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It's getting out of control. Is it possible to do something about it?

I just thought of documenting all these stuff, I don't even have pictures (I'll add them later) 1. Trump Wall As athens you can get a nice research in the sanate that gives you the ability to place walls in neutral territory. this way you can basically partition the entire map in two piece. with Themoclydes or whatever that hero's name is,he gives half construction time and 30% less cost so it's even better. do note that this works very well against annoying cav mfs. also a point to note is to not start to build walls directly from neutral territory. start building them from your territory otherwise the walls you build will fall to gaia. this way you have a literal wall which can act as a root for making storehouses in random places,or making entire forts and stables and barracks and basically a new frkn base without a cc. do note that this costs a shitton of stone and a fair amount of manpower for both gathering and building. so in most cases it's best not to do this,but it's very fun 2. BAKE SOME CITY GUARDS ingredients: Athen civ, Barrack, Hoplite Tradition research, Athenian Hoplites process: P2 Hoplite tradition then bake your Hoplites in the oven (barracks) for about 3 minutes. and voila! you will have fresh champions for barely half the cost! and even before p3! ready to invade with the rest of your army!! it's actually a very strong strat so you can actually do this one quite a lot of times and situations 3. Hippo smash (by now you might have guessed what my fav civ is and who's really the biggest worshipper of Athena) in phase 2,you can invade with peltast mercs, Hippocrates,and a primary citizen spear army with Hoplite tradition. make sure to get the hoplite tradition, and in the forge get the pierce resistance as well as ranged attack damage buffs this strategy focus on constantly bombarding your enemy. the hippo is a very underrated hero,you can spam healers with that hero and your army can be nigh immortal,filled with rank 3 and city guards in little time if the enemy doesn't pay attention. works best against noobs who don't know how to counter. pictures and more troll strats coming soon!!

I mostly agree with you. The risk of making cavalry costs more is getting less early rushs while having no effect on calvalry spam in end game. Since one can use corrals and adding +25 food cost will not have a big enough impact on a fully developed economy.

Yeah, or at the end of the game a upload button. To avoid spam of re-host of games with wrong settings and some sanity checks of game duration, full replay, duplicate uploads etc..

Indeed. @feneur, this image shows a 3rd wave of spam, the 1st one was over 40 minutes ago, and it's still there. I have to strongly disagree that "new users might have to wait a number of hours before their first post is approved" is any worse than this, which affects all users and makes things look trashy and unsafe.

Yeah, that was the thing. As I understand it wfg can't just let any bots run on the lobby. Uff was honest about his bot, but it wasn't approved (yet). I can understand that some boundaries have to be set e.g. to avoid adds, spam etc.. But I liked uffs host. I can also understand that it is not so attractive for a developer to have everything approved of the ideas one wants to try out. For me, I would appreciate such a host in combination with a fast automated pairing system like the LocalRatings Team-Balancer Mod. The hoster could build up a better database than I could by only manually spectating and playing games. This way one could also experiment more with parameters of the pairing system.

Also, nothing is more discouraging to me when I sign in to the forums then to see 50+ bot spam posts in Russian.

We understand that the developers are volunteers and that they don't owe the players anything, but you have to admit that currently game hosting isn't convenient for a variety of reasons (IPv4 CGNAT issues, P2P etc.) if anything players hacking their own solution by paying for their own servers to host the game should be at the very least tolerated. In my opinion the game develops very slowly (that's how open source community driven works) and human nature implies that if you people aren't given an option they'll come up with their own solutions and they can't be blamed for that. I don't see how a single player creating a single dedicated account to host games is any different than a player forgetting his credentials and creating another account to host games, especially considering that it was done with no malicious intent and with well thought safe guards (spam protection, moderator player system etc.) So far everyone who played on those hosted servers had a great experience and they're pushing back on your decision (and rightfully so) because they see how a very efficient and convenient way of playing the game is being taken away from them over technicalities. As for what should be done next I think uff (and other selected players) should be allowed to host a fixed number of server instances (at least 1, more if the mods allow it) since so far it's only been positive until a true functioning headless 0ad server is released.

