Why are Kushite and Carthage mercenary camps still limited?

[Alar1k]

Hello! I started playing 0ad in the early 2020 and play it mostly multiplayer when I have time to play. My main issue with the buildings from a23 and still in a24 is that mercenary camps for this 2 civs (carthage and Kushite) are still quite limited and I wonder why is that so?

For example - macedonians can train mercenaries from barracks that are not limited per game, and there is no limit for military colonies (sele and ptole) - so why do this, mercenary heavy civs, have this limit?  Macedonians can then train merc archers in smaller patches from multiple barracks, when Carthage and Kushites can make only 3 embassies per game.

All in all, what I want to point out is that it is quite hard to diversify carthagininan army than any other mercenary oriented civ, and I think that it shouldn't be like that - on the main game description page there is even a statement and I quote: "Because Carthage always relied on mercenaries to make up the bulk of their forces." (I added the itallic for bulk to emphasise) (https://play0ad.com/game-info/factions/) - Kushites do get some more options in their barracks but still there is a bit of a limit on them too.

This is also making an issue to an economic perspective since, as it was pointed it this post that new a24 mercenaries cannot gather resources  at all:

There I replied my view of fixing mercenary resource gathering issue also.

I think that mercenaries should gather resources, not necessary as good as regular units, but still, even if they could, the Carthagininas cannot make them as fast as other civs can in theory and in practise.

[borg-]

Mercenaries cannot collect resources as a way of diversifying gameplay and also more realistic historically, and particularly I don't intend to change that.
On the main point of the discussion, it is interesting, but if we remove the mercenary camps/embassy then the game becomes more equal for all civilizations, so any suggestions?

Edited February 26, 2021 by borg-

[borg-]

Maybe civilizations with great mercenary potential like carthage, can train level 2 mercenaries instead of 1 like other civilizations, it's just an idea.

[Alar1k]

Well maybe keep the embacies limited, but that one could make 2 or 3 of every embassy per game so that players can at least make units a bit more efficiently in contrast to other civilisations? To make 3 Iberian, 3 Italian and 3 Celtic embassies for example, that would really help out, and it wouldn't be like you could make 10 so it would still make sense to have them separated from barracks because I think that is a great diversifying mechanic for carthage, but maybe a little bit too nerfed a the moment

I understand the historical perspective about resource gathering, but I was thinking - if they were part of the army they sure did help out a little, like chop down some wood for camps before the battles idk - myb limit resource gathering for wood only, and make it like 0.30? I mean, mercenaries are not as strong as champions are, and both do not contribute economically, but take pop space equally.

[borg-]

9 minutes ago, Alar1k said:

Well maybe keep the embacies limited, but that one could make 2 or 3 of every embassy per game so that players can at least make units a bit more efficiently in contrast to other civilisations? To make 3 Iberian, 3 Italian and 3 Celtic embassies for example, that would really help out, and it wouldn't be like you could make 10 so it would still make sense to have them separated from barracks because I think that is a great diversifying mechanic for carthage, but maybe a little bit too nerfed a the moment

I understand the historical perspective about resource gathering, but I was thinking - if they were part of the army they sure did help out a little, like chop down some wood for camps before the battles idk - myb limit resource gathering for wood only, and make it like 0.30? I mean, mercenaries are not as strong as champions are, and both do not contribute economically, but take pop space equally.

Well kushite camps can be built in neutral territory, so I'm fine with them right now. If I am not mistaken for Carthage there is a larger embassy, not currently used in the game. We can replace the 3 embassies with the bigger one, which could train all units, and maybe increase the construction limit.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

I think that having them be trained at rank 2 would be a good option, but it still does circumvent the fact that it is difficult to mass mercenaries for Carthage.  One option that I think would be interesting would be to have it so that Carthaginian heroes could train mercenaries.  A while ago I mentioned the idea of mercenaries taking up 0 population but having a cap on how many could be trained or making them scale up in cost with the number already fielded.  Maybe a compromise can be struck regarding the 0 population idea such as making them cost 0.5 population.  That way mercenaries would still have a potential niche to fill that would differentiate them from their counterparts.

Still, I think the more relevant point that Alar1k makes is that at the moment, mercenaries are inconsistent across civilisations, something that should be at least considered.  

[borg-]

5 minutes ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

I think that having them be trained at rank 2 would be a good option, but it still does circumvent the fact that it is difficult to mass mercenaries for Carthage.  One option that I think would be interesting would be to have it so that Carthaginian heroes could train mercenaries.  A while ago I mentioned the idea of mercenaries taking up 0 population but having a cap on how many could be trained or making them scale up in cost with the number already fielded.  Maybe a compromise can be struck regarding the 0 population idea such as making them cost 0.5 population.  That way mercenaries would still have a potential niche to fill that would differentiate them from their counterparts.

Still, I think the more relevant point that Alar1k makes is that at the moment, mercenaries are inconsistent across civilisations, something that should be at least considered.  

Perhaps an adjustment in the cost of metal or some other attribute may be enough instead of being able to collect resources?

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

13 minutes ago, borg- said:

Perhaps an adjustment in the cost of metal or some other attribute may be enough instead of being able to collect resources?

