Few notes on balance

[Meister]

Hi,
i have a few notes to make that ive come across in recent games.

Lets discuss these things:
- forgot to implement roman fertility festival -> makes romans quite weak, i see them rarely in TGs
- sword cav same speed as spear cav (their counter unit) - all cav is countered by spear cav - except sword cav, it can simply run away. that makes Han sword cav rush still be very op.
- melee cav seems to have a little too much HP in early game, cc fire is completely useless. even when they run into spears, they can often escape. later in the game they seem balanced though, since in larger numbers ranged is stronger.
- athens army is too strong, upgrading citizen soldiers to champions should be like roman centurions with some price...
- also athens: is it cool to give athen one utterly overpowered hero and two crap ones?


other bugs:
- CTRL attack move doesnt work VERY OFTEN, i dont know how and why, but it happens too often to play in competitive style, needs to be fixed.
- when having a group selected, some units dont recieve commands. for example, when attacking with a group of horses, then retreating the group, often one horse will just stay and keep attacking. (stupid)

Thank you for reading and replies,
Meister

[Obelix]

1 hour ago, Meister said:

Lets discuss these things:
- forgot to implement roman fertility festival -> makes romans quite weak, i see them rarely in TGs

No need for discussions on this point: Fixed per commit 19fe52f328 and will be included in the next Release.

[ffm2]

19 hours ago, Meister said:

- sword cav same speed as spear cav (their counter unit) - all cav is countered by spear cav - except sword cav, it can simply run away. that makes Han sword cav rush still be very op.

I think the balance is fine. Spears are strong, but need to close the distance first. Swords are in general worse that spear or jav. Their strength is their fast attack rate to mow down civilians. But they need to run away from anyone with near equal numbers.

On Athens: It's a bit skewed anyway atm. since usually champ cavalry and naked fanatics are usually banned from games. Athens have neither and can shine with the other strengths they have. I don't think its so much unfair how they rank up if you compare it to e.g. elephant archers ranking up.

SDL2 really has some issues. Most notably the common complete click bug (fix: ctrl+shift + a few left - right clicks). I tried to play with recording the screen with "screenkey" and "key-mon" but the few times I tested I couldn't replicate it. I am convinced some key inputs aren't reliably processed. This results in some players repeating the H hold key - which results in the units first attacking the nearby unit, but on the next H aborting the current attack and starting a new one. But if you only press it once, there's still a bit of doubt if it actually registered.

The unequal heros was once discussed here (one version ago though):

On 22/07/2025 at 12:23 PM, ffm2 said:

Since the discussion came up I checked my replays for the popularity of heroes. The script is much generated by AI quickly to get a answer, but the question isn't that complex.

Every replay with a commands.txt and metadata.json is counted. No check for cheats or how good the players are.

If you want to run it you need to place it in .local/share/0ad/replays/heroes/A_heroes.py.

Edit: Now only the first hero per player in that game is counted. The first result was a bit less than I expected and this reflects preferences better.