Fix 0AD Ban Tired of banned trolls constantly spamming your game log? Banned players might not be able to fully join your host, but they can still flood your screen and logs with relentless "Player is connecting" and "Player has left the game" notifications by repeatedly trying to join. This mod silences that behavior completely. Originally built to deal with persistent nuisances like ***, but now it works against any banned troll trying to clutter your UI with connection attempts. + Log & UI Cleanup: Suppresses connection and disconnection chat/log messages from banned players. + Server Stability: Blocks the notification spam without interfering with your standard ban list setup. + Universal Protection: Easy to customize or add new troll names/IDs to keep your screen clear. Installation & Usage + Drop the mod file into your game's mod directory. + Ensure your ban list is updated with the target player(s). Edit gui/fix0adban/banlist.txt + Host your game as usual—connection spam will now be filtered out automatically. Feedback and bug reports are welcome! Mod by Geriatrix. fix0adban.zip

Ok, but I see you said "I know longer have any conversations between us before may 15th. If it was in a previous CWA post, remember all my posts got wiped accidentally cause they thought i was a spam bot", meaning, that from before May 15 your inbox didn't get wiped out, right? You deleted the multiple pages of messages on purpose because you took the necessary notes, right? Then, you should have the corrections you haven't implemented yet still written around, right? What I tell you is always pretty clear, extensive, and sourced, you just choose to not pay attention, dismiss it, forget it, ask again, write unintelligibly, and repeat from the start, for then use ChatGPT for it to tell you whatever you want to hear. But even ChatGPT will tell you things like (just testing it): Sparta: Limited/occasional use of stakes; not a defining tactic. Macedon: More reliance on sarissa pikes than ground spikes; obstacles used defensively when useful. Rome: Most systematic use of stakes and other field obstacles, thanks to strong military-engineering traditions. So, as I've told you before with many things: you are wasting your energy and not being more accurate than vanilla if you indiscriminately add at the same level stuff that is irrelevant for some and characteristic for others.

Yes, well again the manual isnt perfect either. Its ChatGPT trying to summarize everything. But Ill take a look at it and see if we can clean some of it up. what do you mean cut out in the link? Again if you looked at the manual, there are sections that very clearly compare CWA vs BASE. Look at the infantry base tab. You will notice all melee infantry are 0% different from Base. All ranged infantry are 100% of base... thus all "citizen" soliders have same HP. We used different "armor/resitance" packages to set them apart. Based Sword dps is 10.7 CWA is 9.5 the manual does that math so you dont have to tell you swordsman are about 10.9% less DPS than base game. In fact pretty much all "CS" is less DPS than base game, besides the pikeman which is actually up 17%, But are not as tanky as base game. You can check cavalry, champs etc and compare those stats to base game. I guess I will look at may 15th and see if i can find what you said. Again if you say one thing, and someone says something else and they actually play... Ill probably use there terminology for now. Spiked rollers should be implemented per your suggestion (I know longer have any conversations between us before may 15th. If it was in a previous CWA post, remember all my posts got wiped accidently cause they thought i was a spam bot. If you want to point me in the diretion of this may 15th stuff ill take a look. Thats the best I can do right now)

Yes, I agree, since surely these posts in Cyrillic are a first one. I'd maybe even go further and require mod approval for the first three posts, since I seem to remember someone posting something that made sense and then their second post was total spam.

Lately this forum has a bigger problem with spam. Maybe a solution would be to forbid new accounts to post links? Like you can't post a link in your first 5 posts, and neither if your account is still quite young.

I'm not 100% sure. It might be the link. I've changed settings etc to try and limit the spam posts, but it's hard to find the exact spot where we have as few spam posts as possible, but also no issues for genuine forum members, so sometimes topics/posts are held for moderator approval which shouldn't. As soon as a moderator has time to approve it it should show up though

