Wow's and Wow Jr.'s Awesome Gameplay Wishes

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

First off, we're not members of WFG, so whatever they do is up to them and that's cool. But we do have a list of awesome things we'd like to see in the game, either in Empires Ascendant or possible with the engine for mods! My 17 year old son, Wow Jr. who plays Empires Ascendant and Delenda Est a lot (he also plays Age of Mythology, Age of Empires III, Rome 2: Total War, and Battle for Middle Earth II a lot too), has helped me with the list.  In no particular order:

• When you achieve victory, the camera should snap to the location of the event that triggers the victory, so that you are not confused as to what occurred.
  • Battle for Middle Earth II
• When achieving victory or achieving local superiority, your soldiers stand around and cheer.
  • Battle for Middle Earth II (end-match at victory), Age of Empires III (when achieving local superiority)
• When achieving victory in general it needs to be more exciting or dramatic. Right now it's kind of dull. Maybe an inspirational audio quote from a civ or culture specific icon like Alexander the Great or Hannibal. Likewise, defeat should feel more dramatic too.
  • Battle for Middle Earth II, Rome 2: Total War
• Soldiers in battalions.
  • Battle for Middle Earth II, Rome 2: Total War
• Choices when phasing up or at the beginning of the match.
  • Age of Mythology, Age of Empires III, Hyrule: Conquest
• Automatic phasing based on city size (population or number of buildings or both, don't matter).
  • Clicking the "tech" which costs resources to phase up the city seems weird, when you could conceivably build 100 buildings in "Village" phase and have max pop and nothing happens.
• Building snapping to each other, making neat clumps and general neatness. Good for houses and farm fields especially.
  • Age of Mythology, Age of Empires III
  • Note, we don't mean a grid. The snapping alone is good enough in these games without a grid.
• Farmlands
  • Delenda Est, but not as hacky as DE's implementation.
• Naval Battles need some love.
  • They move weird. We understand they can't have 100% realistic movement like in Rome 2, but something a little better than now would be nice. Battle for Middle Earth II's ship movement was nice and fluid. Age of Empires III's ship movement wasn't horrrrrrible.
  • Ships should probably just be shrunk in size and forget about the whole "garrison troops and siege weapons on the decks" idea unless you're really going to put a lot of effort into making that work.
  • If you shrink them, then make them customizable to approximate the original intent of garrisoning archers and siege weapons and stuff.
  • Ramming. Just a simple double-click charge attack. Speaking of which:
• Charging. Would be cool for melee units to have a charging ability, especially if the game has battalions. A simple double-right-click could initiate the charge. Can make it act like a rechargeable special ability and/or base its effect on distance. Add a "mass" stat that can determine the effect of the charge and how hard it pushes the target units around, if trampling effect occurs, etc.
  • Rome 2: Total War, Battle for Middle Earth II
• Goat conversion.  
  • Age of Empires series
• Animal Fattening
  • Age of Empires series
  • Jr. especially misses this one for some reason.
• Fear and Morale
  • Not like in Total War where your units become uncontrollable and run away, more like in Battle for Middle Earth II where units are afraid to attack certain targets or are slow to follow orders. I'd imagine sending a battalion of basic-ranked spear dudes to attack a bunch of squadrons of Armored War Elephants would instill a bit of trepidation. lol
• Run Amok for some units, like War Elephants and Chariots. They go Gaia and attack everyone around them, including once-allied troops. Gain +100% attack and speed, but start to lose health. Can be converted back to your side with Priests. 
  • Rome 2: Total War
• Priest Conversion ability. "Wololo."
  • Age of Empires series.
  • Jr. didn't know what "Wololo" was. lol
• Mercenary Camps and Villages like in Delenda Est.
  • Just in general, things to make the map come alive more, or make map control more interesting. Merc. Camps are a good way to do this and are easily implemented.

 

What do you guys think? We think all of these suggestions fit together just fine. Not too random.

 

Jr. also thinks this UI is "beast."

 

Spoiler

 

Edited June 28, 2018 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Rolf Dew]

I like these ideas! 

Second, I didn't know you had a son 6 years younger than me lol.

[Lion.Kanzen]

I thought you were more younger.

Quote

Choices when phasing up or at the beginning of the match.

