Delenda Est alpha 23 - feedback

[coworotel]

I have been playing the mod since yesterday and I like it very much. I would like to thank the developers. It is really great to have the separation between city territory and farming/mining/lumbering areas. It is also great that there are a lot of choices to be made when it comes to technologies, I think it increases the strategic component.

I haven't experienced any bugs, except some occasional warning messages - which I could just ignore.

One thing maybe that I would like to hear about is the reasoning for limiting some units, like 2 cavalry in the beginning, 5 outposts, etc. For the outposts I think a minimum distance rule would work fine, just like for towers. For cavalry I don't understand why the limit. I was hunting walruses and it was a pain because the cavalry was melee and was killed, so I had to replace them all the time. Is it to avoid rushes? Or to avoid too much hunting? If it is considered somehow overpowered why not just nerf them? (Although I don't think cav is OP in the main game. Haven't had the chance to play DE in MP yet.)

Mercenary camps and gaia CCs could have some gaia units protecting them from being taken (maybe... not so important).

For now those are my observations - I hope this doesn't sound too critical, I have great appreciation for this mod. I hope the strong core/weak countryside concept is added to the main game some day. Independent phases for each CC is also a very good/realistic idea.

Would be nice if more people used it in multiplayer, I saw that it had almost 100 downloads yesterday but didn't see anybody in MP using it.

Edit: Forgot to say, very good job with the main screen! Looks really beautiful.

Edited June 7, 2018 by coworotel

[Stan`]

29 minutes ago, coworotel said:

I have been playing the mod since yesterday and I like it very much. I would like to thank the developers. It is really great to have the separation between city territory and farming/mining/lumbering areas. It is also great that there are a lot of choices to be made when it comes to technologies, I think it increases the strategic component.

You can thank the main developper :P @wowgetoffyourcellphone

29 minutes ago, coworotel said:

I haven't experienced any bugs, except some occasional warning messages - which I could just ignore. 

Can you report those ? :)

 

[coworotel]

9 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Can you report those ?

Next time I get one I will.

Thanks @wowgetoffyourcellphone, awesome job!

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I am planning on making some fixes and re-releasing the mod for Alpha 23. It'll be version 0.0.23.1, and will fix some annoying bugs and errors everyone is experiencing.

[coworotel]

If I recall correctly one of the warnings I've got was with loading of textures. Not sure though. I get back to you when I see it again.

[Feldfeld]

I also just tested the mod today, and recorded a little game.

I can't really say much about the balance and other things because the meta has yet to be invented on multiplayer i believe. The high number of techs and civ bonuses certainly can open a wide number of possibilities.

The issues i could see are that corrals seems a hell lot better than fields (though only played one game and barely tested fields, but from what i see it seems obvious to me). Also, temple unloading zone is wrong (with gauls at least). Units unload at the heal aura frontier instead of just near the building. Useful to climb mountains :)

Will try to upload that one game i played against the AI. There you may also see some unwanted things such as soldiers doing all the building tasks.

[Tomcelmare]

@wowgetoffyourcellphone That's great news! Don't forget the chinese war chariot, in which the pikeman is constantly walking on his platform while the chariot is moving 

[av93]

Cavalry and chariots shows as garrisoned in fortress (probably in other fortifications too), and the upgrading tooltip of some units to experience levels, shows a citizien-soldier reference (saying that they gets worse working when leveling up)

[Feldfeld]

Seems like i was wrong for fields, i didn't know CC put a malus to nearby fields. So they should actually be fine and balanced with corrals.

A bigger issue probably is mercenaries. From the games i played (including online), they seemed to be a must and that rushing with them is a really good strat. They don't cost food, instead metal, and no pop as well so it's easy to make them in the very early game and then you can attack.

The early game army advantage is important : once you wiped the ennemy army you can be around his base there is no comeback possible. Some civs like gauls or britons don't have towers in p1, so the only way to defend from an attack is having about equal amount of men ready to fight. But even if they had, wooden towers are weak. Their range scale with archer range but i don't think that's a good thing as the result is that they'll defend only a very small part of your territory, the attacker can work around with that.