In this analysis I will list out the strengths and weaknesses of each civilisation (based on my opinion). Each strength and weakness will be weighed and given a score. Each civ will have a total score for both Mainland and navy. However, this is only theoretical and things will vary in actual battles; with an appropriate strategy and adequate skills the lowest scoring civ has a significant chance of defeating the highest scoring civ. Skill and strategy matter more than which civ you play as! The weightings are based on my personal preference and I am open to suggestions. I am not taking team bonus into account yet. Civilisation Total score (Mainland) Naval strength Athens 1.5 3 Britons 2.5 1 Carthage 5.5 4 Gaul 2.5 1 Iberia (Lusitano) 3.5 2.5 Kush 5.5 1 Maurya 6 1 Macedon 2 1 Persia (Achaemenids) 4 2.5 Ptolemies (Egypt) 4 4 Romans (Generic) 2 3 Seleucid 4.5 3 Spartan 1 1 Mauryans: Strengths: Worker elephant helps with boom (+2) Archer civ - spam infantry archers and spearmen to protect the archers. There is also a champion archer (maiden guard). By the way ‘Visha Kanya’ means poison girl, they were not soldiers but more assassins or espionage agents. (+2) Asian elephants and archer elephant - new strategy. (+2) Sword cav + champion sword-woman = good defence against siege (+2) Weaknesses: Poor quality houses - need designated house builders and worker elephants can no longer build. (-0.5) Difficult to manage for new players - need to manoeuvre worker elephant. (-1) Rubbish heroes (-0.5) Kushites Strengths: Free Priest - can be used for scouting and healing wounded units in a rush - makes them better at rushing and better at defending against rushes. (+1.5) Quite fast boom (+0.5) Mercenary camps can be built in neutral territory - allows for sneaky strategies and diversification of army composition (+2) Temple guards (champ swordmen) can be trained from temples - allows for spamming (+1) Assyrian rams (does more damage than other rams) (+0.5) Diverse infantry (+1) Weaknesses: African war elephant (+0.5) Require a lot of metal if going for mercenaries or champ spam. (-1.5) Not sure why there is a mercenary javelin camel that has the exact same combat stats as a regular javelin cav (0) Achaemenid Persians: Strengths Kurush is a very good hero who can train immortals - use immortals as front line attack (+1) Asian elephants (+1) Diverse cavalry: Parthian archer cavalry combined with sword cav is strong. Also has 2 champion cavs. (+2.5) Assyrian rams - more damage (+0.5) Triremes can train marine cavalry (+1.5 navy) Weaknesses: Slow boom, vulnerable in early game (-1) Carthage: Strengths: Still a very good naval force (+3 naval) Good variety of siege: lithobolos, oxybeles, rams, elephant (+2) Diverse army from embassies (now you can build 3 of them!). (+1.5) Sacred band is very powerful (+1) Strong wall (+0.5) Spam archers and spears then outflank with melee cav. (+1) Weaknesses: African elephant (+0.5) Needs metal for mercenaries (-2) Slow boom (-1) Ptolemies: Strengths: Cheap buildings - saves wood - faster boom. Compared to A23 they are more durable and can be built faster. (+3) Extremely fast boom with slings and house spam (+1) Archer camels + pikes in syntagma formation is strong once in substantial numbers. This does not require any metal! (+1) Pikemen boosted by hero. Pikemen also rush resistant. (+1) Diverse mercenary available (+1) Diverse siege (+1) Overpowered in naval maps: lighthouse, Tessarakonteres, quinqueremes (+3 naval) Weakness: African elephants (+0.5) Pikemen and mass camels are slow to manoeuvre. (-1) Need designated house builders - slightly reduces workforce in early stage (-1) Anti-ram depends on elephant and mercenaries (-1.5) Dependency on mining (-1) Seleucids: Strengths: Asian heavily armoured war elephants with Seleucus Nikator (elephant champ) (+2) Decent siege (+0.5) Strong melee spam (+1) Mercenary swordsman runs faster than average (+0.5) Navy is still above average (+1.5 naval) Rapid expansion (+1) Strong cavalry: cataphract, Dahae horse archer, archer chariot (+1.5) Weaknesses: Mercenary archer + swords can only be trained from colony (-2) Note that Seleucids need a lot of food. Iberians: Strengths: Very strong defence, needless to say (+3) Strong melee infantry (+1) Fire javelin cav is strong against siege and buildings (+1.5) Fire ship is extremely irritating to opponents (+1.5 naval) Weakness: Slow boom (-1) No long range units - weak against archers protected by fort or pikes in field combat (-1) Athens: Strengths: Decent siege (+1) Sword cav brutality (+0.5) Scythian archers = 2 regular archers combined. Also gym allows champion spam (+1) Significant naval bonuses (+2 naval) Weakness: Requires a lot of mining - soldiers are working on mines instead of fighting (-1) Britons: Strengths: Celtic brutality. Sword cav + spam slings/spears (+1.5) Buildings cost only wood - saves stone (+1) Free war dog (+1) Weaknesses: Lack of diversity (-0.5) Removed bonus - slower boom Poor quality buildings (-0.5) Gauls: Same as Britons except no free war dog Naked fanatics not very useful because requires phase 2 Macedon: Full range of siege (+1) Champion crossbowmen are cheap, mobile options waiting to be developed Now has sword champ - has anti siege Companion cavalry and champion spears are decent (+1) Weaknesses: Mercenary Siege workshop does not stand out Romans: Still good siege options (+1) Hit and run cav (consular bodyguards effectively counter archers) (+1) Nerfed entrenched camp but can still sneak attack (+0.5) Good at defending Superior rams (+0.5) Navy is still strong (+2 navy) Weakness: No long range units (-1) Spartan: Strength: Strong infantry, especially hoplites and Skiritai (+3) Weakness: Weak cavalry (-0.5) Extreme reliance on metal (-1) No long range unit, but can counter with spearmen meat shield and champion hoplite (-0.5)

That is interesting and kinda concerning. AI does have some benefits things like this make it a lot worse. At some point people need to stop and see if it is really producing more good than harm, when you see cases like this it kinda makes it seem that the harms exceed the potential benefits. (That and the constant bots that spam our forums as well) I don't blame the devs they're just trying to figure out how to cope with the flood of issues and bug reports that they have to deal with while still getting the word they are supposed to finish.

