Introducing the Official community mod for Alpha 26

[wraitii]

23 hours ago, alre said:

there is currently a problem of adoption of the mod.

I think people need to enable it in MP, then people will see that others have it and download it.

[chrstgtr]

1 hour ago, wraitii said:

I think people need to enable it in MP, then people will see that others have it and download it.

Can it be downloaded within the game? Some mods got that in a23 and that really helped adoption 

 

another big problem is that people want to download mods, but don’t know where. Players with link the mod in MP chat/lobby, but there is no link feature that allows players to copy text. As a result, players see a 100 character link and give up. A /link command, like autociv has, would help get over this hurdle

Edited October 1, 2022 by chrstgtr

[Stan`]

2 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

Can it be downloaded within the game? Some mods got that in a23 and that really helped adoption 

Yeah of course That's the whole thing :

[LetswaveaBook]

I hope the community mod can address this issue.

 

[Stan`]

Well it's not some magical fix to everything but everyone can contribute to it.

[Lion.Kanzen]

On 01/10/2022 at 1:09 AM, wraitii said:

I think people need to enable it in MP, then people will see that others have it and download it.

It would be good that our youtubers and top players will adopt it.

In order to adopt it , they could create tournaments and seasons, each season is a new update.

[Stan`]

22 minutes ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

It would be good that our youtubers and top players will adopt it.

In order to adopt it , they could create tournaments and seasons, each season is a new update.

There might be multiple updates in a week, so it seems a bit short.

[Lion.Kanzen]

Just now, Stan` said:

There might be multiple updates in a week, so it seems a bit short.

but that's exactly why I say it. make updates fast.

But for multiplaye andr tournaments the updates come in packages[each month(?)].

This way people would have updates faster and almost every month.

Like these trendy online games  that the updates are every season.

Example. Clash royale( smart phone card strategy gaming)

each season represents a set of balance changes that are first consulted with the community.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

4 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:

I hope the community mod can address this issue.

 

I think this is a fairly intricate gameplay issue. (i wouldn't really even consider it an issue, more of an area for improvement). I think we have tried to add more phase 2 and village phase options for attacking, but the "boom meta" remains.

the community mod can address the issue, but there will need to be agreement from plenty of us in order to add things, so we may as well discuss here:

1. Firstly, I think we should continue to add interesting strategies for p2 attacks. @borg- has already written a large patch for Sparta, this could possibly be added to the community mod, although I am not sure how much content is too much for the mod.

• On this note, I made a set of unit specific upgrades that give certain advantages over your opponents, this would undoubtedly add offensive options in p2.

2. @ValihrAnt is mostly correct about booming = turtling, mainly that a boom using citizen-soldiers puts you in a good defensive and offensive position. I think we could adjust women's gather rate stats to equal citizen soldiers for certain resources, but another option could be to add a new economic unit to all (maybe not all) civs:

some sort of worker, peon, slave, serf type unit.

I imagine this unit would have a slightly different cost to women, maybe 50 food and some other resource (maybe 10 metal, wood).

the important thing would be to make it as weak as women, but with a different set of gather rates, perhaps more emphasis on wood, metal, and stone. (1.00 wood, .75 stone, .75 metal)

what are your thoughts? 

personally, I am unsure about the serf unit, I am not sure if the complication to gameplay is worth the potential benefit.

Edited October 2, 2022 by real_tabasco_sauce

[Lion.Kanzen]

2 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

 

some sort of worker, peon, slave, serf type unit.

I imagine this unit would have a slightly different cost to women, maybe 50 food and some other resource (maybe 10 metal, wood).

the important thing would be to make it as weak as women, but with a different set of gather rates, perhaps more emphasis on wood, metal, and stone. (1.00 wood, .75 stone, .75 metal)

what are your thoughts? 

personally, I am unsure about the serf unit, I am not sure if the complication to gameplay is worth the potential benefit.

I agree, ancient societies were slave-owning. whatever you call them is fine with me.In delenda est this idea works well.

they are second phase units and it allows you to have fewer citizens working.

[Graham1]

I've not used mods before, so could you explain how these work. For example, this mod is going to fix an issue I'm having with the game crashing on startup. Are these mods configurable? What I am concerned about is that there seems to be a lot of changes going into this mod, but will this alter the original gameplay or does this just fix issues? (like a service pack).

[Stan`]

16 minutes ago, Graham1 said:

I've not used mods before, so could you explain how these work. For example, this mod is going to fix an issue I'm having with the game crashing on startup. Are these mods configurable? What I am concerned about is that there seems to be a lot of changes going into this mod, but will this alter the original gameplay or does this just fix issues? (like a service pack).

This might alter gameplay to make it more balanced, which can be considered fixes.

[LetswaveaBook]

19 minutes ago, Graham1 said:

I've not used mods before, so could you explain how these work. For example, this mod is going to fix an issue I'm having with the game crashing on startup. Are these mods configurable? What I am concerned about is that there seems to be a lot of changes going into this mod, but will this alter the original gameplay or does this just fix issues? (like a service pack).

The easiest way to get into modding is this: Go in the main menu to option>mod selection>download mods. There you can choose some mods. Once you downloaded it, it will be saved on your PC.

