Borg Expansion Pack Mod implementation in 0ad alpha 24 release.

[av93]

My convention would be

Spear cavalry

They represent shock cavalry, altough not all spear cavalry of all civs would fit this rol, mainly only the eastern civs.

-bonus against infantry, they should shred light infantry.

- the slowest and heavy armoured cav

Sword cavalry

A unit convention. As others have said, sword was mainly a secondary sword when riding.

- fast cavalry, can catch ranged cav, but not so armoured.

- soft counter to light infantry, bonus to other ranged cavalry. Maybe they could lose against spear cavalry one to one, but could be cost effective against them.

 

[Freagarach]

16 hours ago, borg- said:

hero after death cant be trained again

D2411

16 hours ago, borg- said:

rank celebration disabled (unit invulnerable)

D1977 By @Angen

16 hours ago, borg- said:

CC train only women

(You may use the phenotype to make them workers?)

[Stan`]

@borg- Maybe we could consider replacing the woman aura with something else if they are workers, I think it's incredibly sexist and I am ashamed each time I need to explain it.

[av93]

24 minutes ago, Stan` said:

@borg- Maybe we could consider replacing the woman aura with something else if they are workers, I think it's incredibly sexist and I am ashamed each time I need to explain it.

Also the bonus/penalties of woman and man. I'm sure that slaves were used both for both genders to mine and build, for example. From a gameplay POV, the aura is a big load to performance, @Stan`? Also is very micro intensive to place women to men clusters to make them work faster...

[Nescio]

53 minutes ago, Stan` said:

@borg- Maybe we could consider replacing the woman aura with something else if they are workers, I think it's incredibly sexist and I am ashamed each time I need to explain it.

As is the fact that women have different gather rates, a lower cost, and significantly less health.

In Greek society at least, men worked the land and women stayed at home: being pregnant, raising children, milling grain into wheat, converting flax into linen, spinning wool into thread, weaving yarn into textile etc. were all highly time-consuming tasks.

You might want to consider replacing female citizens with male workers (which would be historically justifiable) or add statistically identical male workers and let both sexes exist in equal numbers (as is done in e.g. AoK).

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

4 minutes ago, Nescio said:

You might want to consider replacing female citizens with male workers (which would be historically justifiable) or add statistically identical male workers and let both sexes exist in equal numbers (as is done in e.g. Delenda Est).

 

[Nescio]

7 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

statistically identical male workers [...] Delenda Est

Looking at https://github.com/JustusAvramenko/delenda_est/tree/master/simulation/templates it seems female citizens are capturable while males aren't and female slaves have different gather rates than their male counterparts.

[av93]

Always thought that for emulate slavism, units should have in the loot propierties a slave point value, so you can train a percentatge of killed units (if every unit killed is one point, training one slave should cost 4, so a 25% of killed units could be slaves). Now with the possibility of exclude certain resources from the trading pool, this is more viable.

But I suppose that this is a little bit offtopic

[borg-]

This is an idea I've had for some time.

We could have a male unit (slave for hellenics?) with the same status as the soldiers, but with low capacities and health as women.

My plan is for the CC only train women and men (not soldiers).

Slaves may cost 0, long training time. Other men, same training speed as women, but food cost 60.

[borg-]

7 hours ago, av93 said:

My convention would be

Spear cavalry

They represent shock cavalry, altough not all spear cavalry of all civs would fit this rol, mainly only the eastern civs.

-bonus against infantry, they should shred light infantry.

- the slowest and heavy armoured cav

Sword cavalry

A unit convention. As others have said, sword was mainly a secondary sword when riding.

- fast cavalry, can catch ranged cav, but not so armoured.

- soft counter to light infantry, bonus to other ranged cavalry. Maybe they could lose against spear cavalry one to one, but could be cost effective against them.

 

It was exactly the same as I thought.
I made the templates yesterday and some tests.

Spear cav: Good armour, low move speed, low/medium attack, medium cost, medium health, have a small bonus against other cavalry. Win fights against light cavalry, and can do good damage against light infantry, very vulnerable vs pikemen/spearmen.

Sword cav: Medium armour, fast move speed, medium/high attack, medium cost, medium health, no bonus. Naturally wins fight vs skirmishers/archers cavalry (not as effective as spear cavalry), very powerful against light infantry, vulnerable vs pikemen/spearmen.

Skirmisher cav: Low armour, very fast move speed, medium attack, low cost, low health, bonus vs support units. Lose against other cavalry but can inflict good damage in large numbers. Well positioned can cause good damage to light infantry.

