comparing still images is ignoring animations entirely, which are a key component of recognising units at a glance. I think I remember the original thread that was written about recognising things, and it was more about buildings looking too different across civilisations than it was about units. 0 A.D. also has a problem with seeing units/entities at all, not specifically differentiating them, as they tend to blend in the terrain too much.

I'm pretty sure that's just because that unit reacted to being attacked or something, because the simulation has no concept of direction and/or rotation for units (I say direction because there's no easy way to know what you're pointing towards currently). I don't think that's actually a huge issue, since it could probably reasonably be added, but then you need to change the combat system entirely. Which also is in the realm of possibility, in itself. Ships are a different matter…

Regarding territories, I feel like at least two things should be considered: -forbidding farms inside territories (or possibly dividing their efficiency considerable) -Actually using the concept of provinces from the original design, where the map was divided in provinces and you could conquer those in a largely predetermined way to acquire their resources. This feels limiting, but now that I think of it it's actually probably a much better way to handle this. That being said, it kind of implies larger maps, as do a lot of other things.

This is kind of not true, though. 0 A.D. has constraints that we are extremely unlikely to budge on, such as using Javascript for most things, which makes performance a much more real issue. I'm not saying dynamic LOS is impossible, but assuming perf is just a matter of better coding will end up being wrong more often than not in our case.

I feel like if something doesn't really fit (territories) it would be better to just flat out take it out. No while I do see that you're going for an overall vision/guideline, I'd just like to point out that this isn't enough for really anything. Or, to put it another way, don't expect the team to budge unless you get into the technical nitty-gritty (I don't mean code here, but detailed explanations of how things would work). Still, your direction seems interesting, so do go ahead

I'd like to see some more details on something that's not Athenians and see how you'd make it work. Overall I agree with your analysis of the troubles with 0 A.D., but I don't think you provide answers to all of it (e.g. territories don't really seem that much more useful in your proposal). Women seem like they'd be less useful on the whole and their presence becomes questionable imo. I'd suggest perhaps women are the population providers instead of houses or something. Gathering bataillons just seem like a PITA, too. I could actually like endurance as a gameplay feature provided running is only useful in a very specific "short-range outmanoeuvre to get a flanking bonus" case, which will be tricky to get right. Additionally, directionality with units with no turn radius and no concepts of "engagement" is a relatively dodgy thing. We could add those, but that has larger consequences on combat which you haven't gone into.