Once you located the mod, you can check how they look. A mod is a folder in the correct place on your machine with a mod.json file. The further structure of the mod is the same as the correct 0ad game. If you for example place an edited file named template_unit_cavalry_melee_axeman.xml in your mod in the simulation/templates folder, then the edited file will "replace" the regular file and the axe cav will get edited features.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

3 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

I imagine this unit would have a slightly different cost to women, maybe 50 food and some other resource (maybe 10 metal, wood).

the important thing would be to make it as weak as women, but with a different set of gather rates, perhaps more emphasis on wood, metal, and stone. (1.00 wood, .75 stone, .75 metal)

what are your thoughts? 

personally, I am unsure about the serf unit, I am not sure if the complication to gameplay is worth the potential benefit.

I think a serf unit would be best designed if it was distinctly a better economic unit than the citizen soldier. This will mean that the citizen soldiers' economic role will become more secondary, and that the standard "boom" we see from players will be more focused on women and serf/slave units rather than just citizen soldiers, leaving citizen soldiers open to do battle without rapidly losing their economic value by either dying or being idle. Also, CCs would become a more economic building with this change due to the barracks being de-throned as the main economic building.

I think there are a variety of different peoples ideas to achieve the same thing, and I think this would be an addition that would stay out of the community mod at least for now.

I think the slave/serf becoming a cc trainable unit upon reaching p2 with 70 hp and same attack/armor stats as women would be ideal. Gather rates of .85 wood, .70 stone, .70 metal (a bit less than @real_tabasco_sauce said). I think it should cost 65 food and 15 metal so that they can't be spammed as easily from early berries/hunt eco. Train times for the unit should be the same as CS I think.

[Graham1]

52 minutes ago, Stan` said:

This might alter gameplay to make it more balanced, which can be considered fixes.

Regarding the community mod, will it update itself (once downloaded) or do you need to update manually on each release?

[Graham1]

44 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

The easiest way to get into modding is this: Go in the main menu to option>mod selection>download mods. There you can choose some mods. Once you downloaded it, it will be saved on your PC.

Once you located the mod, you can check how they look. A mod is a folder in the correct place on your machine with a mod.json file. The further structure of the mod is the same as the correct 0ad game. If you for example place an edited file named template_unit_cavalry_melee_axeman.xml in your mod in the simulation/templates folder, then the edited file will "replace" the regular file and the axe cav will get edited features.

I've noticed that the community mod is already available. Will this fix my issue (error on starting games) or do I need to wait for the next release?

[Stan`]

1 minute ago, Graham1 said:

Regarding the community mod, will it update itself (once downloaded) or do you need to update manually on each release?

Sadly it's manually. However it's much smaller than a full 0 A.D. release

[real_tabasco_sauce]

some other things that could easily go in the community mod:

seleucid civ bonus, updated team bonuses.

agis aura (other heroes too),

CC territory, cost changes.

[alre]

I like the idea of using the community mod for experimenting noticeable gameplay changes, but we are getting ahead of ourselves:

- did the community adopt the mod yet?

- before introducing big changes, we should give players a couple of months for testing a26.

[Guest]

On 18/06/2022 at 9:58 AM, wraitii said:

LINK: https://gitlab.com/0ad/0ad-community-mod-a26

I don't get the point to suffix a26 in the git repo name (a26 should rather be a branch or a tag).

[Stan`]

36 minutes ago, rm -rf said:

I don't get the point to suffix a26 in the git repo name (a26 should rather be a branch or a tag).

As stated earlier there is no guarantee that anything from the mod will be kept/backported. So it's possible a new one will be created after that. And if you drop everything there is no point of keeping the same repo.

[Lion.Kanzen]

you are convincing me with this idea of being a pseudo updater or quasi updater.

imagine the following.

There would be August updates and every season there would be balance changes.

that's how these games manage to stay.

Stanislas de a about updating it weekly.

 And if we upload a balance update every month.

But for certain volunteers we update the ring fast here.

Like Windows or other games.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/change-to-the-fast-ring-for-more-frequent-windows-10-preview-updates/

Preview update could be called the weekly ones.

Edited October 3, 2022 by Lion.Kanzen

[Kampot]

@Stan`@wraitii

Current problem with community-mod is that is not "default" setup for all players. So if anyone host without it  (and it will because majority players ignores it) there will no be much will do follow it. Community-mod should be automatically forced since new release is pushed. It was crafted to avoid "releasing new alphas" while just minor fixes required. In this part 0ad team has failed. How to resolve it probably needs time, I hope this feedback will let them to "try address it" if not we have to support it from players base at least.

PS: Announcement box is not enough, many players not on forum

Also maybe you need 2 mods, one for minor fixes auto-pushed (static) - reviewed and stable changes before new alphas will be announced,  and one for just "testing" balancing scenarios (might be more variable and buggy) possibly not forced at all. 

_{My Hosted Games will be only with community-mod enabled .} 

_{And I call others to follow!}

 

Edited October 5, 2022 by Kampot
typos

[wraitii]

52 minutes ago, Kampot said:

It was crafted to avoid "releasing new alphas" while just minor fixes required.

Err, not really. It was created to make the job of balancing the game easier and allow the community a more obvious place to contribute gameplay effort.
It happens to be an obvious place to fix some issues that we've missed as well, but we don't intend to use it as an auto-updater, because it cannot be one.

The main problem is that we currently have no automatic download of the latest version of the mod.

--

Anyways, for now it remains not super useful -> I am looking forward to gameplay balance and contributions there, though possibly Alpha 26 is perfectly balanced

[seeh]

i have sync errors if i in the game (as observer). i was updating the git then and build and again sync error. hmm.

solved my feldmap vesion was to old

Edited October 5, 2022 by seeh