Suggestions for 0 A.D.

[Emacz]

1 hour ago, RangerK said:

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:
 

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.

can always try out CWA where these changes take place p[retty quickly.

But also if you are playing mostly cav, catas in particular and you put in formation to move,t hey move at the speed of the slowest unit in formation, so then he would stay with the catas and move at their speed.

Edited April 14 by Emacz
added a little more

[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 Friday at 11:26 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 14 hours ago 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 9 hours ago 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.

[Thalatta]

41 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

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

Not that fast to get it from a video, but from its wiki: "As the player advances through the ages, and erects more structures within the city limits, the city will expand, increasing its defensive power, gather rate, and extending the national borders, as well as its own radius". Indeed I had forgotten, this is a really nice mechanic, I prefer it to going village->town->city for all CCs at the same time. What ruined RoN for me was the automatic transport ships after building a dock.

 

1 minute ago, guerringuerrin said:

it might be worth considering adding an extra victory option, something like “last CC standing,”

I think I've read this being discussed, and indeed it would be worth having the option, no need to impose one or the other.

 

5 minutes ago, guerringuerrin said:

Instead of breaking something that already works

I don't tend to agree with this, because there are many ways in which something can work, and no one resonable proposes "change this without any testing, because it works in my mental emulation".

[Perzival12]

Something that could fix the necessity of hunting down to the last worker would be to make it so that if a player (or ai) has less than 4 units or the like, they are automatically defeated, as long as they have no buildings (this might encourage early rushes and raids, which is why owning a civil center or other defensive or military building should nullify this).