suggestions Thread for posting suggestions for Alpha 27.

[Fabius]

29 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

Yep. Although I thought there'd be a SF (string freeze) before.

Awesome  

[Stan`]

6 hours ago, Fabius said:

wait RC is shorthand for  release candidate right??

It is.

[gui456wSERTDYF]

• You cannot just demolish your buildings by pressing "delete" for free, to demolish a building should be some time/resource consuming process. It is hateful when you are stealing your enemy's city or CC and he just destroys it in your face. It also does not make sense. A nice implementation would be that when you demolish a building, something similar to what happens when you upgrade a wood tower to a stone tower happens, but instead the health of the building gradually decreases. You may also need to pay some resources, or even garrison some workers. The cost and time would be a function of the building. Even more, the more resources you pay the faster the building is demolished, so you can decide this depending on if you are in times of war and in need of speed or in times of peace and you don't care to spend some time and save resources.
• Some unit/technology that can be garrisoned into stone walls to burn rams (like throwing fire down the wall). This would make stone walls much more attractive (or at least attractive).
• New building complementary to walls: "trenches with water and crocodiles" that block the passage of siege and make the movement of soldiers slower (well, the water and crocodiles are not necessary haha). This would be nice because you can place them in front of the wall to avoid rams destroying it (like it was done in real life).
• Soldiers cannot attack buildings, except some "arrow with fire" or so. It just makes no sense that a bunch of soldiers with arrows and swords can destroy a building, and it is annoying when your enemy does this...
• Elephants cannot attack buildings, instead they are very strong against soldiers. It just does not make much sense that a bunch of elephants destroys a fortress...
• Rams that cannot move unless you garrison soldiers, and increase movement speed/power as soldiers are garrisoned. Make rams very cheap to build, but add this feature to use. Also, rams belong to gaia when no soldier is garrisoned (of course they cannot move or attack in this case), so then if I bring my rams to your city and left them unattended, you can just garrison your soldiers into them and they are yours.
• Randomize the attack of units. In this way it is not obvious that 100 soldiers will defeat 99. The distribution gives more freedom to tune units, consider for example the attached `damage_distribution.png` for some unit before and after it is trained (increased rank or whatever).
• Ranged units that switch to sword when very close to enemy (at least optional this). In the movies this is always the case. They are weaker than sword soldiers but anyway.

Edited June 6, 2022 by gui456wSERTDYF
Added a few ideas I was forgetting about before

[Nobbi]

On 06/06/2022 at 12:33 AM, gui456wSERTDYF said:

• You cannot just demolish your buildings by pressing "delete" for free, to demolish a building should be some time/resource consuming process. It is hateful when you are stealing your enemy's city or CC and he just destroys it in your face. It also does not make sense. A nice implementation would be that when you demolish a building, something similar to what happens when you upgrade a wood tower to a stone tower happens, but instead the health of the building gradually decreases. You may also need to pay some resources, or even garrison some workers. The cost and time would be a function of the building. Even more, the more resources you pay the faster the building is demolished, so you can decide this depending on if you are in times of war and in need of speed or in times of peace and you don't care to spend some time and save resources.
• Some unit/technology that can be garrisoned into stone walls to burn rams (like throwing fire down the wall). This would make stone walls much more attractive (or at least attractive).
• New building complementary to walls: "trenches with water and crocodiles" that block the passage of siege and make the movement of soldiers slower (well, the water and crocodiles are not necessary haha). This would be nice because you can place them in front of the wall to avoid rams destroying it (like it was done in real life).
• Soldiers cannot attack buildings, except some "arrow with fire" or so. It just makes no sense that a bunch of soldiers with arrows and swords can destroy a building, and it is annoying when your enemy does this...
• Elephants cannot attack buildings, instead they are very strong against soldiers. It just does not make much sense that a bunch of elephants destroys a fortress...
• Rams that cannot move unless you garrison soldiers, and increase movement speed/power as soldiers are garrisoned. Make rams very cheap to build, but add this feature to use. Also, rams belong to gaia when no soldier is garrisoned (of course they cannot move or attack in this case), so then if I bring my rams to your city and left them unattended, you can just garrison your soldiers into them and they are yours.
• Randomize the attack of units. In this way it is not obvious that 100 soldiers will defeat 99. The distribution gives more freedom to tune units, consider for example the attached `damage_distribution.png` for some unit before and after it is trained (increased rank or whatever).
• Ranged units that switch to sword when very close to enemy (at least optional this). In the movies this is always the case. They are weaker than sword soldiers but anyway.

