Suggestions for 0 A.D.

[Freagarach]

On 31/01/2021 at 12:05 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

chance to go gaia and start attacking you (or anyone else, see: Mamartines, Mercenary War, et al.)

I very much like this idea, but it can easily be abused. Just make a whole lot of mercs quickly, station them near your enemy, and let them convert to GAIA, no upkeep cost, but still the benefit of hindering your enemy. Any ideas how that could be negated?

5 hours ago, cowehe8775 said:

What if they cost differently like trading in the market. Like bartering for resources, they start low then they get more expensive the more players buy them.

Hmm, would be a nice idea indeed

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

4 minutes ago, Freagarach said:

I very much like this idea, but it can easily be abused. Just make a whole lot of mercs quickly, station them near your enemy, and let them convert to GAIA, no upkeep cost, but still the benefit of hindering your enemy. Any ideas how that could be negated?

Perhaps mercs can be rehired by anyone once they go Gaia. Just click on the Gaia merc battalion and there would be a button in the UI to hire them. 

 

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

5 hours ago, cowehe8775 said:

That's a great idea. What if they cost differently like trading in the market. Like bartering for resources, they start low then they get more expensive the more players buy them. That would be realistic. Or the cost could be relative to the metal cost in the market.

Yeah, that would be my idea for mercs and slaves. There is a global pool (perhaps decided by the game host) and the more mercs hired from that pool, the more expensive they get for everybody. At some point, they'd get more expensive than champions, but you might want to hire them anyway to keep the enemy from hiring them. 

[cowehe8775]

What if you only paid mercenaries when they were fighting and to make it more realistic, they could carry all the metal they are paid with them. When they are idle, they could go to a market and trade resources for the metal they have been given. This way you get the metal returned to you when they trade things with their metal like a realistic economy. This would make it less common for you to run out of metal but you would still loose some metal. When they cannot be paid, they will just go to the nearest market and trade their metal until they can be hired.

Another idea I had was to instead of paying a set price for mercenaries, you set a price that you will pay each mercenary and how many you will hire. That way, you could raise or lower the prices so enemies would loose or not be able to hire any and the prices that mercs will accept would change based on demand for them and all the options they have to each player.

[facts]

A preset option for 1v1 Rated games where-
1. Map is Balanced Mainland
     tbf, any balanced map will do. very important in my opinion, maps are often one sided in 1v1. I know there is a mod for this, but most people don't have it and having one extra map which is balanced in an official release would be a cool addition imo.
2. Map size is small and unit count is 200
   makes it require more skill because larger maps have so much more resources the game essentially becomes a 2 hour spam fest Lesser resources( ample for 1v1) make every unit killed and trained more significant. This also gets rid of potential late game lag. 
3. Starting Resources is low (300)
      Makes rushing more effective and failed rushes more taxing. 

This preset is enabled before hosting and it adds the suffix "<game name> || 1v1 facts settings" ( name is just a placeholder, any appropriate name will do). 1v1s are definitive tests for for objectively deciding where a player ranks among the community. 
This setting cannot be altered once the room is made and will require the host to quit and remake the room and untick "facts settings" ( name subject to change) to be allowed to have their own preferred settings.

This in my opinion is ideal for ideal 1v1. This  makes it easier for players to know what settings are enabled before joining and creates a standard for 1v1 matches that most professionals ( afaik) use.
 Also, this prevents cheeky hosts from changing minor settings secretly to trick the other player.
Let me know what you think about this mode. 
cheers !

Edited February 8, 2021 by facts

[badosu]

3 hours ago, facts said:

1. Map is Balanced Mainland

Should be straightforward enough to use the new map flags and include it as a 'preset'.

Balanced Maps codebase is not in a state I'd deem easy to port to upstream due to not following conventions though. I'd be more than happy with assisting with information on our extensively tested, and iterated over, balancing decisions though.

[badosu]

Bar has a functionality in lobby where you can type `!preset team|duel|ffa` and it works well. Would be interesting to have a default chat bot that can listen to similar commands.

With regard to other points, the preset or map flags should enable that.
 

