Introducing the Official community mod for 0 A.D. Empires Ascendant

[real_tabasco_sauce]

Ok, I have heard questions about this, so I'll answer here. We will do a community mod for a27, however there will be changes to how it works.

In a26, we had issues where the mod would split the multiplayer community into mod players and non-mod players. Also, because the mod fixed a couple of bugs, development on the mod was a constrained by the requirement that each change be a clear improvement. This hampered experimentation.

So the main change will be that each community mod version will be a clean slate, no changes from the last version will remain. What this means is that the mod serve the purpose of a "Community Test Environment", or CTE. Essentially, its a way for gameplay-oriented changes to be run by the community before being committed to the development version of 0ad.

My hope is that we can make release turnaround fairly quick, and test a lot of ideas. Players can certainly continue to submit PRs, but I'd like to invite developers to submit their gameplay-oriented PRs too.

Some stuff I hope to experiment with:

• capture vs destroy balance
• walls delete trees
• 3x cavalry counter
• added economic unit to address boom = turtle
• ship balance
• Improve Han gameplay

[Atrik]

Does this mean no 'relaunch' are planned for a27?

[real_tabasco_sauce]

3 minutes ago, Atrik said:

Does this mean no 'relaunch' are planned for a27?

no it won't disrupt work towards a potential re-release.

[Seleucids]

I believe you can work with Leif on the historical rebalance mod. He has some of these already and you can implement these into his mod. Ideally we can get historical patch onto mod.io to make it more accessible. 

[Dunedan]

14 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

• capture vs destroy balance

Not sure if it's just me, but capturing feels too easy with a27.

The two other points I struggle with are ships being too weak and siege weapons packaging and movement being too fast. In a game I had serious problems countering siege weapons even with champion horsemen, because of how fast they've been able to get back behind enemy lines again.

[guerringuerrin]

why not PR some of the historical changes into community-mod instead of working on a totally new base stats rework?

[real_tabasco_sauce]

yeah there are a few items from @Emacz's mod that fit with vanilla 0ad. We could certainly take inspiration from it and try things out. That's the beauty of the CTE approach.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

Ok the next release of the community mod is near. I have heard a lot of player concerns and with this release we can try out some changes to see if they improve the situation.

• Walls may be placed over trees, causing the tree's destruction once complete.
• Additionally walls give to the garrisoned troops a range bonus in addition to the existing vision range bonus.
• When destroying walls, they will do damage in a 10 meter wide box (length the same as the wall). Destroyed walls would create a cascade of rubble that would be dangerous to attacking and defending troops.

Players have been complaining a lot about hero baiting, so I have some ideas implemented to fix that.

• Hero acceleration is greatly reduced down to 5 m/s^2.
• To compensate for being very easy to shoot, they gain an additional 1000 hp.

Since the Han have been lacking, I made some changes to the ministers to make them more interesting for dynamic gameplay.

• In p1, they gain 5 hack damage for each unit they kill.
• in p2, they gain 10 m/s movement speed.
• in p3, their last modification is that they trade the sword for a club and do 50 crush damage. This last part is a bit of a stretch historically but I think it will make for an excellent contribution to the way the Han play.

 

Let me know your feedback, and lets get ready to play!

 

 

(April fools)

[Seleucids]

17 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

acceleration is greatly reduced down to 5 m/s 

You mean ms^-2 , right? (sorry pedantic physicist here) 

 

Also Iberian walls a bit broken; they let enemy army inside then the gate closes and traps a huge enemy army inside. The enemy then captures your CC. 

Edited April 1, 2025 by Seleucids

[real_tabasco_sauce]

49 minutes ago, Seleucids said:

Also Iberian walls a bit broken; they let enemy army inside then the gate closes and traps a huge enemy army inside. The enemy then captures your CC. 

The destruction damage will help with this, since your own units inside the walls will die from the destroyed wall.

[Seleucids]

13 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

The destruction damage will help with this, since your own units inside the walls will die from the destroyed wall.

That's probably even worse...

Can we prevent non-friendly units from passing through unless authorised?

