Delenda Est alpha 23 - feedback

[av93]

So, the team is not reluctant to add features to the engine that 0 a.d doesn't use?

[fatherbushido]

5 hours ago, av93 said:

So, the team is not reluctant to add features to the engine that 0 a.d doesn't use?

(I won't speak for the others, but at least I wasn't.)

You point out a crucial point, like what do one mean by "engine" or by "0ad" (or even by "wildfire games"). And if we go one step further, since the opening of the source code, what do one mean by "main game" or "vanilla game" or "vanilla mod". Those things really lead to misinterpretation.

[Servo]

I was able to DL the updated one and darn it’s really nice! I may have some errors but it works! I’m using OS X still.

CC produce only gatherers and soldiers can build too! The pacing is awesome. 

Still testing halfway and enjoying the mechanics so far. 

Edited June 10, 2018 by Servo

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Ima repackage the mod in a couple days. It has about 150 additions and changes, most of which no one will notice.

But notably, mercenaries are a little more expensive, the actor errors are all fixed, missing textures are fixed, and some textures added.

 

I might fix the Kiushite blacksmith techs and do a couple more other things before repackaging.

Edited June 10, 2018 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[coworotel]

 

interestinglog.html

commands.txt

[av93]

I noticed that you didn't added the new cavalry meat gathering animation.

[Feldfeld]

8 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Ima repackage the mod in a couple days. It has about 150 additions and changes, most of which no one will notice.

But notably, mercenaries are a little more expensive, the actor errors are all fixed, missing textures are fixed, and some textures added.

 

I might fix the Kiushite blacksmith techs and do a couple more other things before repackaging.

Then i may add some more feedback.

Elephants may need a train time nerf and bigger pop cost. They can be countered when armies start to be big but in the early p3 they seem too strong.

Maybe in the summary screen soldiers could stop being considered as gatherers.

The fact that soldiers can build make the building cost/building time paired tech in CC at the beggining seem not very much a choice except for ptolemies. It also minimizes gauls/britons bonus for building i think.

Also sparta seem to be the best booming civ with their ressources gather rate. They can have a very good p1 with their food/wood gather rate then use slaves at p2 for stone and metal. That doesn't seem that important but i don't know if it is intended.

Gauls sword cavalry have less speed than every other civ's sword cav, without being compensated, i suppose this is not intended as well.

Edited June 10, 2018 by Feldfeld

[Stan`]

On 6/7/2018 at 7:39 PM, 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.

https://0ad.mod.io/conditional-visible-garrisoning
https://github.com/0ADMods/conditional_visible_garrisoning

[Feldfeld]

Last minute feedback.

Catapults, and most likely bolts seem too strong. Now that units don't have high crush armor anymore, they are killed very fast by catapults. They are quite easy to mass, their train time as the same as a cavalry. In this replay you can see how some catapults barely defended can defeat a good number of melee cav (that are wiped very fast) and win the game pretty much by themselves

commands.txt

 

Related to another of my post, here is a replay that shows spartan economy advantage :

commands.txt

 

If needed i can also post replays that show elephant's strength in early p3.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

Related to another of my post, here is a replay that shows spartan economy advantage :

 

This was a relic from when I had male and female citizens and slaves, where female gatherers were boosted at food gathering. I'll fix. 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

Catapults, and most likely bolts seem too strong. Now that units don't have high crush armor anymore, they are killed very fast by catapults. They are quite easy to mass, their train time as the same as a cavalry. In this replay you can see how some catapults barely defended can defeat a good number of melee cav (that are wiped very fast) and win the game pretty much by themselves

 

I initially was trying to emulate AOK's siege warfare where a bunch of Siege Onagers could mow down enemy archers and skirmishers if they weren't careful. Difference is in AOK it's easy to mass cheap trash units, while in 0 A.D. it isn't. I might play with this more.

[Rolf Dew]

@wowgetoffyourcellphone  

Why don't you just make non champion units cheaper and faster to produce, so that they become those cheap trash units like in aoe 2?  Maybe you could tweak their stats so that they would not be op.

Edited June 11, 2018 by Rolf Dew

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

8 hours ago, Rolf Dew said:

@wowgetoffyourcellphone  

Why don't you just make non champion units cheaper and faster to produce, so that they become those cheap trash units like in aoe 2?  Maybe you could tweak their stats so that they would not be op.

I was thinking of keeping up the food cost of citizen-soldier units, but reducing their wood/stone/metal costs by about 25%, yeah. Make them a bit trashier in basic stats, but also give the Rank Upgrade techs to more civs (see DE's Kushites for an example).

