===[COMMITTED]=== Siege Artillery Rework

[Alexandermb]

7 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

Muy bien @Alexandermb lo unico que me incomoda es ese traje con capa.

Ese es el que trae el blendfile, y la capa bueno, por si de casualidad alguna vez implementamos garrisoning en las artillerias haciendo que cualquier unidad de infanteria pueda operarla, si esta unidad usara una capa se veria horrible si no la animara.

[Alexandermb]

For some reason the FPS didn't go above 26 fps on blender sometimes 20 and i doubt it is my pc, thought i have to check. With the light lithobolos didn't had this issue.

[Lion.Kanzen]

35 minutes ago, Alexandermb said:

Ese es el que trae el blendfile, y la capa bueno, por si de casualidad alguna vez implementamos garrisoning en las artillerias haciendo que cualquier unidad de infanteria pueda operarla, si esta unidad usara una capa se veria horrible si no la animara.

entiendo, sigue usando armadura lorica musculata. se que lo haces sin importar la apariencia , pero debo explicarles eso en facebook.

[Alexandermb]

@borg- I tag you here so you read my proposal at the first post talking about a new artillery gameplay. I wonder if its reasonable what i have proposed and if its possible make huge ballista/lithobolos being build on battlefield instead of carrying it on a chariot.

Gameplay speaking i need to split artillery in different clases.

Boltshooter: Scorpion, Polybolos, Oxybeles. Good for killing infantry, this artillery should be able to be killed with arrows and slings and shouldn't be capturable, so you should use them for skirmishes and protect them as well.

Stonethrower: Sling ammunation medium lithobolos/ballista. This should work well for fast siege deploy and ambushes with a decent range (Range should be about the same of a tower). Should also be killed by arrows and slings but this time allow to be captured.

Heavy Stonethrower: Huge Rock thrower specially for siege towns from the distance. If its accepted that should be built on the battlefield whitout rotation i would do some meshes of the ballista being built. However this should require about half time of a Fortress. Why that? Well, you build a fortress with a full manpower and resources. If you are building a siege weapon on a battlefield that means time isn't your friend here being enemies able to see you will give them the chance to send the cavalry and destroy your ballista before its finished. The range of this one should be more than a tower. But this will have a decent amount of min range to give a chance of infantry and cavalry to destroy it before getting hited if they get closer. 

Stat speaking:

I need to increase repeat time of stonethrower from 5000 to at least 7000-8000 in order to avoid visual glitches of siege artillery being shot faster.

For Heavy stonethrower since it could be a new template this one should be around 10000 being slow but buffing the range and crush damage.

Boltshooter will see if it doesn't shoot faster when i've done the first new light artillery.

[Barbarossa41]

Heavy stonethrowers look and sound awesome!

[Alexandermb]

Ready to land!

Spoiler

 

[Lion.Kanzen]

is little more beggier some of them. Roman at last.

https://www.shedblog.co.uk/2008/09/30/full-size-replica-roman-seige-catapult-for-sale/

Edited December 3, 2019 by Lion.Kanzen

[Lion.Kanzen]

Quote

The so-named carroballista was an extension of the similar manuballista technology, but its difference lied in its advantage of maneuverability. In essence, the weapon system was developed as a cart-mounted ballista, thus entailing a type of mobile field artillery. ArcheoArt has described the weapon in some details, based on the reconstruction of Michael Lewis –

The caroballista: a powerful descendent of the Roman ballistae and catapultae. This two-man example is being used at some point in the Dacian War. It shoots heavy bolts, and is an extremely powerful weapon, thanks to the wide sweep of the arms, which transmit a huge amount of stored spring-energy to the ammunition. The sinew-loaded spring frames are made of iron, and have tough leather covers to protect them from enemy fire- and the weather. The machine is mounted on a universal joint, atop a stand, and can be pointed in any direction. To shoot, one man turns the windlass to draw back the slider and rope, while his crew-mate holds it steady, and places a bolt on the slider; he then holds the tiller and aims, while the first pulls the trigger-bar. The whole weapon is light enough for its two-man crew to move it around and load it onto a cart when the division has to move; in this way, it is the equivalent of a WW2 Bren-gun.

Spoiler

 

Edited December 3, 2019 by Lion.Kanzen

[borg-]

I like the possibility of building a heavy artillery on the battlefield.

For work, it needs to have a very high attack as it would be extremely vulnerable cuz cant move (right?).

I really like the idea of Boltshooter/Stonethrower vulnerable to ranged damage, but it has a big effect on current balance. For this to work in my opinion, the patch/unpatch needs to work properly, and increased effectiveness against troops. 

[Alexandermb]

2 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

is little more beggier some of them. Roman at last.

https://www.shedblog.co.uk/2008/09/30/full-size-replica-roman-seige-catapult-for-sale/

1 Step ahead of references:

Spoiler

 

10 minutes ago, borg- said:

I like the possibility of building a heavy artillery on the battlefield.

For work, it needs to have a very high attack as it would be extremely vulnerable cuz cant move (right?).

I really like the idea of Boltshooter/Stonethrower vulnerable to ranged damage, but it has a big effect on current balance. For this to work in my opinion, the patch/unpatch needs to work properly, and increased effectiveness against troops. 

Yep, thats the plan, high attack output while removing the ability to move (i wonder if its possible to make it unable to rotate also).

Yes also, it could have a bonus agaisn't infantry, being this weak agaisn't cavalry and ranged attacks.

Boltshooter should be faster pierceing projectile while stonethrower regular speed sling stone projectile.

