Improving strategic aspect f the game

[Zezil]

Hi guys, with this post, I try to share my ideas on how to improve the game strategic aspects.

The 0ad player set of skills, requires now macro and tactical control. Simply, get the biggest army , get the metal of the map (wich leads to another problem, spawning points advantages, being very high in random maps. On the next post x)), get the best position in the engagements.

Strategy isn't involved. If you have doubt about this, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you ever ask yourself what's your opponent thinking of doing?(or, what is he thinking you're thinking he's thinking? And so on, look for metagame http://it.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=metagame )
• How important is scouting?(is it important at all?)

Personally , I think scouting is only important to keep control of enemy troops movements (tactical tool), and strategies viable are very few and don’t counter each other well , booming reigns supreme (boom son, and hope your opponent boomed less than you).

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Ok, now a bit of explanation.

As 0ad is now, rushing → booming → turtling → rushing doesn't work. (→ means “beats”)

Booming and turtling are too similar, and rushing is not a viable option. (In the spoiler I try to explain why).

In a few word, a good defender who boomed ,beats an as good rusher, so rushing doesn't counter booming.

I underlined “good defender” because is not an easy task what he has, he needs to have enemy cavs under control, have wood workers spread the most he can ,and be very concentrated because just missing the cav approaching to your wood workers and not retreating them in time, means the blitz will be deadly, and you lose those wood workers.

On the other hand, the attacker can only rely on opponent's mistakes to get the advantage out of the rush.

To fix this, it's imo essential to lower cc firepower and/or range, I suppose it was increased from a16 to a17 to make things easier for defender against skirm cav rush, in addition to actually nerfing skirm cav, a bit of a over-nerf to rushing imo.

Other fixes to try delineate better rushing booming and turtling could be differentiating citizens and citizen/soldiers more.

• Lowering females health (they have same armor and health as ranged units in age1), so that they die fast, in addition they flee once hit ,so is very frustrating trying to kill them with less than 20 rangeds.

• And their recruit time: make the time bonus for batches of women bigger, so that if someone commits to booming (which revolves around doing big batches of women) he gets a decisive advantage on someone who plays safe and does the most men and the least amount of women possible.

Doing this few changes, would improve the game strategical aspect, and encourage scouting.

What you get from the current balance ,are long and boring heavily macro oriented games, without the possibility of early aggressions.

/------------------------------------------------------------------/

But here is the more meaty idea, ( which might work in synergy with the above or be an alternative) what I'm suggesting aims to make strategy and metagames the core of 0ad ,without the need of changing units balance, but instead with a small change in the structures balance.

• CC producing soldiers slower (or not at all) than how a barrack does : this way ,coming in with fewer skirm cav before enemy has a barrack would be a viable option, and most important ,it would incentive scouting, going for a rush would require an early barrack, so once you scout it, you have an idea of whats in your enemy's mind, and given your mindgame intuition, you might be right...or maybe you're being bluffed...maybe you should scout more...but this would mean sacrifice your macro...( an early barrack,given its cost ,would also mean that you cant have a fast housing for big early groups of women, and therefore you aren't going to boom).

All this, might require lowering men wood cost. Needs testing.

This minor tweak would imo improve the game experience a lot , more strategies, more build orders (now all BO look the same! Rushing, booming, turtling: barrack pops at 6 minutes if you haven't got extra berries or fauna, and houses ,houses ,houses), more scouting.

Keep in mind , many of the ideas I explained come from comparing 0ad to other most famous Rts ,mostly starcraft2.

Ok , I hope I could explain myself. If something is unclear, I 'll be happy to explain, and if you like what you read, I have many other little concepts to beef up and sharpen the ideas above, but the post is already too long....so maybe a part 2 if you like.

Mario.

I'll try describe how the 3 playstyles are played in 0ad, turtling, booming and rushing, and explain how they interact with each other.

• Turtling- you can reach by minute 10, 130 pop and 50 women, and have early men , you'll be safe from any rushes.
• Booming- you can get up to 160pop, with 80-90 women, men start spawning around 5:30min from both cc and barrack, so you're (in theory) vulnerable to attack before the 5:30 minutes.
• Rushing- is a very hard approach to play, you don't have many options about which unit to send to the attack, the most sensible and potentially rewarding is skirm cav rush(not mentioning camels because they're ridiculously OP) : by minute 6/7, with extra bushes or fauna, you can get up to 26 skirm cavs.

