Suggestions for 0 A.D.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

2 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

You can't boost walls too much

I think people will use them as-is if we can fix their rebuilding mechanic (placing towers at the end of wall segments).

[guerringuerrin]

2 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I think people will use them as-is if we can fix their rebuilding mechanic (placing towers at the end of wall segments).

idk. @Atrik made good improvements with snapings walls that will be probably in the next realease, and are cool. But boosting their building time or things like that. I guess is just a matter of tastes. I find turtling/defensive playstyles very boring

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

4 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

idk. @Atrik made good improvements with snapings walls that will be probably in the next realease, and are cool. But boosting their building time or things like that. I guess is just a matter of tastes. I find turtling/defensive playstyles very boring

I just want it to be viable. I found the knock out drag out siege wars of AOE2 back in the day pretty fun. 

[Perzival12]

1 hour ago, guerringuerrin said:

You can't boost walls too much or you will encourage turtling playstyle, which kinda suck for multiplayer.

I do agree though, that palisades are under used. I mean, historically most civilizations would probably build a palisade around their settlements, especially if they know there is an enemy near by. Lowering the time to construct them (they’re just stakes in the ground bro) and maybe adjusting their cost would make them much more useful. Maybe also adjusting their life and resistance so that it reflects their material and use case would also be helpful.

[guerringuerrin]

2 minutes ago, Perzival12 said:

I do agree though, that palisades are under used. I mean, historically most civilizations would probably build a palisade around their settlements, especially if they know there is an enemy near by. Lowering the time to construct them (they’re just stakes in the ground bro) and maybe adjusting their cost would make them much more useful. Maybe also adjusting their life and resistance so that it reflects their material and use case would also be helpful.

well I don't think they have a long building time anyways

[Deicide4u]

4 hours ago, guerringuerrin said:

roads might be a good feature for a mod focused on city builder or a more economic, design city gameplay

Agree.

3 hours ago, guerringuerrin said:

I find turtling/defensive playstyles very boring

I disagree. Turtling is a valid playstyle like all other playstyles, and it needs to have place in this game, when executed properly. Right now it's almost impossible anyway, especially because we first need to fix walls. Walls are currently the only thing that's not capturable in this game, which means you need siege to break down stone walls effectively. Everything else can just be captured with overwhelming force of units, and that makes turtling nearly impossible. By turtling, I mean investing in defensive towers, Fortresses and CCs to expand, not camping in base amassing CS (what we do now, essentially).

Towers are made of wet tissue paper, it's laughable how easy they are to capture. Fortresses are buffed in R28, but I still find myself capturing garrisoned Forts with masses of units. This shouldn't be possible, which is why I still believe capturing feature was a mistake. It just made the game harder to balance in the long run, and it has created some ridiculous tactics. Like capture+delete of building with 2000+ hit points and ~500 capture points.

[guerringuerrin]

13 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

I disagree. Turtling is a valid playstyle like all other playstyles, and it needs to have place in this game, when executed properly. Right now it's almost impossible anyway, especially because we first need to fix walls. Walls are currently the only thing that's not capturable in this game, which means you need siege to break down stone walls effectively. Everything else can just be captured with overwhelming force of units, and that makes turtling nearly impossible. By turtling, I mean investing in defensive towers, Fortresses and CCs to expand, not camping in base amassing CS (what we do now, essentially).

Towers are made of wet tissue paper, it's laughable how easy they are to capture. Fortresses are buffed in R28, but I still find myself capturing garrisoned Forts with masses of units. This shouldn't be possible, which is why I still believe capturing feature was a mistake. It just made the game harder to balance in the long run, and it has created some ridiculous tactics. Like capture+delete of building with 2000+ hit points and ~500 capture points.

I think it's a good thing that siege units are required to break walls. In fact, I support making building capture more difficult. The same applies to towers, which are currently too easy to capture—especially due to formation capture behavior, where an absurd number of units can overlap, allowing buildings to be captured in a very small space at an excessively fast rate.

Building capture itself is not a flaw; it just needs refinement. It’s one of the game’s original mechanics, and we should stop trying to homogenize the game with others. Instead, polishing its unique aspects will make 0 A.D. even more distinctive.

Yes, turtling is a valid playstyle (albeit a boring and somewhat lame one), and it’s already viable—you just have to execute it properly. I also think that making capture more difficult would make it even more effective. However, making walls cheaper and faster to build would only encourage this dynamic, which, while valid, would significantly harm multiplayer matches.

It also depends heavily on the map. On closed maps with chokepoints and natural boundaries, turtling is already quite effective. On Ambush Nomad, for example, when playing with Wonder victory, turtling is very common and effective. So I don’t think it’s impossible—I just wouldn’t encourage it.

