Discuss it there: [Status] Functionality Wishlist Proposals & Discussion

Legend: JavaScript . JavaScript&C++/uncertain C++ The darker the color the more mature Low priorityColour => solved + (references/credits/working on it)<-- comment

See also: Gameplay Feature Status (trac)

• HybridAI (purely additivie ontop of wraitii's + mimo's + agentx's Aegis+Petra+HannibalAI efforts, introduces first person view, subdueing other civs and to allow for civil wars or rebellion, among others, see below), (agentx, Radagast)
• Campaigning (Triggers), [ticket+tutorial] (Spahbod, Sander, leper) [execute javascript on any possible event!]
  (for building a storyline, this trigger needs to allow being registered within AIs/Players too. e.g. if you reach this fjord/bay, then this should trigger/dispatch a message to an AI to rais e alarm. Just as an example.).
• Collosseum (gladiators, battle reenactments),
• Mod manager -> Mod Downloader (Radagast) + Mod Configurator (Itms, leper, Radagast),
• Supply lines (Niektb, Agentx, Radagast),
• Transformation Component
  • Capturing (slaves, a texture/actor selection change, can also change the model once captured, though continuing the old activity when captured will make trouble, stop instead, keep stats of old player if possible), (Radagast)
  • Surrender system (Radagast)
  • Conversion (e.g. converting priest) [repository], (Idanwin, Radagast)
  • Un-/Packing entities,
• Coralling/herding [ticket] (see also entity on entity for garrisoning as prop), (Radagast)
  
  
• Mercenary system ,
• Seasons (Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn), (Radagast)
• Night/day cycles (Visual), (Radagast)
• Time (comes with Hybrid AI), (Radagast)
• Aging units, (Radagast)
• Moving from ship to ship (jumping without animation), (Radagast)
• Battle on ship,
• Ships ramming each other causes damage,
• Weather (especially crucial in naval battles and in winter as your siege structures might get stuck in the snow while crossing the mountains, particles as to newest consense. Also additional visual terrain layer for flooding + heaps of snow.), (Radagast)
• Walkable Entities (optional: make Pathfinder find path over entities.)
  • Bridges
  • Walkable walls (dynamic position). (if the 1x1 pathfinder finds its way, where is Philip, we need this guy back in 0AD).
• Construction of eye-candy objects (e.g. fences, trees, bridges ...) [repository], (MuteLovestone)
• Animal reproduction (objects reproducing itself, at first simply following e.g. fibonacci),
• Entity on entity e.g. unit on wall or tree but static. [1][commit], (Sanderd17)
  • Units on walls (as props with static position, but rotation flexible, i.e. turret) [commit 2]] (Sanderd17)
  • Visualize garrisoned units as Props /turrets (allowing to shoot from a tower?).
    
• Special units, like treasure guards or standard bearers whose standard may be captured by enemies,
• Unit variation (Enrique, Mythos_Ruler),
• Minimal unit scale/size variation (not easy to do due to normals creating bright spots), (Sanderd17)
• Children (growing entities with time, has to be logarithm or at least saturating to prevent ever lasting growing - related to unit scale/size variation),
• School/teaching,
• Uphill movement deccelerates, downhill makes entities accelerate, (Radagast)
  
• Introduction of Moral attribute,
• Loyalty attribute (towards mayor/government/chieftain),
• Sympathy attribute (towards elite units),
• Constitution/Stamina attribute,
• Cavalry rework to allow for more realism: moral effect, no deep penetration into enemy lines,
• Changing of weapons,
• Two-handers Automatically put the shield into the inventory.
• Two weapons at a time. More choices. Unit chooses what is available.
• Limited ammunition,
• Collecting of weapons/objects (inventory, related to entity on entity and prop system),
• Using (any) objects as ammunition, e.g. allow slingers to collect stones from the ground, arrows from the battlefields, put it in the ox cart and send it somewhere to unload it ...
  