Cossacks and other games from the same developer had some of this features implemented. You could not simply destroy houses. After deleting the buildings, they lost most of their health and slowly burned down. If repaired over a certain health level they could be saved, which in my opinion is quiet realistic, because if you can't hold a captured city you would try to burn it down. In American conquest they also made ranged units fight with daggers when melee units came close. If implementation of a second attack is to hard, one could also add minimum range, so ranged units have to run away to fire as in aoe2.

[Nobbi]

On 31/05/2022 at 3:05 PM, Fabius said:

There is precious little to conquer anyway, it is rather fun building elaborate fortifications and watching others break them, but that is irrelevant in A25. Its all boom and go, I like to enjoy my games like I would a good meal, not a ten minute stop at the fast food place and then off I go to do something else. There is more to playing than just winning. It would be nice to have a satisfying experience too. Which we did have in A23 and progressively seems to have evaporated with each alpha. I personally feel quite jaded with the whole thing, if I had the opportunity I would have stayed with A23, at least there was more to personally enjoy. 

I don't know why people like a23 so much, but I remember it as being less balanced than a25. Where archer civs were not played because they were even weaker as now. They had weaker archers and elephants and no rams (except Persians). And not to forget the OP siege units, were catas or bolts could decimate whole armies ...

But I don't like the additional upgrade in P3 as well. As with booming there is a certain run for this upgrades and than the game ends often after the first attack...

[faction02]

42 minutes ago, Nobbi said:

I don't know why people like a23 so much, but I remember it as being less balanced than a25.

Blaspheme !

[Dakara]

Nerf mercenary cav, up to 120 metal by unit and train instant 

after nerf the first mine metal  and stone to 1000 ressource instead 5000

Edited June 9, 2022 by Dakara

[Lion.Kanzen]

4 hours ago, Nobbi said:

their health and slowly burned down. If repaired over a certain health level they could be saved, which in my opinion is quiet realistic

I like this option.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

1 hour ago, Dakara said:

Nerf mercenary cav, up to 120 metal by unit and train instant 

I think if merc cavs are still a problem going forward, something along these lines should be considered. They shouldn't train instantly, but very quickly, like maybe 4 sec for inf and 8 for cav. Costs would also need to be fine tuned.

1 hour ago, Dakara said:

after nerf the first mine metal  and stone to 1000 ressource instead 5000

I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I think "starting" metal/stone locations should be reconsidered. How about this: They both spawn at some angle relative to the CC, but with a fixed radius of 50 meters. Some measure would be needed to ensure they do not overlap i guess.

About the values:

If first metal mine is only 1000, those who don't have any extra available will be unable to get essential upgrades, so I think that is too severe.

I do agree there might be a little too much metal available currently. Perhaps just replace some of the 5000 metal mines with single 1000 metal mines?

how does that sound?

[gui456wSERTDYF]

I would suggest as a top priority to fix the issues when joining a multiplayer game in the lobby, see attached. I have no idea what is the reason for this, but I know a lot of people experience this, even though very few of us post about it in the forum (1 2 3). This is probably a barrier for newcomers (1 2 3, these links are just the tip of the iceberg, most people never come to the forum) when they get this error a few times they just abandon 0AD. I have been dealing with this since I started playing 0AD back in 2018-2019 (different 0AD versions, different computers, different countries and continents, different internet connections). A solution for this is needed, either automatic (i.e. this does not happen anymore) or non automatic (like Android when it requests permissions for apps, or a link to an easy, complete and up to date troubleshooting guide).

I know this is not a cool game play idea, but I would give this top priority.

Edited August 4, 2022 by gui456wSERTDYF
Less text more to the point

[Freagarach]

As the message implies this is not fixable on the 0 A.D. side, if I am not mistaken.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

There can be many reasons for that message. It could be your computer's antivirus, which you might need to change for 0ad.

I have noticed that certain networks might not allow you to connect to other servers. (For example my university)

Sometimes, however, this error pops up once and immediately rejoining after dismissing the error has no issue.

[Zircon]

I confirm this error happened to me too. The only thing that seems to be depending on is the day. I list a few things I did, although they did not help to the cause:

• Closing and re opening the 0ad
• Disconnecting and re connecting to the WIFI
• different WIFI networks from different places
• use (or not) of a VPN.

 

 

 If there's two people, our experience is that: Person A hosts a game, but person B cannot join. Person B hosts a game, but person A cannot join. Usually, the way out of this is that people A & B join another third game (of a hypothetical person C). However, this can also result in problems more often than not.

 

[hyperion]

3 hours ago, Freagarach said:

As the message implies this is not fixable on the 0 A.D. side, if I am not mistaken.