[Alexandermb]

50 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

Building capture itself is not a flaw; it just needs refinement. It’s one of the game’s original mechanics, and we should stop trying to homogenize the game with others. Instead, polishing its unique aspects will make 0 A.D. even more distinctive.

 

Capture mechanic's could be related to specific buildings only:

Military: Fortress, Towers, Gate's.
Civilian: Civ Center, Wonders, Temples.

Other structures should have a territory dependency like houses could be automatically captured if a city civ centre is captured.

In that way, city siege could have two objectives:

1. Destroy everything at glance.
2. Capture primordial structures to take over the city if the defenses aren't prepared enough to defend the city avoiding turtling.

Capturing fortress could gather small area of effect over the nearby buildings.

Capturing city could have strong area of effect of nearby buildings.

[Grautvornix]

18 minutes ago, Alexandermb said:

Capture mechanic's could be related to specific buildings only:

Military: Fortress, Towers, Gate's.
Civilian: Civ Center, Wonders, Temples.

Other structures should have a territory dependency like houses could be automatically captured if a city civ centre is captured.

In that way, city siege could have two objectives:

1. Destroy everything at glance.
2. Capture primordial structures to take over the city if the defenses aren't prepared enough to defend the city avoiding turtling.

Capturing fortress could gather small area of effect over the nearby buildings.

Capturing city could have strong area of effect of nearby buildings.

Agree except for capturing gates.

[NationGamer090]

6 hours ago, Thalatta said:

@NationGamer090 I think this has been discussed, it would be a nice addition, but I think there might be problems with pathfinding. Palisades and walls already work like a painting tool (just keep shift pressed), so that shouldn't be much of a problem, I guess.

 

Regarding palisades, I never use them, are they used in MP? I think they should be the preferred defence building early on, but seem underpowered to me. I think they should be faster to build: for Spartans, a house costs 150 wood and is built in 50 seconds, while a palisade costing the same amount of wood is built in over 2:30 minutes. This seems unrealistic, given that houses are more complicated to build, but none of that is really a problem, the problem comes if they are, on top of that, not even used because they are mostly useless. Or maybe people don't want to increase defensiveness in the game.

I do use them often, as my first line of defense until I can afford better walls.


Also THANK YOU! I did not know you could connect Walls in this game and continue to work around corners!

Edited April 7 by NationGamer090

[Thalatta]

1 hour ago, guerringuerrin said:

Building capture itself is not a flaw; it just needs refinement. It’s one of the game’s original mechanics, and we should stop trying to homogenize the game with others. Instead, polishing its unique aspects will make 0 A.D. even more distinctive.

That's why I still swear on having a non-controllable default garrison on buildings, ships and siege engines against which one has to enter in "virtual combat" that would act as capture resistance and turn around limiter, and would made boarding and siege make more sense

[Genava55]

8 hours ago, Alexandermb said:

Capture mechanic's could be related to specific buildings only:

Military: Fortress, Towers, Gate's.
Civilian: Civ Center, Wonders, Temples.

Other structures should have a territory dependency like houses could be automatically captured if a city civ centre is captured.

In that way, city siege could have two objectives:

1. Destroy everything at glance.
2. Capture primordial structures to take over the city if the defenses aren't prepared enough to defend the city avoiding turtling.

Capturing fortress could gather small area of effect over the nearby buildings.

Capturing city could have strong area of effect of nearby buildings.

I entirely agree. Capturing buildings should be difficult but rewarding. And the buildings should be tied to the territory. I find it absurd when someone loses his CC and he destroy every buildings before the capture.

A fortress should be also able to create a new territory but smaller than the CC, to have a territorial anchor. 

9 hours ago, guerringuerrin said:

Building capture itself is not a flaw; it just needs refinement. It’s one of the game’s original mechanics, and we should stop trying to homogenize the game with others. Instead, polishing its unique aspects will make 0 A.D. even more distinctive.

True. We don't want a bland AoE clone.

8 hours ago, Thalatta said:

That's why I still swear on having a non-controllable default garrison on buildings, ships and siege engines against which one has to enter in "virtual combat" that would act as capture resistance and turn around limiter, and would made boarding and siege make more sense

The difficulty behind virtual combat is how to make it good with only calculation because the player would not control which unit are getting the hits. People can get frustrated if the damage are distributed evenly and they would get frustrated as well if we give the damages preferentially to specific types of unit. There is also the issue of calculating the damaged of ranged and mounted units. People will complain.

