Suggestions for 0 A.D.

[Perzival12]

3 hours ago, Eilat said:

Oh, you're the guy who revived HC, thanks! Looks like I haven't explored this game enough. I was wondering if there's a way to allow multiple players to choose the same color. You probably know how, right? Could you tell me which part I need to modify?

You're welcome.

I just did some searching, if you want to make multiple players have the same color, there are two ways:

A: Make or edit a Scenario map, making the team members have the same color.

B: Edit PlayerColor.js. Not sure what exactly you would change, but it is doable.

C: Do both, which would fix all maps to be how you want them.

D: Do what @Gurken Khan said above: toggle diplomacy colors (which can be changed in Settings).

[ffm2]

In metadata.json currently for the player are stored:

buildingsCaptured
buildingsCapturedValue
buildingsConstructed
buildingsLost
buildingsLostValue
enemyBuildingsDestroyed
enemyBuildingsDestroyedValue
enemyUnitsKilled
enemyUnitsKilledValue
failedBribes
lootCollected
peakPercentMapControlled
percentMapControlled
percentMapExplored
populationCount
resourcesBought
resourcesCount
resourcesGathered
resourcesSold
resourcesUsed
successfulBribes
teamPeakPercentMapControlled
teamPercentMapControlled
teamPercentMapExplored
time
tradeIncome
treasuresCollected
tributesReceived
tributesSent
unitsCaptured
unitsCapturedValue
unitsLost
unitsLostValue
unitsTrained

I propose adding 
-HP healed
-damage dealt in each damage type
-damage dealt in HP (so after what gets absorbed by the armor)

Like this, one could see if one e.g. has only Hippocrates how much HP he has restored in the game.
One could see which damage type was most relevant, e.g. for defense upgrades.

In the statistics under units the healers are only listed under Total, everyone/everything else gets a category.

[nifa]

I'd like to have a grid underlay for the line charts in the summary. Also it would be cool if "battles" were shown, like in AoE. So when a certain percentage of the total kills happen within a few minutes, the spot is marked on the graph.

[ffm2]

While we are at the charts: The first 8 minutes are very underrepresented but very important. One could make such a insert plot. A bit like this:

[Arup]

8 hours ago, ffm2 said:

While we are at the charts: The first 8 minutes are very underrepresented but very important. One could make such a insert plot. A bit like this:

Karl Pearson Coefficient of 0.95 (strong correlation) but to be honest it's not really slept on. you can know the outcome of 1v1 by min 8 unless both sre equally matched.if one has advantage over the other at min 8 then it's most probably going to stay that way

[nifa]

On 24/12/2025 at 1:35 PM, ffm2 said:

While we are at the charts: The first 8 minutes are very underrepresented but very important. One could make such a insert plot. A bit like this:

I like the idea. Not all graphs start at zero and go up to the right though, maybe zooming in could be a different approach.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

On 24/12/2025 at 7:35 AM, ffm2 said:

While we are at the charts: The first 8 minutes are very underrepresented but very important. One could make such a insert plot. A bit like this:

This is really cool. Maybe make a ticket for it.

[Eilat]

Merry Christmas everyone
I want to ask if it is feasible to make flying units farther from the ground and have freer flight paths, such as flying directly or gliding regardless of the terrain? The style of flying units now is like walking without touching the ground

[ffm2]

10 hours ago, nifa said:

I like the idea. Not all graphs start at zero and go up to the right though, maybe zooming in could be a different approach.

Definitely. Only for some selected ones, like eco, mili and total that follow this pattern. Also for them only with some conditions:

-When the game is longer than 14 min.

-When there's so much space for the inset graph on the top left

(Maybe one suffices)

[Gönndolsalv]

On 26/12/2025 at 12:12 AM, nifa said:

I like the idea. Not all graphs start at zero and go up to the right though, maybe zooming in could be a different approach.

I wish it was possible to zoom in.

Edited December 27, 2025 by Gönndolsalv

[Eilat]

There's a problem with playing on large maps: the movement of units. Units have different movement speeds, and those that arrive first tend to attack first. Sometimes these units wait for those who arrive later to regroup, but more often than not, they don't. The result is a long line of soldiers charging headlong into death. Could this be improved by choosing a regrouping point and making the attack only begin when enough units are present?

 

[ffm2]

5 hours ago, Eilat said:

There's a problem with playing on large maps: the movement of units. Units have different movement speeds, and those that arrive first tend to attack first. Sometimes these units wait for those who arrive later to regroup, but more often than not, they don't. The result is a long line of soldiers charging headlong into death.

That's not exclusive for large maps or units with different speeds.

If you have no formation: Each unit try to get to the destination without collision resulting in this line like ducklings. You can set the destination before the enemy base to regroup.