• Age of Mythology, Age of Empires III, Hyrule: Conquest

•  

Indeed, we can specially troops, economy or defenses, the players choose their style without change faction. add Empire Earth has a similar idea.

Quote

Building snapping to each other, making neat clumps and general neatness. Good for houses and farm fields especially.

• Age of Mythology, Age of Empires III
• Note, we don't mean a grid. The snapping alone is good enough in these games without a grid.

•  

One of pillar underrated, it can be nice for nodding mixed with sock buildings. add Empire Earth 2.

 

Quote

Farmlands 

• Delenda Est, but not as hacky as DE's implementation

It need a better implementation, adding a new building, a water container that increases territory and get bots of water and pop capacity/housing. so opposite to actual penalty to build farms around CC, this give a background economy to have rural base or economic base. is one of my new ideas from city builders.

Spoiler

Quote

Goat conversion.  

• Age of Empires series

• Animal Fattening
  • Age of Empires series
  • Jr. especially misses this one for some reason.
•  

Must have this encourages to have a cattle based economy. etc. good for nomadic like our existent Xiongnu.

Quote

Priest Conversion ability. "Wololo."

• Age of Empires series.
• Jr. didn't know what "Wololo" was. lol

•  

Some civs, like Egyptian , Persian, Indians.. and some mini factions.

Quote

When achieving victory in general it needs to be more exciting or dramatic. Right now it's kind of dull. Maybe an inspirational audio quote from a civ or culture specific icon like Alexander the Great or Hannibal. Likewise, defeat should feel more dramatic too.

• Battle for Middle Earth II, Rome 2: Total War

Some hard to implemented because lack man-power 

Edited June 28, 2018 by Lion.Kanzen

[Stan`]

Those are good ideas. Maybe @Prodigal Son could consider some of them for the design document.

It's missing sockets

I wish you had a coding team working on DE as well. 

[Sundiata]

I pretty much liked all of those gameplay wishes...

[Lion.Kanzen]

More PvE and neutral foe(allies) conversion are need for many proposes @fatherbushido work some patches.

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

Some hard to implemented because lack man-power 

Haha, well, yeah. lol

 

3 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

It's missing sockets

Didn't want the list to get too long. lol. Also, didn't want the list to turn into a "Make EA into DE" thread. Sockets are definitely desired. Reducing number of stances and formations is already possible without new code. 

Honestly, the forum seems kind of dead lately, so I posted this thread to liven the place up.

 

3 hours ago, Sundiata said:

I pretty much liked all of those gameplay wishes...

I think the "drama" things might be pretty easy, for instance, snapping the camera view to the victory trigger at the end (can turn this off in options if you want to, but honestly it makes sense to keep it on so you can be sure of what actually caused the victory or where that last darn villager was hiding), throwing an inspirational quote onto the screen when you win should be easy, though it would be nice to have font support so we can have nice big well-rendered text (the audio can come later: Would be awesome to hear Alexander's voice in Koine Greek extol the virtues of valor). The engine already has "battle detection" for the music, and it already even detects when the battle "ends" to stop the music. Is it hard to extend it to detect which player's units have command of that area when the battle has been detected as ended, and then trigger the (5 second) cheering state for those units? I don't know. 

 

3 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

 I wish you had a coding team working on DE as well. 

Another suggestion is that the "core game" should start to be getting referred to as Empires Ascendant more often. I'd even change the /public/ mod folder to /empires_ascendant/. Who knows how many "official" mods WFG could release for pyrogenesis in the future and they can't all be called "public" or "core game" or whatever.  But maybe that's a change for the future if/when any other official mods are released. Wouldn't hurt to future proof it now though. @fatherbushido

 

4 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

It need a better implementation, adding a new building, a water container that increases territory and get bots of water and pop capacity/housing. so opposite to actual penalty to build farms around CC, this give a background economy to have rural base or economic base. is one of my new ideas from city builders.

Nahh. Maybe watering wells can be capturable map objects that boost health of your units by 5% or something. No need for new buildable buildings though, especially not for the purpose of building farms on farmlands, which can already be accomplished with existing structures. Except for a couple of new civ-specific special buildings (Yakhchals for Persians @LordGood), I think the Barracks-split buildings should probably be the last new buildings, unless y'all add Cult Statues or something interesting like that. 