One could indicate whether it's a properly reachable host (forwarding) or randomly reachable host (stun), if people believe stun is a full solution they won't care about a better setup.  Also ip6 support could help.

Sure there are other reason than stun, but I guess it's the reason in a vast majority of cases.

[Stan`]

1 hour ago, hyperion said:

One could indicate whether it's a properly reachable host (forwarding) or randomly reachable host (stun), if people believe stun is a full solution they won't care about a better setup.  Also ip6 support could help.

Sure there are other reason than stun, but I guess it's the reason in a vast majority of cases.

Wouldn't that require pinging the games at all time, which could go into a small DOS attack if done enough? Since you can access the lobby from the game using some mods.

Quote

Also ip6 support could help.

Maybe enet will support that one day.

[Differential] D1676 Embed zpl-c's version of enet library (wildfiregames.com)

[hyperion]

8 hours ago, Stan` said:

Wouldn't that require pinging the games at all time, which could go into a small DOS attack if done enough? Since you can access the lobby from the game using some mods.

Not sure what you are up to, before even creating a game one could pop up a message "Warning: stun enabled, random success, please consider forwarding, read more ...". Connection testing can also be done by the lobby, upon creation of a game or otherwise, which I consider a low traffic solution. The important bit is to educate game hosts that stun is a poor solution in general, the indicator is mostly for people to learn if they aren't able to connect to stun hosts so as to get rid of the impression that it's 0ad fault.

[Stan`]

Oh for the hosts not the clients. Teaching people how to forward ports seem hard though

[Sturm]

Hello guys. I may have already suggested this on other occasions, but it seems really good to me the idea of having in the game's text boxes, whenever possible, a link to the Wikipedia article about the item, weapon, animal, building, character or civilization to which the text refers. The idea would be to keep the existing texts, but add something like... e.g. "Read more here". (...) It would not be any structural change in the 0 a.d. text boxes and would add a lot of educational potential and deepen the historical issues. Even the maps could have links to articles on Wikipedia, referring to biomes, historical maps, specific battles, etc.

Edited August 5, 2022 by Sturm

[Akira Kurosawa]

Suggestion: Han multi-level houses.

Spoiler

 

[hyperion]

12 hours ago, Stan` said:

Oh for the hosts not the clients. Teaching people how to forward ports seem hard though

Teaching people on how to setup forwarding is not the goal but to let them know they are using a problematic setup. If stun is the only thing they get working, so be it. The main problem I see is they don't even know that there is an issue, which is always the biggest hurdle to address.

[Stan`]

2 hours ago, hyperion said:

Teaching people on how to setup forwarding is not the goal but to let them know they are using a problematic setup. If stun is the only thing they get working, so be it. The main problem I see is they don't even know that there is an issue, which is always the biggest hurdle to address.

I guess the issue is that if we make Stun non default nobody will be able to play ^^

[gui456wSERTDYF]

4 hours ago, hyperion said:

Teaching people on how to setup forwarding is not the goal but to let them know they are using a problematic setup. If stun is the only thing they get working, so be it. The main problem I see is they don't even know that there is an issue, which is always the biggest hurdle to address.

I am an example of such people. I don't know anything at all about those network details. I am getting to know at this very moment that "stun" (whatever that is) is the quick'n dirty solution, if I am getting the point properly.

Does this forwarding port thing affect all online games/apps? If so, how do other games avoid this to be an issue? I don't play others so honestly I don't know, but all other apps that use internet connection work fine...

Edited August 5, 2022 by gui456wSERTDYF

[Stan`]

4 minutes ago, gui456wSERTDYF said:

Does this forwarding port thing affect all online games/apps? If so, how do other games avoid this to be an issue? I don't play others so honestly I don't know, but all other apps that use internet connection work fine...

Only if they use the same port (20595)

Stun works a certain amount of people. Problem is restricted networks such as schools, shared ip adress for instance my ISP only gives me access to  1/4 of all ports out of 65536

For new games ipv6 helps as well as having the money to host games on dedicated servers. There was some attempt at dedicated servers by elexis then by wraitii but both ran out of time / motivation

 

 

 

 

[CovenantKillerJ]

Cossack/American Conquest series style gamemode, where units consume food upkeep, military units cost civilian pops (though would probably work better with two gendered citizens). and seeing units going inside and exiting structures.

Had a blast playing American Conquest, so i'd be living the dream with gameplay like it in the 0 A.D. setting.

[Gurken Khan]

2 hours ago, CovenantKillerJ said:

two gendered citizens

There's a mod for it.