Suggestions for 0 A.D.

[guerringuerrin]

4 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

That's what I do, and some of my farmers ended chopping wood.

@wowgetoffyourcellphone, I don't think it's because of the rally point, because most of my farmers continued farming, while just some ended chopping wood, and had to put them on farms again. Seems something weird is going on.

I never seen this before. It might be worth to test it

[Thalatta]

54 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

I never seen this before. It might be worth to test it

I could be wrong, but it could be that they garrisoned on buildings that were closer to trees than to farms.

[Atrik]

1 hour ago, Thalatta said:

I could be wrong, but it could be that they garrisoned on buildings that were closer to trees than to farms.

Didn't recheck but my experience debugging UnitAI tells me that what probably happened was:

1. Your units were actually chopping wood on a woodline further from garrisonable buildings
2. You call alarm so they move all the way into the buildings
3. The exacts trees they were chopping disappeared (chopped by other units : your soldiers)
4. You ring end of alarm so they try to go back to chopping wood, but since the trees they initially were chopping are no longer there, they search new trees, but relative to their own position. Making your civilians start chopping trees at a different place as they were supposed to.

Just a likely hypothesis and note for myself (or anyone) when I'll work UnitAI, since that would be fixable.

[Thalatta]

But, if I understand correctly, that doesn't seem to be the issue @Atrik, the issue is having less people in farms at the end of the alarm because they go to the trees instead.

[guerringuerrin]

52 minutes ago, Atrik said:

Didn't recheck but my experience debugging UnitAI tells me that what probably happened was:

1. Your units were actually chopping wood on a woodline further from garrisonable buildings
2. You call alarm so they move all the way into the buildings
3. The exacts trees they were chopping disappeared (chopped by other units : your soldiers)
4. You ring end of alarm so they try to go back to chopping wood, but since the trees they initially were chopping are no longer there, they search new trees, but relative to their own position. Making your civilians start chopping trees at a different place as they were supposed to.

Just a likely hypothesis and note for myself (or anyone) when I'll work UnitAI, since that would be fixable.

I’ve noticed that when there are no buildings available for garrison, civilians just stay idle where they are. However, I haven’t verified whether this happens because there are no buildings close enough for them to detect, or because there are no available buildings at all.

3 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

the issue is having less people in farms at the end of the alarm because they go to the trees instead.

 

What I’m fairly sure about is that units do not switch to gathering a different resource. In other words, if they were farming, they will try to resume farming rather than moving to gather wood.

Edited yesterday at 17:06 by guerringuerrin
Fixing quotes

[Atrik]

5 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

But, if I understand correctly, that doesn't seem to be the issue @Atrik, the issue is having less people in farms at the end of the alarm because they go to the trees instead.

Possible. You haven't provided a replay so we're only working with hypothesis.
What I described could have mislead you into thinking the units chopping wood were initially farmers.

4 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

I’ve noticed that when there are no buildings available for garrison, civilians just stay idle where they are. However, I haven’t verified whether this happens because there are no buildings close enough for them to detect, or because there are no available buildings at all.

The maximum distance units travel to garrison seems a bit normal. You don't want units to travel half the map if they don't find any hides close enough. Maybe there is way to optimize the behavior however, with better sorting by distance for example. Also the input to ring the alarm is rather limiting...

[guerringuerrin]

2 minutes ago, Atrik said:

The maximum distance units travel to garrison seems a bit normal. You don't want units to travel half the map if they don't find any hides close enough. Maybe there is way to optimize the behavior however, with better sorting by distance for example. Also the input to ring the alarm is rather limiting...

Yes, I think this behavior is quite appropriate. And I don’t think it’s worth over-optimizing this behavior. If there are no nearby buildings to garrison in, having units stay idle where they are seems like the most appropriate outcome. Players should be responsible for ensuring there are enough nearby buildings for units to take shelter.

Otherwise, keeping them idle is actually helpful, since it makes it easier to quickly select them using the idle hotkey.

 

 

Short video of this. I don’t see any civilians switching resources after the bell. Not even those who garrison in buildings with rally points set to other resources.

[Thalatta]

@Atrik@guerringuerrin I tried many times, but can't reproduce it. Once I thought I did it, but in the replay I saw that a couple of "farmers" weren't farmers, just standing on farms. I wonder if this what happened to me 2 or 3 times before, and since most other workers were chopping wood, I assumed that's where the "missing farmers" went (when actually they were idle somewhere, as before the alarm).

Edited yesterday at 18:21 by Thalatta

[DesertRose]

9 hours ago, Emacz said:

Or you could do each phase (as game progress) soldiers gather rate reduces.  I think this might be a little more practical, as they become more accustomed to fighting their will to work as laborers decreases?

That's an interesting idea.

It would mean that you can still train Citizen Soldiers to kick-start your economy, but the further the game advances the less economically viable Citizen Soldiers become.