 

 

[Lion.Kanzen]

36 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

 

 

 

Nahh. Maybe watering wells can be capturable map objects that boost health of your units by 5% or something. No need for new buildable buildings though, especially not for the purpose of building farms on farmlands, which can already be accomplished with existing structures. Except for a couple of new civ-specific special buildings (Yakhchals for Persians @LordGood), I think the Barracks-split buildings should probably be the last new buildings, unless y'all add Cult Statues or something interesting like that. 

 

 

At last i try to make conceptual with 3D asset and try because the penalty with CC and sub resource.

can be nice try to selector screen in your mod like AoM.  

[Lion.Kanzen]

43 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Haha, well, yeah. lol 

we can try placee holder by us.

[Stan`]

4 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Didn't want the list to get too long. lol. Also, didn't want the list to turn into a "Make EA into DE" thread. Sockets are definitely desired. Reducing number of stances and formations is already possible without new code. 

Honestly, the forum seems kind of dead lately, so I posted this thread to liven the place up.

Yeah hopefully the re-release is not far enough. This release put some strain on the team and I think some people are taking a step back to cool off and some others are just busy with real life.

 

Thanks

4 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Another suggestion is that the "core game" should start to be getting referred to as Empires Ascendant more often. I'd even change the /public/ mod folder to /empires_ascendant/. Who knows how many "official" mods WFG could release for pyrogenesis in the future and they can't all be called "public" or "core game" or whatever.  But maybe that's a change for the future if/when any other official mods are released. Wouldn't hurt to future proof it now though. 

I agree. The 13 civs assets should be moved to such a folder and the rest ( the code, fauna, flora) could stay in the public mod. Maybe could be part of the engine split @Itms @elexis

[elexis]

I was hoping to be able to split the public mod into two mods.

• One mod has the 0 A.D. content that would be left out if there was 500 A.D. or a mod that comes with only original content: models, textures, music tracks, maps, translations, templates, fonts; that could be called empires_ascendant for sure.
• The other mod would be pyrogenesis simulation and shader code and the GUI pages. There are only few things that are hardcoded 0ad references in gui/ and simulation/ that can just be moved to some js, json or xml file.

[Stan`]

15 minutes ago, elexis said:

I was hoping to be able to split the public mod into two mods.

• One mod has the 0 A.D. content that would be left out if there was 500 A.D. or a mod that comes with only original content: models, textures, music tracks, maps, translations, templates, fonts; that could be called empires_ascendant for sure.
• The other mod would be pyrogenesis simulation and shader code and the GUI pages. There are only few things that are hardcoded 0ad references in gui/ and simulation/ that can just be moved to some js, json or xml file.

Yeah. That's what I was hoping for

Modmod -> Engine stuff and gui pages and shaders.

Public -> Eyecandy art and generic art 

Empire_Ascendant -> 13 civs + their specific eyecandy.

Empire_Besieged aka Part II -> Part 2 stuff.

 

[elexis]

12 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

When you achieve victory, the camera should snap to the location of the event that triggers the victory, so that you are not confused as to what occurred. 

The confusion should already be solved by the defeat and victory reasons when that is announced. Suddenly changing the camera perspective to an entity can be unexpected, so confusing too, but is's probably still a good idea to focus, maybe optionally like we have in replay/observermode. Easy to implement for wonder victory and conquest, for relics it would have to focus a random one. Winning because everyone else was defeated could focus the crucial entity for the player who lost. For the cheat-victory and resigning however there is nothing that could be focused.

12 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

When achieving victory or achieving local superiority, your soldiers stand around and cheer. 

Didn't we have cheering at victory already at some point? If not, we should.

And what would local superiority be? We currently have invulnerable cheering for promoted units. But it's problematic and was reported to me reoccurringly to be a relevant issue that this unit draws arrows, possibly all arrows of the attacker, possibly making him lose the skirmish. Arrows could ignore invulnerable units, but it comes with the cost of code complexity, performance cost, it's a bit timeconsuming to implemen. Depending on what local superiority would be, there might be other problems arising too. For instance if it's a territory gain and 100  units in the territory cheer for 2 seconds, you might lose 200 seconds worth of workertime. Maybe it would be balanced if the units of the enemy player play an anti-cheering animation, but then what do the neutral players do? It needs considerate design. Theres a similar problem what to do if we want to play a cutscene without giving the player the disadvantage of not being able to order units.