• War Elephants +5s train time, +1 pop.
  • I might boost the elephant upgrade effects, but move them one phase later to keep the eles competitive in extreme late-game.
• Siege Weapons +1 pop.
  • Bolt Shooters +7s train time, +20w cost.
  • Stone Throwers +5s train time.
  • Has anyone used the new "stationary" Catapults?
• All soldiers +2 crush armor.
• All melee units vision range matched to ranged units' vision range of the same classes. Maybe help eliminate the frustration felt by some folks.  Vision ranges are still 40% less than vanilla.
  • Why do I do this? It helps make the world feel "larger" and maps bigger. Scouting is more important. Also, it helps players keep control of their units.
• Increased the Phase 1 Scout Cav limit from 2 to 5 to help players hunt more and get to that 1000f threshold.

 

 

--------------------------------

 

One thing players need to keep in mind is that you need to use more pop gathering food than you did before in vanilla. Also, placement of farms is very important. You can't just plop  farms around your CC and call it a day. I wanted to make food the very important resource that it was in antiquity. Probably 75% of the population was involved in food production in ancient times and I wanted to bend the pop curve in the game back toward that most important resource. That's also why Phase 2 costs 1000f, to make the player set up a good food economy early.

 

A wish list item I have would be to allow techs to increase training/building limits. Right now, Player.xml is not flexible in this regard, at least as far as I can tell. So, for instance, in Phase 1, you can train maybe 10 mercs per camp -> Phase 2, 20 mercs -> Phase 3, 30 mercs -> Phase 4, 40 mercs. No way to do this currently as far as I know.

[aeonios]

Just my 0.02:

- I don't like how you're constantly fighting the eco all game. You start out housed with half the number of workers as usual, and then workers take twice as long to produce. Not only that but they also have double the resource carrying capacity which means they take twice as long to return resources to the dropsite. Military buildings cost an arm and a leg in stone but you can't afford to gather it because you simply can't get workers on the field quickly enough, also same with units that cost metal like mercs not to mention upgrades.

- I don't like the hard split for producing buildings. Not only is it a pain to find an appropriate builder but if you lose all your initial combat units before you get a barracks up then it's GG then and there because you won't ever be able to produce a barracks. It's also distracting that you have to use your combat units (which aren't good for anything else besides fighting) to build stuff, because it means you can't have them out doing what they're meant for, ie killing stuff.

-The anti-farming aura is unintuitive and dumb. It'd be better just to add a building restriction to fields so that they can't be placed near the CC at all, rather than have people wonder why their farms aren't producing worth anything.

-It's also kind of unintuitive that you need to get the upgrade to produce a second cult statue, and annoying since it's the only path to p4.

-I don't really like the buildable siege catapults. Not only is it impossible to move them but they also barely have any range so you basically have to build them right in the middle of the enemy's base, which defeats the purpose. Also there's a good reason why siege onagers and trebs were separated in AoK. They filled two different roles with one being shorter ranged and more mobile, and the other being a specialized anti-building weapon. Even then the projectile speeds were slow enough that units could be micro'd out of the way most of the time, which is what kept onagers from being op.

[elexis]

I didn't read anything above, but FeldFeld was speaking about DE random maps on the lobby and that they miss farmland. Indeed problematic to change every file, especially when they can change frequently upstream. It could be possible to create some visual actor that also represents farmland and has this aura, just not selectable component. This entity could then be placed after the game was started in a trigger script. This way random maps wouldn't have to change. The Regicide.js and CaptureTheRelic.js code has an example for spawning entities at gamestart.

But that's not really a nice approach and we should move the relic placement to rmgen/ where possible (so we can avoid specific islands for instance).

A mod might instead hook into the ExportMap function by replacing it and then placing fields, then calling the replaced function. But that also doesn't really work well because every map does it's own thing and it's not possible to write a generic field placement strategy that does something very specific on some maps (such as not placing fields on the jebel barkal hill).

So it's a tradeoff between the three possibilites (changing every random map, adding a general trigger script, adding a general random map script).

Perhaps the simultaneously easiest and most rewarding way to implement it would be to add a new random map library function to place DE fields and add exactly one call to it in every random map script. The diff would look exactly like the placeNomad call just before the end of the mapgeneration. So actually, you could copy&paste&modify that commit and fine-tune things per map. rP20866. Maybe I can write the rmgen library function and modify one or two exemplary maps in fact because the task is too easy and rewarding for DE to not have anyone try it.

[Stan`]

Maybe you could place them depending on textures ?