Edited April 8 by Genava55
typo

[Thalatta]

4 hours ago, Genava55 said:

I entirely agree. Capturing buildings should be difficult but rewarding. And the buildings should be tied to the territory. I find it absurd when someone loses his CC and he destroy every buildings before the capture.

A fortress should be also able to create a new territory but smaller than the CC, to have a territorial anchor. 

True. We don't want a bland AoE clone.

Indeed, but how historical seem to you many of these fortresses, and how much just a product of nostalgic AoE2 cloning? (something that I've seen discussed many times already). I don't think removing them from some civilisations, not only to make it more historically accurate, but to differentiate civilisations more, should necessarily mean to unbalance the game, but that balance should be found in their differences, otherwise it's just "similar vs similar" (agreed that it would take more work).

On a somewhat different note: shouldn’t Germans not have stone walls? At least less so than Sparta (which eventually had, but late, and still this doesn't appear in the game).
 

4 hours ago, Genava55 said:

The difficulty behind virtual combat is how to make it good with only calculation because the player would not control which unit are getting the hits. People can get frustrated if the damage are distributed evenly and they would get frustrated as well if we give the damages preferentially to specific types of unit. There is also the issue of calculating the damaged of ranged and mounted units. People will complain.

People are complaining already :P, and will even more when poorly garrisoned ships are stolen like a candy to a baby. Regarding damage distribution, I'd say leave it to the player to decide, by ordering the cards of the units garrisoned (and have some panel somewhere where you can set a default order, to greatly reduce micro). Calculations is something to test, surely in some mod first, and then decide, hard to know beforehand those details, but this is the only simple nice way I see to have siege engines do something that resembles actual siege, and use something more realistic and engaging than capture points (wasn't proposed by me, I just extended the idea to ships).

EDIT: I misremembered, virtual combat was proposed for ships and normally garrisoned units, and I extended it to siege and proposed base garrisons in place of capture points:

 

Edited April 8 by Thalatta

[Genava55]

1 minute ago, Thalatta said:

Indeed, but how historical seem to you many of these fortresses, and how much just a product of nostalgic AoE2 cloning? (something that I've seen discussed many times already). I don't think removing them from some civilisations, not only to make it more historically accurate, but to differentiate civilisations more, should necessarily mean to unbalance the game, but that balance should be found in their differences, otherwise is just "similar vs similar" (agreed that it would take more work).

Several civilisations had fortresses, notably the diadochi. The Greeks seem to practice the epiteichismos, which was about fortifying key settlements and outposts. In some cases, we can truly speak of fortresses, so much have the sites been modified by the process. However the Romans do not seem to have proper forteresses, with permanent structures, during the Punic Wars. Regarding the Celts, the boundary between fortresses and fortified settlements is rather blurred. Hillforts and oppida sometimes have relatively few civilian structures and seem to have specialized in a military function.

The alternative I can imagine would be to have specialised CC. Some CC could be converted in a more military or defensive structure. 

The issue with the current system of walls and gates is that the IA is not using it really and it is quite a challenging project to improve the IA in this aspect. A single massive defensive building is far easier to handle.

50 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

On a somewhat different note: shouldn’t Germans not have stone walls? At least less so than Sparta (which eventually had, but late, and still this doesn't appear in the game).

The Germanic faction currently lacks historical depth. It's actually an initiative that started as a mod and then spilled over into the game.

Many buildings were designed without necessarily having an archaeological or historical basis to rely on.

[guerringuerrin]

1 hour ago, Thalatta said:

People are complaining already :P, and will even more when poorly garrisoned ships are stolen like a candy to a baby. Regarding damage distribution, I'd say leave it to the player to decide, by ordering the cards of the units garrisoned (and have some panel somewhere where you can set a default order, to greatly reduce micro). Calculations is something to test, surely in some mod first, and then decide, hard to know beforehand those details, but this is the only simple nice way I see to have siege engines do something that resembles actual siege, and use something more realistic and engaging than capture points (wasn't proposed by me, I just extended the idea to ships).

With this new paragraph you added, I realize I misinterpreted your first message. It seems like this is something that could be addressed by increasing the base capture resistance of buildings/ships.

The dynamic you’re proposing sounds interesting for certain gameplay contexts, especially in single-player/campaigns, and perhaps even multiplayer matches on “thematic maps” (scenarios).

I think this touches on something we haven’t explored much: the possibility of having different balances and mechanics depending on the game mode (single-player, campaigns, thematic maps, multiplayer). Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that this would increase both the amount and complexity of the work, and available manpower is limited.