Those would potentially be a fair choice, but think that it works around the key reasoning of why mercenaries were hired: the employers did not risk the lives of their citizenry.  If mercs took up less space, it could represent that fairly well.  On the other hand, if mercenaries cost less, it avoids one of the their key disadvantages.  Mercenaries were usually expensive.  The one other area I could see changing a lot would be giving them a massively reduced training time.

[Alar1k]

3 hours ago, borg- said:

Perhaps an adjustment in the cost of metal or some other attribute may be enough instead of being able to collect resources?

Hmm this seems interesting, maybe make mercenaries cost 20 more food (and/or 10 extra metal) but half the build time - so it would be fast but expensive way to boost an army near the end of p2? And then, naturally leave them without the ability to collect resources.


Also I like how Kushite camps work, they seem like a nice gameplay strategy in a24, Carthagininans are the main issue I would say

Making them start of with level 2 is not the best option because there is already a good tech that covers that issue

And also I like the Idea to combine 3 embassies into one large that would cost 200 wood, 200 stone and 200 metal or something like that (because each embassy as it is costs around 200 of wood (Celtic) or stone (Iberian) or metal (Italic), and it can then stay limited to 3  (also one unified large embassy for carthage would then make more balance with slinger/javelins  to counter the lack of archery tradition as an archer civilisation)

Edited February 26, 2021 by Alar1k

[Nescio]

Hello and welcome to the forums, @Alar1k, and thank you for drawing attention to this!

As for the question raised in the thread title, the long and short of it is that nobody has bothered removing it. As for why the embassy limit is there in the first place, I don't know, though I guess it might have been to make them more “unique”. As for whether it should stay, that's open for discussion.

Entity limits certainly do make sense for aura entities (heroes, wonders, theatres, monuments, etc.). However, I don't think they're really necessary for structures that merely produce units; barracks and stables don't have entity limits either, nor do the athen gymnasium, spart syssition, or cart super dock. I'm fine with removing the entity limit of embassies and mercenary camps; or perhaps replace it with a minimum distance, like the rome army camp has (and also centres, fortresses, towers).

Furthermore, I think the fortress and tower entity limits could be removed too; their minimum distances and costs effectively limit their numbers already.

4 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

A while ago I mentioned the idea of mercenaries taking up 0 population

The purpose of population is to limit the number of entities that move around. The more entities there are in a game, the more things have to be drawn, meaning more to render; and the more things that move, the more things that change, hence more draw calls and hence more lag.

Cossacks had an engine that could comfortably handle tens of thousands of units and didn't need nor have a population limitation.

4 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

The one other area I could see changing a lot would be giving them a massively reduced training time.

In A24 mercenaries have 30% less training time than their citizen counterparts. Basically it's 7 mercenaries or 5 citizens or 3 champions.

That said, mercenaries could certainly be further differentiated.

 

[EDIT] I'm also in favour of replacing the cart embassies with mercenary camps (cf. kush) and of introducing mercenary camps for the Greeks.

In the long run having certain maps using certain mercenary camps would be great. (Didn't @wowgetoffyourcellphone start experimenting with that already?)

Edited February 26, 2021 by Nescio
numbers; mercenary camps

[Alar1k]

1 hour ago, Nescio said:

Hello and welcome to the forums, @Alar1k, and thank you for drawing attention to this!

As for the question raised in the thread title, the long and short of it is that nobody has bothered removing it. As for why the embassy limit is there in the first place, I don't know, though I guess it might have been to make them more “unique”. As for whether it should stay, that's open for discussion.

Entity limits certainly do make sense for aura entities (heroes, wonders, theatres, monuments, etc.). However, I don't think they're really necessary for structures that merely produce units; barracks and stables don't have entity limits either, nor do the athen gymnasium, spart syssition, or cart super dock. I'm fine with removing the entity limit of embassies and mercenary camps; or perhaps replace it with a minimum distance, like the rome army camp has (and also centres, fortresses, towers).

Furthermore, I think the fortress and tower entity limits could be removed too; their minimum distances and costs effectively limit their numbers already.

The purpose of population is to limit the number of entities that move around. The more entities there are in a game, the more things have to be drawn, meaning more to render; and the more things that move, the more things that change, hence more draw calls and hence more lag.

Cossacks had an engine that could comfortably handle tens of thousands of units and didn't need nor have a population limitation.

In A24 mercenaries have 30% less training time than their citizen counterparts. Basically it's 7 mercenaries or 5 citizens or 3 champions.

That said, mercenaries could certainly be further differentiated.

 

[EDIT] I'm also in favour of replacing the cart embassies with mercenary camps (cf. kush) and of introducing mercenary camps for the Greeks.

In the long run having certain maps using certain mercenary camps would be great. (Didn't @wowgetoffyourcellphone start experimenting with that already?)

