Specialized worker units?

[hyperion]

On 17/11/2021 at 5:06 PM, faction02 said:

Gameplay issue: Early/Mid-game aggression not favored by the concept of citizen-soldiers.

So you are saying CS are to cheap for their economic/military value => adjust price/economic value/military value.

 

On 17/11/2021 at 5:06 PM, faction02 said:

Idea:

Combine some of the ideas suggested and add specialized economic units (on top of the existing set of units) : "farmer, woodcutter or miner". A specialized economic unit is a unit with:

There are plenty of possibilities to add new unit types, so question to answer are:

1. Are more and more unit types a good thing for gameplay
2. Do specialized economic unit types add anything to gameplay
3. Do they fit the game lore

For point 2 I only see more micro intensive eco management, whether to treat this as a good thing(tm) is up to each and everyone.

[Reyhan]

Perhaps more soldier types and building types is better than worker types. 

[faction02]

  

On 19/11/2021 at 12:22 PM, hyperion said:

So you are saying CS are to cheap for their economic/military value => adjust price/economic value/military value.

This could work too, Valihrant suggestion: " Should female citizen gather rates be increased ?" might be a good solution too.

I would be curious to know why in previous alpha, it was decided that reducing women wood gathering relative to CS and giving an aura bonus to women to incentive their production would be a good approach too (if anyone remember...?).

The gap between women and CS wood gathering rate has been reduced

On 19/11/2021 at 12:22 PM, hyperion said:

1. Are more and more unit types a good thing for gameplay
2. Do specialized economic unit types add anything to gameplay
3. Do they fit the game lore

For point 1, I agree with the excess complexity argument. I would guess that more unit types are suited for environment with relatively low amount of units or slow game speed. Having too many unit types to manage separately in a 200 population game is very likely to become not enjoyable if each of them require different micro. For 0ad, if anything, I would guess that the early/mid game might be better suited.

You raise interesting questions, I think I would prefer seeing a few of them used for civilization differentiation rather than to solve some problems with the game mechanic that can be addressed differently. Dogs or worker elephants bring more to the game than what could do a woodcutter.

Edited November 20, 2021 by faction02

[LetswaveaBook]

On 19/11/2021 at 12:22 PM, hyperion said:

There are plenty of possibilities to add new unit types, so question to answer are:

1. Are more and more unit types a good thing for gameplay

The answer of that question depends on whether the units allow different strategies. If there are different types of units that function very similar, there is no need to have them.

 

For example, I suggested a butcher unit, which can be useful for using corrals. The butcher unit would be a little cheaper and possible automatically search for nearby livestock. If you want to use camel archers as ptolemies and want to use corrals. Then the current situation is that with double clicking the camels, you select both the camels for militairy and the ones for gathering, which is annoying.

[Gurken Khan]

@LetswaveaBook I agree with the first part.

I totally don't see the need for a butcher unit. Cav is fast at gathering from livestock and they automatically look for more in the vicinity. That you don't want to put your fighting cav in a control group or don't want to select them with an area selection doesn't convince me that we need a butcher unit.

[alre]

I think it should noted that in early game (minutes 0-3) this rock-paper-scissor mechanic exists in 0AD. one can go for naked booming (quite common), immediate/early cavalry rush with about 4 horses immediately, and even more after one/two minutes (more convenient if hunt is present around base), or print some extra infantry at the beginning to protect himself from rushes (especially convenient for slinger civs). Rush wins against boom, boom wins against defense, defense wins against rush.

It is in middle game (minute 5 onward) that naked boom is no longer a sensible option, but just because fertility fest is out of balance in this release, that would keep booming with women viable. As for A25 balance, after minute 4/5, raiding can't be your main strategy anymore, you need to settle on either infantry boom or a more committed aggression, be it with cav, infantry, cs or mercs. This is no more a rock-paper-scissor situation, but a two way balance, even if a lot more can be said about different civs and particular strategies - I'm simplifying.