 

[chrstgtr]

3 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

• Hero acceleration is greatly reduced down to 5 m/s^2.
• To compensate for being very easy to shoot, they gain an additional 1000 hp.

 

If hero changes are made to discourage luring then these don’t make sense. First one makes luring worse. Second one make luring easier. Second one will also have knock on effects of making it harder to ever kill heroes. I would just do the first and adjust to appropriate level.

On this, I also like your idea from the other night where hero would be a non preferred unit and attacking units would refocus on preferred classes when in range.
 

3 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

• In p1, they gain 5 hack damage for each unit they kill.
• in p2, they gain 10 m/s movement speed.
• in p3, their last modification is that they trade the sword for a club and do 50 crush damage. This last part is a bit of a stretch historically but I think it will make for an excellent contribution to the way the Han play.

This changes the idea of ministers from being an eco unit that has some fighting ability to just being another fighting unit. That’s fine but it’s a pretty big shift in the unit’s intended purpose (I would personally go the other way and make them more like movable Kush pyramids but whatever).

with that said, some thoughts on the changes…
 

P1: This change makes no sense to me. It just makes the minister suicide rush stronger (it’s already strong). This doesn’t change how you’ll play with ministers or how many ministers you’ll make sine can’t be trained in p1. If you want to give ministers this buff just give it in p2.

P2: so a total speed of 19 m/s? That seems really fast/OP. It would be quicker than every(?) other unit. At this point, you’re basically just making the minister a faster and stronger version of fanatics that’ll be able to take down buildings easily in p3. 
 

P3: fine but see above re speed. I generally like the idea of having quick moving units that can quickly kill buildings but others may disagree. I also think this idea would be better served by just creating a different unit that does these things instead of changes the Han unit from an anti unit raider to becoming an anti building raider (ie, why shouldn’t there be an anti unit raider in p3?). 
 

4 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Walls

I can see pluses and minuses with these. They just need to be tested. 

[Arup]

5 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Players have been complaining a lot about hero baiting, so I have some ideas implemented to fix that.

• Hero acceleration is greatly reduced down to 5 m/s^2.
• To compensate for being very easy to shoot, they gain an additional 1000 hp.

please tell me this is a joke XD

[Arup]

5 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Since the Han have been lacking, I made some changes to the ministers to make them more interesting for dynamic gameplay.

• In p1, they gain 5 hack damage for each unit they kill.
• in p2, they gain 10 m/s movement speed.
• in p3, their last modification is that they trade the sword for a club and do 50 crush damage. This last part is a bit of a stretch historically but I think it will make for an excellent contribution to the way the Han play.

this sounds fun hahaha maybr this can be part of a little aprilfools silly mod ?

[real_tabasco_sauce]

Ok, we have a community mod release for a27 out now.

Here are the main changes:

• Units no longer get "stuck" attacking low preference units, like buildings. When attacking buildings without player intention, they will check for higher preference units each time they attack. If you told them to attack a building, this does not occur.
• Walls and palisades can be placed on top of trees, deleting them upon completion. Also, walls and palisades are cheaper, faster building, and weaker. This is to selectively improve their utility early on, while decreasing their effectiveness when spammed all over the map.
  • Stone walls can be destroyed in reasonable time by infantry.
• Buildings are more difficult to capture while empty.
  • Base building capture point regen: 0.5 -> 5.
  • CC capture point regen: 5 -> 20
  • Fort capture point regen: 10 -> 30
  • What this means is you will need a larger capturing advantage over the defender in order to start bringing down capture points.
• Buildings (except for CCs and Fortresses) are easier to destroy without siege.
  • Hack and Pierce armor are both decreased, so ranged units will now be able to damage buildings, just not as well as melee units.
  • For some buildings, crush armor is decreased from 3 to 2, allowing siege to break through weaker buildings more quickly.
• Edit: I forgot to mention that cavalry receive a 30% damage debuff vs buildings, which mirrors their existing 30% capture attack debuff.

It is my understanding that something along the lines of the last paragraph was intended to come with attacking buildings by default, so we can see what gameplay effects this has. From my own testing, destroying a building is roughly as good as capturing with the same number of units, but buildings don't regen health like they do capture points, so attacking buildings would be better than capturing if there are defending units.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

Ok, its not on the mod downloader yet, but you can download here if you want it now.

