War crimes - default settings in 0AD

[Yekaterina]

38 minutes ago, seeh said:

Paintball

slings = paintball

arrows = NERF gun bullets

https://youtu.be/ZqFPalcFVzE

 

 

[ChronA]

I'd contend there is one good idea in this thread, which is to consider changing the default victory condition away from conquest.

Conquest has two problems as a victory condition:

1. The point at which victory becomes impossible for a defeated player occurs well before the victory condition will force their capitulation. Therefore you are essentially relying on the good will of the defeated opponent not to drag out the game and waste everyone's time. That choice feeds trolling and toxicity in the community. (Admittedly 0AD is much better in this respect than most of the Age of Empires games because it has the territory mechanic, which encourages major military defeats to cascade into a complete civilizational collapse more rapidly. But it is still a problem.)
2. Conquest discourages multimodal gameplay. The only thing that matters at the end of the day is who is better at killing enemy units and buildings. That means some aspects of the game that some players might find enjoyable, such as building a diverse, attractive, and defensible city or constructing effective resource extraction and trading operations, don't actually improve their chances of victory unless there is a parity in basic military competence between the contestants. A completely pacifist player will never win a default match of 0AD, even if they have 10X the economy and territory of their opponent.

If I were trying to devise an alternative, I'd probably go with a victory-point contest based on territory controlled. Players get victory points for the total amount of territory they own, plus major bonuses for having civilizational monuments like temples and wonders. Eliminate players when they have less than 1/3 the victory points of the next highest ranked player.

This game mode would appeal to a variety of playstyles. Boom oriented players could race to carve up the whole map as fast as possible. Eco turtles could plow resources into monuments to keep parity, and perhaps ultimately drive to victory as a miniature cultural powerhouse. Militarists would steal territory. Balance would hang on the territory radius of buildings, and the VP bounty vs price of monuments.

[Yekaterina]

@ChronA nice ideas, but:

• Eliminating players with too few points automatically will also eliminate the possibility of come-backs, which 0ad already lacks due to units dying too quickly. A seemingly advantageous rusher will suddenly lose to an eco-bot.
• Territorial gain focused play encourages turtles - Iberians certainly win.
• There are already game modes of conquest structures or kill hero or conquest units. However, most players prefer the total conquest mode and resign long before they are completely massacred. There are very few trolls who refuse to resign and they are either perma banned from TGs or are reported to user1 in 1v1 games.

You can make a mod which adds the victory point mode but please keep the conquest units mode as well.

 

 

 

[alre]

the main issue whith multimodal gameplay is that it lacks features and balance testing. wonders work like ordinary buildings (which also give substantial perks and are easily defensible) instead of being properly balanced winning conditions like in AOE (where wonders are also automatically revealed to every player, which is nice).

kings for regicide are also obviously unbalanced, and all the talk about sacred places victory never had any real follow up.

for the time being, conquest can stay the default winning condition. toxicity caused by players hiding to keep the game running is not an issue currently.

[ChronA]

10 hours ago, Sevda said:

Eliminating players with too few points automatically will also eliminate the possibility of come-backs

Really? How often are players who control 1/4 the map coming back against someone with 3/4ths? I've seen people comeback from having 50% the territory of an opponent (in various other symmetric RTS games, not 0AD) but even that is extremely rare. Usually, in my experience of symmetric design RTS, matches can swing decisively on just +-10% map control.

10 hours ago, Sevda said:

Territorial gain focused play encourages turtles - Iberians certainly win.

If you are plowing resources into fortifying territory then those are resources you are not plowing into expanding. If a certain player or a civilization predictably turtles every time it will be trivial to take more territory than them by naked expanding. From there even if the booming player doesn't have enough territory to win on VPs directly they still have an economy advantage to win on either a monument race or open combat. Boom beats turtle.... 

