Suggestions for 0 A.D.

[Servo]

@MayQueen hard to understand what you mean. 

@Lion.Kanzen I think I'm going to try the Iberians on Tuscan Acropolis. I'm curious how the walls would look like. If it covers all the edges which I doubt would be great otherwise I have to delete it then rebuild. My favorite spot of this map is on the lower left which I could preserve more pine trees, etc.  The Iberian opponent I had only built two lines of walls but not on the edges. The passages way down too had very deep spots on two passage places which make it hard to build a nice flat gates. 

By far the best buildings I had seen were the Ptolomies, they're beautiful though Ibearean houses are the greatest!

Oh it's the Maurians having elephant dropsites. 

Edited April 12, 2017 by Servo

[Libervurto]

Why is it left click to place buildings, when every other order is given with a right click?  This inconsistency continues to confuse me.

[Doubleb017]

Hi, i'm new to the game and i must say it looks pretty good so far. However, there are a few elements that ,according to me, could enhance the gameplay. These elements are:

• Having a way to see how many workers you have on each resource(by either hovering on the resource or by placing it next to the resource)
• Adding a timer to see how long you are in game
• Adding a scoring system to see enemy and ally progress(like in aoe2-3)

These are some minor, and optional, things but i feel like they could improve the game.

[Lion.Kanzen]

1 hour ago, Doubleb017 said:

Hi, i'm new to the game and i must say it looks pretty good so far. However, there are a few elements that ,according to me, could enhance the gameplay. These elements are:

• Having a way to see how many workers you have on each resource(by either hovering on the resource or by placing it next to the resource)
• Adding a timer to see how long you are in game
• Adding a scoring system to see enemy and ally progress(like in aoe2-3)

These are some minor, and optional, things but i feel like they could improve the game.

• There a ticket about this worry.
• you can activate in main option this feature.
• planned feature for now.

[FeXoR]

15 hours ago, Libervurto said:

Why is it left click to place buildings, when every other order is given with a right click?  This inconsistency continues to confuse me.

In the default cursor mode the left mouse button is used to select entities (units, buildings, trees, ...) by clicking while the cursor is above the entity or dragging a selection box to select all units of the selecting player within it. The right mouse button is for giving orders for the current selection.

If you are not in the default mode (e.g. with a building selected you want to build) the right mouse button is used to return to the default mode - which is vital to be fast and simple. So commands are given with the left mouse button only in non-default cursor modes.

We actually care about consistency.

[marcog]

The game is very beautiful, but maybe it would take some difficulty, from simple to medium to very hard.
Now it's definitely set to very hard, so far I've managed to go a long way past, but if it comes, soon after the truce, a nearly invincible horde of very aggressive invaders ..?

[feneur]

On 2017-05-03 at 2:02 PM, marcog said:

The game is very beautiful, but maybe it would take some difficulty, from simple to medium to very hard.
Now it's definitely set to very hard, so far I've managed to go a long way past, but if it comes, soon after the truce, a nearly invincible horde of very aggressive invaders ..?

For now you can set the difficulty per AI bot, just click the little gear next to the AI name and choose another difficulty setting. There are most likely many things which can be fine-tuned, and the AI behaviour could change between the difficulties. for now the default AI difficulty simply means that it will do its best without any bonuses.

[temple]

Here's some suggestions I have for the game. I've tried to avoid obvious ones (like improved pathing), but probably many of them have been discussed before.

BUGS

(1) When constructing buildings, workers should add a certain number of hitpoints to the building each second, but instead they add the floor of that number. This makes buildings take longer to complete in a lot of situations. For example, one unit building a 1000hp defense tower should finish it in 150s. But instead of adding 1000/150 = 6.667 hp to the building each second, they only add floor(6.667) = 6 hp each second. So it takes them 1000/6 = 166.7 seconds to finish instead of 150s. If you've ever just barely failed to finish a tower or fortress or something, this might've been the reason why.

The worst example of this is in building a civil center. It has 3000hp and takes 500s to build, which is 3000/500 = 6 hp/s. With ten women, they each build at a rate of floor(6 * 10**0.7 / 10) = floor(3.007) = 3 hp/s. All together that's 10 * 3 = 30 hp/s, so it takes them 3000/30 = 100s to finish. However, with eleven women they each build at floor(6 * 11**0.7 / 11) = floor(2.922) = 2 hp/s, combined 11 * 2 = 22 hp/s, so it takes them 3000/22 = 136.4 seconds to finish. So in this case, adding an extra woman to help "speed up" the building process actually slows it down by over 30s!

I think this occurs in the following line in "public/simulation/components/Foundation.js". Is there a reason to use Math.floor?
    var deltaHP = Math.max(work, Math.min(maxHealth, Math.floor(work * this.GetBuildRate() * this.buildMultiplier)));

(2) Workers drop off resources at the nearest drop site, but it seems that "nearest" is calculated using the distance to the center of the drop site instead of the edge. Can this be changed, or is the calculation too complicated?

(3) Units stand in a square formation to attack buildings, why? They can attack from a circular range but instead walk closer.

