wraitii

It would probably imply changing the rest of the game's look too, though, so it fits. Aiming for an off-white/cream color could work.

About work: a method I've found fairly efficient to start working efficiently is doing 30 minutes of something, 5 minute break, rinse, repeat until it's over. Working for school takes willpower, it's boring, no-one really wants to do it. And willpower is fairly limited, particularly if you don't have the habit of working. Don't start too big. Learn to only work efficiently, by focusing 100% on what you do. Then you'll slowly be able to do more and more. But I stress this, taking breaks are very important. Not too long, but often enough so that you don't fall into a spiral of inefficient "lemme check Facebook every second" work phase. Find at what time you find working easiest, and then begin planning your work for the day. It sorts itself out. What Ludo say is very true. But I find you don't even really have to like what you work on. The simple satisfaction of having worked "right" and knowing the material can compensate a little for doing things you dislike.

I agree with that. Those are default modes, interesting but not requiring complete change of the game. More fancy modes would be fun (a PVE builder mode for example could be really interesting) but that'll be for later.

I believe this is the same error as the one you've already posted. If I recall correctly historic_bruno is giving a look at AI serialization right now, I'm not too sure, though.

I think [13357] counts as a minor gameplay improvement: ability to garrison in your allies' buildings.

The diff is pretty huge, which is kind of surprising (in the former case too). You seem to imply this always happened on Alpine Lakes 2v2? Have you tried a specific seed or does it simply always happen?

Yeah. That worked fine.

Trample could be directional, so Auras wouldn't fit. I'd rather have it not use the same logic anyway, so it's easier to mod/change/upgrade.

I think running/charging can(well, should, really) be delayed until after the pathfinder. I believe that however we look at it, it's going to be linked to that issue somehow and this will stall progress, which would be inefficient. Trample damage on the other hand sounds reasonably easy to do. Conversion and Building Capturing would require a proper guideline. There have been many discussions about building capturing (latest things being, I believe, the topic I did about that a few months ago). A member of the design committee could look into that, make a few different propositions and then it can be decided upon once and for all allowing the programming to actually start. (note that again, I'm saying this strictly informatively, since I have no time to work on it. Reading the forum already makes up most of my pauses ).

Well the thing is, we kind of need to capitalize on people when they're available... Which is a bit of a problem with a short Alpha release cycle a the freeze takes a good 3 weeks out of actual development for some people. Also, for longer stuffs, there has been a lack of developers, which is kind of tied to the fact that newer features are sometimes a little nebulous to understand, without proper updated description (which is why the new design committee posts are necessary). Also: this summer should probably be more efficient because more people will have time (well, students, at least). But generally with good design documents, implementing the new features should be semi-fast. The problem is starting to do it, and generally for now these kind of things were only for 1 developer, since code-sharing is not really practical (thing git). The problem is actually the major gameplay features. The rest is consistently there between each alphas (spaced out 3 months apart generally). Major gameplay feature require a good idea of what to do, how to do it (which requires knowing the code) and time to actually go through or it'll be lost forever. (Art is moving swiftly enough). This might be caused by a lack of effective planification in the programming area, though.

Takes about 2/3 alphas, iirc . If we still work at the "current" rate, that's probably a good 4 months. (of course, this is assuming current rate is the good rate to estimate this. Which may or may not be right).

Since there was none, I've taken the liberty to make this post the discussion post for Formations Review. Feel free to create a fresh one if it's wanted. I liked formations in RoN. The entrenchment and the fact they were actually useful for something made them pretty strategic, which was actually interesting. This is something we should strive to emulate (the usefulness). I'd say they should basically be inspired from common formations in the ancient world. There's not a necessity to have a ton (5/6.. Up to 8). Perhaps some unit types/combinations could unlock some different formations. Generally it'd be a power vs movement trade-off, to me, but there could be other advantages obviously. Perhaps it could make units resistant to converting (to simulate the fact it's easier to keep morale high). Some might give a Pierce armor bonus (tons of shields making arrows less efficient). Things like that. Also, right now, units only attack "actively". Formations could attack "passively". Take the phalanx: a horse going in front of the phalanx will not live long, even if the phalanx stays static. So that would give a natural defense bonus (against hack) and it would be an interesting gameplay possibility. This could potentially be done using something similar to the trample damage, with a little twist for being direction based. Generally, formations should be pretty orientation-dependant, which might require semi-serious changes to some areas of the code. I'd like to be able to combine unit types in a clever way (swordsman in front, archers behind) to some extent, to this could be left as a micro-task to the player.

Note that it wouldn't really fix the fleeing issue. That's mostly because an attack anim starts, stopping the attacking unit, and then by the time the actual hit should be there… The unit is gone. Rinse, repeat. That's all in the ticket.

For the advanced case: I figure it's more logical to have it fire the initial attack followed by the primary on a right click (since that's basically how yo expect the unit to attack). Using alt click should probably make it use the primary attack directly.

Also: several weeks of balancing doesn't seem like that much (I mean the gave's been in development for other 10 years now) . If something's OP in 0 A.D., we just UP it until it's no longer. Pretty quick. Of course there's always the risk that this will throw the rest of the game out of balance, but generally I don't think it'll prove impossible right now. The actually hard part will be thinking of most strategies (I will always remember an AoE II MP game I did a long time ago where a Spanish player won using only his citizens. Turns out with the right upgrades in the castle, the villagers became absolutely OP. That's the kind of thing that is harder to balance. That's the kind of things for which players like TheMista are useful).