Thank you for the detailed and thorough answer! :))

As for the mercenary camps, I am in favour that carthagininas have an embassy to make them unique in that sense, but as for the current situation I think it would be nice, as @borg- suggested, to "merge" the three embassies into one - but here there could be something like the seleucids have: for example embassy starts with Celtic mercenary swordsman and melee Gaelic mercenary cav, (lets say sword cav in this example) - and there could be three different techs to unlock Iberian mecenaries (slingers and skirmishers), Italian (spear cav and skirmi) and add Macedonian option (slinger and pikes)  - and depending on the situation player would pick the tech instead of building three different buildings with such limitations - and perhaps in this case remove the building limit for that large embassy

Edit: Just to be clear, only one choice per game would be possible, so as not to make carthaginians op

I hope I explained what I'm thinking clearly haha

Edited February 26, 2021 by Alar1k

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

Along the lines of Nescio's idea, I think that the idea of calling them embassies makes little to no sense.  Should we also consider having a mercenary camp for the Persians as well given their extensive use of Greeks during Alexander's campaign?

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

8 hours ago, Nescio said:

In the long run having certain maps using certain mercenary camps would be great. (Didn't @wowgetoffyourcellphone start experimenting with that already?)

Yes, they've been in Delenda Est as a concept for 3 years now. Keep getting refined and improved. 

[av93]

I think that I'm one of the responsibles

 

 

My original suggestion was to choose from one alliance and stick to them among the rest of the game. Then IRC, the implementation was that embassies were limited to 2, so you could train two of the three factions. Then I think that the limit was increased.

But my proposal was more among the lines of AoM minor gods, where you choose a path and you get units and techs, as a special feature of Carthaginians

 

 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by av93

[flint1]

Hey, thanks for the explanations and the detail, it's clearer now 

[av93]

Just to say, that in my view, when you choose an alliance, you should able to 1) build whatever embassies you want from your "allies" 2) be able to train your "allies" on your barrack and let the embassies able to do techs and allow allied mercenaries to be trained.

[Nescio]

@Alar1k: https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3666

[fatherbushido]

 

[Player of 0AD]

The camps are limited to make those civs stronger, because mercs are rubbish now. ; )

[maroder]

@fatherbushidoyour post is restricted "Sorry, we can't show this content because you do not have permission to see it. "

 

On 26/02/2021 at 4:14 PM, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

The one other area I could see changing a lot would be giving them a massively reduced training time.

I like the idea. Because why is there a training time for mercenaries in the first place? You hire them and they should be ready. So from a logical standpoint, the don't need any training time.

Edited March 12, 2021 by maroder

[fatherbushido]

17 hours ago, maroder said:

@fatherbushidoyour post is restricted "Sorry, we can't show this content because you do not have permission to see it. "

Oh sorry :-)

 

I had opened that discussion (among others) back in 2017:

Quote

 

The embassy/embassies was/were introduced in r10604, see also https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Civ%3A_Carthaginians?action=diff&version=32

The purpose of that one was mainly to split the training in two different buildings (barracks and embassy) and give that mercenary civ flavour.

Then a building limit restriction was introduced in r13801. The purpose of that one was mainly to push to choose between two 'civs' among three.

I always prefer protect past decisions but it seems that one was not really finished and currently, it's a bit in contradiction with that old clean Wijitmaker sum up:

Quote

 

In 0 A.D. the Carthaginians will have a strong navy and the largest selection of units in the game due to their tendency to hire mercenaries.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041214000913/http://www.wildfiregames.com:80/0ad/page.php?p=1388

 

Can we remove that limit?

 

 

To be more precise, there wasn't really a concept of mercenary in the initial_design* of that game.

The notion appeared among the years of the development of that game, with different meaning: artistic, names, technologies, structures...

Some experiments were done, more in DE ("delenda est") than in EA ("public"). Around 2017 there were some big and nice art commits importing the green portraits from DE mods, so we tried to fit with it. There wasn't any guideline in the team around that concept, so basically there were just not discussed fix around that idea at the time, in random directions (put those things in green, reduce their cost, use a technology, oh a mercenary champion now...). Note that it happened even if there was someone in charge of the gameplay at that time (which is still in charge if I am not wrong) and also big plan from the project leader (which is still in charge if I am not wrong) about the game design that I don't know if they were done or followed.

In the initial design of 2004, which was considered to be some kind of flexible "let's design and follow that", there was a concept of tribes, reflected in art and names of units to show the diversity of armies and "civilizations" of that time. So there wasn't a "Mercenary" class.

Sum up:

- nuke the mercenary concept

- if units are duplicates, adjust their costs and combat stats

- embassies are unlocking structures

 

 

 

 

[Dakara]

Why not for romans camp only auxiliary units ? like mercenary but units with a precise identity and role

[maroder]

@borg- @Nescio Would it be an option to let mercenaries have zero training time? Because as i said, from my point of view, if you hire them (that's why they have a high metal cost) they should be ready. No need to "train" mercenaries, because they are already soldiers. Or does the training time implies the time they need to arrive from their original country?

[maroder]

2 hours ago, fatherbushido said:

embassies are unlocking structures

i don't think i understand that concept.

[fatherbushido]

11 minutes ago, maroder said:

i don't think i understand that concept.

Just as there is unlocking technologies, there could be unlocking structures.

One use of those structures would just be to unlock the corresponding units, not to actually produce them (barrack is for that).