Suggestions for 0 A.D.

[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).

[Thalatta]

3 hours ago, Perzival12 said:

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

Well, but the number of units will be arbitrary. I think it's ok for people to decide if they want to chase units, or to do it with last CC standing. I thought about an intermediate possibility: if all CCs are taken, units lose HP, unless they are close to a Hero or garrisoned (maybe just on certain buildings).

[Grautvornix]

In some rare case I also try to recover from my last remaining units to build up a CC and population  again  - so would not like to give up if I still have units available. 

But that is a personal feeling...

[Thalatta]

On 28/01/2026 at 6:02 PM, Thalatta said:

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.

The lack of this is really annoying sometimes... How do you all deal with the situation of having a mass of units but wanting to select just a specific number of them?

Also, should I do a poll regarding many of those proposed points? Many on that list don’t seem that controversial (not so much on the follow up list I made).

[Deicide4u]

3 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

How do you all deal with the situation of having a mass of units but wanting to select just a specific number of them?

With the current control group selected, I hold CTRL and maka a selection box over the units that need to be deselected.

[Thalatta]

7 minutes ago, Deicide4u said:

With the current control group selected, I hold CTRL and maka a selection box over the units that need to be deselected.

If the units are in a blob, it’s almost impossible to do that to end with a specific number of units selected, BUT instead of a selection box, clicking also works. One still has to manage to hit the unit, which can be a bit cumbersome if the blob is moving. I think CTRL+right click on portraits should remove a random (or some other criteria) unit from that selection, or at least I keep wanting to do that. But what you said is indeed useful.

[Obelix]

Hello Thalatta,

I'd like to refer to the OP.

On 11/07/2004 at 6:04 PM, Wijitmaker said:

Do you have a comment about what you have seen so far in the game? Would you like to see some changes?

If you have some constructive criticism, please post it here!

We can't guarentee that we can make the changes; but, if your point is a valid one... we just might. http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif

I understand the intention of this thread to be that individual points of criticism may be posted here. All too often, lists of suggestions are posted here in one answer which then become the subject of discussion, even though each of them would be better off in their own threads.

37 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

Also, should I do a poll regarding many of those proposed points?

I feel it is too early to start a separate thread with a poll. The power of the first draft is too influential here.
Perhaps it would be enough to discuss the individual topics in separate threads and, if some are likely to receive more support, to launch a poll if necessary. However, this does not commit the developers.

Please bear in mind that probably many people do not read this catch-all thread.

[Thalatta]

2 hours ago, Obelix said:

Perhaps it would be enough to discuss the individual topics in separate threads and, if some are likely to receive more support, to launch a poll if necessary.

Thanks for your answer. Separate threads for many of these details seems too much… for example, alongside 3), these seemed well received and don’t seem controversial (if so, I thought it would be good to know with a poll), besides being apparently easy to implement: 1) loading screen having a “press any key to continue”, 2) double clicking idle worker button to select all of them, 4) Continue Campaign appear only under Single Player, 5) Campaigns must have different names, 6) Restart and Load game options during a game, 7) option to hide full health bars. There are a few more like this, I was going to gather those with more chances of going somewhere after my next 20 points. I’ve seen polls regarding way more controversial things, so I’m really not sure what should be the next step to have a better grasp of everyone’s opinion, how to move from "too early" since those were posted in January

[guerringuerrin]

@Thalatta I think polls can certainly help foster discussion around certain proposals, but at the same time, 0 A.D. doesn’t really work as a democracy where changes are decided by majority opinion. It’s also very hard to get participation that is truly representative enough to justify implementing something simply because “most people voted for it”.

Your intention to improve aspects of the game is genuinely valuable, and I think that kind of feedback will always be appreciated. That said, personally, I don’t think posting 20 suggestions at once is the most effective strategy if the goal is to eventually see some of them materialize as actual PRs in the repository.

I think there’s also an important aspect of the development dynamics that’s easy to underestimate from the outside. All official developers and contributors are working on the game in their free time. There’s an enormous amount of work to do, many competing priorities, and far more ideas than available hands.

I can’t really speak on behalf of the official developers since I’m still a relatively recent contributor myself, but in my own experience, the most effective path is usually either: working directly on a PR yourself, or getting the attention of another contributor/developer who becomes interested enough in the proposal to implement it.

Always keep in mind that submitting a PR does not guarantee that it will be merged.

For what it’s worth, I do think some of your suggestions are interesting, and I’d personally love to spend time on some of them eventually. For example, the last one you mentioned about being able to deselect specific units from the current selection sounds genuinely useful to me.

And above all, don’t get frustrated. Some ideas will work out, become PRs, and eventually get merged and others won’t. That’s just part of how open-source development tends to work (at least here).

What really matters is maintaining a constructive attitude and trying to filter, among all the things one would personally love to improve in this beautiful game, which ones are realistic and feasible enough to actually move forward and become reality.

[Thalatta]

@guerringuerrin, no worries, there's zero frustration from my side, just wanted to make sure I was doing what one is supposed to do. Regarding PRs, as I’ve said before, since there’s a lot of work, I didn’t want to overload, similarly as to a thread per point, I wouldn’t want to spam (I’m already posting too much lately anyway). My intention with a poll was not to force the developers to do anything, but to gauge support and increase visibility of simple things that I think could be helpful for many or polish some details (and that have nothing to do with gameplay), which otherwise just get lost in this thread.

[guerringuerrin]

37 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

@guerringuerrin, no worries, there's zero frustration from my side, just wanted to make sure I was doing what one is supposed to do. Regarding PRs, as I’ve said before, since there’s a lot of work, I didn’t want to overload, similarly as to a thread per point, I wouldn’t want to spam (I’m already posting too much lately anyway). My intention with a poll was not to force the developers to do anything, but to gauge support and increase visibility of simple things that I think could be helpful for many or polish some details (and that have nothing to do with gameplay), which otherwise just get lost in this thread.

There is also an alternative that might help prevent some of those suggestions from getting lost, which is creating Issues for the ones that seem more concrete, feasible, or broadly supported.

[ffm2]

Problem: The replay folder format YYYY-MM-DD_NNNN uses a per-machine sequence counter. The same multiplayer game has a different folder name on every participant's machine and different games having the same name. This makes it harder for cross-player merging of replay data (rating aggregation, replay sharing, debug traceability) without parsing every commands.txt to extract the matchID.

Proposal: Change the new replay folder format to YYYY-MM-DD_<matchID>, using the existing matchID already written into commands.txt. Date prefix preserved for chronological sort; existing replays unchanged.
matchID already exists, is generated by the engine for every game (multiplayer and singleplayer), and is identical across all participants of a given match.

Use cases:

Replay-sharing site https://replay-pallas.wildfiregames.ovh: matches uploaded by different players collapse to the same identifier instead of being renamed.
Mods (e.g. local ratings): users can merge rating data from co-players without name-collision workarounds.
Bug reports: devs can ask for a specific replay by ID and the user finds it directly in their folder list.

Edited 1 hour ago by ffm2