 

Ok its on the downloader now.

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

• Buildings are more difficult to capture while empty.
  • Base building capture point regen: 0.5 -> 5.
  • CC capture point regen: 5 -> 20
  • Fort capture point regen: 10 -> 30
  • What this means is you will need a larger capturing advantage over the defender in order to start bringing down capture points.
• Buildings (except for CCs and Fortresses) are easier to destroy without siege.
  • Hack and Pierce armor are both decreased, so ranged units will now be able to damage buildings, just not as well as melee units.
  • For some buildings, crush armor is decreased from 3 to 2, allowing siege to break through weaker buildings more quickly.

Thanks, all great and needed changes. Needing siege for every single building, including towers, is just a waste of time. Attack priority change is more of a bug fix, than a change, IMO.

2 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Ok, its not on the mod downloader yet, but you can download here if you want it now.

Just wanted to ask about it, then I saw this. Thanks.

I'll try it, already have community maps mod for a while.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

4 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

Attack priority change is more of a bug fix, than a change, IMO.

Well hopefully it will be eventually. I did some 1v1s today with it and it turned out that a bug exists.

5 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Here are the main changes:

• Units no longer get "stuck" attacking low preference units, like buildings. When attacking buildings without player intention, they will check for higher preference units each time they attack. If you told them to attack a building, this does not occur.

This change is reverted with version 0.27.1 because there was a bug. I'll need to troubleshoot it. 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

there might be some issues with the mod downloader at the moment. In the meantime, you can download it from gitea, mod.io, or right here:

community-mod.zip

[Guest]

After a few rounds of testing, I've noticed that I'm staying in P2 for much longer now. There is no longer a rush to go for p3 just to get siege weapons.

CS armies are now more viable as you don't need a strong capture attack anymore to do major damage to the opponent. A buff to base building capture point regeneration further underscores this shift. Armies that have troops that do crush damage (like Persians with their Cavalry Axemen) can sometime even skip going into P3 altogether.

[Fabius]

I have rarely felt that the overbearing need to rush third phase was because I needed siege to break an opponents buildings, it was because I needed to get champions out quicker than my opponent. Siege is just a nice afterthought, and with the threat level of any building that shoots arrows now practically zero, siege is reserved to sniping rams and border annoyance. 

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, Fabius said:

with the threat level of any building that shoots arrows now practically zero

Except the Forts and CCs, as their armor was not touched.

I agree about the champions, it's just that they are expensive and take a lot of time to mass. Now that my enemy can't just mass towers and be safe, I can rely more on CS armies to do the job.

[Fabius]

1 hour ago, Deicide4u said:

Except the Forts and CCs, as their armor was not touched.

that is nice for staying power, but armies of ranged citizens can camp under fully garrisoned forts, which highlights that they are now quite useless at area denial, therefore not worth the investment unless you need a tech which is basically just an added cost to whatever tech you wanted to begin with, or a hero. You are better off putting the stone into walls and catapults which will impede an opponent

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, Fabius said:

(forts) not worth the investment

Murder Holes are a must if you intend to build any. Without that tech, they are just a nice decoration.

14 minutes ago, Fabius said:

You are better off putting the stone into walls and catapults which will impede an opponent

Ah, I haven't thought much about using walls. Mainly because I prefer Forts with Murder holes. A reflex passed over from AoE2.

Edited May 5, 2025 by Deicide4u

[Fabius]

I recently came across this video on Lanciarii, link below for interested parties, and I was curious as to whether this fell within the scope of the current 0 AD time frame.

I have two ideas for a Lanciari unit type, both assume a link with Marian Reforms. Eg unlocked by it and having the legionary keyword.

The first would be either to revive the old champion skirmisher that used to be present in A23 but was cut entirely from A24 onwards, and have them as an upgrade to legionary skirmishers or a separate entity you train from relevant buildings.

A second idea and more unique would be to utilise The Persian immortal template and make a champion unit that switches between javelin and sword. The idea of giving the ranged version a small multiplier against cavalry also came to mind.