Formations have big problems on their own for path finding. Some players (not me) just activate formation short before a attack so the units run in the formation (a speed slightly faster that normal walk).

For new units from the barracks you could make batches. But loose unit groups are vulnerable. If you find such a line and can attack it with a group you can take out a lot of units with without taking much damage. A basic aspect is to attack few units with a lot. It's the players duty to run from outnumbered fights or attack when you are stronger.

So:

5 hours ago, Eilat said:

Could this be improved by choosing a regrouping point and making the attack only begin when enough units are present?

Yeah, but what do you want the game to do about it? You can set the regrouping point before the battle and send them in when you feel ready.

[fabio]

6 hours ago, Eilat said:

There's a problem with playing on large maps: the movement of units. Units have different movement speeds, and those that arrive first tend to attack first. Sometimes these units wait for those who arrive later to regroup, but more often than not, they don't. The result is a long line of soldiers charging headlong into death. Could this be improved by choosing a regrouping point and making the attack only begin when enough units are present?

A similar issue was recently addressed:

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/8580

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8589

[Eilat]

5 hours ago, ffm2 said:

That's not exclusive for large maps or units with different speeds.

If you have no formation: Each unit try to get to the destination without collision resulting in this line like ducklings. You can set the destination before the enemy base to regroup.

I mean, the longer the march, the worse this problem becomes. But anyway, the player won't be affected by it. I forgot to mention that the AI is the one affected, AI controlled troops are simply walking into their deaths in a single file.

[Eilat]

5 hours ago, ffm2 said:

Yeah, but what do you want the game to do about it? You can set the regrouping point before the battle and send them in when you feel ready.

I mean, can the AI be programmed to always do that, while the player will certainly do it?

[Deicide4u]

38 minutes ago, Eilat said:

AI controlled troops are simply walking into their deaths in a single file.

Yes, and this is a major problem. 

Some games have AIs that just group units some distance away from the targeted base and commence the attack from there.

I know for certain Brood War does this, but it's buggy. Units will still sometimes ignore the player's units while going to their grouping spot. Other times, the grouping spot will be inside the enemy base, so the units will be in a single line anyway.

It's not easy to code good grouping without the AI actively using formations. In the older alphas, AI would have grouped his units properly because formations were hard-coded.

Edited December 29, 2025 by Deicide4u

[Genava55]

An interesting video with several proposals on cohesion. A few ideas could be inspiring for 0 A.D.

[Deicide4u]

Some things to think about for release 29 or 30.

1) Only buildings that can be captured are production buildings and Civic Centers. Any other building cannot be captured, including Houses that have "Fertility Festival" researched and Fortresses.
2) To compensate, introduce three levels of building armor classes. "Civic" or "Civilian" structures will have ~30% hack resistance. "Military" structures (Barracks, Stables, Arsenals, Elephant Stables) will have ~60% hack resistance. "Fortification" structures (Walls, Towers and Fortresses) will have a highest ~80% hack resistance. Pierce and siege resistance doesn't have to be changed, except for structures belonging to the "Civic" class.

This should massively simplify game balance and solve the Capture and Delete meta once and for all.

[LienRag]

Well, capturing a fortress was a major strategic objective in many ancient situations...

[Thalatta]

Hi, I checked 0 A.D. around 15 years ago, and only lately had another go at it. I found it quite nice, with some interesting ideas. Lots of respect for the volunteers, it's impressive how it looks already. Obviously it still has many rough and suboptimal things, as expected from an unreleased game (and released ones, for that matter). In some ways it’s so good that I feel compelled to say that in other ways I think it risks missing the mark in making itself attractive to new players, for reasons I might tell later on (obviously I don’t mean to be mean). For now I just wanted to mention a few trivial things I noticed (maybe some are actually implemented and I didn’t find them), I hope this is the right place for this:

 

1) The loading screen with tips goes away too fast for me, it should say “press any key to continue”.

 

2) Many times I would have wanted that double clicking on the idle worker button would select all of them.

 

3) Many times I wanted to remove a few units from a selection. I think this could be done with shift+right click on the selection panel icons, removing a unit from the icon clicked, since just right click removes the whole icon from the selection.

 

4) Continue Campaign should appear only under Single Player, otherwise seems too redundant, and a bit confusing.

 

5) New Campaigns shouldn’t be allowed to have the same name as a previous one.

 

6) Many times I just wanted to Restart Scenario, instead of having to set up everything again, or to Load Game from one.

 

7) It would be nice to have the option to hide health bars, and better, hide full ones only.

 

8) I know about ctrl+D, but extending a bit zoom range (both in and out) could be a menu option. And I also found myself wanting to look a bit upwards, but it has to be fixed for gameplay since structures that should not be seen become visible.