12 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

victory in general it needs to be more exciting or dramatic

maybe a cutscene

12 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Farmlands

Might want to insert a reference for the readers. Just wanted to say that JB is a map where players are incentivized to build fields further away from the CC by having the CC be very exposed to scripted attackers, while some parts of the base can be far away from both gaia and the enemy. So the task to make farming less dumb and introduce tradeoffs for players is certainly a mapdesign task too (just like in DE).

12 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Clicking the "tech" which costs resources to phase up the city seems weird, when you could conceivably build 100 buildings in "Village" phase and have max pop and nothing happens. 

I like about the current phase model that it's a significant barrier, that it is more satisfying to have it achieved than the other technologies and that it is a tradeoff of resources whether one researches it sooner or produces more units and creates a greater city size sooner.

If nothing happens when a player built 100 houses, then it's because he didn't read the "pls research age 2 first" tooltip yet. Whether your suggestion is balanced depends on the consideration that the Cost component has a use which would be removed, the use case is that it gives the player the need to decide between different actions, whether to either train more units, or build more buildings, or send resources to an ally, or research a technology. If there won't be resource costs, the number of strategical choices are reduced.

12 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Building snapping to each other

Would be practical for houseclumps indeed. Building snapping would mean there are minimum distances between buildings unless players disabled the option or hotkey, probably not a problem.

Also would be nice if the player wouldn'T have to search that one pixel where the building can be placed, albeit not straight forward to implement.

12 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Priest Conversion ability. "Wololo."

Would be an exciting new feature. Would need lots of template changes, I think mimo added the foundation for the {civ} template things in the last alpha, not sure.

12 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Mercenary Camps and Villages like in Delenda Est. 

• Just in general, things to make the map come alive more, or make map control more interesting. Merc. Camps are a good way to do this and are easily implemented. 

It depends on what their use case should be. Should it make players rush that building or should it make them stay away from it as far as possible ; what should be the advantage if the player captures it. One empty current mercenary camp with 4 aggressive units surrounding it that don't do anything other than chasing the first one seeing it across the entire map and then giving no further gameplay interaction at all seems dull. That's what we have on one map at in 0AD currently, I didn't see Delenda Est ones yet. On other maps we have garrisoned villages or cities with reoccuring gaia attackers. In general it's something which I want to extend a lot more. It would be great to have an even more vivid and natural city than in jebel barkal.

The main problem with NPC villages is the map space, which is no problem if the mapsize and playercount is fixed, but a difficult task to solve if players expect the map to work well if it's a tiny one with 8 (or later even more) players and giant with 2 players. The additional implementation difficulty however seems worth it as the these maps, if well done, can surprise and challenge the player every time.

To make map control more interesting, it's a mapdesign problem. If the map is radially symmetrical (all places having the same chance of receiving a resource, forest, hill, lake or camp), then it's still not important to capture on specific place. So it's good to only mirror the map along at most one axis, so that the mapgeneration still provides equal chances to opposing teams while making the map asymmetrical in the other direction. Each place on the map should have an own meaning, a different reason to conquer it than the other places. (Again <insert JB advertizement> here.)

Also each map can have an entirely different gameplay than "here is the same base you get every single match, kill the enemy, bye". By definition if maps aren't unique, they are repetitive and to some degree characterless. It's why on one of our maps the waterlevel is rising, on the other hungry polar wolves are out for you. After considering all of that, were still missing multiple narrator voices .

[elexis]

42 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Mod -> Eyecandy art and generic art  

I wasn't sure with how many mods we could get away. On the one hand people have to become convinced that it's a good idea to split in the proposed way, on the other hand every additional mod that needs to be launched by the player in the correct order can make it harder and more error prone for them to get the mod setup right. (With some additional mod inheritance features that may or may not be improved.)

The most important line to be drawn is separating 0ad content from more generic engine code. The remaining parts seem more intertwined, need to check all directories, possibly files once.

[Stan`]

Putting stuff in mod could work too. I just wanted a clear separation between engine and optional stuff. You can live without having terrain textures and trees. Harder to live without the code. Worth noting that modmod is not packaged in the windows alpha 23 release (as in not zipped) that would have to be fixed. We shouldn't also include the test folders.