Would also deprecate having to use autociv or fgod as a patch for that, for example `!balance` automatically balances per rating (though ideally we'd have to calculate and use rating for team games instead of 1v1), as its done there. One can set a `!clan <myclanname>` so balance can prioritize player who like to play together.

I know people (and myself) complain about rating not being reliable, but that's only because we calculate it on a very specific circumstance (rated enabled in 1v1). IMO we should be safe to enable tg rating for all tgs, it's what's most played anyway and people shouldn't really bother that much with it. Nubs will have a good notion of actual rating, experienced players will have a better experience, caring about tg rating is much less stressful since if you have a bad rating you will be included in teams with better players so I think that should be fine.

Most map decisions can be performed by voting as instead of the rooms boss, voting would help considerably.

Anyway, a bit off-topic but some food for inspiration (and A25). I would not have any expectancy of having balancing changes to maps in A24 as we are feature frozen and the changes would not be trivial (and tbh not deemed essential).

Edited February 9, 2021 by badosu

[Pepre]

Is it possible to make diplomacy more detailed (like in CIV 4 for example)?

[Silier]

hi,

can you please describe what it is in civ 4 looks like? or what specifically do you have in mind by more detailed? 

anyway, it would be possible, but someone needs to find time and do it or at least create some kind of blueprint, complete suggestion to see if it would be welcomed

[nifa]

On 22/02/2021 at 2:26 PM, Angen said:

hi,

can you please describe what it is in civ 4 looks like? or what specifically do you have in mind by more detailed? 

anyway, it would be possible, but someone needs to find time and do it or at least create some kind of blueprint, complete suggestion to see if it would be welcomed

I had some ideas, it's not a complete suggestion but maybe i can get the discussion running:)

Right now there are only 3 kind of diplomatic relations, which are Neutral, Enemy and Ally. I think it might be nice to add "unknown", as I've seen people many people requesting here on the forum. Further, right now all three diplomatic relations are balanced. Adding uneven relations, like Vassal state / Hegemonic state could add some dynamics to the gameplay. The idea is, that when you have heavily damaged an opponent, you can make him your vassal and focus on other opponents, while still being able to have some control over him. On the other hand the vassal has the opportunity to come back to power in later game.

As far as i see in alpha 24 there are three variables to be controlled, which are whether attack is possible, shared vision and shared dropsites. More possible variables could be:

Territory invasion: Make it unpossible to move units into another players territory (unless support units). This could also prevent some sneaky moves

Continious tribute: Paying a percentage of all gathered resources (not at once, but like out of 10 wood gathered 1 goes to the hegemonic power)

Production ban on siege: Make it impossible to produce rams, catapults etc

In the end this could look like this:

This is only a basic idea, other ideas are welcome:) Allied and team might be one too much, out of Protectorate and vassal state one might be enough too. Historical correctness might be improved. So far all relations only have effects between the two parties, maybe an effect on the relation with others is desired, like abolishing trade with a third party and so on

[Lopess]

56 minutes ago, nifa said:

I had some ideas, it's not a complete suggestion but maybe i can get the discussion running:)

Right now there are only 3 kind of diplomatic relations, which are Neutral, Enemy and Ally. I think it might be nice to add "unknown", as I've seen people many people requesting here on the forum. Further, right now all three diplomatic relations are balanced. Adding uneven relations, like Vassal state / Hegemonic state could add some dynamics to the gameplay. The idea is, that when you have heavily damaged an opponent, you can make him your vassal and focus on other opponents, while still being able to have some control over him. On the other hand the vassal has the opportunity to come back to power in later game.

As far as i see in alpha 24 there are three variables to be controlled, which are whether attack is possible, shared vision and shared dropsites. More possible variables could be:

Territory invasion: Make it unpossible to move units into another players territory (unless support units). This could also prevent some sneaky moves

Continious tribute: Paying a percentage of all gathered resources (not at once, but like out of 10 wood gathered 1 goes to the hegemonic power)

Production ban on siege: Make it impossible to produce rams, catapults etc

In the end this could look like this:

This is only a basic idea, other ideas are welcome:) Allied and team might be one too much, out of Protectorate and vassal state one might be enough too. Historical correctness might be improved. So far all relations only have effects between the two parties, maybe an effect on the relation with others is desired, like abolishing trade with a third party and so on

 

I always had this kind of idea, it would be something incredible for the single player and future campaigns. I hope this is not so hard to program

[Dragonoar]

Some suggestions:

1. Projectile trails

Right now projectiles are hard to see, especially when zoomed out. This is exacerbated by projectiles not having impact sounds, and the audio is out of sync so sometimes you have silent arrows or sounds that play midflight. Another easy way to fix this is by making the projectiles bigger (and I mean much bigger).

