Units too small, hard to distinguish.

[Gurken Khan]

2 hours ago, Sp00ky said:

I am still not familiarized with 0ad counter systems (are there counters?)

We have 'soft counters'. I'd say 'hardest' counters are spears against cav and swords against siege. Here's more:

 

[Sp00ky]

thanks for the info I will check that out

 

[Yekaterina]

@Sp00ky in 0ad there are hard counters and soft counters.

Hard counters are forcefully implemented by the programmers, making one unit dealing extra damage to another unit type, no matter what, for example, the attack of a spearman is tripled if it's victim is a cavalry unit. The only hard counters that exist in 0AD are spear and pikes against cavalry.

 

Soft counters are one type of unit naturally having an advantage over another type in certain situations. For example, sword cavalry against archers. The sword cavalry received no damage multipliers or bonus of any kind against archers, but their swift walking speed, fast repeating sword damage and high health makes them ideal for destroying groups of archers who have low damage per second and unprotected by melees. But, even though spearman can beat sword cav, the agile archers can snipe them from a long range and retreat when spearman get close, so it can be argued that archers are soft counters for large groups of spearman. 

Heavy and light infantry are not well distinguished in 0AD ( at least not in A25). There are only 3 categories of units: citizen-infantry, mercenaries and champions. The specific names of entities might be called "Roman heavy swordsman" or "Numidian light cavalry", but what's important is which of the 3 categories it belongs to. Within each category, heavy or light is just an artistic name with no real reflection on the unit's strength. The Seleucid Romanised heavy swordsman has identical stats to a half-naked Mauryan maiden guard.

[Yekaterina]

50 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

swords against siege

Actually that is another soft counter. Siege weapons have low hack armour and low crush armour, but swords only do hack so every bit of attack is absorbed by the ram. This is why women are more effective than champion javlins at smashing rams. You will find mace or clubs even more effective against siege. 

Similarly for siege against buildings: buildings have very hight pierce armour, slightly lower hack and almost no crush armour. This makes clubs and siege which deal crush damage very effective against buildings.

The fire and poison attacks are undefendable, because no unit or building has fire armour or poison armour. This makes fire cav OP. Fortunately poison doesn't affect buildings, otherwise Maiden guard archers would be the next fire cav.

[Gurken Khan]

27 minutes ago, Sevda said:

Actually that is another soft counter. Siege weapons have low hack armour and low crush armour, but swords only do hack so every bit of attack is absorbed by the ram. This is why women are more effective than champion javlins at smashing rams. You will find mace or clubs even more effective against siege. 

ok. But since chiseling by shooting or poking at siege is so ineffective, using swords (or daggers) is what I want to do really hard.

[BeTe]

On 03/05/2022 at 4:51 PM, Sp00ky said:

I am still not familiarized with 0ad counter systems (are there counters?) but isn't this inneficient? there are units that might soak up a lot of damage from units that are not their counter, and distinguishing between units types is important in terms of microing the army efficiently.

 

I am mostly playing aoe3 as of late and I might be biased because of it's hard counter system, but for example attacking skirmishers with your light cavalry will get your troops wrecked. while attacking them with heavy cavalry will destroy them but attacking heavy infantry will destroy your heavy cavalry. Both heavy, and light inf can be ranged. I guess that in the case of 0ad you could make a difference between heavy infantry (roman legions with throwable pilum) and light infantry (velite, archer, peltast).

Perhaps my impression is wrong for 0ad but distinguishing unit types is usually very important in RTS and it often takes precedence before scale and realism.

 

 

I just found this discussion and I like it. Countering is important in RTS games I guess so I want to bring my concerns into this discussion... It was about too many units on field: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/86939-why-units-are-produced-so-fast/

It's kind of boring if you need to do development for 15mins. and then just send blob with attack move. I guess we don't want 0AD to be like The Sims and similar games   

1. I watched SC2, WC 2, AOE 2 - they all have small number of units and you can attack with smaller forces and make advance by microing. We should not "reinvent the wheel" and focus on things that these games are NOT doing properly. 

2. Also I like countering system in OpenRA TD ( example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msDHcYf0Qqs )- the game has some issues and is different type than 0AD, but for examples: as GDI vs Nod faction you can't just go T2 and produce Medium Tanks if Nod is going 2x war factory on Tier 1 - they will be overmaneuvered and overwhelmed by T1 units... If you see Nod opponent has 2 War Factories you must build faster and cheaper units (Humvees) to clean his T1 army. If you do it and he scout it, then he must go Tier 2 and make stronger armored unit, etc.

Then there are also air units which makes this even more interesting. Gdi's air is good again economy/harvesters, Nod's against infantry....  

So all this will force you to scout and build proper units, not only big blobs. 

Edited September 12, 2022 by BeTe

[Orphydian]

being able to tell at a glance what type of unit (swordman, spearmen, ranged unit etc.) I think it's pretty common sense. I think this can be done via banners but as of now they are for formations including mixed units as well so don't know where to go from here. How other strategy games deal with this?

[Yekaterina]

2 minutes ago, Orphydian said:

being able to tell at a glance what type of unit (swordman, spearmen, ranged unit etc.) I think it's pretty common sense. I think this can be done via banners but as of now they are for formations including mixed units as well so don't know where to go from here. How other strategy games deal with this?

Use symbols and shapes. For example distinct shapes instead of detailed humanoids to represent units. A triangle with a "s" written on it represents a spearman etc