 

4 minutes ago, elexis said:

I wasn't sure with how many mods we could get away. On the one hand people have to become convinced that it's a good idea to split in the proposed way, on the other hand every additional mod that needs to be launched by the player in the correct order can make it harder and more error prone for them to get the mod setup right. (With some additional mod inheritance features that may or may not be improved.)

The most important line to be drawn is separating 0ad content from more generic engine code. The remaining parts seem more intertwined, need to check all directories, possibly files once.

 

[Nescio]

1 hour ago, elexis said:

I was hoping to be able to split the public mod into two mods.

• One mod has the 0 A.D. content that would be left out if there was 500 A.D. or a mod that comes with only original content: models, textures, music tracks, maps, translations, templates, fonts; that could be called empires_ascendant for sure.
• The other mod would be pyrogenesis simulation and shader code and the GUI pages. There are only few things that are hardcoded 0ad references in gui/ and simulation/ that can just be moved to some js, json or xml file.

Yes, separating the engine from the content certainly makes sense. I never dared to propose it myself, though :)

1 hour ago, stanislas69 said:

Yeah. That's what I was hoping for

Modmod -> Engine stuff and gui pages and shaders.

Public -> Eyecandy art and generic art 

Empire_Ascendant -> 13 civs + their specific eyecandy.

Empire_Besieged aka Part II -> Part 2 stuff.

 

Where would you put maps? They include both gaia and civ objects. And the AI? It requires both classes and hard-coded templates. On the other hand, you might want to avoid duplication.

[Stan`]

13 minutes ago, Nescio said:

Yes, separating the engine from the content certainly makes sense. I never dared to propose it myself, though

Where would you put maps? They include both gaia and civ objects. And the AI? It requires both classes and hard-coded templates. On the other hand, you might want to avoid duplication.

Correct I guess that's why we have mod dependencies ?

[Nescio]

2 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

Correct I guess that's why we have mod dependencies ?

Yes, we do, I'm aware of that. Suppose we would have the following mod structure tree:

modmod
+ pyrogenesis/engine
++ public/gaia/shared stuff
+++ EA (500-1 BC)
+++ EB (1-500 AD)

I'd imagine both EA and EB would want to use the same maps and AI, as would other unrelated mods (e.g. Hyrule Conquest) therefore it would make sense to put those in the new public mod. However, AI and maps also have civ-specific content, therefore the game would still require EA or EB or crash otherwise.

A separation might be wise long term, but will be an enormous and troublesome task short term without immediate benefit.

Edited June 29, 2018 by Nescio
ce

[Guest]

Some of the points highlighted on the above list probably deserve tickets IMO. But who am I to judge which ones.

[Stan`]

2 hours ago, Nescio said:

Yes, we do, I'm aware of that. Suppose we would have the following mod structure tree:

modmod
+ pyrogenesis/engine
++ public/gaia/shared stuff
+++ EA (500-1 BC)
+++ EB (1-500 AD)

I'd imagine both EA and EB would want to use the same maps and AI, as would other unrelated mods (e.g. Hyrule Conquest) therefore it would make sense to put those in the new public mod. However, AI and maps also have civ-specific content, therefore the game would still require EA or EB or crash otherwise.

A separation might be wise long term, but will be an enormous and troublesome task short term without immediate benefit.

Splitting means making sure we don't have hardcodings. 

Scenarios should be in the mods they depend on.

AI should not depend on mods. And is part of the engine.

[Nescio]

59 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

AI [...] is part of the engine.

Is it?

[Stan`]

Well yeah. If simulation scripts are engine so is AI if the AI was cpp the question wouldn't be asked

[Nescio]

Interesting. The game can run unproblematically without AIs (it would be a bit boring in single player, though) and people can use other AIs than Petra (if someone would create them), therefore I assumed the AI would count as content (as it is in other games).

[aeonios]

Animal fattening could easily be done in a mod. It would require a bit of work and a few sanity checks, but still totally doable.

[Stan`]

15 minutes ago, Nescio said:

Interesting. The game can run unproblematically without AIs (it would be a bit boring in single player, though) and people can use other AIs than Petra (if someone would create them), therefore I assumed the AI would count as content (as it is in other games).

Well I can see some people wanting to rewrite an AI from scratch but in general you'll probably just want to tweak a few files instead of rewriting the whole thing