[Thalatta]

1 hour ago, Genava55 said:

Several civilisations had fortresses, notably the diadochi. The Greeks seem to practice the epiteichismos, which was about fortifying key settlements and outposts. In some cases, we can truly speak of fortresses, so much have the sites been modified by the process. However the Romans do not seem to have proper forteresses, with permanent structures, during the Punic Wars. Regarding the Celts, the boundary between fortresses and fortified settlements is rather blurred. Hillforts and oppida sometimes have relatively few civilian structures and seem to have specialized in a military function.

Agreed, that's my point. Regarding oppida, I was having them in mind when proposing making more use of palisades (and walls for relevant civs, I seem to remember Gauls had them), this could be combined somehow with "specialised CC". Palisades don't have to enhance turtling too much, just delay some rushes and small attacks.

 

52 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

With this new paragraph you added, I realize I misinterpreted your first message. It seems like this is something that could be addressed by increasing the base capture resistance of buildings/ships.

I think the discussion was that, even when doing that, the player doing the capture would then turn around things instantly, giving too much advantage, and some proper conversion time was being proposed to avoid this. It seemed to me that things were getting unnecessarily complicated, and the base garrison concept would address all issues at once, on top of bringing some control (card ordering) and realism (siege-looking sieges). I'm just proposing it for if someone with modding skills finds the idea interesting and wants to test it, before anything else.

[RangerK]

SPEED MISMATCHES with Seleucid Heroes:

FIRST ISSUE -  Seleucid Elephant Hero (Seleucis I)
He moves at 9.0, but he boosts Elephant movement to 10.8, so he can't keep up with the elephants he's boosting.

There is still some advantage to having him boost the elephants for local movement, even if he can't keep up, but I think it would be overall better to increase his speed to 10.8.
 

SECOND ISSUE - Seleucid Cav Hero (Antiochus III)
This one is more debatable.

He moves 18, which is the standard for Hero melee cavalry.

However, in 0.28, Seleucid Cataphract speed has been nerfed to only 14.4, and Jav Cav speed is 16.2, which is the fastest cavalry unit of the Seleucids.

So the Hero is always outrunning the units he's supposed to be boosting by a ridiculous margin.

Historic context:
 

Quote

Antiochus III had a strong reputation as an excellent cavalry commander, arguably better with cavalry than with infantry. Ancient and modern analysts note that his best moments in battle are on the wing, leading horse himself, while his big defeats often come from mishandling the phalanx and overall coordination.

1. Types of cavalry he used

Under Antiochus, the Seleucid cavalry arm was diverse and quite sophisticated:

• Royal/elite cavalry (“Companions”, Agema, Median horse) – heavy shock cavalry close to the king, used as the decisive hammer on a wing.

• Cataphracts – very heavily armored cavalry, rider and horse in armor, used as a shock fist. Antiochus had no cataphracts at Raphia (217 BCE) but fielded around 6,000 at Magnesia (190 BCE), probably recruited after his eastern campaigns.

• Allied and mercenary cavalry – e.g. Dahae horse archers, Galatian cavalry, and camel‑mounted Arab archers, plus other regional horse archer contingents.

• Light cavalry / horse archers – used for screening, harassment, and pursuit, especially on the eastern front and at Magnesia.

This mix let him combine heavy shock cavalry, missile horse, and allied contingents in layered ways on his wings.

• Personal bravery and leadership – he fights at the head of his cavalry, which often boosts performance and morale.

• Good sense of formation and timing – in several battles he correctly forms squadrons, stabilizes his line under pressure, then hits at the right moment.

• Effective use of mixed types – heavy cavalry, cataphracts, and horse archers are combined on the wings to break enemy cavalry and threaten flanks.

Possible solutions:

1.  Do nothing.  Keep everything the same.
2.  Keep him as a melee cavalry hero, but nerf his movement to 15 or maybe 16.2, matching the jav cav.  This would reduce the issue of him outpacing the cav he is commanding, but it might be strange for him to be unique melee cav hero with a slower speed.
3.  Instead of giving him "spear cav" speed, create a new category of "cataphract speed" and use this to justify the reduction in speed.
4.  (my suggestion)  Change him to a jav cav hero, and lower his speed accordingly.  While the historic record most strongly suggests that he be a melee cav hero, I think there's enough diversity in his history that you can justify him being a jav cav hero.  It would also be cool to have a javelin cavalry hero, as I think he'd be the only one.

Edited April 14 by RangerK
no gud at speling

[Deicide4u]

Are additional voices planned for R29? 

I was inspired by Carthaginian voice lines in DE, but I'm not sure how much of it is made by AI and not historically accurate. 