[Feldfeld]

2 hours ago, aeonios said:

Military buildings cost an arm and a leg in stone but you can't afford to gather it because you simply can't get workers on the field quickly enough, also same with units that cost metal like mercs not to mention upgrades.

Well, if you start with standard ressources which seem to be medium, then in early game you can make any 2 combination of military building except for 2 barracks where you would need 100 additional stone. Stone is not an important ressource in p1 so it doesn't really harm eco to build these. Also perhaps that if these buildings seem expensive then that would make the training time upgrades useful.

For mercs, they don't cost food nor do they cost pop so they are actually easy to afford early game without affecting your economy and that makes them very useful early game. Food is very important ressource and you would be in a tricky position if you have used depleted your fast food ressources (berries, hunt) but still didn't click p2. This is what makes mercenaries so useful, and stone and metal aren't rare ressources in skirmish maps which emphasize this fact.

I think that making upgrades is worth it, they don't cost so much so consider them in your plan.

[Servo]

For SP it’s really nice except with house restrictions (20) with one CC? I don’t know yet how I can maximize the pop to 1000 with one CC alone. Fort is limited to 3 per CC built? I need to keep exploring the mod to find out or if readme file tells clearly of the gameplay. 

It feels weird if you play the vanilla a lot but I’m getting used to the mechanics right now. And tbh it’s really really more realistic, beautiful and playable despite some warning error/s. 

Now that Romans have archers their pretty walls will be garrisoned. 

The game is really slowing the pace to which more strategy will come up. Not much easy unit spamming! 

Food is mostly overproduced in later part of the game so if phasing up needs more is not a problem. From P1 to P3 I’m expecting more skirmishes and units will not be spammed much. 

For MP all the players need to do is micro some worker for needed resources to train armies or build structures so their carry capacity need not be too predictable. It’s more of planning and thinking ahead not just spamming to gather, build and train. 

For army choice of upgrades I hope all possible upgrades are available too and not just limited to either melee or range but if realistic gameplay should suffice I will be contented with choosing the best upgrade for selected units. 

Good job DE! Nice graphics, good looking units and more structures. 

Btw players can just group all military building for easy unit training. Barracks alone to train all types of units is not a dumb idea but separate  structures for each realistic units coming out from it is much much better. 

The game is beautiful no need to make too much drastic changes except balancing and AI enemy behavior to be more disciplined and not too dumb.  

[elexis]

2 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

Maybe you could place them depending on textures ?

Varies per map however.

Got this error whenever starting random maps:

Quote

ERROR: CCacheLoader failed to find archived or source file for: "simulation/templates/structures/scyth_wallset_stone.xml"
ERROR: Failed to load entity template 'structures/scyth_wallset_stone'
ERROR: Invalid template found for 'structures/scyth_wallset_stone'
ERROR: CMapGeneratorWorker::LoadScripts: Failed to load script 'maps/random/rmgen-common/wall_builder.js'
ERROR: JavaScript error: globalscripts/Templates.js line 165
TypeError: template is undefined
  GetTemplateDataHelper@globalscripts/Templates.js:165:1
  loadWallset@maps/random/rmgen-common/wall_builder.js:42:20
  loadWallsetsFromCivData@maps/random/rmgen-common/wall_builder.js:33:1
  @maps/random/rmgen-common/wall_builder.js:8:20
  @maps/random/jebel_barkal.js:6:1
ERROR: CMapGeneratorWorker::Run: Failed to load RMS 'maps/random/jebel_barkal.js'

One can remove the "structures/scyth_wallset_stone" line from the civ json file.

After that I noticed you deleted kush_champion_infantry, Jebel Barkal doesn't like.

So if you put this function into rmgen-common/delendagen.js:

function placeFarmland(entityTemplate, terrain, radius, amount, constraints)
{
	g_Map.log("Creating farmland patches");

	let constraint = new StaticConstraint(constraints);
	for (let i = 0; i < amount; ++i)
	{
		let entities = createObjectGroups(new SimpleGroup([new SimpleObject(entityTemplate, 1, 1, 0, 0)]), 0, constraints, 1, 200);
		if (!entities || !entities[0] || !entities[0][0])
			continue;

		createArea(
			new ClumpPlacer(diskArea(radius), 0.4, 0.6, 0.3, entities[0][0].GetPosition2D()),
			new TerrainPainter(terrain),
			constraints,
			amount);
	}
}

and this into a copy of mainland.js, just before the last line (ExportMap):

placeFarmland(
	"other/farmland_40",
	"desert_farmland",
	6,
	scaleByMapSize(5, 25),
	avoidClasses(clForest, 1, clHill, 4));

There will be some areas with that aura entity.