• Rework armour system
  • More soft counters, less hard counters (Mythos_Ruler, Alpha123, Scythetwirler).
  • More friction between units/armies in battle,
  • Units get wounded quickly once the armour is damaged or did not withstand the force of the enemy thrust.
• Commander system (goes with the Hybrid semi-self-learning AI),
• Goods/resources represented as objects (low priority), Extend resource representation. => Real objects (2D plane or triangle / pyramid or cube mesh).
• (units have to carry resources/goods to the foundations to allow for construction work to proceed).
• Units will need resources (food, water) to live. The more units, the more difficult to feed, making the population cap superfluous. The same is valid for animals.
• Reproduction but nothing to eat means famines and less births (can't be protected because parents have to search the whole day for food).
• Erosion of entities. => Houses that are closer less damage but units move slower especially if in a formation.
• Allow units to modify Height map. e.g. flattening out impassable terrain, digging a well/trap. You may build tunnels if you are besieged and have run out of food.
• Paths, roads, and streets EITHER
  • grow + only visual if units pass this way often OR if the mayor/AI decides to
  • construct roads like walls. (visual effect, functionality troublesome + is not possible with new uniform pathfinder, use vehicles instead or figure out workaround like texture detection or attach invisible vehicle which can only travel on roads (vehicle speed depending on road entity health) to the road) (MuteLovestone)
• Aquaduct water transportation system.
  
• ease History visualisation (like battle reenactment) and simulation.
• Make props attackable/destroyable. [commit] e.g. 1st destroy all props (e.g. researched building-extension towers) then the building. (related to: Allow actor changes on technology research.). (Sanderd17)
• Or the other way round: if the building gets destroyed then the props lay around. (related to inventory, non-endless ammunition, ..)
• Indicate damaged buildings using darker shaders and attaching particles/smoke props.
• Short pathfinder: in a formation only the formation leader executes the range check and should
• change formation according to situation, e.g. if there is a narrow path only, then adapt from a wide to a narrow closely packed formation to pass the bottleneck.
• Formation mod: Units should rotate and be moved/distorted relative to each other on impact with another formation. (use crowd algorithm)
• Allow custom formation shapes at runtime (e.g. define your own formation shapes/rules on the fly ). (Sanderd17)
• Units attacking another army/formation and being battered with arrows should slow down significantly. (Radagast)
• Other than this slowing down effect, the Archers' long range doesn't do a lot of damage. So calculate long-range damage depending on distance.
  
• Units should have the possiblity to dissolve obstructions. i.e. enter through a building's doorstep by removing the interior obstruction (perhaps make door a prop and add hitpoints on a per entity base. --> C++ patch entity on entity.).
• Sun/Planets
• Moon
• Tidal visual system (which should be tackled when we test/work on different water heights). (FeXoR, Sanderd17, Radagast)
• Morale boost units. e.g. Druid, Trumpeter, ... (either a permanent aura, or a triggered aura, or a attack type which directs at single units as we don't have spreaded-/area attack type).
• Resource conversion - like an alchemy type thing (Tech + Alchemist?) <-- not to confuse with unit conversion which should be called entity ownership change. (MuteLovestone)
• Rework Looting - make type of loot & its look depend on more parameters, (MuteLovestone)
• Rework schemas - Rework schemas to allow for better modifications <-- as late as possible as it will break compatibility with 0AD. (MuteLovestone)
  
• Element Attacks - (Fantasy/map dependent) <-- temperature attack should be one of those (MuteLovestone)
• Fire/Cold Attack - (non Fantasy) <-- should be temperature attack. needs entity's living temperature range being defined in XML schema. (MuteLovestone, Veridagorin)
• Status Attacks (temporary damage) - IE: poision, bleeding and a few others (MuteLovestone)
• Death Attacks (permanent damage) - attacks that happen on death (MuteLovestone)
• Unit Abilities + Talents (Talent is nearly fixed per unit-birth, Skill can be improved) <-- could/should be done via tech + experience => skills increase (MuteLovestone)
• Tech: Units can learn (applied only to that unit) <-- why tech? (MuteLovestone)
• Rework Extended tech (allow to chose any tech-state on a per unit-type base ) (Radagast, MuteLovestone)
• Rework combat (MuteLovestone)
• Separate tech into categories-combat/unit/ability/resource/work/extra/attack bonuses <-- keep it flexible and dynamic. (MuteLovestone)
• Rework units <-- in what way? Philip already reworked entities recently. A unit is a special type of entity. Just like building. (MuteLovestone)
  
• Redo how buildings are constructed, (MuteLovestone)
• Rework templates <-- As late as possible if otherwise no 0AD synch possible. (MuteLovestone)
• Critical Hits (MuteLovestone)
• Weak spots <-- addition to armour? by making it more locally defined? or general weakness, should go with ability + skill + talents system (perhaps like NeverWinterNights with skillpoints which can be increased or decreased). (MuteLovestone)
• Extra Phases mods, (best as dynamic as possible) (MuteLovestone)
• Revolts/Civil war (see above listing). (MuteLovestone)
• Trainable Animals (MuteLovestone, early version available)
• Animals equal to units. Break into categories just like units: support animal (healer, female, dropsite) + fighting (complete, 1/2)
• Animals / Entities as companions (best not restrict to animals to allow for adventurer system) (MuteLovestone)
• Water Resource (MuteLovestone, get it here),
  
