Suggestions for 0 A.D.

[Atrik]

25 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

Now do it for every building with aura and PR 

Works for all buildings  Will do for the PR.

33 minutes ago, Emacz said:

what you do? May we use in CWA?

Sure, I've just added to ModernGUI so you can pull if you want.
If you want to add it to CWA because it helps understand some of your buildings mechanics you can just copy past this file :
https://gitlab.com/4trik/ModernGUI/-/blob/master/simulation/components/GuiInterface~auraInBuildingPlacement.js 
Conveniently holding in a single isolated mod file for you to do so, but of course, unrelated to your request 

 

[Emacz]

10 minutes ago, Atrik said:

Works for all buildings  Will do for the PR.

Sure, I've just added to ModernGUI so you can pull if you want.
If you want to add it to CWA because it helps understand some of your buildings mechanics you can just copy past this file :
https://gitlab.com/4trik/ModernGUI/-/blob/master/simulation/components/GuiInterface~auraInBuildingPlacement.js 
Conveniently holding in a single isolated mod file for you to do so, but of course, unrelated to your request 

 

thanks, ill see if i can figure this out, but its probably above my paygrade

[Thalatta]

39 minutes ago, Atrik said:

Works for all buildings  Will do for the PR.

Is there a way to also show ranges of buildings that shoot arrows? To know where to place buildings. Ideally showing all these ranges when pressing something, while not cancelling the placement process.

[Atrik]

2 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

Is there a way to also show ranges of buildings that shoot arrows? To know where to place buildings. Ideally showing all these ranges when pressing something, while not cancelling the placement process.

That's already the case but you might have it disabled, check option or it's also a hotkey still "Atl+C". Thanks to @guerringuerrin this hotkey will be unassigned next release as it tends to troll people.
Also in the PR i made all range overlay are forced enabled for the placement previews.

[Deicide4u]

Man, I love open-source.

We've touched on this, but I've just enabled Citizen-Soldier upgrade techs on Alpha 18. Thanks to the developers for leaving them in there. All I had to do is to edit several templates and put them in.

Since there are no standard rank upgrades through fighting in A18, this is the perfect compromise for me. I've also removed the useless Stamina bar on multiple selection.

EDIT: The CS rank stats are all messed up, and basic units are often stronger than Advanced units. It seems like the game was balanced around Basic CS only at the time. Such a shame.

Edited Sunday at 15:32 by Deicide4u
Correction

[NationGamer090]

Good Morning,

after playing this game for a few days, I thought that Roads and Paths would be a great addition.
Road and Paths, (Stone, Dirt, etc.) could boost ground units and carriages, especially between allies.
It would also look nicer, to have a town with some pathing, instead of just grass or dirt.

As an alternative, it could also be done with a painting tool that would allow us to just paint roads and paths, that would not have a gameplay advantage, besides looking nice.

Thank you in Advance
Imran

[Thalatta]

@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.

[guerringuerrin]

You can't boost walls too much or you will encourage turtling playstyle, which kinda suck for multiplayer.
Also, roads might be a good feature for a mod focused on city builder or a more economic, design city gameplay. For and RTS i think is a bit too much

[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 15 hours ago 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 7 hours ago 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 2 hours ago 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.