IMPROVEMENTS

(4) Can we have a hotkey to cycle through buildings where we have units garrisoned? We currently have one to cycle through idle units, but garrisoned units don't count as "idle". More than a few times I've put women in houses to protect them from raiders, only to forget about them for the rest of the game! You can have units garrisoned inside allied structures, so the hotkey should cycle through them too. (Also, houses should get a flag when units are garrisoned inside.)

(5) Can we have a hotkey for the town bell?

(6) Can we control which units towers, etc., attack? I'd like my tower to focus on the opponent's tower, rather than also attacking their houses and fields.

(7) Can we let women and worker elephants place the foundations for every building? Right now it's annoying to select a man chopping wood, have him place the foundation for an outpost or house on the other side of my base, click back to wood so that he doesn't move, and then select the woman or elephant to go actually build the building. It's a lot of unnecessary micromanagement. Either let women and elephants build the foundations themselves (my preferred solution), or if you don't want women building barracks or whatever, then don't allow them to build them period!

MORE ANNOYING THINGS

(8) In order look at unit stats (to check if your opponent has blacksmith upgrades, for example), you have to stop your cursor over the shield icon and then wait half a second for the tooltip to pop up. I'd like it if that just popped up immediately while you're hovering over the icon. The half second delay is annoying enough, but because I use a pen rather than a mouse it's actually hard to stop exactly on the icon.

(9) There's only 13 civs if we count random, do we really need a scroll bar?

Also in replays, can we make the player drop-down menu wider (when there's room) and longer, to again remove the scroll bar?

(10) In the lobby, can we select and copy chat? There's conversations or links I want to save, but I have to settle on taking a screenshot.

EXTRA THINGS

(11) I don't know how complicated it would be, but I'd like to see corrals treated different in the summary page. Currently, if you make one sheep you're credited for one unit created, 100f gathered and 50f spent. This is technically correct, but in the game you're at the same point as someone who's simply gathered 100-50 = 50f from berries, and their stats are 50f gathered, 0f spent, with no units created. So instead I'd like sheep to be ignored in terms of "units created", and for them to count as -50f gathered rather than +50f spent. So after one sheep they'll have zero units created, 100-50 = 50f gathered, 0f spent, the same as the berry player. In this way, the unit and resource statistics will be comparable between those who use corrals and those who don't.

(12) I'd like "random" civs to be a 1/12 chance of each one, rather than the current 1/9 chance with briton/gaul and athens/mace/sparta grouped together.

I think this is it for now. I'm looking forward to Alpha22!

 

[Imarok]

(1) Nice bug. Tried it out myself, it feels really strange 10 women are faster with building than 11

(2) May be fixed by https://code.wildfiregames.com/D13#10156(not sure)

Edit: (12) see https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3987

[wraitii]

I do believe I sort of fix (2) in D13. Nice catch on the first bug though.

[fatherbushido]

@temple: do you want to provide a patch for (1) or do you want we take that over?

 

[temple]

I think it might be a simple fix, so I can give it a shot. I haven't done any patches/tickets/etc. before though, so it might take me a few days to figure everything out.

[elexis]

Already had issues finding that improvement again, as it's buried on page 132 of a collective thread and the remarks are soon becoming forgotton history, so please create trac tickets for these issues, temple.

For the civ dropdown size, I've created D527.

[temple]

Okay, will do.

[borg-]

1- We need an indicator for minimap, For now nothing complex, (attack here, help here, etc..) just something to indicate.

2- I would like to see the units come out of different points of the constructions as indicated. They are always coming out ahead, this can sometimes be delayed (if you have only wood behind the CC, it takes a lot longer to get around), and also prevents you from ambushes or fleeing enemies that are around the building.

3- One thing I really miss, is to be able to create units and leave them inside the building as soon as they are ready. Currently you can not do this, they leave the building so you can put them in later, and they can often die carelessly instead of protected.

4- Rabbits should be domestic like chickens. Its very very hard kill them with horses range, are very small, and need more than one attack. I do not see any player hunting habbits, is very rate. They should be hunts like chicken.

5- What I'm going to put here seems to be something of no value, but I missed it a few days ago, and I'll expatiate because.

As you can see in the picture, most games have an indicator of where your unit will move, after your click, at 0 a.d we do not have this, I never felt lacking to be honest, but days ago I was having problems in my Mouse, right click, then sometimes it ended up not clicking, so I got lost several times, (there were not few) because I thought I had clicked and had not, as we do not have the indicator I had no way to know. I relied on the audio, okay is a good indicator, but have you stopped to think about possible deaf users? I think an indicator would really be very useful, especially for users with possible hearing problems.

 

Edited May 20, 2017 by borg-

[Imarok]

31 minutes ago, borg- said:

3- One thing I really miss, is to be able to create units and leave them inside the building as soon as they are ready. Currently you can not do this, they leave the building so you can put them in later, and they can often die carelessly instead of protected.

Select building and then Ctrl + right click on that building.

[borg-]

4 minutes ago, Imarok said:

Select building and then Ctrl + right click on that building.

Wow thanks!!! I did not know, and I think most players do not know. Likewise, I think this should be simpler with just the right click, without the Ctrl.