A quick look at the numbers will show that at the current state of things, a player could have a booming BO, and still deal well with a rush.
Simple countermeasures like spreading your women in many areas, and preventing to be caught by surprise building your houses close to your borders(which will grant you some vision)and maybe outposting critical areas, will make the rush ineffective and buy enough time to counter it with men.

The sweet spot for the rusher to approach is after 6/7mins because he has an ideal amount of units to attack and a good economy, but by that time , the boomer will already have enough men to discourage enemy to split his cavs ( which would be the only way to harass effectively) and will have many more men very soon, which will kill the rush.

Rushing with less skirm cav before enemy has a barrack is not a good option either, the sooner you come the less you outnumber your enemy, the harder is to take down eventual wood towers, the more you sacrifice your economy back at home.
(Balance between footmen and mounted units is fine, that's not the problem I 'm trying to highlight, boosting skirm cav would just lead to a new a16).

[Lion.Kanzen]

Looks a nice suggestion but now we are testing a new layer of strategy with capture( a new feature) so that wooden tower can be easily to capture with a early rush.

But I can't test it in a PVP only P vs CPU . But now is more hard try to be Defensive because your defenses if are alone can defense at all by a capture, capture is like an attack without armor but with the difference instead to destroy you steal buildings.

But you need a big army to take a CC, the damage help to take a building more easily.

This my point of view of course, in other words be need re-balance all with this mechanic of gameplay.

[Zezil]

Capturing could be of course a nice feature, and the more nice features we can implement, the better. But,

as the game is balanced out, it doesn't respect the mechanics of all the good Rts out there.

Other Rts are balanced in such a way that the player can choose wich strategy to play once the game starts, and those strategies can be grouped in 3 categories, you can play greedy, you can play defensive or you can play aggressive.

And these 3 strategies counter each other,

• being greedy means you invest your resources into getting a strong economy, wich will eventually fuel a strong army later.

And I say eventually, becouse someone who plays greedy can be punished by someone who is

• aggressive, someone being aggressive, will spend his resources into making an army early, and this army must be able to kill an undefended greedy enemy.

But if you play aggressive and you encounter an opponent who plays

• defensive, meaning that he gets an army soon himself, and in addition to that he gets some static defenses up, the aggressive player loses , becouse the defender has static defenses and the shortest rally point for reinforcements.

if you play defensive tho, and you encounter someone who plays

• greedy, you lose, because a greedy player will soon overwhelm you with his superior economy, while you invested your money in soldiers that were basically idling waiting for an aggressor.

Since there are these mechanincs in any good Rts, knowing what your opponent is planning is crucial, so scouting is part of good Rts.

Problem with 0ad now, is that being greedy cant be countered, and thats partly because 0ad uses the citizen/soldiers system , which is a lovely idea, but is not balanced and is not easy to balance to work with the mechanincs described above, and mostly because attacking and defending balance is broken, defending is easier than attacking, and once you get to a decent level of control while defending, there's nothing fancy the attacker can do to turn things around.

If game stays as it is now, it's gonna still be enjoyable for new players or for those who just play for fun once in a while, it gives you a nice experience, you can make a cool army, get big coreographical clashes , artworks are nice and so on.

But once you get to a certain level of play, the only viable strategy becomes 1 (being greedy, booming), all games look the same, and the winner is basically the player who gets the spawning advantage ( getting some extra berries in your territory age 1, getting mineral closer to your base, easier to secure for you once age

2).

The few tweaks I hinted , aim to make game strategical, trying to balance the c/s system ( first time ever i think?do other games use this?) to respect canons of modern Rts (the canons that make some Rts become a profession), ultimately implementing decision-making and strategy part of the game, while still keeping the game enjoyable at lower levels of play of course.

Now once you get good at it, game gets boring, learning curve is very short when it comes to understanding of the game, strategic choice and mindgame.

Also TheMista pointed it out in one of the games we played, he made me think more on the subject and i have to say he was very right.

Again, if you need more explaination im happy to give more details and rephrase whatever you want, if you can prove me wrong i'll be happy to be proved wrong.

Just please dont ignore the topic, because this game has potential and we must be far-sighted. The game can be much more. Without doing much.

Mario.

[sanderd17]

Game balance changes from version to version. In A16, the only way to win was by going for a rush, and the first one to rush his opponent won.