Archer cav: Bassically the same status as an infantry archer.

Edited November 8, 2019 by borg-

[Stan`]

31 minutes ago, borg- said:

Slaves may cost 0, long training time. Other men, same training speed as women, but food cost 60.

Why split it when you can have both use the same button ? With the new features in A24 you can have a button train man or woman randomly.

[borg-]

5 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Why split it when you can have both use the same button ? With the new features in A24 you can have a button train man or woman randomly.

Didn't know this feature is already available.

But if they will have different resource rates I'd rather be separate. Example: if i need fast food i can focus only on women.

Would be interesting to know the opinion of players too.

Edited November 8, 2019 by borg-

[Stan`]

51 minutes ago, borg- said:

But if they will have different resource rates I'd rather be separate. Example: if i need fast food i can focus only on women.

Of course. But as long as it has a good reason Not removing one sexist thing to replace it by another

51 minutes ago, borg- said:

Didn't know this feature is already available.

 

53 minutes ago, borg- said:

Would be interesting to know the opinion of players too.

Indeed

[borg-]

About infantry:

Spearmen: medium health, low/medium attack, medium move speed, medium hack armour, high pierce armour, bonus 4x vs cavalry. Very effective against all cavalry. Great unit to protect ranged units and absorb damage from a distance. Win fight solo vs ranged infantry.

Swordmen: Medium health, medium/high attack, high move speed, medium hack/pierce amour, no bonus. Very effective against melee infantry. Win fight solo vs ranged infantry, but lost fights if enemy have spearmen, example: 30 archer + 30 spearmen win vs 30 archer + 30 swordmen. Good unit for quick attacks and flanks.

Pikemen: High health, low attack, low move speed, high hack/pierce armour, cost ADD +10food, bonus x5 vs cavalry. Very effective vs all cavalry. Slow but high damage absorption potential. Win fights against spearman and lose against swordsman.

Ranged infantry are not protagonists now. These are secondary units that should be used in combination with your infantry or cavalry. In large numbers can cause very good damage.

We can still add techs or some smart bonuses to make them more important units throughout the game, like flamming arrows for example.

Edited November 8, 2019 by borg-

[Sundiata]

1 hour ago, borg- said:

But if they will have different resource rates I'd rather be separate. Example: if i need fast food i can focus only on women.

What's the rational against a simply villager unit as the main economic unit?

I don't completely agree with giving dedicated male and female workers/villagers different stats. In some civs men did a lot of the hard work, but in other civs women worked just as hard or even harder. In most societies agriculture is a family operation, involving men, women and children. So were many other small scale economic activities (and most economic activities were small scale) as well as things like building homes. I'd caution against gender specific stats in this regard, because the stats would probably differ quite a lot across different culture groups. Some of the reasoning behind different stats might apply to Greco-Roman civs, but probably won't apply at all to others. In my opinion, plebs are plebs, and I think gender differentiation only becomes really relevant for higher social classes, politically or militarily.

I think it would also be interesting to differentiate laborers/workers/villagers (whatever you want to call it) by using a more slender body type, perhaps even a teeny weeny little bit shorter than soldiers/warriors, and use different walk animations, with a slightly hunched over look, face looking down, instead of straight or up, like the higher ups on the social ladder, who brim with confidence. The lower classes laborers/workers/villagers should have a humble look. Less meat, fish and diary, and a hard life of back breaking menial labour makes them look a little more scrawny than the average "citizen" who would have looked a little more "plump"/less hunched over. ( @Alexandermb, don't know what your thoughts on this are).     

[Sundiata]

13 minutes ago, borg- said:

Spearmen: medium health, low/medium attack, medium move speed, medium hack armour, high pierce armour, bonus 4x vs cavalry. Very effective against all cavalry. Great unit to protect ranged units and absorb damage from a distance. Win fight solo vs ranged infantry

Is it possible to reduce that bonus to 3x or 2x vs champion cavalry? Armored horses should be able to hold their own against a weak/average spear unit, I think. 

