Alpha 6 Thread

[General Octavian]

Will wall upgrades be available? (arrow towers, catapults, boiling oil)?

[Sebovzeoueb]

Will wall upgrades be available? (arrow towers, catapults, boiling oil)?

+1

[TheArchive]

An idea on walls: walls may be very strong, fast and cheap to build so that they would be built in most games by players. Only, they would need manteinance since they would automatically lose HPs until they would be repaired. Walls may be repaired automatically by workers assigned to that work. An attacking army would find weak points of walls and exploit them.

Also, undefended walls (without near defensive units ) would be climbed by enemy units ^^

That sounds like way too much trouble. Just think about how annoying it would be on large maps, where there will probably be a great amount of walls. Yes, you could assign workers to them, but that would require way too many workers, and unless you had a great amount of them then by the time they finished with one spot, another would be just as bad.

So I say no to walls which weaken over time.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I would like it if the Roman army camp and siege walls lost health over time to make them temporary.

[Rasunadon]

Completed wall system would be nice but, if it is too big now, openable gates would be sufficient for me.

I would like to see both curtain and D&D wall. The curtain ones could be ordered in Civ Centre and built automatically (type of research). Different nations would have different types and shapes of walls. You would be able to place gates and towers IN the wall. Something like in Castle strike.

[SMST]

I would like it if the Roman army camp and siege walls lost health over time to make them temporary.

Please don't do that. Make them very weak or something, but dont make them collapse over time out of thin air. It's just too random.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

Well, I don't necessarily support it, but if you merely have them appear to rot away, eventually collapsing, I don't see much of a problem in it.

[Alpha of the Eagles]

Unoccupied forts lose HP over time to 1 HP or something?

[Boo]

Town Center way points!

So that when you create a villager you can have the town center selected to say a food bush so the created villager goes and gathers food from the bush on creation.

[plumo]

Something else i thought about: building flags. For the town center, you normally place 1 flag and your units go there. My idea is to have 2 kinds of flags: 1 for gatherers, 1 for military units ( cause the civ center allows you to train both). So whenever you create female workers, you can send them automatically to a farm whilst soldiers automatically can be sent to your borders f.e.

It seems handy to me. In A0E3 i put the flag on a gold mine or farm, but whenever i get sent a shipment of units from home i have to find them between my farmers or gold miners, blocking everything.

[feneur]

Since all units you can build from the Civ centre are both workers and soldiers I don't think you can make that difference. Maybe we could separate female citizens + infantry from cavalry as cavalry units can't gather from the same sources + cannot gather. Potentially there could of course be one for each unit type, but that would probably be overkill and hard to implement well.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Military units are gatherers.

[chaosislife]

Completed wall system would be nice but, if it is too big now, openable gates would be sufficient for me.

I would like to see both curtain and D&D wall. The curtain ones could be ordered in Civ Centre and built automatically (type of research). Different nations would have different types and shapes of walls. You would be able to place gates and towers IN the wall. Something like in Castle strike.

I have an idea for that, if the transform function can check the distance of allied units from a unit then it could transform to a 'gate open' model with no collision when allied units are within melee range. Then after the units have passed thru the gate and gotten far enough away the 'gate open' model could transform back into the usual closed gate. This has the added realism effect of allowing enemies to pass thru the gate if they're right on your heels rather than stopping for no apparent reason at an open gate like in AoE/M.

Another idea using the transform function could make building the walls and towers evenly easier. That is to first remove the collision from the present wall/tower models and set them up to transform into a solid model once fully built. This should allow for walls and towers to overlap and hence merge more or less seamlessly visually. It annoys me when building them to occasionally find out that the enemy can walk through a space between the wall pieces.

[Sebovzeoueb]

For now at least, couldn't we just have a button to open or close the gate? Having enemy units stroll through the open gate because your army is just on the other side can be pretty annoying, and renders the gates pointless.

[Mythos_Ruler]

How about yours and allied units can pass, but enemies cannot? Simple.

[chaosislife]

At most you'd only get a handful of enemies through unless your units sit right on top of the gate and hold it open for some reason. Unless you've done some horribly bad base design a few units past your gate should just become a few corpses in no time. I still say it make no sense that an enemy unit shouldn't be able to walk through a gate that's wide open.

[Mythos_Ruler]

At most you'd only get a handful of enemies through unless your units sit right on top of the gate and hold it open for some reason. Unless you've done some horribly bad base design a few units past your gate should just become a few corpses in no time. I still say it make no sense that an enemy unit shouldn't be able to walk through a gate that's wide open.

I have no problem with that. In fact I'd like gates to act just like in Age of Kings.

[andreaplanet]

I like the snake idea, so I would suggest the idea to make a rounded wall by specifying the starting, the ending point, how much the wall should be curved (deviate from the direct path start-end) and finally the face of the external wall (defense toward outside or inside even if probably we would prefer always an outside wall because it will give use more space within the city). Rounded walls should be cheaper/faster to build because they are shorter.

I doubt that there exists any ancient city with a perfect circle wall. Cities where typically build on hills with walls using the natural conformation of the terrain to improve the defense. And in any case with the snake idea I have to build just 4 wall steps to create a perfect circle.

[knight133]

kings of wildfire games, I have an request that is an good idea for your ROCKING GAME!!!!!!!

I think that it will be cool to add stronghold 1 wall building system into your game and some siege ladders with siege towers.

any sign that your going to do that email me knight133@bellsouth.net

[plumo]

I really hope the wall system ( drag and drop ) will be implemented. It will be very rewarding , i' m sure. Although it is nothing crucial right now, it will make the game feel much more complete and more pleasant.

Forget about gates and gate animations: just the walls will do for now IMHO.

Edited June 19, 2011 by plumo

[Rasunadon]

And what about more keyboard shortcuts? That should be really easy.

For example

• Enter = Start Battle (when selecting scenario)
  
• Enter = OK (deleting units, ending game)
  
• Escape = Menu (during game)
  
• Escape = Cancel (deleting units, ending game, when selecting scenario)
  

[Mythos_Ruler]

Personally I'd use F1 for menu (it's usually used for 'help' in other contexts), while using ESC to escape out of a selection or window.

[plumo]

Another question: can the limit of 8 players per map be changed to a higher number? 10 or 12 ? I think it will be really useful for single player custom made scenarios, where these 2 or 4 'hidden players' can be used for triggers and neutral factions. I know I often regretted when I made RPG scenario's in AOK:TC that 8 factions is the limit.

Edited June 20, 2011 by plumo

[feneur]

Personally I'd use F1 for menu (it's usually used for 'help' in other contexts), while using ESC to escape out of a selection or window.

F10 is used for the menu at the moment, whether or not that should change is another matter, but I think F1 should be saved for help. At least in my experience Esc would be more intuitive as it's used in many other games, though preferably keep Esc for closing dialogs as if I recall correctly it's harder to implement if the same button does different things. (Don't quote me on that though, I'll leave it to the programmers to know how hard it is to implement something )

[Mythos_Ruler]

Thats fine.