• Well harvesting, (MuteLovestone)
• Obsidian Resource, (MuteLovestone)
• River/Sea/Lake harvesting, (MuteLovestone)
• Extra Resources (on request)
• GUI: Tabs for categories of constructable buildings (when selecting a builder unit e.g.).
• GUI: Statistics charts (workaround or C++ component) [1]. (agentx)

Long list, but I like it. Did we forget anything?
Good day!


Still a lot of room for your ideas!
Feel free to propose in the thread..

Quote:

prisoner system that makes it possible for an attacked unit to have a sort of surrendering animation in the middle of the fight (which I think was tied up to the amount of HP / morale that remains for that unit

Thanks, that's what we plan while we take the distance into account. So if there are many fit enemy units around a single hero, then even that one will get captured if the encirclement is close enough unless the loyalty / sympathy is high / low to the friends / capturers.

Females as they have less health-points will get captured easily even from a distance. The weaker a unit the earlier (closer distance) it will surrender, becoming a neutral unit that follows the unit that captured. This unit now only can capture more units for as long as the own health is higher than the altogether health of all captives.

Then the unit might go home, taking the captives away.

This way, if a well aimed javelin hurts the capturer that has already many captives, then probably one of them can break out, the fittest in this case.

The cool thing is, in 0 A.D. this is not limited to soldiers .. you can even catch a fox or crododile like that. Beware that crododiles attack your units, if you should lose control over one of them while having them as a captive nearby.

Once we have the possibility to place eye-candy objects (like fences) then we can fence the captives.

For animals a corral was planned and there is a patch around that makes animals be tied to the corrals. It's even possible to have them inside the building. Though I like the fence thing better as then we don't have to prop extra animals to the stable object. And they would still be attackable/freeable. It's more realistic than first to have to destroy the building down to 25% .. especially if you just had to jump over the fence to get the horse out.

Good you mention the morale. We need it for the military anyway, so way not adding this too for every unit. If a formation has overrun other units, then moral would increase and even if they meet a stronger unit then, they could hold out longer due to the initial morale being high while it's decreasing more and more as long as they have more losses than the enemy, lose ground or are heavily overpowered. We have flexibility here.

As we already have to execute range check for picking attack targets in the battle, then we could even make units nearby to a loss more affected than those far away. This could lead to a partly dissolving army if they encounter elite units at a certain part of the front.

Perhaps we should not even store morale at all having it at 50% instead and deriving the + and - through a calculation that takes all nearby factors into account. Later we can add that bad news from another army has influence into the formula depending on time, the news was received by the unit.

Quote:

Maybe we can have a sort of eye-candy family created whenever there is a certain number of houses present, and then, have each house spawn children who then grows up to become (free of cost villagers) - sort of the peasants of Stronghold.

Interesting! You sparked another idea, we could create an optional vasall system too.

The free of cost is good idea. I think it would be cool to not allow instant units at all. The exception are the mercenaries. They are getting much more interesting this way too.

Each map could have either infinite mercenaries available. Or we limit it to eye-candy mini-cultures that of course could also go extinct if too many mercenaries are drawn (it's possible they also send mercenaries to other tribes, e.g. the AI, perhaps we should add a tech for allowing to force the mini-cultures to not send mercenaries to other units. Of course the enemy will get a message and could use your takeover of the mini-civ as a reason for war.).

The cost for the units would be the school and grow-up then. Also the food and water they consume will be pricy. They need leather too. Iron later once they become soldiers if they decide to apply for the posts that are written out of the mayor/government.

So if you decide to recruit all you have in an emergency (raising alert the second time, e.g.), then you might well lose your teachers too. Could still send a general or other elite instead. Of course you don't have to send the teachers in yourself. We could add a button that decides if only teachers are teachers or all other elite units too.

I wish to avoud having it all hard-coded, I like it if it's flexible.

As we introduce time (somewhere I calculated 1 world-day will take 60 minutes by default) we will have a quite realistic feeling. The flow of time can be increased. just like it is currently.

Of course this open the problem of overreproduction, so this could lead to send your units abroad to populate an island or to conquer new territory. This might also trigger an AI to lead an preventive attack before the enemy gets too strong.