For other cilizations like gauls and mauryans capturing this siege weapons i wish there was a feature that make the captured entities decay at time, in this case for weapons means that the gauls would learn how to use it but not build them, but not using it properly neither giving proper maintenance it will end consequently damaged over time and lastly decaying to death.

 

 

[Lion.Kanzen]

Mauryas have some stone throwers.

[Alexandermb]

Progress update on roman ballista:

Spoiler

 

[Alexandermb]

Another one ready:

Spoiler

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Hmm. "Real size" here is overkill and will likely be detrimental to gameplay, not to mention look super weird next to buildings and ships. It's cool af of course, but do you intend to make Wonders real size? Trees? Ships? Cliffs? Mountains? How about army sizes? 300 pop after all. 

[Barbarossa41]

Real sized siege may be good as campaign "bosses" (cf. Bad Neighbor from AOE2)

[Alexandermb]

7 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Hmm. "Real size" here is overkill and will likely be detrimental to gameplay, not to mention look super weird next to buildings and ships. It's cool af of course, but do you intend to make Wonders real size? Trees? Ships? Cliffs? Mountains? How about army sizes? 300 pop after all. 

Doing it whitout "real size" its a problem at least to me when animating, not only with artillery but in any other case, using other measure likely lead to bugs and problems when animating/meshing at some point ending on a week of blender looking a wait to fit the size issue with infantry.

Animals, Trees, Weapons, Helmets, and anything that is used or affected by the human scale mesh on game should have real size either it will end looking cartoony and breaking historical accuracy.

Gameplay related size only matter on ships if we ever had ship boarding but thats far from being possible i belive, if that happens then we can scale up all structures and ships if we ever have navmesh. 

And its only in this case Height for roman ballista. Lithobolos does have around 1,5 or 2 footprint more however i haven't touched that yet.

Imagine having a WW2 Tank being smaller, it would end looking very ridiculous and people will make fun of it.

Structures somehowe already have a decent size, not to mention that it was wrong at first place when the game was done not the scale of the buildings but the Scale of all living entities being too big for the world size.

Because if i do a RPG Size Scale infantry on a RTS map i will need a RPG Scale size with RPG level of Detail.

And yep, the point was doing it huge not comparing to buildings because its already useless to compare sizes since we already know buildings aren't real size scale.

The main idea is to introduce what i've proposed in gameplay splitting artillery into Small boltshooters, Medium Stonthrowers, Huge Stonethrowers. If its okay either this ballista is replacing the actual one, or another one im planning to do after polibolos with medium size for med artillery.

My mystake in many cases was to "Follow" what it is ingame, following what it was already done lead many times to mistakes and weeks of struggling on blender trying to achieve the "Detail" or artistic work ever done on 0.A.D. 

At least to me that lead me many times to mistakes and time wasted. I accept that i can't work with "fake measures", i can do adjusments to match gameplay but sometimes i can't go farther than this because every artist have his own way to work.

[Alexandermb]

In other talk, from the beginning i've always considered siege artillery excluding ram a joke, not visually speaking, because that haven't been updated since the beginning of the game i assume (excluding roman ballista) but size.

A polybolos, scorpion and oxybeles having around the same size of a Lithobolos, but the lithobolos does by far more damage? Thats a joke. That lithobolos scale only can throw a sling rock.

Small artillery have a good size, but Roman/Carthage Ballista and lithobolos are a joke.

[Lion.Kanzen]

The ship scale bothers me a lot... Some ships can be used in rivers others can be some kind/near to the real scale

[Alexandermb]

9 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

The ship scale bothers me a lot... Some ships can be used in rivers others can be some kind/near to the real scale

Ship Scale is already an issue, at some point if gameplay performance isn't that bad with huge maps naval battles with ships should be real scale, but im not the one to decide that.

Neither we have the performance available for have the amount of sea we need.

Just throw out of the board that AoE scale gameplay stuff, thats already wasted and disgusting at this point of 3D worlds. I can't enjoy a game like AoE Online not because of the cartoon look but the size of a Ship or an artillery having the same size of a cavalry.

We already have AoE 2 DE and in the way an AoE 4 with walls with the size of an elephant why we need to sell the same product but cheaper?. Every company/indie group should have their own artistic vision and gameplay.

That era of fake scale stuff has ended a long time ago with the death of first RTS's.

Spoiler

 

[Alexandermb]

Progress update: Polybolos.

Spoiler

i've already figured out how it works so i will make it shot faster whitout introducing bolt.

[Lion.Kanzen]

11 minutes ago, Alexandermb said:

Progress update: Polybolos.

  Hide contents

i've already figured out how it works so i will make it shot faster whitout introducing bolt.

Similar to chinese Chu ku nu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow

Edited December 4, 2019 by Lion.Kanzen

[Alexandermb]

9 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

Similar to chinese Chu ku nu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow

Only on magazine, the trigger is different. It took me a while to figure it out because every single reference only says:

"Here, this is the polybolos"

-But how does it work? "

Here, this is the polybolos"

[LordGood]

There is no ‘trigger mechanism’ on the polybolos; it is set to automatically loose the string at full draw, likely hurting accuracy but definitely increasing the frequency of shots, which is sort of the polybolos’ thingg 

[Nescio]

Vitruvius book X is on various machines; scorpions etc are discussed from chapter 10 onwards; see:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Vitr.+10&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0072

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0073%3Abook%3D10

For what's it worth, Wikipedia has a table of for various calibres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_siege_engine#Measurements

Also note that while in 0 A.D. there is just one class (“Siege”), historically artillery and siegecraft were separate subjects.

[Stan`]

Would be nice to have capturable rolling fireballs you could throw on your enemies.