Borg Expansion Pack Mod Release V 1.0.5

[StopKillingMe]

You're the guy trying to tell me I'm not playing this game, so anything else you say at this point is moot.  I know what I am doing, and your attempt to tell me that what I am doing isn't valid pretty much sums you up.  I'm gonna keep playing 0ad in the game lobby and stay away from this toxic place, it's clear that all you guys want to do here is start flame wars.  The level of ego here is truly astonishing.  Everything becomes a juvenile slinging match.  It's an embarrassment.

I honestly have no idea what some of you are on about - I installed the current version, and have been having fun playing the game in the Game Lobby - there isn't anything glaringly wrong with the game, Celts need to be nerfed a little bit, but that's it.  Installing a mod means you can't get an MP game - so for obvious reasons I'm not gonna do that.  Nerfing the Celts would be easy, but what I see here is a bunch of people with massive ego issues and their own agendas around what they think the game should become, too selfish and stubborn to just deal with what we have.  Delusions of grandeur...looks to me like a good many of you just don't understand what open source means.

What I find extremely ironic is that I see borg playing vanilla all the time, and it is undeniable that in the Game Lobby is where the action is for 0ad - so all these dissertations on what is wrong with the game and how some mod needs to become the defacto standard and blah blah blah are just pie in the sky ideals with no actual substance behind them.  The whole thing is just laughable to me, I'm just gonna start hosting Rated Death Matches in the Game Lobby and leave this bizarre ego chamber for good...SMH.

Edited June 7, 2019 by StopKillingMe

[borg-]

1 hour ago, DarcReaver said:

Women can be spammed massively, that's why they are not allowed to build all types of buildings. To reduce the snowballing effect of multiple worker units when someone reduced build times of units in some alpha years ago.
This issue can be reduced by making gatherers more efficient but less spammy (i.e. doubling the training time) and put hard caps on gathering spots (one of many options).

You can ofc do that, still doesn't really fix the old issue that military units doubling as resource gatherers is an issue. It has down sides in controls (if you use them to attack the enemy you need to micro a lot to get them back on track again). Also as soon as your military quits to march to the enemy you immediately start loosing resources.

Just a quick math example about my point: You have 10 soldiers, each gathering 10 metal every 10 seconds.

Enemy base is 60s away and also has 10 soldiers.

If you march your soldiers over to the enemy you loose 6x10 = 60 metal just for walking over to the enemy. While your enemy mines 60 metal. This leads to a 120 metal difference between attacker and defender.

That means three things:

1) you need to make infantry/units move quick around hte battlefield to keep the resource loss low, and you need to outmicro your opponent because he potentially has more resources for defending - which gets larger for every second the enemy is not forced to fight with all his soldiers. I.e. 30 seconds of not loosing a unit means another 30 metal difference difference that can be used to make defensive units.
2) the attacker puts a lot of risk into his rush because he needs to disrupt the enemy eco while the enemy is already ahead - and this is not by choice but by design, that's why it's an issue and there are only very few games that mix military and economic units.
3) to lower the negative effect of this you can make soldier gather rates low, to reduce the amount of resources lost when launching attacks (which is why most soldiers do not gather super fast). This makes economy snow balling harder. It's like having an exponential mathematic function. Id you take following assumption: 1) each soldier gives you a 10% bonus to your resource income (fast gathering rates) and 2) each soldier only gives a 3% bonus (slower gathering rates)

10% bonus stacking means: 10x1.1 = 1.1, 10x1.1^15 = 15 additional workers mean 41 times more res/minute.
if you apply only 3% you need 10 x 1.03^48 = 48 workers instead to get 41 times more res/minute.

It's a bit abstract but I hope you  get my point. Right now these effects are not showing all the time because the individual gathering rates of all units are relatively slow, and you need a lot of workers anyways. If you switch those stats you'll get lots of issues though.

In 0ad currently each military AND economy unit gives you a low bonus, and over the course of the game you get an exponential curve at some point if you spam enough soldiers. This can't be wiped unless you rework the way the economy works though.

 

Women's spam is not a viable strategy at the current meta. Even though they can build all buldings, it does not work, for two reasons. Women train faster and are cheaper, but ineffective in collecting metal and stone. Also a simple rush with 15 soldiers is enough for you to lose the game, or at least take away all the initial economic "advantage" that women provide. You do not see spam from women being used even by lower ranked players.

About boom to compensate more than early attacks, really is true and I would like to go deeper into this issue. We had some ideas like lowering the collection rate, or giving a trickle xp to units in enemy territory. I would like more ideas about this.

 

[nani]

Chester is a master at women booming.

[theotherhiveking]

2 hours ago, borg- said:

About boom to compensate more than early attacks, really is true and I would like to go deeper into this issue. We had some ideas like lowering the collection rate, or giving a trickle xp to units in enemy territory. I would like more ideas about this.