To be honest, I'm not a fan of boom-rush-defense balance: it can be very fun to rush a defenseless player, but it is quite frustrating to get rushed when you are defenseless, or fall behind because you picked the wrong strategy compared to your opponent. Scouting could help giving you a clue of what the other player is gonna do, but at the beginning of the game scouting comes at a high cost, so, all in all, a player can be rewarded for essentially being lucky about some risky choice. This is just my opinion, and I can see why others may disagree. I hope that some player better than me, or more used to play 1v1, shares his/her opinion about this.

[alre]

18 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

@LetswaveaBook I agree with the first part.

I totally don't see the need for a butcher unit. Cav is fast at gathering from livestock and they automatically look for more in the vicinity. That you don't want to put your fighting cav in a control group or don't want to select them with an area selection doesn't convince me that we need a butcher unit.

agree, also I'd add that I never understood why women and inf have such a bad rate of gathering meat compared to cav. ok cav moves faster, but does it also have to butcher faster? 5/10 times so? why?

[LetswaveaBook]

12 minutes ago, alre said:

agree, also I'd add that I never understood why women and inf have such a bad rate of gathering meat compared to cav. ok cav moves faster, but does it also have to butcher faster? 5/10 times so? why?

Undoubtedly if the women and infantry would gather hunt faster that could open a lot of new strategies, which some people might even consider dirty(cavalry) strategies. However it is a valid question none the less.

 

20 minutes ago, alre said:

Scouting could help giving you a clue of what the other player is gonna do, but at the beginning of the game scouting comes at a high cost, so, all in all, a player can be rewarded for essentially being lucky about some risky choice. This is just my opinion, and I can see why others may disagree. I hope that some player better than me, or more used to play 1v1, shares his/her opinion about this.

There are 3 options and scouting would come at high cost. Rushing and naked booming are the risky ones. You could chose the safest of the 3 options, playing defensive or decide to bear the high costs of scouting. Also in serious games, I like to do something that is in between all of those options, making a few cavalry to enjoy nearby hunt and recruiting some infantry before the first barracks. If you have nearby hunt, that is a very convenient way to make a few (mounted) soldiers without letting your development suffer.

52 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

Cav is fast at gathering from livestock and they automatically look for more in the vicinity.

If you run out of livestock, the cavalry go idle. Even if livestock arrives later, then the cavalry stay idle until you command them to.

53 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

That you don't want to put your fighting cav in a control group or don't want to select them with an area selection doesn't convince me that we need a butcher unit.

sometimes its get messy when the opponent enters your base with a minor cavalry force. Even though it takes only a few seconds to sort things out with the current tools at our disposal, my minutes have only 60 seconds and every moment there are at least two and sometimes more things I want to do at the same moment. When playing a competitive game, I am a busy man and don't like to see any precious seconds being wasted.

 

[hyperion]

2 hours ago, faction02 said:

This could work too, Valihrant suggestion: " Should female citizen gather rates be increased ?" might be a good solution too.

Increasing females gathering rates would be mostly the same, just that unit spam is probably to common in 0ad, so I'd try out adjusting CS (including cav) to have 80% of current gathering rates of females for any resource (including hunt so the scout is more likely used for scouting instead of butchering chickens) instead. This needs quite some testing tho as it has quite far reaching impact on the current meta.

Females being always better at eco will force a trade-off for CS, which is what you desire and I can imagine to be good for gameplay, as for lore one can argue the arms always carried around dragging the CS down.

[alre]

1 hour ago, hyperion said:

Increasing females gathering rates would be mostly the same, just that unit spam is probably to common in 0ad, so I'd try out adjusting CS (including cav) to have 80% of current gathering rates of females for any resource (including hunt so the scout is more likely used for scouting instead of butchering chickens) instead. This needs quite some testing tho as it has quite far reaching impact on the current meta.

Females being always better at eco will force a trade-off for CS, which is what you desire and I can imagine to be good for gameplay, as for lore one can argue the arms always carried around dragging the CS down.

I just don't think this needs changing. buffing fertility fest a bit would be more than enough, booming doesn't need to be better than that, raiding doesn't need to be easier than it already is.