How intelligently they are placed now entirely depends on the constraints.

A mapgen usually is better off if the large scale structures are done first (water, playerbases, hills, farmland, forests) and then the smaller stuff in between (mines, straggler trees, animals, decoratives, nomad units).

So placing the farmland at the end of the map either results in forests mines and animals being placed on top of the farmland terrain or farmland does avoid everything but doesn't find any place because straggler trees have been placed all over. So if one wants to do it right, one would really have to put this line into the right place of every mapscript and possibly adapt later lines to avoid farmland.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

5 hours ago, aeonios said:

Not only that but they also have double the resource carrying capacity which means they take twice as long to return resources to the dropsite.

1. This is only an issue after you first build the dropsite. After the resources start coming in, it averages out.

2. Did this to reduce pathfinding a little bit. Also, units spend more time harvesting and less time shuttling. This, in the end, is way more efficient all-around, which is why the wheelbarrow techs are pretty useful to grab.

 

5 hours ago, aeonios said:

Military buildings cost an arm and a leg in stone but you can't afford to gather it because you simply can't get workers on the field quickly enough, also same with units that cost metal like mercs not to mention upgrades.

FeldFeld addressed this pretty good:

3 hours ago, Feldfeld said:

Well, if you start with standard ressources which seem to be medium, then in early game you can make any 2 combination of military building except for 2 barracks where you would need 100 additional stone. Stone is not an important ressource in p1 so it doesn't really harm eco to build these. Also perhaps that if these buildings seem expensive then that would make the training time upgrades useful.

 

It is 110% intentional that you will start with just enough resources to have to choose between building 2 out of the 3 military buildings. Then once you start teching up your eco in Phase 2 the costs become much less of an issue.

It is also 110% intentional to slow down P1. Citizens are mediocre gatherers so P1 feels a lot like an Age of Empires game. Later on, you can start training Slaves, who are excellent gatherers, so you can get a rockin eco going and start training huge armies if the match lasts past, say, 20 minutes or so.

 

5 hours ago, aeonios said:

It's also distracting that you have to use your combat units (which aren't good for anything else besides fighting) to build stuff, because it means you can't have them out doing what they're meant for, ie killing stuff.

You don't need the Soldiers to build stuff, merely to place the foundations. Citizens are perfectly capable of building the building once the foundation is laid. Soldiers are just more capable than in a typical RTS. But your last part is baffling, since Vanilla 0 A.D. makes it even more distracting since your soldiers in Vanilla are a necessary component  of your eco, while in DE they are not. 

 

5 hours ago, aeonios said:

-The anti-farming aura is unintuitive and dumb. It'd be better just to add a building restriction to fields so that they can't be placed near the CC at all, rather than have people wonder why their farms aren't producing worth anything.

I don't think it's dumb. It's unintuitive right now because I lack the skills to mod the game properly to make it obvious to the player. I like the idea of simply restricting the placement of farms altogether, which is already possible without modding the game code. It's simpler, if more restrictive. I'll probably just do that for the repackage.

 

5 hours ago, aeonios said:

I don't really like the buildable siege catapults. Not only is it impossible to move them but they also barely have any range so you basically have to build them right in the middle of the enemy's base, which defeats the purpose.

Yeah, there are ways to make them packable. I'm going to check the Siege Mod to see if he does anything interesting here. Also, I hear you about the range.

I had in mind much different roles for the Catapults vs. the Bolt Shooters. Bolt Shooters are supposed to be the packable siege unit that you can garrison on walls, towers, fortresses, and warships to add a nice ranged defensive punch against attackers, while Catapults are those that you build in the field to take down enemy buildings and defenses. I haven't worked much on the concept since packing/unpacking things while VisibleGarrisoned throws errors I can't fix and I had focused on other things besides fixing the field catapult packing. 

 

5 hours ago, aeonios said:

It's also kind of unintuitive that you need to get the upgrade to produce a second cult statue, and annoying since it's the only path to p4.

Either you're misstating something here or are confused. You don't have to upgrade anything to build a 2^nd Statue. You build them, right after another. I had to do this in order to make the progressive cost aura work. Foundations can't add to the cost, only completed buildings. Auras simply are (rightly) built to work that way, it's just the only way I figured out to make the progressive cost work was with auras. I suppose auto-research techs could work, but can't be undone if a Statue is destroyed. With auras its dynamic. What do? 

