Revisions to Phases

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

At the moment most people generally seem to describe the meta to be some aggression in the Village Phase, practically none in the Town Phase, and more in the City Phase.  Ideally speaking there should be good opportunities for fighting during all of these times in the game.  With that in mind, there are a few reasons I can think of that have led to this situation.

 

The Village Phase has a wide variety of options with unit compositions.

 

The Town Phase does little to help this and in fact introduces a number of defensive upgrades that discourage aggression.

 

With the City Phase, access to champions and siege make pushes far more possible.

 

Given these points, there are a few ways I could see the phases being more distinct and flavourful through a few measures:

 

In the Village Phase, players should only have access to one melee infantry unit (typically a spearman), a ranged unit (either a slinger or a skirmisher), and one melee cavalry unit.  This would help to first of all reinforce the general rock-paper-scissors formula that I believe 0 AD is aiming to represent.  Also, it probably would not be overly restrictive at least in my mind.

 

The Town Phase would introduce more unit types and perhaps some key upgrades to allow melee infantry to at least somewhat efficiently counter defences by either boosting attack or capture.  At the same time I could see rams being introduced.

 

One important thing to stress is that this would not be an iron rule.  If one civilisation has an appropriate reason to have more than just the three, that should not be a problem.  Likewise, factions famous for swordsmen like Rome could have that as their early unit while Carthage could maybe start off using Numidian cavalry.  The point is that where differences are valid, exceptions can be made.  I'll admit that these would introduce some difficulties for balancing, but I think that there is still merit to these ideas regardless of that.

[Lion.Kanzen]

3 hours ago, Thorfinn the Shallow Minded said:

In the Village Phase, players should only have access to one melee infantry unit (typically a spearman), a ranged unit (either a slinger or a skirmisher), and one melee cavalry unit.  This would help to first of all reinforce the general rock-paper-scissors formula that I believe 0 AD is aiming to represent.  Also, it probably would not be overly restrictive at least in my mind.

There are definitely 3 options to correct or improve this.