2. "I need [resource]" button for MP

Perhaps this can further be expanded into a 'Give [resource]' button prompt (100 default, 500 shift click) - so you don't have to open the diplomacy panel - and/or a chat wheel system, with "Yes", "No", "Help", "Attacking", etc. 

3. Visible production/research progress bar below the capture point

IIRC this was in AoE 2 DE and I find this feature quite nice. Also useful to tell which buildings are idle thus maximizing APM count as well. In MP I see people queueing 5 women then forgetting about it. 

4. Flags for unit destination

Unless you're queue building houses it's hard to tell where your units are going. We already have flags for garrison so I think we can use that.

 

Attached are what they could look like:

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by Dragonoar

[Stan`]

Maybe I need to finish #557/D657

I suppose we could have particle trails for slings but it will have a perf hit I guess.

6 minutes ago, Dragonoar said:

I need [resource]" button for MP

Perhaps this can further be expanded into a 'Give [resource]' button prompt (100 default, 500 shift click) - so you don't have to open the diplomacy panel - and/or a chat wheel system, with "Yes", "No", "Help", "Attacking", etc. 

3. Visible production/research progress bar below the capture point

IIRC this was in AoE 2 DE and I find this feature quite nice. Also useful to tell which buildings are idle thus maximizing APM count as well. In MP I see people queueing 5 women then forgetting about it. 

I'm not sure how hard those are @Imarok @Angen @Freagarach @wraitii

[Samulis]

16 minutes ago, Dragonoar said:

Some suggestions:

1. Projectile trails

Right now projectiles are hard to see, especially when zoomed out. This is exacerbated by projectiles not having impact sounds, and the audio is out of sync so sometimes you have silent arrows or sounds that play midflight. Another easy way to fix this is by making the projectiles bigger (and I mean much bigger).

I like this suggestion of 'tracer' lines, it was done to great effect in AoE III and many other games. It would be helpful so long as it is not too difficult or graphically expensive.

Arrows and javs do have impact sounds, I do not know why they might not be working for you; maybe they are just too quiet. Right now it is just a single dirt impact sound because detection of material impacted is not yet possible and that is the 'safest' sound to use (material-dependent impact is in progress, hopefully for a25).

Edit: regarding the bars showing progress of construction, etc. for a building, I think that is not a very elegant solution. In a perfect world, the buildings should imho be animated when working (like some of the later Settlers games), to mitigate immersion-breaking random bars floating over buildings (but that would be a crazy amount of work I reckon). It is also easy to mistake such bars for either capture status or health, which serves to confuse new players and even old players. I found the 'feature' more annoying than helpful when I tried AoE II DE: I'm trained to see a bar above a building in AoE and assume the building just suffered damage, then waste several minutes hunting for a hidden enemy. XD

Edited February 27, 2021 by Samulis

[Imarok]

10 hours ago, Dragonoar said:

2. "I need [resource]" button for MP

Perhaps this can further be expanded into a 'Give [resource]' button prompt (100 default, 500 shift click) - so you don't have to open the diplomacy panel - and/or a chat wheel system, with "Yes", "No", "Help", "Attacking", etc. 

#6074

[DanW58]

I haven't read all 148 pages here, but a quick look reveals much interest in trading and deals and more complex inter-civ relationships.  Here's an idea that might make a transition to more complex things easier:

Implementing Free Market forces.