Except of course that we all know with 0AD boom is turtle. So you may be correct that the Iberians or some other civ will certainly win. But that's a bigger problem with the game and not a good argument against imagining other options for improvements IMO.

 

I concede the point though. It seems like for this community there are many lower hanging fruits for expressing whatever toxicity they have. And adding multimodal competitive gameplay would further complicate balance complexity and tuning, which is already a sore spot for many potential players. Tring to introduce something like this right now would be an unnecessary and 100% foreseeable train wreck. But anyway, I'm not planning to make a mod, just trying to sustain an interesting hypothetical discussion.

[Yekaterina]

Just now, ChronA said:

? How often are players who control 1/4 the map coming back against someone with 3/4ths?

Firstly this doesn't really happen often in high level 1v1 unless one side is trolling. If your territory is too large, you are spread out, so you are weak at each point. If you attack your dense enemy, they will certainly beat you then push back. You will have nothing to defend your CCs. I have seen this before; often the player with more territory loses due to poor positioning of troops. The larger your territory the more likely you are to make a mistake. They can attack in any direction and you would either respond or lose something.

Of course, this is assuming standard settings. If you corner them with no resources then obviously GG

[Yekaterina]

Just now, ChronA said:

every time it will be trivial to take more territory than them by naked expanding.

Seleucids and Ptolemies win with the colonies. GG.

 

[ChronA]

12 hours ago, Sevda said:

Firstly this doesn't really happen often in high level 1v1 unless one side is trolling. If your territory is too large, you are spread out, so you are weak at each point. If you attack your dense enemy, they will certainly beat you then push back. You will have nothing to defend your CCs. I have seen this before; often the player with more territory loses due to poor positioning of troops.

That's kind of the point. If a strong player turtles against a weak player naked expanding, then the stronger player will almost certainly have the ability to punish the booming player before they get even a 3:2 territory advantage, to say nothing of 2:1 or 3:1. Conversely if the turtle is the weaker player they are unlikely to have success breaking out. Keep in mind that with a 3:1 territory advantage, even if the turtle has massive success breaking out and doubles their territory, they are still only even for territory control. And, economy wise the booming player still has at least a 2:1 lead; probably more because the turtle had to invest into military earlier in order to break out.

Conquest teaches new players bad habits by withholding immediate feedback on the effectiveness of their strategies. A lot of new players gravitate toward turtling because they observe that they can survive for 20 minutes or so and kill many enemy units by sticking to one heavily defended base, whereas they will die immediately if they try to attack or expand.

Edited May 10, 2023 by ChronA

[seeh]

On 08/05/2023 at 10:49 PM, Lion.Kanzen said:

Blood is strawberry juice?

nice idea we could say its a movie recording (yes used strawberry juice) and the result of it are the Cinema-Movie-Files (we call it replay files)

[Sun Wukong]

On 07/05/2023 at 12:29 AM, Gurken Khan said:

Personally, killing pixel-people including pixel-civilians (= genocide) doesn't wake the urge in me to transfer that into real life, but I wondered if you had an opinion about that, maybe changing the default settings to a non-bloody victory condition like a wonder victory?

It is better to change PEGI to 18 and continue to make a normal game, and not listen to a schizophrenic organization that enriches itself in wars and plunders humanitarian aid.

[Adeimantos]

I'm a conscientious person and don't right click on women, so my units may commit war crimes but I don't. I would prefer women being capturable, and deleting units equal dismissing them rather than killing them.

A score victory condition would be nice; the requirement for victory should be to both have at least a certain score, and have like double the score of any enemy player.

[Gurken Khan]

4 hours ago, Adeimantos said:

I'm a conscientious person and don't right click on women, so my units may commit war crimes but I don't.

Sure, sure. When you just point your soldiers in the general direction of women you don't bear responsibility for their actions.

I agree to the capturing and dismissing. Maybe it's good for the fertility of the fields, still seems a bit cruel to just kill my workers late game when I don't need them anymore.