 

Maybe extra loot for killing units in enemy territory?

[Lion.Kanzen]

I still feel op cavalry but, you are working with hard counters?

[Stan`]

In svn it is now possible to add techs to modify counter bonuses. I commandeered D1707 so soon the tooltips will be generated automatically

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

4 minutes ago, Stan` said:

In svn it is now possible to add techs to modify counter bonuses. I commandeered D1707 so soon the tooltips will be generated automatically

Hmm. There are a couple of complications to the new D1782 commit. Namely the fact that you have to modify an existing bonus, you can't add a new bonus. To get around this, I was going to give the unit an initial 1x bonus and now I can modify that with a tech. Perhaps your tooltips can ignore 1x bonuses.

[wraitii]

1 minute ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Hmm. There are a couple of complications to the new D1782 commit. Namely the fact that you have to modify an existing bonus, you can't add a new bonus. To get around this, I was going to give the unit an initial 1x bonus and now I can modify that with a tech. Perhaps your tooltips can ignore 1x bonuses.

Indeed, I think we ought to lift that limitation but it sounds harder to do (also D270 is kinda related).

[DarcReaver]

7 hours ago, borg- said:

Women's spam is not a viable strategy at the current meta. Even though they can build all buldings, it does not work, for two reasons. Women train faster and are cheaper, but ineffective in collecting metal and stone. Also a simple rush with 15 soldiers is enough for you to lose the game, or at least take away all the initial economic "advantage" that women provide. You do not see spam from women being used even by lower ranked players.

About boom to compensate more than early attacks, really is true and I would like to go deeper into this issue. We had some ideas like lowering the collection rate, or giving a trickle xp to units in enemy territory. I would like more ideas about this.

 

I didn't say that someone should spam women at the start of the match - I said it's POSSIBLE to spam/boom women in general. The game gives enough incentions to do it, along with houses being able to train women for some factions. This isn't really meant to be an earlygame problem but a lategame problem. 

After a certain point you reach a critical mass of workers and start gathering so many resources that only pop cap/amount of barracks for training units start to become an issue. Sort of the "AoE lategame effect" - and in 0 ad it used to be even worse with training women from multiple houses along with Town Halls.

The "build women in houses" tech allows to multiply your economic force after a certain point to absurd gathering rates (unless I'm mistaken and it was removed in the last alpha). 

By artificially slowing gathering rates you only accomplish a slower game start and delay this point-of-no-return to be a couple minutes later in the game. But this is a design choice anyways. If people are free to spam as many workers for their economy without outer limits you always get to this point - which can be fine if it's intended to be that way. It has advantages but also drawbacks.

Another option is to cap workers by having a hard cap on resource spots.

Without hard caps on resource spots means that your only limitation for economic growth are your own resources and pop cap (to train workers). Each individual unit then serves as a small multiplier of your economic force. And the economic growth rate is (gather rate) x (gather multiplier)^(number of workers).
With hard caps means to limit economic growth along with map control. If someone only has 1 metal mine (or other resource) in his reach he can only get a maximum of / metal/minute. While with 2 mines he can have 2 x Z metal/minute, for 3 mines 3 x Z metal/minute and so on. Same for other resources. 

Version 2 creates a maximum number of "useful" workers - because after a certain point additional workers will not give the player more economy but only block pop cap instead. This way you limit the effect of loosing resources during attacks, because after some point a player will have soldiers that cannot serve as gatherers anymore because there are no free resource spots left. At this point the player can attack and defend freely without risking to loose resources from walking around.

AoE does a mix of Version 1 and 2 with their food production from farms, while other resources are not limited. 
Empire Earth, Wc3 and Star Craft also use version 2. You can have up to 24 workers on minerals (5 per goldmine in wc3) and after that point each additional worker will not increase your resource income anymore. Unless you expand and take different resource spots on the map.

Edited June 7, 2019 by DarcReaver

[Lion.Kanzen]

18 minutes ago, DarcReaver said:

With hard caps means to limit economic growth along with map control. If someone only has 1 metal mine (or other resource) in his reach he can only get a maximum of / metal/minute.

there not another way?  I play to matches today with borg's mod, the first  match was a  disaster because my ai allied in a  2 vs 1 (I take  my time to understand the mechanic, so the ally take some military responsibilities) but still a spam of units. I can do same as ai, but that way is boring using stables and 4 barracks to spam. I don't like spam of units. I use Turtle tactics, but the core gameplay fail, isn't possible because you need protect each building, capturing is easy ...but is a boring mechanic , a waste one. houses are the problem and capture rate. (because the spam of units.)

[Stan`]

3 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Hmm. There are a couple of complications to the new D1782 commit. Namely the fact that you have to modify an existing bonus, you can't add a new bonus. To get around this, I was going to give the unit an initial 1x bonus and now I can modify that with a tech. Perhaps your tooltips can ignore 1x bonuses.