Presently, your role as a player is as a (benevolent) dictator.  You decide how many men and women will be born, and what their jobs will be.  But just as there are currently "mercenaries" available, though they do not yet charge you money, like mercenaries would, by definition, but this could be fixed, you could also have entrepreneurial farmers that spring up when food is low (and presumably price is getting higher).  The same could go for weapons production, training of mercenaries, and research.  Doesn't have to be one way or the other;  it could be a mix of government and private industry.  And the mix might have a default number for each civilization, but be amenable to change through player actions.  I'm not talking about a full economy;  just about entrepreneurial, private industry actors vetting for government contracts, presumably.  So, say, if you manually start a lot of farms, entrepreneurial farmers never happen;  but if you let the food run low, then you see private farms popping up.  Same for private barracks.  Same for "research centers", which might be a new type of building where all the research that any other buildings can do is reflected all in one building, BUT where you cannot order what to research, it rather happens by itself, more slowly, but for free (they manage their own budget);  --or in the future you could pay a price to request a research direction.  Also, these buildings could have hidden gems of technologies not available in any of the government buildings.   Private houses could also pop up when food is plentiful.

Edited February 27, 2021 by DanW58

[Dragonoar]

23 hours ago, Samulis said:

I like this suggestion of 'tracer' lines, it was done to great effect in AoE III and many other games. It would be helpful so long as it is not too difficult or graphically expensive.

Arrows and javs do have impact sounds, I do not know why they might not be working for you; maybe they are just too quiet. Right now it is just a single dirt impact sound because detection of material impacted is not yet possible and that is the 'safest' sound to use (material-dependent impact is in progress, hopefully for a25).

Edit: regarding the bars showing progress of construction, etc. for a building, I think that is not a very elegant solution. In a perfect world, the buildings should imho be animated when working (like some of the later Settlers games), to mitigate immersion-breaking random bars floating over buildings (but that would be a crazy amount of work I reckon). It is also easy to mistake such bars for either capture status or health, which serves to confuse new players and even old players. I found the 'feature' more annoying than helpful when I tried AoE II DE: I'm trained to see a bar above a building in AoE and assume the building just suffered damage, then waste several minutes hunting for a hidden enemy. XD

I am simply coming from a competitive multiplayer point of view. For constructions we do not need a progress bar since people usually hover the cursor over the building and are able to tell just from the hp, and/or the scaffolding. As for what you are suggesting, we do have that with forges producing smokes when they're researching (though for me this isn't noticeable enough). Besides, I don't know how it would work with barracks and other smokeless buildings. but that is up to the art team. I may have to play settlers to get some new perspectives. But what I'm suggesting doesn't involve creating/modifying assets. 

In fact siege weapons already have that progress bar when they're un/packing. If anything it would conflict with the delenda est packable building (are they packing or are they producing? or both?), but such feature does not exist yet in the main game.

Off-topic, I really like how when you get attacked there's a notification and when you click on it it automatically focuses you to the attacking unit, but I think that can be expanded to include notifications when buildings & upgrades are done or units are created. I'd reckon that would be handy. But I can't tell if a lot of players would deem the screen chaotic with all those notifications (especially in late game). This is just a half baked idea after all.

[Stan`]

34 minutes ago, Dragonoar said:

I am simply coming from a competitive multiplayer point of view. For constructions we do not need a progress bar since people usually hover the cursor over the building and are able to tell just from the hp, and/or the scaffolding. As for what you are suggesting, we do have that with forges producing smokes when they're researching (though for me this isn't noticeable enough). Besides, I don't know how it would work with barracks and other smokeless buildings. but that is up to the art team. I may have to play settlers to get some new perspectives. But what I'm suggesting doesn't involve creating/modifying assets. 

Forges don't do that. I wanted them to but there was a lot of complaints about it being a cheat or whatever so I never did it.

 

[Dragonoar]

4 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Forges don't do that. I wanted them to but there was a lot of complaints about it being a cheat or whatever so I never did it.

 

Wait. But I swear I saw exactly that in a video or a gif. Forge animations it was labeled

[Stan`]

16 minutes ago, Dragonoar said:

Wait. But I swear I saw exactly that in a video or a gif. Forge animations it was labeled

You did.on the forums That little demo was how far it got.

[Sundiata]

Just now, Stan` said:

Forges don't do that. I wanted them to but there was a lot of complaints about it being a cheat or whatever so I never did it.

Really?? Who was complaining, when and where and why? Obviously it's not a cheat (obviously), so what were the legitimate arguments against it? 