[Lion.Kanzen]

Yekaterina should be forbidden to approach a camel and denied to carry a bow.

She is a threat to the villagers.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

2 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

kill my workers late game when I don't need them anymore.

The plague

[Lion.Kanzen]

13 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

still seems a bit cruel to just kill my workers late game when I don't need them anymore.

I pretend that they go out to explore the world and go to the enemy's base to gather intelligence.

 

Then they die.

[Gurken Khan]

9 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

I pretend

If they just wouldn't let out a death-cry and fall down so visibly...

[Lion.Kanzen]

6 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

If they just wouldn't let out a death-cry and fall down so visibly...

I only see the results. My enemy must have changed his diplomatic stance.

[Yekaterina]

7 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

If they just wouldn't let out a death-cry and fall down so visibly...

install autociv, set corpse to 0. When units die, there won't be a death animation. They simply disappear. 

[Lion.Kanzen]

@WhiteTreePaladin 

It seems to me(I am not sure) that he once suggested that to get rid of the village women they should sell them to the market as slaves.

[Gurken Khan]

45 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

@WhiteTreePaladin 

It seems to me(I am not sure) that he once suggested that to get rid of the village women they should sell them to the market as slaves.

Are you sure you replied in the right thread? I can't see a post by @WhiteTreePaladin here...

[Lion.Kanzen]

17 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

Are you sure you replied in the right thread? I can't see a post by @WhiteTreePaladin here...

it was years ago.

 

2018(?)

Edited May 16, 2023 by Lion.Kanzen

[seeh]

On 09/05/2023 at 9:17 AM, seeh said:

or Paintball ? if a being is full of colors then it want go/home out for washing (dont come back)

example:

put your Audio file here:

~/.local/share/0ad/mods/SomeModDosentMatter/audio/actor/human/death/female_death_01.ogg

https://gitlab.com/sl5net/0ad-redinked-sounds

and use this female_death.xml in same folder

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no" ?>
<SoundGroup>
    <Gain>0.9</Gain>
    <Priority>100</Priority>
    <ConeGain>1</ConeGain>
    <Looping>0</Looping>
    <RandOrder>1</RandOrder>
    <GainUpper>0.9</GainUpper>
    <GainLower>0.7</GainLower>
    <RandPitch>1</RandPitch>
    <Threshold>10</Threshold>
    <Path>audio/actor/human/death/</Path>
    <Sound>female_death_01.ogg</Sound>
</SoundGroup>

 

 

Edited May 19, 2023 by seeh

[fabio]

It's a bit I don't play, are women and traders still required to be killed to win? Maybe removing them from victory conditions would help for this?

EDIT: also civilian structures like houses.

From https://playbytherules.icrc.org/ :

Quote

Who is protected under the Rules of War?

Civilians, aid workers, medical personnel (those not fighting) as well as injured soldiers and prisoners (those not able to fight).

What other places or items do the Rules protect?

Water sources, crops, livestock and civilian housing should not be harmed—anything key to survival for those not involved in the conflict itself.

[Delfador]

40 minutes ago, fabio said:

It's a bit I don't play, are women and traders still required to be killed to win? Maybe removing them from victory conditions would help for this?

EDIT: also civilian structures like houses.

From https://playbytherules.icrc.org/ :

It's like a game about antiquity, in which 99.9% had neither human rights nor stupid useless organizations. Following the sick logic of the Red Cross, you should stop developing the game altogether and stop promoting the times where slavery was the norm. If you hide the cruelty of real life everywhere and everywhere all the time, then over time the question may arise: "Since everything was "white and fluffy", then what have you been fighting against all this time?"

Edited May 31, 2023 by Delfador

[Delfador]

41 minutes ago, fabio said:

Who is protected under the Rules of War?

Oh yes. If you really want to follow the rules of the Red Cross, you should remove all unauthorized red cross signs from the game, like healing icons and so on.