The only problem is potential dilution of the thread. Then again that can be fairly easily moderated.

Now it's the red on the thingy on top of the loincloth/skirt (however it's called) that's a bit too saturated, to me. The others look really good though!

I think a middle ground between both images is pretty good (leaning towards Amish's version). Depends on how actually vivid it was IRL, but the original image does look too blue to me. Also: I think perhaps the pedestal is a little too detailed, texture-wise, it contrasts a lot with the statue and it probably won't be possible to see in-game anyway... (particularly the top, I don't really mind the sides).

It's not really complicated if you're used to Age Of Empires. I think the issues currently are mostly that we kind of lack tooltips, a comprehensive list of hotkeys easily accessible, and there should be a "tip" section. Perhaps below quote of the day (which I believe is to be replaced anyway?). There are some things that never really get explained otherwise, such as diminishing returns and things like that. Beyond that, a proper documentation would be nice to add some more info, but generally the learning curve seems good to me (Ok, so I've been a hardcore EU3/Crusader Kings player for a while, which might skew my opinion slightly). The new features (gameplay-wise) are not really hard to understand nor to play with, since they're not really added on top of existing things but rather give new things to do. I also agree that the art department is basically really efficient, and the programming department can't really follow up. It is however bad that optimizations have delayed that much, but we're working on that and it looks fairly promising. Civ balance isn't really an issue right now, afaik. This is kind of because most civs play "basically" the same, though, which perhaps isn't that desirable either.

Agreed. It's a little saturated (perhaps it looks different in-game though, seems like this is a Blender render with some approximate AO). I'm a little concerned some buildings will be too decorated, but if the texture is for fancy buildings it should be all-right. (and I'm hoping you will give the Egyptian building the same sort of "resting in the sun" feel as to the Carthaginians one. Dunno where that comes from, though. Might be that they have a stronger AO.)

This would require severely limiting farming, though. I do agree with the Aura idea. This all depends on if farmlands are implemented. If so it's obvious: make corrals better on non-farmland areas, and farms better on farmland areas (actually better than corrals). With a few twists, this will make farms hard to defend, farmlands interesting to have, and this will also create real diversity in food sources. It's a choice for the player, and it seems like it would be pretty fun. I mean, that's at least a case for having farmlands. It would solve that issue very nicely.

Certainly in RTSs like AOE2/AOE3, there was an obvious early game food source: hunting, and an obvious late-game food source: farming, with hardly anything in between. I even recall a very detailed study on AOE3 which showed that whatever the situation, corral was useless. So that's bad. Right now in 0 A.D. things play out much in the same way: the corral is generally worse than farming late-game, worse than gathering/hunting early game. Thus it never gets used, even if it's in itself in the game. So the game "apparently" has diversity, but in fact only two actual food sources (three if you count berries apart) instead of 3/4. I'm not against having hunting better early game and farming better late game, it's "semi" realistic, a fairly basic mechanic, and it's still interesting. Furthermore the advantage from hunting/gathering really goes away because food gets scarce, so if you're motivated you can still do it later in the game right now. Corrals however are problematic because they are basically a blend between farming and hunting: fairly micro-intensive, static, average gathering rate. So they're never the better choice. So what could be done about this? Perhaps farms should be more limited in how you can use them: perhaps we could only allow them to be built on farmlands, which could be scarce. So you would fight for them and otherwise rely on corrals. Other solution, as Alpha123 said: make farms require more workers or more space for the same efficiency (perhaps make their yields more diminishing). This would be trickier for players, but it could be interesting. Basically you'd need huge farm fields with a few workers on each, which would be harder to defend from raids (and obviously costlier to build)… than only having one or two corrals in your base. Final solution: find a way to make corrals better in some specific strategies. A possibility here would be to rely on techs: through some clever playing around with stats we could probably make corrals more attractive if you want to rush for food in the beginning (like making them cost minimal wood, I dunno. This needs to be faster than hunting quickly, though), which would make them more attractive than farms to rushers. Then with techs we make the corrals even more attractive, but specializing on corrals (through linked techs) makes farming less interesting as time goes on and you never really switch back. For a slower player, farms could still be the way to go. So that would make corrals do something, allow farms to still retain a use, and also keep hunting/gathering as the early game gathering resource. I'm saying this about rushes, but we could make it more interesting for some actually more daring of even more specific strategies, or some specific cases. At least, they should be different enough that they're attractive in some situation. For example, right now cavalry units hunt at an insane rate. If it's also true for sheeps, it could be interesting for an early all-cav rush. I think the key here is to make corrals useful in different situations than farming. Not making it more or less equally good, as the players will always end up with one solution, the ever-so-slightly better one. I don't really have an opinion on the farmstead vs city center thing. I'd be ok with them being required to build fields. Perhaps simply a bonus to gathering rate of fields around farmsteads would make them more attractive than city centers to build farms around. (afaik, hunting is basically always the best choice for food in terms of gathering rate right now, even late game, if you upgrade. However the hassle gets big. So I think that balances itself nicely.)

None that I know of. Reddit hasn't really gotten around to know about 0 A.D. yet. Which is in my opinion both a shame and a chance, since it would probably be pretty successful there, but then we can wait until the game is actually ready for advertising there.

I think we should aim to make effective/doable as many different playstyles as we can, in fact. (obviously as long as it doesn't infer with other realism/doability/fun rules)

If you need some input about not saving things or optimizing thsize, feel free to ask.