That was even worse than the current situation, since successful rushes meant that nobody ever reached town phase, and thus a vast amount of artwork was never seen.

Over-compensating isn't that strange, and we tend to go towards an equilibrium I think (as far as no new features are added, like capturing).

[Zezil]

Yeah, A16 ,as A17 and A18 had only one viable strategy. Which means that the early game , say the first 10 minutes, were exactly the same in every game.

Those 3 Alphas (which I played a lot) had each one an optimal strategy (the best strategy possible, which leads to the best result given the goal of winning the match), which didn't depend on what your opponent was doing, and that's why scouting has never been used as a strategic tool (since whatever your opponent was doing, the best strategy to counter his plan was always the same) and ultimately there's never been strategic thinking involved.

As I said earlier, I played 0ad a lot.

It has been the first Rts game I ever played, and i fell in love with it instantly, it was like discovering chocolate and candies at 20 years of age.

I wanted to learn the most I could , so I played with the best players, watched their videos, spectated their games and so on, just for the sake of getting better at the game, because i loved it.

I got some understanding of the game mechanics and ultimately became good myself, so whenever i say 0ad is a bad game, it has no strategy involved or that it's broken, I'm belittling myself first as a player more than anything else, I'm not attacking and criticizing the game because i can't play it , which is the kind of reason which, sadly, leads to most of the "constructive critics" ( more or less subconsciously) the game gets by players (just take as an example a16, where everybody was hating on rushing , just because they were frustrated of losing by it, and not because it broke the strategic aspect of the game).

I'm criticizing the game even though I can play it, I'm saying rushing is not a sensible choice even though I 'm a macro oriented player who likes to boom, I'm saying rushing is not a good strategy even though the few times i tried to rush in a18 I always succeeded also against very strong players.

I'm doing so because I still love the game, and I'm trying to give back all the good things the game gave me, I haven't got the skills required to fix bugs and such things, so I can only share my intuitions to improve the game, which derive from a quite deep understanding of it.

So if i decided to write this post, it's because I thought that there was no awareness about this problem, and nothing was being done in order to solve it.

The most important thing is to fix the overcompensation that happened from A16 to A17 in regard to rushing. Simply reducing the civic center damage output, might be enough, and the 3 strategies might find a balance.

In addition to that ,I hinted how giving the barrack a more distinct role could add a lot of depth to the game. I understand how the big potential of this small change is hard to understand, that most people don't get to a certain level of play to even know what booming rushing and turtling mean, and that most of the community and the volunteers participating to the craft of the game are involved in art works , programming and such, but the gameplay experience has the same value of the above for the success of the project.

I can't make a mod myself to show you my plan, if I could I wouldn't have even made this topic in the first place.

The most I can do is to share my ideas with those who can.

As always, I 'm happy to hear your feedback and so on.

Mario.

[Lion.Kanzen]

May be train units more weaker from the CC peasants and sentinels( watchmen) and more advanced from barrack

The units will be good for gathering, never reach experience level, very low defense, weak attack ( using a club, rod or sickle)

The wood tower will be more slow to build and cost some little more of wood.

The resources will be more far from the CC, like AOE and AoK, not too nearly like Starcraft

These are my suggestion watching Aok rush style

Edited April 26, 2015 by Lion.Kanzen

[shieldwolf23]

That last post was perfectly told, Mario. I hope the community will do something about this eventually.

[Zezil]

May be train units more weaker from the CC peasants and sentinels( watchmen) and more advanced from barrack

The units will be good for gathering, never reach experience level, very low defense, weak attack ( using a club, rod or sickle)

The wood tower will be more slow to build and cost some little more of wood.

The resources will be more far from the CC, like AOE and AoK, not too nearly like Starcraft

These are my suggestion watching Aok rush style

I think wood tower and defense towers in general need a rebalancing too, and about the resources placement thing you said, I'm planning to make some maps ,simmetrical with resources placing ,and not flat like the random maps, with different eight of the ground so that some regions have a strategic advantage, and maybe the game will be less tactical and more strategic by doing so. Sadly I think the community isn't willing to make new units and commit changes to the game.

That last post was perfectly told, Mario. I hope the community will do something about this eventually.

I appreciate your words, I really tried to explain the problem the best I could.