Also, reduced LOS and range make battles tricky to micro. Units only attack what is in their LOS i suppose, the consequence being that often in battles, you'll see some of your units fighting but the other units slightly out of range will just idle there.

Here a video i made when i first tested the mod :

 

You can see the temple ungarrison issue i described earlier in the end of the video.

Also you can see somwhere that (i don't know if it's only this case, but) When you select some ranged units and attack a non-tamable animal, they'll use their weapon to kill it, but if you add a scout in selection (or maybe any melee unit ?) then the ranged units will just walk endlessly to the animal.

 

commands.txt

Here a multiplayer replay that illustrates well the importance of mercenaries early game. (and the eco techs as i completely forgot them)

 

commands.txt

And another one that shows how the game is lost once you don't have enough military units to compete with the attacker.

[Alexandermb]

6 hours ago, Tomcelmare said:

@wowgetoffyourcellphone That's great news! Don't forget the chinese war chariot, in which the pikeman is constantly walking on his platform while the chariot is moving 

i've made a change in TM about that, hope @wowgetoffyourcellphone merge from there.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Some of these bugs and errors are problems with the core game that DE just happens to help bring to light, unintentionally. lol  Most of them aren't though.  

9 hours ago, Tomcelmare said:

@wowgetoffyourcellphone That's great news! Don't forget the chinese war chariot, in which the pikeman is constantly walking on his platform while the chariot is moving 

 

2 hours ago, Alexandermb said:

i've made a change in TM about that, hope @wowgetoffyourcellphone merge from there.

Yeah, that's an easy one. I'll add that to the list.

 

9 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

The issues i could see are that corrals seems a hell lot better than fields

Farm on the farmlands. This is a 100% boost on this terrain!  

 

3 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

A bigger issue probably is mercenaries. From the games i played (including online), they seemed to be a must and that rushing with them is a really good strat. They don't cost food, instead metal, and no pop as well so it's easy to make them in the very early game and then you can attack.

Would you suggest a bit of a nerf? Train time, cost, or any combo? I intend for mercs to be important, but not game-breaking important.

One of the issues is, I would like the ability to mod the starting resources, where the player would likely start with something like 500F, 500W, 300S, 200M, 200G, instead of 500 everything (scale it up and down from there). 

 

3 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

 The early game army advantage is important : once you wiped the ennemy army you can be around his base there is no comeback possible. Some civs like gauls or britons don't have towers in p1, so the only way to defend from an attack is having about equal amount of men ready to fight. But even if they had, wooden towers are weak. Their range scale with archer range but i don't think that's a good thing as the result is that they'll defend only a very small part of your territory, the attacker can work around with that.

 

I'm thinking of going the Age of Mythology route and giving every civ 4 free wooden towers at the start of the skirm match. Just an idea I'm toying with.

 

3 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

 Also, reduced LOS and range make battles tricky to micro. Units only attack what is in their LOS i suppose, the consequence being that often in battles, you'll see some of your units fighting but the other units slightly out of range will just idle there.

This is kind of a problem with the core game, DE just magnifies it. I would really like a "Vision" range and an "Aggression" range tied to a (reduced number of) stances for units, so I can boost up vision range a bit without units berserking everywhere like in core game. Also, other games have smaller vision range than core game 0 A.D. and what you're talking about occurs. I just think you're used to core 0 A.D.'s massive vision ranges. Consequently, you're used to the units just attacking attacking attacking without much input. I dunno, it's a different style of play, not necessarily a bug. What do you think?

 

3 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

You can see the temple ungarrison issue i described earlier in the end of the video.

Yeah, that's a consequence of me using the Footprint code to make that pretty aura texture show up. Ungarrison position is dictated by the size of the footprint, rather than the size of the obstruction. Unless (ideally) the aura visualization code is extended in core game, or ungarrisoning switched to obstruction instead of footprint,  I might have to drop the pretty aura textures because of the issue you highlight there.

 

3 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

 Also you can see somwhere that (i don't know if it's only this case, but) When you select some ranged units and attack a non-tamable animal, they'll use their weapon to kill it, but if you add a scout in selection (or maybe any melee unit ?) then the ranged units will just walk endlessly to the animal.