[Stan`]

5 hours ago, av93 said:

From a gameplay POV, the aura is a big load to performance, @Stan`

As I don't like to go unbacked when making some claims, here are some stats from a 2v2 AI game of 29:05 min

{"Component":"Auras","FunctionName":"RemoveTemplateAura|teambonuses/cart_player_teambonus","TotalTime":0.6760000000000446,"Count":7,"Average":0.09657,"TurnAverageCount":0.0008022922636103152}
{"Component":"Auras","FunctionName":"RemoveTemplateAura|teambonuses/sele_player_teambonus","TotalTime":0.7779999999999632,"Count":7,"Average":0.11114,"TurnAverageCount":0.0008022922636103152}
{"Component":"Auras","FunctionName":"RemoveAura|structures/temple_heal","TotalTime":23.631999999692198,"Count":62,"Average":0.38116,"TurnAverageCount":0.0071060171919770775}
{"Component":"Auras","FunctionName":"ApplyAura|structures/temple_heal","TotalTime":36.10199999980978,"Count":55,"Average":0.6564,"TurnAverageCount":0.006303724928366763}
{"Component":"Auras","FunctionName":"RemoveAura|units/female_inspiration","TotalTime":2777.575000000241,"Count":8538,"Average":0.32532,"TurnAverageCount":0.978567335243553}
{"Component":"Auras","FunctionName":"ApplyAura|units/female_inspiration","TotalTime":2930.252999999917,"Count":8599,"Average":0.34077,"TurnAverageCount":0.9855587392550142}

Time is in ms. Turn time is 200ms. So that means it's in average called 5 times per second. (To add and 5 more times to remove) So I wouldn't call à 5s (in total for that aura) delay on a 30 min game slow, but it's not fast. Also notice those are the only auras that were called. mileage may vary. Also this is A24 so Spidermonkey is a bit better and I have a pretty decent rig

OS             : Win 10
CPU            : x86, Intel Core i7-6820HQ @ 2.70GHz (1x4x2), 2.71 GHz
Memory         : 32768 MiB; 7579 MiB free
Graphics Card  : NVIDIA Quadro M620/PCIe/SSE2

 

[badosu]

2 hours ago, borg- said:

This is an idea I've had for some time.

We could have a male unit (slave for hellenics?) with the same status as the soldiers, but with low capacities and health as women.

My plan is for the CC only train women and men (not soldiers).

Slaves may cost 0, long training time. Other men, same training speed as women, but food cost 60.

Not sure if possible to implement, but maybe you can only train slaves after a certain number of enemy units are killed, this would avoid slave spam and be historically accurate as well.

With exception to spartans, which were a slaver society, perhaps they could train slaves for free at a certain limited rate as a civ bonus.

I am not sure which other civilizations had big slave populations but this could be available for Romans, Hellenic and Ptolemies.

[Stan`]

Just now, badosu said:

Not sure if possible to implement, but maybe you can only train slaves after a certain number of enemy units are killed, this would avoid slave spam and be historically accurate as well.

With exception to spartans, which were a slaver society, perhaps they could train slaves for free at a certain limited rate as a civ bonus.

I am not sure which other civilizations had big slave populations but this could be available for Romans, Hellenic and Ptolemies.

Maybe it would make more sense to actually be able to capture units in that case...

[smiley]

The whole point of the game is to allow players an alternative take on the real world. So, why are there restrictions that do not apply logically just because it was the way things were. There really is no point of differentiating the male/female citizens.

[Alexandermb]

For Slaves, maybe spawn entity on death could be spawn some slaves based on buildings such houses and civ center.

Civ center: 10-15 Male Slaves.

Houses 2-3 Female Slaves.

After being destroyed the house spawn a capturable on sight gaia entity slave.


This could be good for force early game rushes attacking houses of the enemy in order to get some early slaves and economy boom.

[badosu]

2 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Maybe it would make more sense to actually be able to capture units in that case...

I am thinking of a more practical, both in logic and micro intensive, sense. I would imagine that to be a very hard mechanic to fit in the game, especially with a mod.

[Alexandermb]

23 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

( @Alexandermb, don't know what your thoughts on this are).     

thats sounds good for a immersive perspective however we would lack some good textures for differentiate some of them.

[borg-]

1 hour ago, Sundiata said:

Is it possible to reduce that bonus to 3x or 2x vs champion cavalry? Armored horses should be able to hold their own against a weak/average spear unit, I think. 

Yes, its possible.

Naturally champion cavalry has more armor and life, so it makes it much stronger by itself.

[borg-]

1 hour ago, badosu said:

Not sure if possible to implement, but maybe you can only train slaves after a certain number of enemy units are killed, this would avoid slave spam and be historically accurate as well.

With exception to spartans, which were a slaver society, perhaps they could train slaves for free at a certain limited rate as a civ bonus.

I am not sure which other civilizations had big slave populations but this could be available for Romans, Hellenic and Ptolemies.

It is possible to put a unit limiter too. Athens/sparta can be limit of 30 for example.

Remembering that the changes should be simple now, avoid js changes, so limiter can be a good.

Edited November 8, 2019 by borg-