Nakamura signing in

[Nakamura]

Hello everyone,

I`ve stumbled across 0 AD around 2 years ago through a topic on RTS-Sanctuary. Even then I found the game fascinating, but now, seeing as so much time has passed I decided to try it (realistically it`ll be released within the next few years the way I see it).

About me, I`m the project leader of the Age of Mythology fan patch, and of the Complex Enhanced (renamed to Rebirth now) mod for Homeworld 2.

I`m an active age of mythology and starcraft 2 player as well. Seeing how at least in my opinion both of those have a rather broken design, I have been looking for a new RTS game that will bring a fair design to the genre. My hope is that 0 AD can be the one.

While I did not spend a lot of time playing the game, I intend to. So far I`ve been rather happy with what I`ve seen.

The concept of territories is interesting, however I find it rather restrictive in the early game, as it does not allow for deposit points to be placed further out in the map, which would be excellent for hunting animals. I mean, you did stick to the concept of hunt being a faster gathered source of food than farms or berries\herdables, right?

I like how you`ve dealt with the shift click-queue, a very clever mechanic. Proper 1-by-1 training however will clearly be a superior way to go, but this is a nice tool for the slower players. Way better than Autoqueue, as seen in the age of mythology expansion.

What I find funny is that scenarios are set as the main game type. You might want to change that to RM.

Something that was a bit disappointing to me was that buildings and upgrades aren`t assigned any hotkeys, and that "WASDE" is taken up by camera functions... these are the most commonly used hotkeys in higher level RTS, you guys seriously have to change that. Implement camera locations hotkeys rather than a WASD movement system, plus we got mouse scrolling anyways.

So far so good, though. I`ll dive deeper into testing and will see what I`ll do from there

[idanwin]

Hello, welcome to the forum!

I hate mouse scrolling! But I agree with you that hotkeys are necessary.

[quantumstate]

Something subtle you should know about the shift click training is that it decreases the training time. So training one female citizen take 10 seconds, training 5 takes 37 seconds. So you can have fewer training structures at the cost of increased queuing.

Building hotkeys are a planned feature but aren't implemented yet. I agree that wasd should be rebound for that. We have location hotkeys on F5-F8 (Ctrl F5-F8 sets the location), keys can be rebound by modifying a config file (default.cfg) currently which isn't too friendly but does work.

Do you have the svn version of the game? If not it might be worth getting it to be more current with the features as they get added.

[Nakamura]

Yes I have the SVN version. At the time I wrote this I wasn`t aware of the queuing feature. It`s a good feature, as stockpiling resources is usually a bad thing.

Thanks for the info about hkeys.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I would prefer we have a couple of hotkey presets, like how RTW had a couple of different setups, and WASD=Camera could be a part of a "FPS" preset, while WASD rebound to buildings could be part of a "RTS" preset.

Personally, I hate using the screen edge to move the camera around. I like the WASD because I can keep my cursor in the middle of the screen where the action and focus is.

[LordGood]

It was a breath of fresh air to have WASD, i get immediate control over camera movement while still being able to use my mouse. I like how it's set up