[Lion.Kanzen]

Quote

4- Rabbits should be domestic like chickens. Its very very hard kill them with horses range, are very small, and need more than one attack. I do not see any player hunting habbits, is very rate. They should be hunts like chicken.

 

 

 

Can be capturable like AoE series.

@elexis can be nice for A23 start with capturing and conversion. Yeah the other methods described in that ticket.(#997)

 

5- move animation. I think is time to open a task.

[Imarok]

2 hours ago, borg- said:

Wow thanks!!! I did not know, and I think most players do not know. Likewise, I think this should be simpler with just the right click, without the Ctrl.

Without Ctrl you reset the rallypoint. Ctrl always stands for garrisioning

[elexis]

Re temple:

(3) Because the building is square and they start shooting once in range.

(4) Agree, but the issue is especially that we can't select multiple buildings of allies at once.

(5) sure

(7) That's controversial, discussion goes back forth. Most recently here #4576.

(8) We've noticed th half-second delay for tooltips in D459 too. Agree to remove it, trivial.

(12) Agree, the civs are well differentiated, all unique, even all hellenic ones. Apparently this is wanted though, so a new page was proposed once upon a time #3987

[Lion.Kanzen]

With borg suggestion.

5 - @elexis what is the name ( technical) of that animation? I can't find any ticket related.

Edited May 21, 2017 by Lion.Kanzen

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 hours ago, elexis said:

(12) Agree, the civs are well differentiated, all unique, even all hellenic ones. Apparently this is wanted though, so a new page was proposed once upon a time #3987

My god, what is holding this one up? https://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/3987

 

@Sandarac @s0600204

Edited May 21, 2017 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[temple]

2 hours ago, elexis said:

(3) Because the building is square and they start shooting once in range.

In the pictures below I ctrl-clicked to attack the cc. The top row shows what usually happens, with units in the back walking around to their place on the ends. But in the bottom row I ctrl-clicked a second time while they were walking around, and the units stopped in place and started attacked the cc. So the units in the top row are definitely in range, but for some reason they walk around to their position on the square before they start to attack.

I think currently units are within range if the center of the object is within range? And maybe that's going to be changed in D13 to if any part of the object is in range? That's my understanding. In the first case, the units should line up in a circle around the cc, and in the second case they should line up in a circle/square hybrid, in straight lines parallel to each side, but then 1/4 circles around each of the corners.

Playing around in the editor: Archers actually line up in a circle like they should! Slingers and skirmishers line up in a square like in the picture. Hmm, playing around more: Attacking a barracks instead of a civic center, slingers will line up in a circle too! But skirmishers still stand in a square. Skirmishers will stand in a circle to attack a house though. So maybe it has something to do with how the building's "radius" (whatever that means) compares to the unit's range?

I'll make a ticket for this. For the other things on my list, I searched for old tickets that mentioned them, and only made a new ticket if I didn't find anything.

[temple]

On 5/21/2017 at 0:16 AM, temple said:

I think currently units are within range if the center of the object is within range? And maybe that's going to be changed in D13 to if any part of the object is in range? That's my understanding. In the first case, the units should line up in a circle around the cc, and in the second case they should line up in a circle/square hybrid, in straight lines parallel to each side, but then 1/4 circles around each of the corners.

I was wrong with the first line, units are within range if they're within range of the object's obstruction, which is a rectangle for buildings. The problem is in the pathfinding, where it approximates the correct circle/square hybrid shape by either a circle (which works fine) or a square (which doesn't work so well) depending on how the unit's range compares to the size of the obstruction. However, that section of the code's being removed in the D13 rewrite, so for now I think this bug can be ignored.

[temple]

I wasn't able to get D13 working in Phabricator, but I did get something working through wraitii's GitHub. Units attacked differently, but there was some weird behavior (units walking back to a previous point for no reason, before continuing again), so it's certainly possible that I grabbed the wrong branch or the code isn't up to date or something like that. But I thought I'd share what I found anyway.

Currently, units line up in either a circle or a rectangle, when they should line up in the circle/rectangle hybrid. In all three of these cases units take a lot of time walking around to their correct spot at the end of the line. In wraitii's rewrite what happened was that some units (even when selected individually) walked too close to the building, which left room for more units behind them. The effect of this was that the units attacked sooner, since they didn't spend so much time walking.

For example, here is a group of archers attacking a civic center. Normally they'd stand shoulder to shoulder in a big arc, but here they stand three or four deep. I like this effect, but normally you'd do it manually: attack the cc, walk forward a bit (or try to capture the cc) for just a second, then attack the cc again. In that time the units in front all walk forward a step which leaves room for the units behind them to get into range.

Here's skirmishers attacking a civic center. You can see the outline of the correct circle/rectangle hybrid shape on the outer edge, but again many units walk too close to the building. The main problem with this is that when your units outrange the enemy's buildings or units (they walk too close when attacking units, too), if they walk closer than they need to they risk getting hit.

Hopefully I'm just looking at obsolete code. But otherwise I'm not a fan of this change.

Also, the "nearest dropsite" bug was still in effect, so I made a ticket for that.