[azayrahmad]

17 hours ago, DanW58 said:

Presently, your role as a player is as a (benevolent) dictator.  You decide how many men and women will be born, and what their jobs will be.  But just as there are currently "mercenaries" available, though they do not yet charge you money, like mercenaries would, by definition, but this could be fixed, you could also have entrepreneurial farmers that spring up when food is low (and presumably price is getting higher).  The same could go for weapons production, training of mercenaries, and research.  Doesn't have to be one way or the other;  it could be a mix of government and private industry.  And the mix might have a default number for each civilization, but be amenable to change through player actions.  I'm not talking about a full economy;  just about entrepreneurial, private industry actors vetting for government contracts, presumably.  So, say, if you manually start a lot of farms, entrepreneurial farmers never happen;  but if you let the food run low, then you see private farms popping up.  Same for private barracks.  Same for "research centers", which might be a new type of building where all the research that any other buildings can do is reflected all in one building, BUT where you cannot order what to research, it rather happens by itself, more slowly, but for free (they manage their own budget);  --or in the future you could pay a price to request a research direction.  Also, these buildings could have hidden gems of technologies not available in any of the government buildings.   Private houses could also pop up when food is plentiful.

This is a very interesting idea. So this is like mixing RTS to city building genre games, where player only define regions (residential, industrial, etc) and let the game populate it... or depopulate, depending on your economic condition. Although deciding on player's level of control is important here, lest the game could play itself without player's intervention.

[Genava55]

Suggestion: differentiating the civs with deeper changes in the mechanisms of gameplay similar to Age of Mythology, Warcraft III and Starcraft 2.

People generally object that there are too many civs for this.

Counterargument: Grouping the civs by similar features and each groups having different mechanisms unique to their groups. The civs inside the same group could have also a few moderate differences like actually in A23 and A24 or like it is in the majority of AoE2 civs.

Goal: having real different gameplay experience from switching to another civ.

Note: this has nothing to do with previous suggestions proposing to make the game unbalanced on purpose with tier-list. I still think the game should be balanced.

 

Examples of group (this only an illustrative example):

Bellicist civs: Romans, Macedonians, Spartans

Inheritor civs: Seleucids, Ptolemies, Persians

Far-away civs: Maurya, Kushites

Thallasocratic civs: Carthaginians, Athenians

Barbarian civs: Britons, Iberians, Gauls

Example of unique mechanism: the inheritor civs group could have a unique free building at the start because they have prospered in a territory with a very long story. Or a bunch of free houses because there were a lot of prosperous cities on the territory they acquired.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Genava55

[Stan`]

It was here, and I thought there were more people against it

 

[DanW58]

3 hours ago, azayrahmad said:

So this is like mixing RTS to city building genre games, where player only define regions (residential, industrial, etc) and let the game populate it... or depopulate, depending on your economic condition. Although deciding on player's level of control is important here, lest the game could play itself without player's intervention.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback;  I think defining just one region, "civilian" would suffice, and be optional.  First of all, this could be exclusive to the less historically autocratic, more democratic civiliazations.  So you are playing Athenians, say, and you can designate an area of terrain for civilian structures ahead of time, if you want.  Otherwise, when the AI is ready to place a civilian building, it will place it wherever it wants.  If the location is too inconvenient for your plans, you can still select the building and scuttle it.

In terms of game balance, this could be made to be both good and bad.  Good in that it could unlock technologies you won't find through normal buildings, perhaps;  and it may produce food and build housing for you.  On the other hand, it would increase the cost of materials and labor in general, which would manifest as buildings taking longer to build.  For this to work, instead of the current paradigm of resources being enough to build something or not being enough, there should be a smooth interpolation between not enough and plentiful, where the interpolation applies to building speed.  If you are too close to not having enough resources, building is possible but takes a long time;  so it is better to have plenty more resources than are strictly necessary.  With this paradigm change in place, resource consumption by civilian concerns can be a smooth and continuous issue.   On the other hand, over time it self-adjusts, as high price of resources induces private mining startups.

Although you could fear this would become a game that plays itself, consider that if larger maps are the future, and therefore longer games, the M-word ("micromanagement") can begin to be pronounced.  So this would gradually relieve the problem as your population grows, so you can concentrate on military strategy.