So it seems there would be now two distinct groups of resources. The primary group directly adjacent to the CC, starting animals, small forest, berries and two mines. And a secondary group somewhat far away but still part of the greater player base. Neutral resources would be outside of the greater area I suppose.

Indeed that's the goal (this emulates fairly well former mainland gameplay except this time resources are balanced)

In D4232#201256, @marder wrote:

Just some random meta comments:

There are enough forum threads of people wanting balanced maps that we should definitively do something for a27.

my biggest question is to what extent should things be balanced?

We already have the 'basic' balance of the normal starting animals + straggler trees. Funny enough, many of the new scenario maps don't even have this anymore.
This patch aims to also balance the hunt in the surrounding area (and maybe in the future also the surrounding forests)
We have some symmetrical maps proposals which make 'everything' balanced, while still having random looks: D4053 or https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/85756-fair-multiplayer-random-map/
And we also have the multiplayer who just want a flat perfect balance plane: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/83077-map-balanced-plainland/

So I'm not sure what the right balance is between randomness and balance / or what people want.
Should we go after all of the approaches? I.e. have some symmetrical maps, have a flat plane for people who don't like pretty things and try to include something like intermediate area balancing/ this patch?
Or should we choose one and stick to it?

In D4232#200536, @lyv wrote:

I am not sure if this is actually going to be that usable unless the map scripts are explicitly designed to be balanced. And having the overall balance of it tweaked via Gamesettings seems somewhat ineffective. Having the option doesn't really matter if the underlying generation isn't updated too.

I generally dislike having too much options as well since it essentially creates two branches of code. And while balance is important, so is imbalance.

I propose making actual balanced maps, starting with D4053, and your balanced mainland, under a new keyword, "Balanced".

Then again, balance and resource balance are also not the same thing. And the patch Is specific to food, as you see, this quickly spirals to the point where trying to plug this into existing maps as a knob in gamesettings isn't enough and you end up rewriting the map anyway.

Feel free to argue for the concept, nothing is set in stone. Read "requested changes" as "requested for comments".

In D4232#192239, @marder wrote:

Makes sense, but I think that's not what you would expect when reading the description : Every team will receive the same amount of resources overall sounds to me like they actually get the exact same amount. So maybe that would need to be rephrased.

In D4232#192236, @marder wrote:

after a quick test: It does work as advertised with player balance and no balance, but the team placement seems a bit less reliable?
What is the expected result in a 1v3 for example?

Of course if there is a new patch to add mainland balanced, it would have to be much smaller and include only that map.
The reason biomes were duplicated was so I could remove the Jungle biome, IIRC it was quite laggy, but of course that would not be something I do if Mainland Balanced gets included in the game.

The ideas I had to make biomes look better was to first of all let them describe more resources, like @wowgetoffyourcellphone did. Some resource/decoration type could be left blank if the biome doesn't feature them and from there, the biome tries to describe as much stuff as possible. And behind this, the map maker would implement as much as they need/want.
This would make map scripts more complex in general (so I guess against what @smiley said if I understood correctly), but well I feel like many random maps currently in the game lack refinement.

Thanks :) Yes I agree that the snow distribution is subotimal, the problem is the the new snow textures don't blend well with other textures, therefore it is hard to reach a natural looking result either way. But I can try the ways you proposed.
It should be noted however, that the current distribution is at least semi realistic. When the first snow falls, the forest floor is usually not covered, as the snow fall on the trees and melts there with the next sunshine.
In spring it is the other way round: snow stars to melt on open ground as the sun shines on it, but the snow that has fallen over the course of the winter inside the forest is covered in shade and survives longer.

That's a nice rework of the map, I like the concept of the new biomes.

In D4232#181200, @marder wrote:

To throw it into the discussion here, because it seems related,
This map could solve balancing resources:
https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4053

Resource distribution has been moved to player.js, where base resources are done.

Updated, now the function works as I intended.

Yes indeed this is what I had in mind.

Here I used the function scaleByMapArea in mainland and I will explain my changes and my non-changes.

• The terrain textures currently scale by map size, however not only their quantity, but also their size scale with map size, so by the same argument used with forests earlier in this patch discussion, even if it is possible to reach a good and natural result using scaling with map area, it is not immediately obvious how to reach it, so I didn't modify this
• The placement of hunt and berry patches only scale with the number of players. As a consequence it looks unnatural, if I generate a 1v1 in giant size the map will be almost empty of hunt and berry patch, and the probability that one of these resources spawn next to a player is very low. Like I justified in this patch, resource placement would be an improvement using scaling with map area, however since it will be even better with my other player resource balancing patch I decided not to change it yet.
• The placement of decorative actors scales with map size, and looking at the values it looks like the intent was to preserve the density with map sizes. However it will always be imperfect using linear interpolation as explained in the patch summary. See how straightforward the conversion to using map area was, and how I didn't need to tune a 'max 'argument.