It now ignores 1x bonuses https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1707

[av93]

Calm down everybody, and back to the specific topic: try to do this in the game, lay a foundation of barracks, and select women to build it. Right now women can build everything, they just cannot lay the foundations. You know that?

So this change is actually trivial.

Edited June 7, 2019 by av93

[Guest]

RTS games always does such a poor job simulating population.

1. Ridiculous exponential growth

2. Economy and population count feedback loop. This is hardly realistic.

3. There is a time constant in reality.

Some of those points are a subset of one another. But if those 3 are neglected, you can kill half a civ’s army and face an even larger one a minute later. In reality, leaders were more prudent with lives. (Not entirely out of good will).

I guess it’s a tough problem to solve considering none of the classic rts games ever managed to do so.

Rise of Nations attempted something using variable unit costs. But even that can’t keep up with the eco.

The problem is magnified so much because of citizen soldiers.

Edited June 7, 2019 by Guest

[Servo]

People don’t like caps idk why. There is a limit on things. Without capping things the strategic essence is lost and spam effect makes the game more ugly. 

In RoN the variation in caps make you adapt to what could possibly be the best strategy or route that could put the player ahead if his guess is right. Every little numbers count in the beginning of the game until you reach Age 3. The unit costs increase every after another makes the player to think more as to what effects these could have in the other areas. The game is so balanced that all pro players take a random civilization in every game and in all rated games. 

AoE alike, 0ad is not going to become great by going the same route imo. Just imagine 200 units in 15 minutes or even less to others. This is what you call a spamming game, nothing strategic. The faster and accurate clicker you are you can be a pro sooner. 

[Guest]

Rise of Nations does a great job until the end. When the 2 crazy expensive techs come into play. It all goes downhill from there.

[borg-]

In my view, spam happens only for the reason that the same fighting units also collect resources. But going against it would be a disaster for the current design. In the moment that soldiers only fight, then it would be possible to work in a much more dynamic economy.

there are variety of units is also greatly affected. You can not have an initial dunit being weaker, but costing 60% of the value because it would trigger dishonest spam, eco boom.

Edited June 7, 2019 by borg-

[Guest]

Quote

Sometimes a lot of standbyes of the genre seem to hurt gameplay I think. eg unit veterancy only makes it a slippery slope for whoever comes out on top of an engagement

A quote from a reddit discussion about RTS game theory. Back in 2011.

Edited June 7, 2019 by Guest

[Sundiata]

I actually like the unit veterancy in 0AD. It's one of the few good incentives to keep your troopers alive in my opinion (too many people see their army as disposable/easily replaceable, which shouldn't be). I prefer a soft snowball that benefits the better player over a stalemate that turns into an hours long grind. I don't really like long battles of endurance in an RTS. I don't have any problem with long games, but I'd prefer them to evolve around strategy and tactics, and not wasted investments in upgrades and techs that don't give me any tangible advantages. People should be rewarded for keeping their army alive long enough for them to gain a credible amount of experience, and have that experience translate into kicking butt. 

[Guest]

I guess it counterbalances the population shortcomings somehow (mentioned above).

Human resource isn't infinite. If they are, why not make wood, metal etc. infinite?

20 barracks can spam out 200 units so quickly. That is the normal population cap. That kind of turnover is just ridiculous. I have personally built 25 barracks once.

Population growth should not depend on the number of training facilities. It would be nice if unit count does not depend on clicks. But rather, controlling their specialty is. Giving 2 bows to an archer would not make him shoot any faster. I have no idea how to bring such a thing into a game.

[Guest]

Regarding artificial-caps:

They are just a cheap shortcut of fixing bigger issues without much consideration. And most of the time, end up being even more frustrating and unrealistic.

[Lion.Kanzen]

11 minutes ago, (-_-) said:

Regarding artificial-caps:

They are just a cheap shortcut of fixing bigger issues without much consideration. And most of the time, end up being even more frustrating and unrealistic.

economic growth?
technological effectiveness?

[Guest]

Economic growth is directly related to technological effectiveness. RoN had an "artificial" limit there. It kinda makes sense and is somewhat similar to reality. Although, I would have preferred if it economic growth was an S-curve. It gets harder to grow the bigger it gets with new techs raising the ceiling. Not an arbitrary limit that you can reach within 5 minutes.

Edited June 7, 2019 by Guest

[Lion.Kanzen]

9 minutes ago, (-_-) said:

economic growth was an S-curve.

yes I have that feeling.

[Servo]

That’s why I like to play it up to gunpowder or the most without stealth bombers and nuclear missiles. 

[Guest]

The final science tech was op.

The final eco tech was kinda op.

Actually, all of them except missile shield was op.

 

(just saying stuff could be better is not good enough. We need to build a new design document which fixes the issues and hopefully innovate something new in the genre. Once there is a clear blueprint, building it would be way easier.)

Edited June 7, 2019 by Guest