Still ,I like to think ,and I hope, that I didn't get attention because I couldn't explain myself well enough ^^, if it's the case, just ask and I'll try to find better words.

I hope the real reason isn't because the community isn't willing to commit the few changes, having the fear that they would take too much effort to be balanced and such, I'm sure they wouldn't take much work to be committed, and I'd work myself hard to get out the best balance possible. I think this is not the case though, since implementing the capturing feature is far more ambitious than doing the few tweaks I suggested.

A little tweaking of civic center and barrack units spawning time could make the game much more strategic, deep and enjoyable, with little effort.

Anyway I think the post was good enough to get a conversation and an exchange of ideas going, I cant stand a chicken engine gets more attention ^^

But maybe I was too ambitious, maybe I should've asked for this in the first place: I have little familiarity with javascript, but it might be enough to make a mod myself, since I think it would only take changing some already existing strings numbers, so if anybody can help me get started i'd appreciate (maybe hint me a guide or give a bit of explaination on where to find those strings I was talking about) , i'd like to give it a shot.

Mario.

Edited April 29, 2015 by Zezil

[Lion.Kanzen]

Is not hard create these units, the tools like you use in farm exist, the peasant hat are already for Greeks and Romans,myths other may be uses other protection for the sun needs some investigation, the basic skin all civs have one.

For me including new units in games depends more to the consent of community ( accept the idea) and devs ( accept the idea and make respective commits) the idea can birth as mod and the mod turn into a task.

[sanderd17]

I think wood tower and defense towers in general need a rebalancing too, and about the resources placement thing you said, I'm planning to make some maps ,simmetrical with resources placing ,and not flat like the random maps, with different eight of the ground so that some regions have a strategic advantage, and maybe the game will be less tactical and more strategic by doing so. Sadly I think the community isn't willing to make new units and commit changes to the game.

Last 10 days, we did 50 commits to the game. Sometimes fixing small bugs, sometimes adding new features.

New units can be added if it doesn't complicate the gameplay too much, or if it's really needed for balancing. Which I doubt for now.

I appreciate your words, I really tried to explain the problem the best I could.

Still ,I like to think ,and I hope, that I didn't get attention because I couldn't explain myself well enough ^^, if it's the case, just ask and I'll try to find better words.

I hope the real reason isn't because the community isn't willing to commit the few changes, having the fear that they would take too much effort to be balanced and such, I'm sure they wouldn't take much work to be committed, and I'd work myself hard to get out the best balance possible. I think this is not the case though, since implementing the capturing feature is far more ambitious than doing the few tweaks I suggested.

Well, thanks to capturing, balance is completely lost now. So we probably will switch between a few rush-only, turtle-only or boom-only games in the next versions. Which is why balance comments on A18 are sadly of low value now.

A little tweaking of civic center and barrack units spawning time could make the game much more strategic, deep and enjoyable, with little effort.

Anyway I think the post was good enough to get a conversation and an exchange of ideas going, I cant stand a chicken engine gets more attention ^^

That's just because it's laughable. We all want some humour.

But maybe I was too ambitious, maybe I should've asked for this in the first place: I have little familiarity with javascript, but it might be enough to make a mod myself, since I think it would only take changing some already existing strings numbers, so if anybody can help me get started i'd appreciate (maybe hint me a guide or give a bit of explaination on where to find those strings I was talking about) , i'd like to give it a shot.

Mario.

Stats are simply defined in XML templates. F.e. the stats of generic spearmen are defined here: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/simulation/templates/template_unit_infantry_melee_spearman.xml

Thanks to inheritance, you don't have to define stats for every unit. You can define generic stats for infantry, a bit more specific for melee infantry, even more specific for spearmen, ...

I do advise you to work on SVN, else your work will be outdated by the time you want to publish it.

[Zezil]

I agree with the first 3 quotes ,and thank you a lot for the last bit.

So basically if I get to change those templates on my svn copy and simply save the changes, once I open the game I get my version, or do I have to do more fancy stuff to get the changes going?

[leper]

So basically if I get to change those templates on my svn copy and simply save the changes, once I open the game I get my version, or do I have to do more fancy stuff to get the changes going?

That's pretty much it. Though it would be better if you used a mod for your changes since that makes it easier for others to test your changes. (Also reduces the risk of changes to svn conflicting with your own changes, but you will still have to update your own changes if some svn change requires it.)

