Some Feedback and Questions from a 0AD newbie

[KazPaz]

Before I start I just wanted to say this entire project is such an awesome community effort and 0 A.D is impressively put together, especially considering it's still in Alpha. Just fantastic. I also understand that it still needs a lot of time and work to be improved upon so I hope I don't come off as too harsh or misunderstanding with my following comments. I certainly don't mean to.

Questions first:

1. Is there a way to make units run and not walk everywhere?

2. In the editor there are different levels of troops. It seems like your troops are supposed to advance and look visually more impressive as you upgrade them. When I try to upgrade troops in-game though they never seem to advance, for example my Persian archers always look raggedy and never progress to wearing gold armour as I've seen them do in the editor. Have I interpreted this wrongly?

Just a little feedback:

• The killer so far for me is the PAINSTAKINGLY slow pace. I am by no means some A.D.D gamer, but the pacing does need work. There's no real sense of urgency particularly when all your units are casually strolling along the battlefield. There's no way I would play anything bigger than a 1v1. Of course, going back to my 1st question, if there is a toggle for units to run then that would be nice to know. Even so, this is the main barrier to enjoyment for me.
  
• The battering rams look silly, historically accurate or not they look more like heavily fortified classical era sweeping mechanisms than anything that could bring a building down
  
• Metal deposits often don't look striking or stand out enough. The gold sparking effect is barely noticeable when zoomed out. They just need to look more golden I suppose.
  

Editor Related:

• Doesn't seem possible to move anything that comes under the "Actors(all)" tab in the editor once I place it in a map. It's just stuck there forever unless I Ctrl+Z
  
• Not possible to select a bunch of objects and change their allegiance all at once... or rotate them all at once etc. They each have to be selected one by one in order to do so.
  
• Some large rock or cliff face assets would be nice to have, just to add some visual flair to maps here and there and to help block off units from places when designing maps.
  

Anyway hope the devs appreciate this in some way and feel free to prove me wrong on anything I've brought up! Having a lot of fun with the scenario editor atm

[feneur]

1. Is there a way to make units run and not walk everywhere?

Running is not yet implemented. See http://www.wildfiregames.com/0ad/page.php?p=10066 for a basic overview of how we think it should work (exact implementation might change, especially since that article was written such a long time ago, but the general idea is still relevant).

2. In the editor there are different levels of troops. It seems like your troops are supposed to advance and look visually more impressive as you upgrade them. When I try to upgrade troops in-game though they never seem to advance, for example my Persian archers always look raggedy and never progress to wearing gold armour as I've seen them do in the editor. Have I interpreted this wrongly?

Units advance to the next "level" automatically when they fight (or for Healers, when they heal), see the Experience bar to the left of the unit portrait when you have a single unit selected. The symbol in the upper left corner tells which rank the unit currently is.

The killer so far for me is the PAINSTAKINGLY slow pace. I am by no means some A.D.D gamer, but the pacing does need work. There's no real sense of urgency particularly when all your units are casually strolling along the battlefield. There's no way I would play anything bigger than a 1v1. Of course, going back to my 1st question, if there is a toggle for units to run then that would be nice to know. Even so, this is the main barrier to enjoyment for me.

We do intend to add the option to change the overall speed of the game. As for the sense of urgency we do intend to implement things like attack notifications so you are aware when some of your units are being attacked. And of course individual speeds are likely to be tweaked before a final release.

Doesn't seem possible to move anything that comes under the "Actors(all)" tab in the editor once I place it in a map. It's just stuck there forever unless I Ctrl+Z

Just press the Alt-key to left-click-select or banding box drag select. I've added that info to the Atlas manual ( http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Atlas_Manual ) though since it was missing there (there's still some info which needs to be added there, but it's a good starting resource anyway I hope )

Not possible to select a bunch of objects and change their allegiance all at once... or rotate them all at once etc. They each have to be selected one by one in order to do so.

This should definitely be added, I've added a ticket to our bug/feature tracker here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1735