Bug in core game you uncovered. I don't think this is a DE problem.  

 

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

7 hours ago, av93 said:

Cavalry and chariots shows as garrisoned in fortress (probably in other fortifications too

There is a patch to make this not happen: VisibleGarrisonClasses. But I think it's currently deprecated. I hope it makes it into A24.

[Stan`]

33 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

There is a patch to make this not happen: VisibleGarrisonClasses. But I think it's currently deprecated. I hope it makes it into A24.

I don't think so. I couldn't convince them it was a good feature the fact that vanilla doesn't use it doesn't help too. I could probably rebase it but that means you'll have to carry it around which is suboptimal. One could use mod dependency and I could upload it to modio. But meh :/

[Feldfeld]

17 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Farm on the farmlands. This is a 100% boost on this terrain!  

Yes i didn't know that when i wrote the post, farms seems completely fine

18 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Would you suggest a bit of a nerf? Train time, cost, or any combo? I intend for mercs to be important, but not game-breaking important.

One of the issues is, I would like the ability to mod the starting resources, where the player would likely start with something like 500F, 500W, 300S, 200M, 200G, instead of 500 everything (scale it up and down from there). 

I think some sort of a nerf is needed. If your custom ressources thing get in the game then mercenaries would be bit nerfed yes but i'm not sure that's enough. Train time is low, if that is nerfed it would make them less efficient in let's say late P1 and after but they'll still be collected in very early game and players would attack with that pretty much no matter what. Perhaps a cost nerf could be good. Then we could keep train time as it is since it's logical that mercenaries are hired and not trained.

26 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I'm thinking of going the Age of Mythology route and giving every civ 4 free wooden towers at the start of the skirm match. Just an idea I'm toying with.

That could be an idea. Also as i wrote in earlier post i thought wooden towers needed a buff, preferably range. (they seem easy to work around)

30 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

This is kind of a problem with the core game, DE just magnifies it. I would really like a "Vision" range and an "Aggression" range tied to a (reduced number of) stances for units, so I can boost up vision range a bit without units berserking everywhere like in core game. Also, other games have smaller vision range than core game 0 A.D. and what you're talking about occurs. I just think you're used to core 0 A.D.'s massive vision ranges. Consequently, you're used to the units just attacking attacking attacking without much input. I dunno, it's a different style of play, not necessarily a bug. What do you think?

Yes, the problem is from the core game, only happens with archers since it's the only unit to have their range almost equal to their LOS and that for the other units players take care of the LOS. Well, the problem is that the efficient way to start a fight in vanilla is to let units pick their target by pressing halt because their hits will be relatively well distributed over the ennemy units. If we choose not to do that, in Delenda Est, then we have the choice to give units order to attack an ennemy units (or multiple orders which takes lot of micro). If this units is isolated from ennemy army then the problem may happen again, otherwise the opponent could try to press halt at the right time to wipe the closes unit that are still walking to their target.

This is why the best way to start a fight for me is still to try to press halt while barely in range, with the purpose not to give an advantage to ennemy.

I don't know much about the other games. I think that in AoE2 units have about a 1 second delay on pressing halt before attacking, making players prefer to use patrol/attack move key. I didn't try yet the attack move in 0 A.D. perhaps it is good.

45 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Bug in core game you uncovered. I don't think this is a DE problem.  

I guess, it isn't really important anyway.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

28 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

I don't think so. I couldn't convince them it was a good feature the fact that vanilla doesn't use it doesn't help too. I could probably rebase it but that means you'll have to carry it around which is suboptimal. One could use mod dependency and I could upload it to modio. But meh :/

Hmm. Any number of mods could use it. I might just take visible garrisoning out if not.

[wackyserious]

Glad that DE made its debut at mod.io

This is something refreshing after suffering from a terrible flu these past days.

epir_merc_infantry_1 has death animation issues. The only issue I've gotten so far.

[Feldfeld]

18 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

Perhaps a cost nerf could be good. Then we could keep train time as it is since it's logical that mercenaries are hired and not trained.