Edited April 17 by Deicide4u
R29, not R28

[Eilat]

Why don't we let the AI build more "cities"? Would distributing structures like houses in different locations instead of concentrating them in one place reduce the risk of complete destruction? I think so. In many matches with more than two players, there were times when I was on peace with all sides, and when one player was about to wipe out the others, I knew next target would be me. I sent my siege troops to where most of their structures were concentrated. When the declaration of war was made, my troops had already destroyed the enemy's structures, and they didn't have time to rebuild due to cavalry raids. This is just my personal experience. I think some people don't like the idea of AI building so much structures, and I'd like to know everyone's thoughts on this.

Edited April 21 by Eilat

[Thalatta]

4 hours ago, Eilat said:

Why don't we let the AI build more "cities"? Would distributing structures like houses in different locations instead of concentrating them in one place reduce the risk of complete destruction? I think so. In many matches with more than two players, there were times when I was on peace with all sides, and when one player was about to wipe out the others, I knew next target would be me. I sent my siege troops to where most of their structures were concentrated. When the declaration of war was made, my troops had already destroyed the enemy's structures, and they didn't have time to rebuild due to cavalry raids. This is just my personal experience. I think some people don't like the idea of AI building so much structures, and I'd like to know everyone's thoughts on this.

I think it's annoying to chase the last house around, same as it's annoying to chase the last unit around. I guess that's why this game has put emphasis on CCs, fortresses and towers as “last bastions” (which I agree it should build in decent numbers and all around), all other buildings should be secondary, once your “government” and main defenses are finished, you should be done. After all, Alexander didn’t chase the last ice house and persian worker around. In any case, I think that when all CCs are taken, all units should slowly lose "allegiance" (unless they are near a Hero, or garrisoned) and become Gaia’s or something, and something similar to buildings to avoid their instantly collapse at the end, which I don’t think looks good. I have a suggestion about all this that I’ll post when I gather another 20 of them.

[Deicide4u]

4 hours ago, Eilat said:

Why don't we let the AI build more "cities"?

Because even players aren't building "cities" around their new CCs. And because this is not a City-building game, but a conquest one.

Rise of Nations had an interesting mechanic of forcing players to build up their other bases (literal Cities) in order to progress their economy.

[Eilat]

22 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

Because even players aren't building "cities" around their new CCs. And because this is not a City-building game, but a conquest one.

 

34 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

I think it's annoying to chase the last house around, same as it's annoying to chase the last unit around

Actually, when resources were abundant, I built more than one "city," I don't know if anyone else did it besides me. Perhaps few players play like me, or maybe not at all. I had matches that lasted for hours, sometimes over 3 hours. I found that having many well-defended places like the first "city" also made the AI harder to defeat. Even if you didn't build houses there, at least you had barracks and stables, and they could train soldiers. Because many places only had a single civic center and a market, they were often easily captured quickly, and soldiers had to march a long distance to defend them. And sometimes the AI still wanted to train more soldiers but there was no space because the soldiers blocked all the exits from the buildings. That is, the potential for increasing army size was limited by the number of buildings. Of course, I want long battles, so I find it interesting, because an empire rising from destruction is spectacular to me, and they will have a chance to rise again if there are other "bases" or "cities" with potential. Currently, I have the feeling that the AI is building city-states; it's not large enough for empires yet, but maybe people will find it annoying.

[Thalatta]

1 hour ago, Deicide4u said:

Rise of Nations had an interesting mechanic of forcing players to build up their other bases (literal Cities) in order to progress their economy.

Can you remind me? This was over 20 years ago for me. I remember one would build cities, and things around them, but I don't remember why this was necessary, and not end like in 0 A.D., having almost everything you need around only one city.

In any case, I wonder if something could be done to make it a bit more realistic and force expansion, for example, to have limits for each building type around each CC. Surely this was discussed at some point.

Edited April 21 by Thalatta

[Deicide4u]

1 hour ago, Eilat said:

Actually, when resources were abundant, I built more than one "city," I don't know if anyone else did it besides me. Perhaps few players play like me

Few players do it. I don't bother with anything more than a couple of fields and some towers. Maybe a Temple and a Fortress if it's a forward CC.

1 hour ago, Thalatta said:

Can you remind me? This was over 20 years ago for me.

You can remind yourself by watching a couple of Rise of Nations gameplay videos on Youtube.

[guerringuerrin]

In this game, you can always rebuild even if you’re down to a single unit. This happens quite often in team matches. A player might lose their entire base but still have a few units left; even without enough resources, allies can share the bare minimum needed to bring them back into the game.

Instead of breaking something that already works, it might be worth considering adding an extra victory option, something like “last CC standing,” so no one gets frustrated (especially when playing against the AI) searching the entire map for that last unit.

As for the other buildings, you just need to wait a few seconds for them to lose control.