p1 cavalry mod

[LetswaveaBook]

A general complaint in 0ad is that archers (actually it holds for all ranged infantry) are to strong. I think this is not exactly the case, but it holds some truth. The main type of units that should be able to punish ranged infantry is mellee cavalry, which is for most civs unavailable in p1. When you reach p2, there are allready so many ranged units on the field, that the cavalry nearly seems just to be target dummies. From my experience melee cavalry does not work out as an archer(or more generally ranged infantry) counter. On the other hand, even civs like Rome or Macedon that get melee cav in P1 don´t seem to be able to use them effectively in P1.

Hence I have been working on a mod, whose purpose is not to be peak gameplay, but rather a test on how the gameplay would shift after small changes. I expect that there will be a lot of people who will be voicing concerns, but rather I am looking for 1300+ rated players to test with/against me how it affects gamplay and what can be concluded from these results. If you would like to try it out and see what new meta it would create, please leave a comment here. Also the idea is more about getting generic balance right and less about specific civs.

The mod is still a little work in progress(I will publish it soon) and I have implemented some features:

Carthage, Gaul, Iberians, Persian, Seleucids get access to a second melee(exception sele who get cav archer) cavalry unit in P1 at the stable/Iberian embassy. For Carthage I did some changes to get the Ib. embassy  in P1.

Melee Spear/Sword Cavalry get +1 pierce armor and +1 pierce attack for spear and +1 hack for sword.

Citizen archers get +10% spread(inaccuracy).

Infantry swordsmen get +1 pierce armor and +10% speed.

Towers take 50 seconds longer to build, but are 25 wood cheaper in compensation. This prevents panic defenses or situations were people build towers right in front of your army, which seems ridiculous to me. Also garrisoned infantry contribute less to the arrow fire of towers.

Finally all buildings(Including towers) get less of a loyalty regen bonus per garrisoned infantry after advancing.

 

My main goal is to create a system with melee cav>infantry swordsmen>infantry spearmen triangle, where players are encouraged to do aggressive strategies and build a good mix of melee and ranged units. If A24 units would be perfectly balanced, I would hypothesize a mod like suggested would totally break the game in favour of the cavalry and sentence ranged infantry to death. I hope you would like to give the mod(I´ll upload it soon) a competitive try and we see if the hypothesis of the unit balance holds true.

[LetswaveaBook]

As promised, here is the zip file containing the mod. I have added a readme file with a little extra explanition, which you might need to open with a basic text editing tool.

 

lwb_mod.zip

Edited April 19, 2021 by LetswaveaBook
solved a bug in the mod

[Yekaterina]

Nice idea, but when I loaded your mod an error message appeared: failed to load ptol_camel_archer

The mod works for gauls but didn't work for iberians

[LetswaveaBook]

39 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Nice idea, but when I loaded your mod an error message appeared: failed to load ptol_camel_archer

The mod works for gauls but didn't work for iberians

I am happy to see that the idea is appreciated. I have not been able to reproduce the bug you mentioned for iberians as they seem to be able to produce spear cav in p1. However I found a mistake in the code for the ptolemy camel archer and reuppload it. There is also an issue with carthaginians but tht does not affect gameplay.

As it shows: I am a noob modder, but that is how we start.