[Request] more realistic walls

[Nescio]

Currently 0 A.D.'s city walls are a bit simplistic: they are symmetrical (the inside mirrors the outside) and the wall segments run from the centre of one wall tower to the centre of the next.

In reality, city walls typically wouldn't have battlements on the inside and wall towers/bastions would be on the outside. Also, the latter would usually be massive up to the parapat level of the wall segments and wouldn't have doors at the bottom or stairs inside (contrary to border forts (0 A.D.'s fortresses) or outposts (0 A.D.'s towers), which are hollow on the inside).

Spoiler

Diagrams of Greek city walls (E. W. Marsden Greek and Roman artillery : Historical Developments (Oxford 1969)):

 

Walls of Constantinople (İstanbul, Turkey):

 

Roman walls of Ávila, Spain:

 

Being able to build city walls with a clear city-side and country-side in 0 A.D. would be a nice improvement. @LordGood, @Stan`.

Edited December 15, 2019 by Nescio

[LordGood]

There is no way currently to build walls with a clear facing side other than building them in a clockwise fashion, given the fast paced nature of most games this will most likely not be considered and end up making common visuals worse.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

There was a proposal a while ago to make walls be a matter of making a circuit around a selected Civic Centre with the press of a button.  This would make the walls be able to get away with being directional without the aforementioned problem.  Obviously this restricts the player's ability to use walls compared to Age of Empires and was probably scrapped for that reason.  That's not to say that someone couldn't mod that sort of thing into the game though...

[Nescio]

It turns out that the Byzantines in Millennium A.D. have four sets of wall segments, default two-sided high walls, realistic one-sided high walls, extra two-sided low walls, and realistic one-sided low walls. After making the realistic walls the default, I discovered the wall placement map script works the other way around:

[Stan`]

Or the walls are not in the correct rotation

[Silier]

7 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Or the walls are not in the correct rotation

Hotkey would do the magic +180 degree. Not sure how hard it is to do it correctly.
Although remake all walls would be long process for art team, but this would be kind of features, that does not require art beforehand.

[Nescio]

To be clear, this is just the Fortress random map. I didn't build anything myself.

I merely wanted to show that realistic walls could look great in game, but then it turned out the script placed them in the opposite direction, which still looks good, though not as intended.

Anyway, it turns out it could easily be solved by inserting

  <WallPiece>
    <Orientation>2</Orientation>
  </WallPiece>

or 0, or 4, or any other multiple of 2, into the `byza_wall_long.xml` template:

Which makes me wonder why specifically 1 (i.e. π rad = 180°) is chosen as the default value. (@s0600204?)

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

On 12/15/2019 at 10:51 AM, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

There was a proposal a while ago to make walls be a matter of making a circuit around a selected Civic Centre with the press of a button.  This would make the walls be able to get away with being directional without the aforementioned problem.  Obviously this restricts the player's ability to use walls compared to Age of Empires and was probably scrapped for that reason.  That's not to say that someone couldn't mod that sort of thing into the game though...

The idea I think was to make the circuit of walls more important. Players could still "draw" out wall segments like they do now, but the pre-designed wall curtain would be almost wonder-like in cost and construction.