Edited June 12, 2018 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Servo]

I have this error when I tried to play capture the relics, no relics in the map. And when exiting the game...

[aeonios]

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

1. This is only an issue after you first build the dropsite. After the resources start coming in, it averages out.

2. Did this to reduce pathfinding a little bit. Also, units spend more time harvesting and less time shuttling. This, in the end, is way more efficient all-around, which is why the wheelbarrow techs are pretty useful to grab.

Wheelbarrow techs are only useful if the initial carry rate isn't ridiculously high. I don't think I ever once bothered to get them in DE. The problem is that in the early game you may spend a lot of time waiting on resources to come in to build individual things, so longer waits are bad. Especially when the dropsite is placed right next to the resource so that there's no walking distance, which is generally the case in the early game and even moreso in DE where you have giant tree clusters that run out very slowly and in one big chunk so that the walking distance doesn't increase for a long time.

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

It is 110% intentional that you will start with just enough resources to have to choose between building 2 out of the 3 military buildings. Then once you start teching up your eco in Phase 2 the costs become much less of an issue.

It is also 110% intentional to slow down P1. Citizens are mediocre gatherers so P1 feels a lot like an Age of Empires game. Later on, you can start training Slaves, who are excellent gatherers, so you can get a rockin eco going and start training huge armies if the match lasts past, say, 20 minutes or so.

Eh, I don't think all civs have slaves (like the celts). AoK did have a slow P1 but everyone played at 1.5-2x speed so in real time it was about the same as 0ad, which was probably why 0ad was designed the way it was. It just feels more like an artificial wall stopping you from playing well though. Nobody sane would ignore their eco for 20 minutes to muck around with stuff they can't even afford at the beginning of a game. Balancing eco and military is part of what constitutes skill, and placing a block on eco is something I personally find distasteful.

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

You don't need the Soldiers to build stuff, merely to place the foundations. Citizens are perfectly capable of building the building once the foundation is laid. Soldiers are just more capable than in a typical RTS. But your last part is baffling, since Vanilla 0 A.D. makes it even more distracting since your soldiers in Vanilla are a necessary component  of your eco, while in DE they are not. 

True, but playing find-the-builder is irritating to say the least. It's pretty nonsensical to have to select one unit to place a foundation and another to build the building, even more so for combat units. If you're going to separate combat units and workers (which is something I do agree with) then the separation ought to be clean and total, otherwise you're still forcing extra micro that nobody wants to deal with.

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I don't think it's dumb. It's unintuitive right now because I lack the skills to mod the game properly to make it obvious to the player. I like the idea of simply restricting the placement of farms altogether, which is already possible without modding the game code. It's simpler, if more restrictive. I'll probably just do that for the repackage.

Well you could do something like the shiny selection circles that temples get, except with like a "no-corn" design.  I think the restrictions are still the simplest and most no-nonsense option though.

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I had in mind much different roles for the Catapults vs. the Bolt Shooters. Bolt Shooters are supposed to be the packable siege unit that you can garrison on walls, towers, fortresses, and warships to add a nice ranged defensive punch against attackers, while Catapults are those that you build in the field to take down enemy buildings and defenses. I haven't worked much on the concept since packing/unpacking things while VisibleGarrisoned throws errors I can't fix and I had focused on other things besides fixing the field catapult packing. 

That's an interesting idea, not that anyone ever uses walls.  I'm still pretty much a noob when it comes to modding though, so can't really help you there.

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Either you're misstating something here or are confused. You don't have to upgrade anything to build a 2^nd Statue. You build them, right after another. I had to do this in order to make the progressive cost aura work. Foundations can't add to the cost, only completed buildings. Auras simply are (rightly) built to work that way, it's just the only way I figured out to make the progressive cost work was with auras. I suppose auto-research techs could work, but can't be undone if a Statue is destroyed. With auras its dynamic. What do?

Eh, I see how that works now. You end up with a lying stats screen this way, but I don't know of any other way to go about that. The engine/base scripts aren't really set up to handle progressive cost schemes. I suspect you could hack something up in js so that it counts foundations properly, but I don't really know enough about all that to have an idea of how to implement it.

[Stan`]

@wowgetoffyourcellphone did you try my mod ? The visibile Garrison one ? 

[Servo]

Roman Legionaries are sliding using Testudo and after breaking up as well. They can return back to original walk once you change their stance to other forms except the none.

Edited June 12, 2018 by Servo

[Servo]

Humnn something wrong now it’s not working. I hope fgod new version did not cause it. Now it’s not loading mod.io mod list for download.