Whether it's Athenians or Spartans, some players have already realized that this units are broken and keep abusing it. Every match is the same strategy: pressing a single button out of everything the game has to offer (Just press one button and win most games??) I know there are ways to counter it, but honestly this style of gameplay becomes super boring for me. I was even reading a document about the vision for 0 A.D. here in forum, where is mentioned spamming as something that should be addressed. They talk about automate repetitive actions, which honestly does not sound like a good idea to me. Automatic spam of broken units? Hmm, probably not. Could these units maybe be nerfed a bit? Maybe increase their cost the more you train, or simply limit how many can exist at once, similar to Ministers or Centurions? I found the link: https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/0AD_The_Vision. Snares section.

Sadly, right now a "DawsonKiboult" posted his first message, full of nonsensical spam. A solution I'm thinking of is if posts that are flagged as spam by a certain number of people (3?) could become hidden, for the mods (the only ones able to see them) then to decide what to do with them (as a way to keep things clean faster, help mods, but not give definitive power to non-mods, and of course any abuse of the actual purpose of this should be penalised).

The best way imo is to make new accounts require being approved by moderators (that will catch a lot of the spam bots, since you can just deny ones that have names like "Starz_CO_1", "Starz_CO_2","Starz_CO_3", without even reading anything past their names The other way is to make a poster's first post require approval by a moderator, but this wouldn't really help with the amount of effort placed on the mod's shoulders.

agree sorry I don't think I understand this part. I thought I remembered their attack got nerfed but I'm unsure. The war horses tech only gives them more health. The HP nerf makes sense and I like it. That's why currently players with a not-so-perfect spam of less than 40 champ cav actually loose fights. But this applies to all champ cav equally. I tested it some time ago and cataphracts quite reliable win with a large numbers of survivors against other champ cav and the +2 resistances help against infantry too.

Besides the Fanatics, Spartiates are by far the most broken units in the game. Seriously, these units are insanely overpowered and hard to counter. Can anyone name a unit that can reliably stop Spartiates? I bet you can’t. They hit hard, have massive armor, can promote to Olympic status and even have technologies that make them stronger and faster. The only thing the developers could have done to stop the spamming of this unit was to add a population cost of 2. Unfortunately, they didn’t do that. There are players abusing this by spamming Spartiates in P1, and it’s ruining the game for everyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if some ecobot or clever Sparta player designed this unit to exploit the game by spamming them relentlessly for an unfair advantage. What do you guys think? Any ideas on how to properly nerf or counter these broken units? I believe adding a population cost of 2 to build them would be an effective way to balance this unit. Moreover all Athenian Marines should be nerfed for sure. We’ve already banned Fanatics from our games, and Spartiates definitely need to be banned as well. If the developers don’t nerf these units in the next alpha update and keep introducing unfair, broken units, we’ll have no choice but to keep banning them from our matches to maintain fair gameplay.

erictommy01, please read the title of the thread again. You are doing exactly what we don't want. Now, I don't fully understand the context behind all this, but please stop this spam or this thread will get locked. I don't want it to be locked. Please go vent somewhere else. Start a separate topic

I'm not going to say you shouldn't report spam posts, but I will say that generally it's not difficult to see which threads are spam threads, so it's not a big deal if they aren't reported. We are grateful for all posts in other topics though, they are harder to find when e.g. looking through the new posts page.

Besides the champion cavaliers, Fanatics are by far the most broken units in the game. Seriously, these units are insanely overpowered and hard to counter. Can anyone name a unit that can reliably stop Fanatics? I bet you can’t. They run fast, deal massive damage, and don’t even require metal to produce, which makes spamming them nonstop super easy. The only thing the developers could have done to stop the spamming of this unit was to add metal as a required resource. Unfortunately, they didn’t do that There are players abusing this by spamming Fanatics in P2, and it’s ruining the game for everyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if some ecobot or clever Celt player designed this unit to exploit the game by spamming them relentlessly for an unfair advantage. What do you guys think? Any ideas on how to properly nerf or counter these broken units? I believe adding metal as a required resource to build them would be an effective way to balance this unit. Moreover all cav champs should be nerfed for sure. We’ve already banned Champion Cavaliers from our games, and Fanatics definitely need to be banned as well. If the developers don’t nerf these units in the next alpha update and keep introducing unfair, broken units, we’ll have no choice but to keep banning them from our matches to maintain fair gameplay.

New bot spam