 

9) Camera controls could be applied to the minimap if the cursor is placed on top of it.

 

10) On the left or right of the game speed button there could be a camera button with all the controls, including one to return to default view, which I don’t remember now if it can be easily done.

 

11) A visual representation that commands indeed were queued would be helpful.

 

12) As someone posted in this thread long ago: units should not remember where they were when receiving a standard command, and repairing a dropsite shouldn't be an invitation to gather. All these things can be easily instructed if wanted.

 

13) The way unit information is displayed doesn’t seem the most intuitive, too much text. It wasn’t evident for me which class structures were, to be able to change phase (one has to build almost everything anyway).

 

14) There’s no limit of Traders or Merchant Ships a given trading route can have, and there should be because those continuous routes look ugly, maybe could be fixed with a time the unit needs to stop for business, to space them out a bit, automatically limiting their useful number.

 

15) Capture is interesting but seems broken. Buildings are taken too fast, and then suddenly collapse, it’s unrealistic and not fun. I wonder if capture, garrison and occupy turret (which I don’t know what it does yet) could all be combined in one button, or are there situations where more than one is needed for a given target? I see removing the ability of capturing Fortresses has been proposed, but this destroys realism, as the post before mine states, surely better solutions can be reached.

 

16) Army placement is not good. Maybe something like Rise of Nations or Total War is hard to code? Where by dragging the cursor at the destination one can see and control the final positioning of troops (considering formation limitations).

 

17) (Un)garrisoning should be gradual, now it looks unrealistic, and could help with landings in small places. One could drag the unit icons on the panel to reorder them, meaning in which order they would disembark. Doing it in or near a port could make things faster.

 

18) Ships not taking into account the size of units they are transporting is a mechanic a bit dated.

 

19) The relationship between groups, formations and battalions is quite messed up. I like all these concepts but I don’t think the implementation is right. I have an idea for it but it would take me a few lines to explain, not the purpose of this list.

 

20) As pointed out recently, the lettering is way too small, it just doesn’t look good, “unplayable” was mentioned. UI scale is buggy, makes quality worse, and windows won’t fit in the screen. One shouldn’t have to install mods to fix something like this.

 

Regarding that last point and what I said at the beginning, default settings should be friendly for new players. There are many things I can say about that, along with more suggestions (some historical for the Spartans), if this kind of feedback is wanted.

 

[Perzival12]

2 hours ago, Thalatta said:

Hi, I checked 0 A.D. around 15 years ago, and only lately had another go at it. I found it quite nice, with some interesting ideas. Lots of respect for the volunteers, it's impressive how it looks already. Obviously it still has many rough and suboptimal things, as expected from an unreleased game (and released ones, for that matter). In some ways it’s so good that I feel compelled to say that in other ways I think it risks missing the mark in making itself attractive to new players, for reasons I might tell later on (obviously I don’t mean to be mean). For now I just wanted to mention a few trivial things I noticed (maybe some are actually implemented and I didn’t find them), I hope this is the right place for this:

 

1) The loading screen with tips goes away too fast for me, it should say “press any key to continue”.

 

2) Many times I would have wanted that double clicking on the idle worker button would select all of them.

 

3) Many times I wanted to remove a few units from a selection. I think this could be done with shift+right click on the selection panel icons, removing a unit from the icon clicked, since just right click removes the whole icon from the selection.

 

4) Continue Campaign should appear only under Single Player, otherwise seems too redundant, and a bit confusing.

 

5) New Campaigns shouldn’t be allowed to have the same name as a previous one.

 

6) Many times I just wanted to Restart Scenario, instead of having to set up everything again, or to Load Game from one.

 

7) It would be nice to have the option to hide health bars, and better, hide full ones only.

These are all great ideas, I definently agree that these should be implemented (at least the first 7).

[guerringuerrin]

Hey, @Thalatta! Thanks for sharing your suggestions here. I think some of them are very nice to have and I hope some day it will. I just wanted to share some answers about some of your suggestions that might help you.

2) if you mean select all of the idle workers you can achieve that by using the Include offscreen modifier hotkey (alt by default) and the Select next idle worker hotkey which i think by default is " . " but you can check it our on the hotkeys window. Mind that if you alt+double click, it will select all same untis including offscreen. To get the idle ones you need to use this hotkey combination.
EDIT: Just checked. You can also alt+click this icon:


7) There is a Toggle status bar hotkey that covers the first part of this suggestions. I think is Tab by default.

8) You can achieve some of this with the next release of autociv mod. Also in the next release will be a Bird's Eye camera which set a top-down camera view. very nice to place buildings and develop your base layout.

15) Capture has been recalibrated for the next release and will be more difficult to achieve.

Edited January 28 by guerringuerrin

[Thalatta]

Hi @guerringuerrin, thanks for your answers!

