Will be featuring Delenda Est on my Youtube Channel

[mysticjim]

Hopefully will be doing a feature on Delenda Est fairly soon, huge kudos to @wowgetoffyourcellphone and anyone else involved in the making of this epic piece of work.

Have only just installed it and messed around with it yesterday. I knew from the write up on mod.io that is wasn't your average 0AD mod, but I honestly had no idea just how much scope had been added to the game. I was initially thinking I could knock together a short vid about in very quickly, but the deeper I've dug into the changes and added features, the more it's become evident that that wouldn't really do it justice, so it's going to take me a little longer to cover it properly. 

I'd love to get a little more insight into the story of how this mod came about, if you get chance, I have some questions about it, if you have a few minutes to indulge me? 

_What was the initial thinking and concept behind the project?

_How many people have worked on the development of this mod and who does what? 

_How did the creation of the fourth phase come about, 

_Whats the biggest difference in the playing experience from vanilla 0AD and Delenda Est? My initial thoughts are that the average game would probably be quite a bit longer and much more tactical

_Are there any features from Delenda Est likely to make their way into Alpha 24? 

_What will become of of it when Alpha 24 finally arrives? Will it you be able to adapt it to the new version to keep it alive?

_Finally - flaming pigs? What on Earth? We they really a thing? 

Many thanks in advance. Any insight you offer will be terrifically helpful in me framing the narrative of the video. 

Congrats and kudos again on this 0AD shaped monster of a mod that you have so skillfully created.  

Jim

[badosu]

Nice to see DE getting some long-deserved love.

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

Quote

Historical accounts of incendiary pigs or flaming pigs were recorded by the military writer Polyaenus^[10] and by Aelian.^[11] Both writers reported that Antigonus II Gonatas' siege of Megara in 266 BC was broken when the Megarians doused some pigs with combustible pitch, crude oil or resin, set them alight, and drove them towards the enemy's massed war elephants. The elephants bolted in terror from the flaming, squealing pigs, often killing great numbers of their own soldiers by trampling them to death.^[12][13] According to an account, Gonatas later made his mahouts keep a swine among elephants to accustom the animals to pigs and this practice was immortalized by a Roman bronze coin dating back to his time, which showed an elephant on one side and a pig on the other.

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

6 hours ago, mysticjim said:

_What was the initial thinking and concept behind the project?

I felt that the meta of 0 a.d. could be improved and I wanted to do it on my own accelerated timeline rather than join the team directly and have to compromise the vision. Empires Ascendant is a good game, but I wanted to make it better by pushing the engine and seeing what I could do.

 

6 hours ago, mysticjim said:

_How many people have worked on the development of this mod and who does what?

Honestly, it's almost exclusively a personal passion project. But I have enlisted the help of many others when I've found my own limited talents lacking! Models, textures, and coding help from a few names you may recognize: @Stan` @wackyserious @Freagarach @Alexandermb @Enrique and anyone who's worked on Terra Magna and Millennium AD, as DE borrows some artwork from those mods.

 

6 hours ago, mysticjim said:

_How did the creation of the fourth phase come about,

It came about as a way to make Wonders more integral to the game and to add more progression to a match.

 

6 hours ago, mysticjim said:

_Whats the biggest difference in the playing experience from vanilla 0AD and Delenda Est? My initial thoughts are that the average game would probably be quite a bit longer and much more tactical

Gameplay wise the goal was to make the game both more tactical and more strategic. With the addition of mercenary camps and better map design, map control becomes more strategic, while the implementation of hard unit counters and other combat tweaks and changes makes the game more tactical.

 

6 hours ago, mysticjim said:

_Are there any features from Delenda Est likely to make their way into Alpha 24? 

Probably not. The development of Empires Ascendant just isn't heading in that kind of direction as far as gameplay changes or improvements. The emphasis over the past years has been on balancing what is already there rather than implementing any interesting features.

 

6 hours ago, mysticjim said:

_What will become of of it when Alpha 24 finally arrives? Will it you be able to adapt it to the new version to keep it alive?

The current development version of the mod is fully compatible with the development version of 0 a.d., so that with a couple weeks if A24's launch the A24 version of Delenda Est will drop.

The development version of DE is here:

https://github.com/JustusAvramenko/delenda_est

 

6 hours ago, mysticjim said:

_Finally - flaming pigs? What on Earth? We they really a thing? 

A fun little feature that probably wouldn't be used much, but when it is should provide amusement to all the players. Lol

 

 

[mysticjim]

Thanks @wowgetoffyourcellphone - that's a huge insight  

Out of interest, presumably the mod is built purely upon the base code of the game - does that mean it suffers from the same bugs that the vanilla game has, most notably the pathfinding bottleneck problem and the resulting lag with high numbers of units? 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

13 hours ago, mysticjim said:

Out of interest, presumably the mod is built purely upon the base code of the game - does that mean it suffers from the same bugs that the vanilla game has, most notably the pathfinding bottleneck problem and the resulting lag with high numbers of units? 

DE does a couple things to try to mitigate some of the game's problems. For instance trees do not block construction and do not block pathfinding. There might be a small performance improvement from that (I haven't benchmarked it, if someone would like to). But for the most part the mod will have the same performance issues that the base game has.

[mysticjim]

Nice, thanks again. One last thing - by any chance do you have any interesting replays of DE games - either 1v1 or small multiplayer team games? I'd be intrigued to know if it works as a spectator sport in a similar way to the vanilla game. May even do a commentary over some if they are engaging. 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

59 minutes ago, mysticjim said:

Nice, thanks again. One last thing - by any chance do you have any interesting replays of DE games - either 1v1 or small multiplayer team games? I'd be intrigued to know if it works as a spectator sport in a similar way to the vanilla game. May even do a commentary over some if they are engaging. 

I haven't tried playing it much via multiplayer yet. Others have though, so maybe someone can send you some replays. I'm focusing a lot lately on getting the new Hero system completed (and keeping the mod compatible with all latest dev changes). 

[badosu]

In much anticipation

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Where dat video at @mysticjim?

[badosu]

The people have spoken @mysticjim

[mysticjim]

Hello y'all. It's going to be a little while.  Got a backlog of games to do commentary on and tutorial to finish. But I've pretty much written the whole script.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]