It should be checked if this is really required. Example maps might convince.

From a technical standpoint, I guess you are trying to replicate AoE2 style distribution where the base resources of berries, 2 boars, etc. In that case, rather than making a swiss army knife of a function for N cases, it might be better to incorporate this into player placement.

In my opinion this just forces a particular type of game

It forces nothing as soon as the meta is different than (rush OR p3 boom with timing attack), which it arguably already is in a25

If you have more berries, then a rush of any type is more likely. If you have more hunt then a rush of any type is more likely.

It is more likely... but it is far from guaranteed. So, if you play in this balanced map and you see you have 1 or 2 patches of berry other than the starting one, what are you going to do? Judge that a rush is more likely, decide to skip scouting, and make more men early and risk being at a disadvantage if the opponent decides to go full boom? Looks like scouting is still useful. Even without additional resources, scouting how much commitment an opponent has booming can still be useful, I have a good replay which shows that.

Additionally, another way to make rushing less predictable in game, would be to have hunt being useful to things different than rush, say booming, or corralling.

In D4232#179859, @chrstgtr wrote:

In D4232#179849, @Feldfeld wrote:

In D4232#179836, @Freagarach wrote:

It would make it easier for potential reviewers to take a look at your patch if you would provide context. :)
(And set the repository to 0 A.D. when uploading.)

If it is what you mean, the context is that the multiplayer community is interested in the balance of the game, and map balancing is an important part of it. Since mainland is the most standard map played online, it is the first map getting changed in this patch.
The biggest cause of imbalance in multiplayer games is the availability of additionnal food near the player base. Because this food is faster to gather than say fields, and because it can facilitate strategies such as cavalry rushing, you can see there is an interest of having each player get a similar amount of food around his base.

For what it is worth, "imbalanced" res actually makes games much more fun for me. If everyone has the same food, especially if I know what type of food, then I can make a pretty good prediction as to whether or not I will be rushed. For example, look at games on African Plains. Everyone knows there is a ton of hunt. Everyone knows a lot of hunt means that a rush is likely. As a result, everyone makes a ton of men/cav early. Is that balanced? Sure. Do I know whether a rush is coming? Pretty close. Is that more fun than an unpredictable game? I don't think so. And I think the fact that African Plains is now a rarely played map reflects the fact that this isn't something that multiplayer community actually wants. This has been a compliant that has been repeated with respect to the balanced maps mod.

Personally, I would prefer if teams--not players-- had more balanced resources. That way the unpredictable, fun nature of the game is preserved while enhancing balance. Team balancing would also fix the 1v1 problem of imb resources because that would still be two different teams.

In D4232#179836, @Freagarach wrote:

It would make it easier for potential reviewers to take a look at your patch if you would provide context. :)
(And set the repository to 0 A.D. when uploading.)

Handle square maps

Is it different though? It would make just as much sense to scale forest sizes with areas.

Fixed a bug which could trigger errors on placing players initial resources, and could slow down loading time. Now the map generation should be very reliable.
Added winter biome, and 3 environmental presets that go with it: Sunny, Snowy and Night. For now they are chosen at random. I am not fully sure that I know what I'm doing with environmental settings.
Here is how the map looks like now:

New terrains. Might make a winter biome, and possibly also something more elaborated later on.

• Flood fill now avoids the map border
• Now nomad generations always have enough space
• Better wood generation
• Updated a few gaia entities in reaction to the terrain and map overhaul, however I didn't change terrain, but I am open to suggestions for that.

Update: use flood fill to get an area instead of only connectivity check.

Considering this patch as a standalone (ignoring major gameplay changes that could happen), and from a multiplayer gameplay POV:

• From the few games I played up to now in a24, I would say that in 1v1 mainland, both strategies (making a new Civic Center in town phase, against going straight to city phase without building a new CC) are good depending on the situation. Note that for the 2nd strategy, still building a new CC in the city phase will probably be needed.
• However in teamgames played in mainland expanding with a new CC is generally not worth it.
• That said many maps other than mainland reward expansion.

where one player can be basically entirely surrounded by mountains except for a minor passage near the border, things like that

It is in my plans to add a constraint so that the flood fill passage can't be near the border because indeed that can hurt gameplay.
I will also try to guarantee bigger passages but I don't know to which extent I can go without making the loading time too long.