More precisely, this could apply to all mercenaries that have low train time, from mercenary camp or the ones available from a faction's building. This would not apply to Carthaginian mercenary since they have normal train time and pop cost. Then a relatively cheap tech which cost glory and another ressource would return these mercenaries to their initial cost. It could indeed be nice to have the custom starting ressource to lower starting glory  so that aggressive players could make early p1/p2 tech (such as the one i described) using the glory they can only have from fights. These tech would not be relevant to booming players

Also i noticed carthaginian shield cavalry have 5 second train time. I suppose this is not the intended number.

In the map from my video it seems like the player 2 will struggle with the camera which will often go up as the camera is close to the mountain.

The idle unit key selects the military units and not the citizen.

I'm also suspecting that spearmen/pikemen could need a bigger bonus vs cav and elephant is perhaps too strong, but i didn't play enough to confirm this.

Edit : After 1 game elephants seem fine.

I suggest bigger bonus vs cav only for non-hoplite spearmen after all. Pikemen are fine.

Edited June 8, 2018 by Feldfeld

[coworotel]

As promised, some screenshots of warnings (although I didn't see anything wrong).

In this one the cyan soldiers are dead, but the image is as if they are alive:

 

I hope this helps.

Edit: I have the impression the graphics are better/sharper in Delenda Est compared to original game, is there any change in contrast or something like that or I'm crazy?

Edited June 8, 2018 by coworotel

[Stan`]

Can you attach the interestinglog.html file (If it didn't get overriden), and the commands.txt ?

[coworotel]

These?

commands.txt

interestinglog.html

[Servo]

I DL the mod but doesn’t run and had error on OS X. 

[elexis]

On 6/7/2018 at 10:02 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I am planning on making some fixes and re-releasing the mod for Alpha 23. It'll be version 0.0.23.1, and will fix some annoying bugs and errors everyone is experiencing.

Welcome to the club

28 minutes ago, Servo said:

I DL the mod but doesn’t run and had error on OS X. 

(-> Second invitation to the club?)

[av93]

On 6/7/2018 at 8:14 PM, stanislas69 said:

I don't think so. I couldn't convince them it was a good feature the fact that vanilla doesn't use it doesn't help too. I could probably rebase it but that means you'll have to carry it around which is suboptimal. One could use mod dependency and I could upload it to modio. But meh :/

Why shouldn't be added although it wasn't used in vanilla? Because it's more code to maintain?

[elexis]

There were some wishes for the public mod, for instance if there are visible garrison spots, the player should be able to determine which units go there (for instance if you want the bolt shooter or the citizen archer on top). And in case your units have low HP and you don't want to expose them, there should be a way to not have units visibly garrisoned. So basically a panel, maybe hotkey was wanted.

[Stan`]

5 hours ago, av93 said:

Why shouldn't be added although it wasn't used in vanilla? Because it's more code to maintain?

That and what elexis said. Basically Iwanted a really simple feature that allows modders to edit templates in order to allow visible and non visible garrisoning. For instance you might want to Garrison elephants and archers in the maurya fortress. Currently if you do so with visible garrisoning you'll get elephants on the towers. With the patch you can tell the game you only want archers. So elephants will be in the building and archers on the towers. If a user wipes out all the units you have to regarisonn units to make them pop on walls atain. That seemed to be a problem because people wanted more micro with toggles and stuff which were fare beyond my skills at the time. 

For me it's was more of a requirement. All visible Garrison spots needed to be garisonned and them being killed was a side effect. 

On a side note given we make smaller siege engines you could also garison them in towers to boost them. If they were to be be packable that would meant you could pack and unpack them on the towers (Unless I fix that code but I'd like my patch to stay minimal)

So I will update my patch for those who want it but I won't add buttons because that's not how I want the thing to be. Not sure if a mod is the way to go but if needed I'll make one you can use as a dependent to your mods.

3 hours ago, elexis said:

There were some wishes for the public mod, for instance if there are visible garrison spots, the player should be able to determine which units go there (for instance if you want the bolt shooter or the citizen archer on top). And in case your units have low HP and you don't want to expose them, there should be a way to not have units visibly garrisoned. So basically a panel, maybe hotkey was wanted.