Fruit trees are too difficult to tell apart from other trees.

[AIEND]

Today I played against a friend who has only played A23 before and is not familiar with the map that now has fruit trees.
After the start of the game, he wanted the workers to chop down trees, but he clicked on the fruit trees. After a while, he realized that he had no wood, and the economy was much slower, so we had to start a new game.
Hopefully A26 will make the fruit trees on the map look a bit more distinctive, or simply replace them with berry bushes.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

10 hours ago, AIEND said:

Today I played against a friend who has only played A23 before and is not familiar with the map that now has fruit trees.
After the start of the game, he wanted the workers to chop down trees, but he clicked on the fruit trees. After a while, he realized that he had no wood, and the economy was much slower, so we had to start a new game.
Hopefully A26 will make the fruit trees on the map look a bit more distinctive, or simply replace them with berry bushes.

Which fruit trees? There are different kinds. I think the fruiting Date Palm trees are very distinctive and are good, while the Apple trees could be improved greatly.

[AIEND]

1 小时前，wowgetoffyourcellphone 说：

有哪些果树？ 有不同的种类。 我认为结果的枣椰树很有特色，很好，而苹果树可以大大改善。

Mainly fig and banana trees. The fig tree in particular looked so stout, I was tricked every now and then into thinking it was a tree with a lot of wood.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Banana trees seem very obviously distinct as well. I will grant you the Fig and Apple trees though. Perhaps the Fig trees should be removed and the Apple trees remodeled.

[alre]

there is a reason AoE only has fruits on bushes.

[Stan`]

10 minutes ago, alre said:

there is a reason AoE only has fruits on bushes.

Yes, weakness

[faction02]

7 minutes ago, alre said:

there is a reason AoE only has fruits on bushes.

They have no interest in botanic?

 

There were some nice improvements in the art to make berries bushes and fishes spots more visible, even with low graphic settings. Berries bushes on Sudanian savanna are still a bit hard to find too.

In many cases, the minimap remain probably the most effective way to proceed. Simply because berries can be hidden behind a forest or berries are barely visible on the explored map for example. This specific case is however quite interesting since it provide an example in which the minimap could fail. The extra green dots next to the civic center could be confused with the starting berries.

Not sure if something new to help players find what they are searching for could be useful. I vaguely remember a post talking about having different icons around selected champions/CS, I am wondering if applying the same to trees would help. Then maybe defining a "select all berries" shortcut to highlight them ?

 

P.S.:

In SVN, these trees would be more likely hidden on the minimap by the big civic center icon. Mines icons can also hide important information too. Thanks for letting that feature as an option! (I am looking forward to see if the big icons can be exploited for sneaky attack  ).

[Gurken Khan]

I, too, think that apple trees look too much like regular trees.

[alre]

yeah, clearly they are more interested in game accessibility than in botanics. in reality there is a whole lot of trees that give edible fruits and can also be cut down for wood, figs for instance give a high quality wood, but in 0AD can only be exploited for food.

at AoE they decided to have food and wood gathering separated in order to simplify game mechanics, and they had food gathering limited to berry bushes because they are easier to render in a clearly different way.

this is mindful designing. something 0AD never bothered about.

[maroder]

1 hour ago, alre said:

this is mindful designing. something 0AD never bothered about.

sounds unnecessarily harsh and generalized.

but I agree that having a clear distinction between trees=wood and berries=food does make it easier to understand.

The question is if we should copy that or if there is another way to make the food trees visually more distinct?

 

3 hours ago, faction02 said:

Not sure if something new to help players find what they are searching for could be useful. I vaguely remember a post talking about having different icons around selected champions/CS, I am wondering if applying the same to trees would help. Then maybe defining a "select all berries" shortcut to highlight them ?

something like this for example.

But tbh, I wouldn't mind switching to just berries for food. We can still keep the models for the trees, only that they would only supply wood then.

[Sebastián Gómez]

2 hours ago, alre said:

yeah, clearly they are more interested in game accessibility than in botanics. in reality there is a whole lot of trees that give edible fruits and can also be cut down for wood, figs for instance give a high quality wood, but in 0AD can only be exploited for food.

at AoE they decided to have food and wood gathering separated in order to simplify game mechanics, and they had food gathering limited to berry bushes because they are easier to render in a clearly different way.

this is mindful designing. something 0AD never bothered about.

I just had to sign in and give your comment a like. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Edited March 16, 2022 by Sebastián Gómez

[wackyserious]

3 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

I, too, think that apple trees look too much like regular trees.

What about adding fallen fruits and decals? Or adding fruit meshes as props?

[AIEND]

3 hours ago, maroder said:

听起来不必要的刺耳和笼统。

但我同意明确区分树木=木材和浆果=食物确实更容易理解。

问题是我们是否应该复制它，或者是否有另一种方法可以使食物树在视觉上更加明显？

 

例如这样的事情。

但是，我不介意只吃浆果。 我们仍然可以保留树木的模型，只是那时他们只会提供木材。

I feel like adding different kinds of berry bushes is also an expression of biological richness, better than using fruit trees.

[LetswaveaBook]

3 hours ago, maroder said:

but I agree that having a clear distinction between trees=wood and berries=food does make it easier to understand.

If you are bothered by the way fruit plants look, then you should go to settings and ideally there would be an option "Yeka Fruit". That option would change to visuals of fruit plants to the equivalent of yekaterina's chickens.

I think that is a fair solution to the problem.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I think the bananas for tropic maps, date palms for desert maps, and berry bushes for temperate maps are pretty clear. The date palms in particular look supremely distinct from the other palm trees. Same for the bananas. The major problem is with the Fig and Apple trees. The Apple trees can be redesigned and remodeled for sure. And then the Fig, which looks too much like a strangler or baoabab, can just be removed completely.

With the new minimap proably coming in A27 (crosses fingers; sacrifices to Athena), I think we can look into options for adding a berry bush icon or something because the minimap will be bigger (and dynamically scalable). No pressure, @Langbart   

 

 

Edited March 16, 2022 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Old Roman]

If your farmers are close enough they of course find the fruit trees after exhausting a berry patch with no prompting.  Seriously do we really need more hand holding than hovering your cursor over a tree to see if its wood or food?   Since fruit trees are usually solitary, does anyone waste time setting up a wood line next to one?

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

+minimap OP

[Gurken Khan]

7 hours ago, wackyserious said:

What about adding fallen fruits and decals? Or adding fruit meshes as props?

Isn't there a variant with blossoms? Maybe use only those, as they're instantly recognizable as non-wood plants. I guess fallen fruits, decals, meshes, props, whatever might be fine if they're instantly recognizable. I seriously don't think botany should be a required skill in this game, so I don't think we need more than one variant. And as one can see from the discussions about the berry bushes, subtlety and artistic ambition are not necessarily acknowledged.

 

4 hours ago, Old Roman said:

Seriously do we really need more hand holding than hovering your cursor over a tree to see if its wood or food?   Since fruit trees are usually solitary, does anyone waste time setting up a wood line next to one?

You can have some solitary food trees and some solitary wood trees, around the CC or in some part of your territory, and distribution of your workers or placement of a farm might depend on that; and yes, I think it would be nicer if one could see what's what without having to select a specific entity with a specific cursor state and then hover over various trees.

[sarcoma]

Use Yekaterina's mod (or mine whynot.zip )

Guaranteed you won't miss them

Spoiler

 

[Dakara]

it good already