Rebased

In D3538#155144, @wraitii wrote:

I'm OK with committing this if you're confident in the values. They seem sensible to me.
For reference, bireme is 800 health, trireme 1400, quinquereme 2000, meaning it now takes one additional fire ship death to destroy them.

Not really. We had two +10% cavalry speed technologies, now only one +10%. Before we had a +20% health increase for all cavalry, now it affects only champion cavalry and a new one with +10% health.

Fair points. The speed technologies were quite expensive though.

In general the ranged cavalry was very nerfed compared to the a23. Now you need stables for mass training, range and attack is reduced, spear cavalry has its bonus increased and sword cavalry is more effective against ranged units, including cavalry of course.

To compensate there are 2 new technologies for cavalry (speed and health) whereas infantry doesn't get any of this. Also now forge technologies that affect cavalry also affects infantry so it makes it a bit easier for cav player since sometimes they will want to fight with infantry too.
The train time of cavalry has been relatively reduced compared to infantry (+2 seconds for infantry when they were at 10, +1 second for cavalry when they were at 15 iirc) so it makes them easier to mass. Also persian for example has 2 technologies that reduces train time by 10% for archer cav
Range is reduced but spread as well so they are more accurate.
The formation change makes it easier to hit and run.

Good for me, the fire values before the patch had very little effect.

I think Freagarach's values are a bit more natural, it makes fire damage more continuous.

I used svn's context menu on windows.
I asked someone else and they also could apply the patch just fine so no problem.

Can do that.

Rebased

This is blatantly untrue. They had 150 crush / 1.5 s in A21, A22, A23 and still do in A24.

I guess borg looked at roman ram and forgot about the bonus. That number also felt familiar to me.
I'm also fine with not changing because of the new siege technologies and also because after all there were a lot of complaints about rams in a23

I had this error on applying the patch:

I think there is an issue with the patch (file path)

I see. Then just in case I will do some experiments with the new values I think.

Indeed as of right now siege technologies are almost never researched. Looking at the modifications the new values seem good, nothing will be broken.

Indeed as of right now iber champion cavalry's fire damage has very little effect. I like the proposals in this patch, either borg or Freagarach values
That said are Freagarach's values really equivalent? For example if an iber champion cavalry constantly attacks a building, is the 'Duration' constantly extended or something different happens?

I agree with this line of thought (there's also the fact that if a bunch of sword champions are garrisoned in a fortress for exemple, and that a ram attack if, then they can unload, melt it in 1-2 seconds and go back in)
That said their cost was a bit reduced. Just in case I'll try to talk to Valihrant today about this patch.

I like this patch because it goes well with the defense upgrades rework that is already in, and it will not (or at least, less) lock players into an army composition they invested in (like they can switch from cav to infantry and vice versa if they have to)
That said the first technology might be a bit expensive but I think it's an improvement.

Good for me.
The reason I want to see this in a24 is that it will act as a buff to corraling, encouraging players to consider this option.

My proposition.
I think I remember Valihrant agreeing with that too when we played a game.

Oh and yes, I think it would be a good call to raise cattle time like you said

Indeed they are, I rather like it, but since this patch goes a little bit against my policy which is to be careful of patches that could change balance in a not 100% known way just before balancing freeze, I would invite other players to state if they feel it's dangerous

Could you elaborate? I'm confused now, 25% of what? And 20 to 40 s looks better than 30 to 60 s, doesn't it?

When writing this post I didn't see that you already modified the patch, but I meant a 25% reduction from animals original training time.
Now the new values are a buff of corrals, which I'm good with. However I don't know the stance of other players about it.

I initiated the idea of reducing range because my feeling was that archers were possibly too strong, and that it would also make the game a bit nicer (and also fixed buildings range).
My fears for this patch is that it will have unknown effects for balance, it could change quite a bit the balance between ranged units, and we don't have the time or the means to do proper tests for a24

It could work, although i'd prefer 25%, but I think an additionnal problem with this approach is that train time values are supposed to look good in the beginning if you see what I mean

If the question is between having a cost or not for this tech, I'm fine with anything I guess. I'd also have been fine with keeping training in fortress.

This patch nerfs corralling to the ground (and it was already difficult and arguably subpar against farming). There needs to be some compensation, like reducing base animal training stats by quite a bit (like the values after researching the technology that is getting removed)

I'll copy my arguments from the balancing PM here:
"2 things changed that lead toward the same effects: the effect of economy technologies have been increased a lot for the early phases of the game (from +15% to +25% for anything that is not food, +15% to +20% for food I believe). Secondly, the train time of citizen soldiers and women also increased.