So advancing to the next Phase does not also mean spending resources now to gain a long-term advantage, it also means that you potentially sacrifice economic power for military power. It also has the downside that after advancing to the next Phase you are practically forced to attack; you cannot advance to further increase an economic lead.

 

[DesertRose]

On 10/03/2026 at 9:43 PM, real_tabasco_sauce said:

This could be a neat way to replace the less intuitive diminishing returns feature. As long as the spots get filled by proximity to the storehouses, and the farmers choose the move to the closer spots if they are vacant. Lots of stuff to implement for this tho.

Another idea somewhat related to this.

Farm upgrades, instead of giving you +x% faster gather rate, allows you to put one more farmer per Field. E.g. Fields start with a maximum of 2 Farmers, and each Farm upgrade increases the maximum by 1.

[Grautvornix]

24 minutes ago, DesertRose said:

That's an interesting idea.

It would mean that you can still train Citizen Soldiers to kick-start your economy, but the further the game advances the less economically viable Citizen Soldiers become.

So advancing to the next Phase does not also mean spending resources now to gain a long-term advantage, it also means that you potentially sacrifice economic power for military power. It also has the downside that after advancing to the next Phase you are practically forced to attack; you cannot advance to further increase an economic lead.

 

Well unless this is linked to the individual experience of each citizen soldier: advances in fighting capability/ranking up would then coupled to an individual gathering capability decrease. Newly trained uniots would have full capability (for a CS) decreasing with each fight. In the end you woudl have an army of fighter pros that are not good for any gathering anymore while the newbies can very well help in the economy but are less powerful in battle.

Sound interesting to me.

[Stan`]

@guerringuerrin Ah my bad, thought those threads were public, it is now 

[Arup]

@guerringuerrin I had no idea storehouses also have the bell! thanks for the vid lol

[Thalatta]

46 minutes ago, Arup said:

@guerringuerrin I had no idea storehouses also have the bell! thanks for the vid lol

Now that you say it, isn't that a bit weird? They don't garrison troops with the alarm. I'd only have it in all buildings that can garrison, and maybe add a garrison of 1 to the Lookout just as an excuse to have it there also.

Edited 6 hours ago by Thalatta

[Thalatta]

4 hours ago, Stan` said:

@guerringuerrin Ah my bad, thought those threads were public, it is now 

What's this?:

On 02/05/2021 at 1:00 PM, Stan` said:

See the discussion on Phab' : )

Maybe something that is not public?

[Grautvornix]

Isn't the bell intended to be a general alarm no matter if units can go inside that building or not? It does not say "come home to me" but "go, look for shelter"

I fdo agree that we should have a garrison of 1 to a lookout. It used to be the case in earlier versions of the game. The intent was to permanently occupy a gaia lookout and keep it (avoid decay). This has changed a while ago. Now you can claim a lokkout and it will not decay.

 

[Stan`]

7 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

What's this?:

Maybe something that is not public?

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1718 (Phabricator is the software we used before Gitea)

[Thalatta]

3 minutes ago, Grautvornix said:

Isn't the bell intended to be a general alarm no matter if units can go inside that building or not? It does not say "come home to me" but "go, look for shelter"

Then shouldn't it be in every building? What I mean by weird is that it's present on buildings that don't garrison, and absent in buildings that do. I'd add it only on buildings that garrison because if one at some point has only buildings that don't garrison then the alarm wouldn't do much.

[guerringuerrin]

2 hours ago, Thalatta said:

Then shouldn't it be in every building? What I mean by weird is that it's present on buildings that don't garrison, and absent in buildings that do. I'd add it only on buildings that garrison because if one at some point has only buildings that don't garrison then the alarm wouldn't do much.

Is intended for hide civilians. If you remove them from storehouses you might not be able to garrison your civilians chopping woods.

I think the current behavior is good

3 hours ago, Arup said:

@guerringuerrin I had no idea storehouses also have the bell! thanks for the vid lol

Yeah and is nice bc u those bells will garrison your choppers, keeping the farms gathering.

[Thalatta]

@guerringuerrin ah, that's a different thing, and makes sense. Then maybe each bell should mention something about that, I would have thought all bells are for all civilians.
 

3 hours ago, Stan` said:

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1718 (Phabricator is the software we used before Gitea)

Well, regarding "balance was a huge concern", I think I didn't see more than a couple of people complaining, while the rest seemed to be on board, but maybe I'm still missing part of the discussion.

I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient, to have a better sense and gather all these regularly mentioned ideas, to have somewhere some kind of perma-poll that orders items by approval (most for:neutral:against on top). With the link always visible or added to the title of this thread.

Edited 2 hours ago by Thalatta

[guerringuerrin]

1 hour ago, Thalatta said:

@guerringuerrin ah, that's a different thing, and makes sense. Then maybe each bell should mention something about that, I would have thought all bells are for all civilians.

Yes, only for civilians.