Tab indeed hides status bars, but still hiding only full bars would be missing, which would be my preferred setting.

I see that alt + idle unit works, just not as intuitive as double clicking it I'd say (Edit: maybe double clicking could select all idle units onscreen). In your screenshot that button and the send flare appear together, while in my game send flare is on the upper left of the minimap, which I think looks better, not sure if that will change.

I wasn't aware of the use of alt as offscreen modifier, I wonder if it would be too confusing to propose ctrl+alt+number to define battalions? I can explain an idea of how to make selections, formations, groups and battalions not totally mess up each other, and be completely functional at all times.

Edited January 28 by Thalatta

[guerringuerrin]

20 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

I see that alt + idle unit works, just not as intuitive as double clicking it I'd say. In your screenshot that button and the send flare appear together, while in my game send flare is on the upper left of the minimap, which I think looks better, not sure if that will change.

I totally agree with you, double click on the idle worker icon to select all units make total sense and its much more intuitive. 
And yes, offscreen modifier is very useful! You can also use it to select all your buildings of the same type.

 

20 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

In your screenshot that button and the send flare appear together, while in my game send flare is on the upper left of the minimap, which I think looks better, not sure if that will change.

That's because I forgot i had enabled this mod which makes your minimap bigger and also adds unit stats next to the unit portraits which are very useful. Is the second message, posted by @Atrik

 

20 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

wasn't aware of the use of alt as offscreen modifier, I wonder if it would be too confusing to propose ctrl+alt+number to define battalions? I can explain an idea of how to make selections, formations, groups and battalions not totally mess up each other, and be completely functional at all times.

Of course, any idea you’d like to share is welcome, and I encourage you to do so. Naturally, many ideas don’t get implemented due to a lack of consensus or a lack of availability to work on them. I’m not a developer, but it’s worth pointing out that often ideas can’t be carried out simply because there isn’t enough time or enough volunteers who can dedicate themselves to them

 

Edited January 28 by guerringuerrin

[Thalatta]

Ok! Then I'll have a go at expanding point 19.

I found it annoying that by default battalions would be automatically defined when selecting units, would override groups, and it’s not that obvious that you can disband a battalion and get those groups back just by breaking formation. If the “Battalion-style formations” is disabled I’m not sure how you can make battalions yet. If it’s enabled (default), and I have in Group 1 10 spearmen and in Group 2 10 archers, and grab 10 spearmen and 5 archers, that becomes a battalion, then pressing 1 would select the battalion and pressing 2 would select all units. And you cannot select multiple battalions because they become one big mass where groups don’t work anymore. The groups shown on the left of the screen become quite useless. Thus, selections, formations, groups and batallions interfere too much with each other.

 

What I thought is, with that option disabled, battalions (whose purpose should be only to select all units in it by selecting one, and not mess up anything else) could be defined with ctrl+alt+number and selected with alt+number. Selections with the cursor would in no way be able to change any definition. Formations could visually appear on the left as a box surrounding group icons, and a label on the side with their number (right-clicking on it would disband the battalion), which would make intuitive how the whole thing works. If multiple battalions are defined, the same group icon could appear on multiple boxes (if a group is split into battalions). Ungrouped units in a battalion wouldn’t have a number on their “group” icons (needed to show them as part of a battalion). The flags would show up for battalions only.

 

Then for example, one could define archers in group 1, and define them into 3 battalions. One can select the group with 1, or each battalion with alt+1, alt+2, alt+3, and set either the whole group or each battalion into different formations. Or one could even press 1 and then alt+formation, and all units are selected, but each battalion has its own formation (all the same in this way). This behaviour is like Total War. But one could do more things, like invert things and have one battalion with 3 groups in it, to which one can give different orders, for example each group shooting at a different target, or even move, without breaking up the battalion. All with the player not being compelled to do anything, selections not forcing anything, all is optional. One could seamlessly play like AoE, like TW, or like something new.

 

Finally, it would be nice if 2 digit numbers were allowed, one might want to have group 1 with battalions 11, 12, 13, and group 2 with battalions 21 and 22 for example, to remember things easily. Ctrl ctrl and ctrl+alt alt could do something, like defining a group and a battalion respectively, using the lowest number available, or giving a time window to enter the number, all considering that ctrl+alt+number can become uncomfortable with one hand and the rightmost keyboard numbers. Also, to make some things more visual and easier, group icons could be dragged into battalion boxes, or the other way around (less intuitive, but should also work).

 

I hope all this makes sense.
 

Edit: and thinking about what @guerringuerrin said, clicking on the left on a group portrait in a formation box could select the units of that group in that battalion, double clicking it could select the units of that group onscreen, and alt clicking it could select all units of that group.

Edited January 28 by Thalatta