Adjusted player placement so that they spawn further apart (on low player numbers) which reduces the imbalance in player positions.
I didn't yet replace the unreachable trees on mountains by their actor variation, because some of them are placed with a TerrainPainter which requires a template.

Adjusted values in previously deprecated functions

Well probably not actually otherwise the deprecated functions placeholder wouldn't be needed. Plus I just reread the ticket so indeed there is no equivalence. I'll adjust the values if necessary

If I recall from my whacky memories, createObjectGroupsDeprecated is equivalent to a createObjectGroups call with a retryFactor of 0, is that correct?

Bug fix required for D2830 to work.

Hi, after I realized that the look of this version of the map might not be as bad as I thought back then, I decided to rebase it to open it once again for feedback.
When evaluating the look of the map I recommend to sometimes generate it with the fog of war, as seeing it from a players perspective can be different from having all revealed.

In a21 where champions were more used, spartan and macedonian champions were quite popular with the previous values of the technologies, which encourages me to think the techs shouldn't be buffed too much.

I also wondered why they were the same when I started the game. The values look good to me. Still ping @borg-

Understandably so. If the train time is removed then the tech should at least cost equal amount of resources than the macedonian silver shields (like now)

I'm fine with it too but the fact that macedonian champions are almost equal to spartan ones, but train 10% faster bothers me a bit but arguably this is compensated by tech cost.

Discard the preceding post, it was not up to date. The changes look good to me

I completely missed that he changed the stats (had probably another version in mind), then it is fine. Now spartan champion might be a little bit too strong but this is probably fine.

In D2846#122473, @Stan wrote:

@Feldfeld care to accept again if it's good?

The changes are good for war horses
For silvershields, the tech will still remain better than the spartan agoge. (macedonian spear champion remain a little bit stronger and train faster than the spartan equivalent after the techs). This is not necessarily a problem by itself but I just want that this is recognized before accepting the patch.

Feel free to suggest different values.

I would suggest not to change champion elephant stat so as to keep current balance for them (which has been achieved by the patch I linked)

I don't understand (in particular the values @borg- suggested), this nullifies half of the work done in D2575(@ValihrAnt). Having hack attack is justified by elephants being good against humans, the walk speed could be justified by armor values (but I can understand why we would want it to be the same as other elephants, that works too).

In D2854#122354, @Nescio wrote:

Does it affect the regeneration rate of all buildings ?

No, not all structures, only centres, colonies, and crannogs are affected by these technologies:
"affects": ["CivilCentre"],

Does it affect the regeneration rate of all buildings ?

The changes are good. Small thing to note though, this makes the upgrade arguably inferior to the macedonian silver shields upgrade (especially for the train time increase). I don't know if this should be considered a problem or not.

After quick playtest I don't think it will have much impact on gameplay for everything not related to combat. For combat (raiding in particular) there might be a need for multiplayer testgames to get a better feel of it.

I think that this nerfs dance up to a reasonable point. Here are some details I got from my testing :
First note that when testing (for everyone that is interested in that) it's important to know the difference between singleplayer and multiplayer. In multiplayer, IIRC there is 1 turn every 0.5 seconds (which makes traditional dancing easier). In singleplayer, things are much smoother. When testing, you should go multiplayer -> Host game (even if no other human players will join you).

• There is one variant of dancing i came up with trying to break this patch, however it works only in singleplayer, not in multiplayer (because somehow this requires perfect timing). It consists in clicking a resource and then repeatly hit the stop hotkey, then back to work hotkey, then stop hotkey again etc. Works a bit differently between attack stances and no attack stances. As i said it shouldn't be a problem but i say it just in case.
• Even if formation dancing is not fixed this should be less of a problem (because it is easier to call out formation dancing) but some players that don't care could still do it i guess.
• Other than that it is still possible to dance between resources (depending on the situation this can require good accuracy from the player though) but despite that it's still good to not waste time turning going for ressources / buildings for the gameplay I think. That also is made a bit easier to call out, and impossible to do for heroes, very situational for cavalry. Dancing with infantry citizen soldiers is harder due to low speed and HP. (But in the end still possible).

In D2821#122209, @borg- wrote:

What about increase cost of brit stable to 300w? since can train dogs now.

This can be an interesting idea to nerf celtic civilisations. One thing to discuss would be if that makes sense to make a separation when the justification of that tech is for celtic structures. I would be interested in the opinions of Valihrant and borg on this.
Also, just to makes sure, does that give back the 5 population increase on docks for gauls ?