[Zezil]

That's pretty much it. Though it would be better if you used a mod for your changes since that makes it easier for others to test your changes. (Also reduces the risk of changes to svn conflicting with your own changes, but you will still have to update your own changes if some svn change requires it.)

Yeah, I created a mod folder and put all the folders that are in the public folder.

Now I'm basically changing stuff and trying to see if it works, but I'm getting errors.

Tell me if i guessed wrong, all the .xml you can see (in no folder) here template_structure_civic_civil_centre.xml describes all the features common to all civil centers in the game, and athen_civil_centre.xml will add to the first template ,just for the athenian cc, the fact that it can recruit 3 different types of soldier, plus the history description and aging specification)

So I thought that just by changing the <Production queue> in athen cc template tag, I should be able to make cc unable to produce soldiers.

This is how it appears on public

<ProductionQueue>

    <Entities datatype="tokens">      units/athen_infantry_spearman_b      units/athen_infantry_slinger_b      units/athen_cavalry_javelinist_b    </Entities>    <Technologies datatype="tokens">      -phase_town_generic      phase_town_athen      -phase_city_generic      phase_city_athen    </Technologies>  </ProductionQueue>

In the mod I guessed that just deleting the entities tag should've been enough to do the trick, but i get errors, game fails to load the template.

[leper]

Removing <Entities ...>...</Entities> should work. What are the first few messages in the log? (http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths)

EDIT: Yes, that is correct. The actual parent entity is specified in the <Entity> tag as an attribute (second line).

[Zezil]

Thank you leper!

First i was trying to do the modification with open office and i got error, game did load but failed to load the template and i ended up having no civil center at all. Now that i'm using notepad++ i dont get errors anymore but loading of the game is stuck at 15% and doesnt start. I'll keep trying and update you, if have any hint thanks in advance

edit: I got a crashlog,an interestinglog(wich is an empty xml file) , a system_info and a mainlog, those came from the tries to run the game i did this morning.

Crashlog first line is: (error while formatting error message)....after that i get the specifications of my hardware.

mainlong goes like this:

"0 A.D. Main log

Loading config file "config/default.cfg"

Loaded config string "windowed" = "false"

Loaded config string "showdetailedtooltips" = "false"

Loaded config string "splashscreendisable" = "false"

[and a lot of other messages like those]"

System info gives first the hardware specifications and then things like this

"OpenGL Extensions:
GL_EXT_blend_minmax
GL_EXT_blend_subtract
GL_EXT_blend_color

....and so on"

Hope those help(now that i use notepad++i dont get errors, but as i said above game cant load more than 15%)

Edited April 30, 2015 by Zezil

[sanderd17]

When you make a mod, it's better to not copy all files to your mod. If you load your mod together with the public mod (0 A.D.), then the mod manager will automatically prefer your files over the public files, but fall back to the public files when the files are missing in your mod.

By only copying the file you modify, it's easier to maintain. Else you'll have to keep up with all changes we do, which can be hard on your own.

And as you may notice, the version you're working on is already outdated. The current version uses {civ}_infantry_... instead of athen_infantry_... This is so that buildings can still produce units when captured, but don't give access to units from the enemy civ.

Finally, that crashlog line is a very annoying thing. It means we can't see where the actual problem is. But I expect it's still caused because openOffice left some files in the directory that can't be read (like a backup document). The best thing (since you're only started) would be to delete everything, and start over with a clean mod of only the files you modified.

[Zezil]

Yeah , at first i tried just copying the simulation folder in my mod, but this way my mod didnt appear when i tried to turn it on in the mod manager.

I went the easy way copying everything , just to try and see if i could really commit myself to the modding or if it was way out of my abilities.

I'll try to first make a little mod, doing the least amount of job possible to get the feel of my idea going and to try to figure out how to balance it. Once I can tweak and test easily and fast ,it shouldn't take too much time. Problem is that game stucks at 15% now...I'll try different ways around, i'll mess with the cc templates and see if i can find a way to get it done, and if i cant i'll go deeper to understand the problem i get now.

About my version being outdated....i fear that starting to work on a version of the game i haven't played and that i dont know might be a problem...so maybe i can keep 2 mod, one with all the svn commits you're doing and another with the a18 balance, if i'll be able to make a mod with only the folders i change in it. Anyway I'll work on it the next days and see how it goes, wait for updates

Thanks you!

Mario.