comp3820

Sorry I missed all the posts - for some reason I'm not subscribed to this. Anyway, I found a Carthage.zip in my documents and uploaded it to 0ad.me again, but it's waiting for Admin approval - when that comes I'll post the link here. Or asmartgoat will, since I think that's his site. Otherwise, just browse around on the site to see if it's there. I haven't changed it, so there could be errors with all the changes that have been going on with 0ad. EDIT: Here's the link: http://0ad.me/sword/download.php?view.15

Here are a few clips I made with Fraps. They've got "www.fraps.com" on the top, and they're compressed. I do have higher quality versions, but they're also quite a bit larger. Zipped Folder Nothing terribly exciting, but they do showcase some of the graphics. A few clips panning over Miletus with ships sailing by, a very small fight in the Oasis map, a sunset over the oasis, and some villager/soldier gathering clips. There are more, but not from the player's perspective. I had a number of them that I'd recorded to make a video, but I lost the scenario file somehow, so if you want a half-complete film about a Celtic ambush of a Roman army, I've got that too.

I think there should be a pile of resources either way - the unit would drop the resources to defend himself if he was attacked, but even if he was killed right away, there would still be a pile of resources after his death, since that's how it would really happen. That would make for more interesting raiding, too, since the raiders could wipe out a mine plus all the workers, quickly gather the crates, and walk off with hundreds of resources.

I think satchitb is right about the resources, but you could compromise on that by making a pile of wood/gold/stone/iron appear right by where the unit was attacked. I think in real life that's exactly what a unit would do - not worry about putting it in a certain spot, but dropping it right away. The pile would be in the form of a crate or something that can be gathered faster later.

I've never played a game with a concept like this, but it sounds interesting. To extend the idea further (and make the doctrine choice less permanent), you could have buttons on the side of the screen, or at a specific building, allowing you to switch quickly back and forth between different doctrines. For example, you could put your nation on a war footing when gearing up to attack an enemy, at which point your economy would slow down considerably, but unit production would increase. Maybe you could even get a temporary attack bonus. A boom doctrine might help your economy at the expense of your military, by lowering soldier's attack, but increasing their gather rates (ie they left their weapons at home to work in the fields). Of course, you'd have one for a last-ditch defense, where economy is cut completely, and all units fight (maybe female workers garrison in houses and give the house an attack?). It would kind of be like a combination/extension of the "town bell" idea in Age of Empires, as well as the "Revolution" idea in Age III. At the same time, the doctrine choice could change the GUI setup (or make this a different option, separate from doctrines?). When attacking, your minimap would highlight only military units, you would get a tally of your entire army, a highlight on idle soldiers, special alerts for newly built soldiers, one click selection for formations, etc etc. When switching to economy mode, your GUI would color-code workers per their job on the minimap, show the number of workers per resource, give special buttons for building economic buildings without having to select villagers (nearest villager would build? nearest idle villager?) etc.

I think trees and bushes affecting the sight of units is a great idea. It's pointless to hide in the forest if your enemy can see you anyway. You could cut the effectiveness of the LOS in half for forests, or even less, and decrease speed through there as well, which would greatly increase the effectiveness of a well-planned ambush. It would be neat if cliffs would have the same effect - you can't see over them in real life, why now? Make the units find out how to get on top to see what's up there.

Ok, so I went and did it: I built some buildings to model the actual dock. It took a bit of doing, seeing as though I had to teach myself how to mod. But here are the screenshots:

Well, I got most of the bugs worked out. you can check it out at 0ad.me. The numbers are down to 200 Romans vs 80 Carthaginians, but the Carthaginians have desperation (or a lot of heroes) on their side. It seems to run mostly smoothly on my computer, although it does bog down at times.

As soon as I find all the little mistakes and make sure it works correctly I playtested it with 250 legionaries vs 222 mostly Celtic infantry. Since I made quite a few of the Celts super infantry, or used heroes, to make them look/act a little more like desperate Carthaginians, the Carthaginians swamped the romans. Not exactly a historical ending. I did use the find/replace method to change all the buildings to player 1, and then again later (some of us don't learn ) to change the celts to player 1. In doing so, I figured out that there were 1027 buildings ( plus any that were already Player 1, including all the docks) on the map, and 222 Carthaginian soldiers. The biggest problem is that it ran fairly slow at first, then sped up a little later - I actually think it ran faster than it was supposed to - it felt like it was trying to "catch up." And I've got a Radeon HD 4670 that runs AOEIII like a champ. Hopefully if I reduce the number of Carthaginian soldiers it will run faster. A few more issues: due to my use of the flattening tool (I think), there is occupiable land outside of the viewable area, so the legionaries tend to get stuck out there. Also, as far as I know there is no victory condition yet unless you destroy all the opponent's units and buildings. Good luck!

Ah, thank you. Exactly what I was hoping for. I think I'll use find/replace to make everything player 1, then if I need to I can add a few attacking player two units and actually test this map out. Is there any way to suppress the errors that come up for "missing projectile" ?

Yeah, there are a few docks in there . @satchitb: the problem with playing this map is that the players aren't set up right. The first time I worked on it, I made the buildings Player 1, but after I reopened it Atlas must have defaulted back to Gaia, so the rest of the buildings are Gaia. Also, it constantly gives me errors for "missing projectile" for the wall towers (since they're shooting at the ships). Does anyone know how you could change a ton of buildings to a different player at once, or is that a job for sometime when I'm really bored?

I made this map working off of the first few Google images for "Carthage," so its not exactly a research project. I also scaled things a little bit different, in order to get a few more city features into a smaller area. You don't even want to know how many docks I put in that center dock - a smarter person probably would have just made the Carthaginian dock in blender . A few more pictures: Img 1 Img 2 Img 3 Img 4 Img 5 Img 6

I can see how complete randomness like a single-hit loss could get really annoying, but a compromise might prove to be the best way. Giving units a random attack, ie ranging from 10 to 20 or something similar, might produce the same effect, but keep players from randomly losing scouts to a single arrow. If you want to throw math into it, make the unit's attack a normal distribution centered around the nominal attack value, with most values near the center, and some further away that could cause considerably more (or less) damage. There's a certain fascination (and realism) in watching a horde of arrows being fired at a single unit, and that unit still surviving. I think it was Stronghold that had this - most arrows seemed to miss, but some arrows hit and produced random effects on the unit. [completely unrelated -> an arrow-hit animation, or a unit pausing slightly when hit, but not killed, might be really cool] Also, I think realism would actually go down with a one life point unit because it would remove any idea of a wounded, tired army struggling to finish the last goal of the campaign. There's nothing like a bunch of red bars hovering over your troops to keep you on the lookout for potential ambushes.

What would actually be neat, and would incorporate what you just mentioned, would be a directional armor. +5 armor if attacked from the front, for a unit with a shield. That would give significant incentive to ambush or flank your enemy, instead of sending in mass amounts of troops from the front. It would also create the "shield wall" effect for the phalanx, which was obviously pretty significant in ancient warfare.

Ruins would be really cool. It would certainly add another level of realism - you couldn't get away from the fact that a battle was fought here not too long ago. In fact, you could turn the ruins into collectible stone, just like the temple ruins on one of the maps (I think). Little caches of food and gold would also fit in naturally with a destroyed city and a spoiling army.