Good you mention stronghold, I hope we will have a similar building-damage system soon. Time will tell us how to achieve it.

shieldwolf said:

Let me add on the mercenaries - if a map will have infinite mercenaries, then in time, there should be a sort - of either an assimilation of cultures or total rebellion/ defeat of the culture who hired the mercenaries (something akin to what happened with the Late Western Roman Empire).

Though we planned rebellion with the Hybrid AI, I did not think of this usecase!! glorious, colleague! That must go on our list.

The mercenary count will be examined taking their loyalty to the tribe/player that hired them into account. So the formula will be something like: mercenary_rebellion_probability_0..100 = 1 - (moral + loyalty_towards_those_who_hired_them) / (morale.max + loyalty.max)

where

moral is already affected by military success and health, so health must not go into the calculation explicitely.

loyalty_towards_those_who_hired_them is a property of each unit that comes with the Hybrid AI. (we should discuss if additionally each unit has sympathy_towards_other_tribes_or_players. The units already have plenty have plenty of sympathy values to store, i.e. for all elite unit and all direct and indirect chiefs. We can't include every unit probably, but we can test if hardware can handle it to store sympathy of a peasant towards another peasant. would be cool indeed to add additional battlefield possibilities like, ha, I abandon this comrad and help this. You see. Or I help this woman and I marry her if she feels the same. I think you get the idea. We could make this moddable so that forced marriage might be possible for other cultures.)

they_will_be_loyal is a factor, usually 100 . Might be lowered for mercenaries that are known to not be very reliable. could be read from the units XML-file as an optional property.

Note: If we use floating point, then each factor has to be divided by 100. Then the probability would be between 0..1 just like it's formally correct as a probability is always between 0 and 1. (not that you accuse me I teach wrong things, what I probably do anyway.)

Quote:

On overreproduction, may I suggest though that the children spawning be tied up to a certain number of houses so that if like, 20 houses are reached with 20 children, no more children is spawned. Something like that.

Are you sure it's tied to houses in nature? hm.. Perhaps it is. So probably each house a number maximum people and others (children grown up) then have to live on the streets/ inthe woods .. lowering their moral and increasing their will to become hired as mercenary of other tribes. Or join the military if any new soldiers are wanted (what might not be the case. The moral will sink and sink ... and they will start being like Robin Hood, finally even changing clothes to become citizens of the woods, split by their original tribe.). . interesting.

Or simply a cap like:

#citizen_maximum = #houses * #people_per_house

Like it currently already is. So no work to be done here.

Edit:

Quote

(something akin to what happened with the Late Western Roman Empire)

If I am remembered of this tragedy of failing commanders then I get quite upset. Really throughout history things are happening that are difficult to grasp from our informed position:

• They said: Celts and Avar, only the fittest are allowed to take shelter in the Roman Empire. All elderly are left to the huns.
• Emperor: You are allowed to settle here.
• Local praefect: You are no longer allowed to settle here.
• Emperor: You want to settle? Well, you are not allowed to settle anywhere, you can cross the danube if you like the huns.
• Awar: How do come to say that, then we take the land we want. Try to stop us.
• Emperor: Call the armies. I lead one myself.
• General victorious against a small cohort of Avar.
• Emperor: You see, it's easy.
• Another General victorious in France/Germany against celts. They try to help the others, because there are plenty of Avars. They have a long way.
• Emperor: Oh, all are winning. Well, it's easy. I will show. To General: Is my army ready?
• General: We better wait for the others.
• Emperor: You maybe. Me certainly not.
• General: Awk... Okay.
• Emperor and General both dead after they underestimated the number of gothic tribespeople.
• Ha, nothing else than free way to destroy everything for the now certainly angry tribes.

And the bad thing is, those stories never end. Just recently another example came up in real world.

Okay. Back to topic. That re-sparked another idea I almost forgot:

• Technological advances will spread. So neighbouring celtic and other tribes will gain knowledge if a high-tech country is nearby. Even far-away will have influence, so that it's at no time possible to have knights at one half of the world and spaceships on the other. (at least no majorities, local ancient tribes are fine)

Self-awareness of units: So if a unit is idle, well then I look there, the tavern for some time, perhaps depending on the number of units nearby. If there are too many, go elsewhere. Perhaps fishing.

Should be random. Could be location oriented too.

If an idle unit is nearby a lot of fish or a fisherman it might sit down nearby under a tree, watching the fisherman - at least until it's dark. Then all units go home and light is kindled.