Units don't get increases in other stats (e.g. armour, attack damage, resource gather rates) automatically from phasing up, separate technologies are for that, so why should phases increase citizen health?

They shouldn't necessarily do that, but all current numbers for balancing depend more or less from that. Removing health increase will nerf citizen soldiers and can lead to unknown consequences

Looks good

Different players have different play styles. Not everyone is interested in competitive multiplayer. Many people are perfectly happy with single-player vs the Petra AI.
The point is that these phase stat increases strongly favour a particular play style, punishing players wanting to explore different strategies.

But isn't that the point of gameplay balancing ? By removing the scaling of RegenRate you will either heavily favour focusing on capturing things in the late game, or you will make trying to capture useless in early game, or maybe both. It will punish players wanting to try different strategies and, if that turns out to be a balance problem, could lead to the usual complaints on the forum, which should also be perfectly valid for single players, and that will be a bit different than "I'm in the Village phase and researched 0 technologies, my opponent is in City phase, and I die, how could this be happening?". Plus I don't think think this prevents players to go with other strategies if they ever wish to. They can stay in the Village phase for a long time if they ever wish to, but first, they should expect it to be inferior, and then, if they don't want to compensate with some other smart ressource spending choices (like training more soldiers), they should reduce the level of the AI. Plus, the AI should be quite bad at exploiting players weaknesses.

In D2845#122074, @Nescio wrote:

For me it makes sense that regeneration rate scales through the game. As a game advances the attacker will be able to output more capture power while the defender will not be able to garrison much more units. The current values seem good now.

The problem with this is that it effectively means a severe penalty for everyone who's not advanced to the city phase. Suppose player A rushes to city phase and player B stays in village phase. Then if A attacks B, each garrisoned unit equals one champion; if B attacks A, each garrisoned unit equals ten citizen soldiers.

Good changes. I still kind of wish small pyramid to be just a little bit cheaper but new values are an improvement.
The monumental architecture technology, either before or after the patch will probably not be used much, but it's good that it got cheaper.

For me it makes sense that regeneration rate scales through the game. As a game advances the attacker will be able to output more capture power while the defender will not be able to garrison much more units. The current values seem good now.
For the health change, I don't know. This is an indirect buff to champions, towers and fortresses and it is difficult to see how gameplay will be changed.
I don't consider phasing up to be too strong now. Players can decide to phase up earlier when they expect fights to happen for the HP increase, but that's an investment of a good amount of ressources that could be spent somewhere else. The primary benefit of phasing up is unlocking economic techs in current meta (it is also often motivated by territory increase in 1v1s). This could change a bit depending of how the game changes of course but I think right now it's in a good position.
The changes of territorial increase could decrease just a bit the interest of expanding with another CC in town phase but nothing crazy.

The only technologies that do are advanced_unit_bonus.json, elite_unit_bonus.json, and special_war_horses.json

There are the phasing tech that give HP bonus. That brings spear cavalry to over 300 HP if advanced and about 360 HP if elite.

{ "value": "Heal/HP", "add": 5, "affects": "Healer" },
is rather excessive (basic healers have a value of 5). Could you replace it with e.g.

		{ "value": "Heal/Rate", "multiply": 0.8 }?

I think that indeed basic healers are too weak but promoted healers are probably too strong, maybe overall changes could be done in another patch. I think @borg- had ideas for them.

Also the consistency is not strictly held through all the game. There is special_colonisation.json for Carthage, and special_hellenistic_metropolis.json that doubles the HP of civil centres (but is quite specific)

In D2792#121841, @wraitii wrote:

I have personally always disliked our promotion system. It gives no real choice to the player, and it stems from a weird vision of historical perspective where people would be more or less specialised towards combat, but this is completely inaccurate anyways -> the warfare division was generally based on social class, not on 'experience'.

My question is simple -> Are the current values of these techs actually a problem in-game? I would agree that in general I would expect most melee units to die anyways, so promotions seems irrelevant.
If it's simply a change because you dislike the promotion system, I would actually go all the way and simply remove it entirely.

If it's a necessary balance change, then I would like to see some more motivation for it in the comments.

Just in case, I'm waiting for either a consensus or a decision by @FeXoR before updating my patch. I saw P212
This patch was intended as a connectivity test but I'm fine with changing it to return an Area.
The reason I didn't check against constraints instead of Tileclasses was because I didn't check how they worked under the hood (and, again, I wanted quickly something to work with my map), but that sounds better indeed.