A tricky question. His suggestion that aoe2 could have gone down the cosmetic route is a good one if you could make it work, but I doubt you could. As he says, for a game like this it is essential that users be able to choose for themselves how units look, for readability. But in games where people purchase cosmetics, part of the point is to be able to show that off to other players, is it not? So I don't think cosmetics are as viable a way to fund the game here as they have been for shooters.

With the exception of the latest DLC, I've been a big fan of the approach aoe2 has taken so far. I do like almost all the new civs and new mechanics and new units. But I know many people are getting tired, and it's certainly more difficult to start out today than it would have been 20 years ago. And with the fact that these DLCs are what's been paying for the continued balance & bugfix patches, running the servers, and paying for tournament prize-pools, it's hard to see what other option they could take.

Whoops. My bad. That's what I get for converting the short URL by hand into a long URL on my phone. It's fixed now. (Just had to remove that "+".) Also added in a thumbnail.

The link doesn't seem to work for me. Redirect to YT even if I enter the URL (https://www.youtube.com/watch?+v=dqWPJCIl7tY).

Sounds like it 0 AD really needs some UI/UX work. I've never played it honestly, though I have heard about it and first saw screenshots/videos 15 years ago or so.

It's like @Shyze3D@feddit.nl said in a thread I can't reply to because my instance hadn't federated that Community (and won't retroactively federate comments):

it‘s an amount of micromanagment I don‘t want to deal with. There are already so many combat units with special abilities and specific counterunits.

You could rename them to "serfs" (or some other more period-appropriate term..."slaves" comes to mind, but would carry its own baggage) and "citizen-soldiers" (the latter term actually used in some documentation already) and do away with the sexism. But it wouldn't fix the annoying micro. That's a more fundamental game design issue.

Ok I played a game of it. Can't say I was super enthused by the experience. Unit readability was poor. The male/female thing is bad. Just putting completely aside the sexism, the fact that some of your military units can gather resources but some can't is very unintuitive, made worse by the aforementioned readability. And it makes it feel really bad when you have to decide between sending units to fight or build up eco.

I had, and still have, no idea what units are good at what. In Age of Empires 2, I can hover over the skirmisher and read that it's good against archers. In this game...no idea what units do what. You get overloaded with information when you hover over a unit, but none of it is easily actionable. I had skirmishers and slingers and archers but I have no idea which ones should be used when. The information is probably available in a wiki somewhere, but it really should be presented up front and clearly within the game itself.

My enemy was able to somehow convert my dock, shockingly quickly. But then I couldn't convert it back (or couldn't find any option that would allow that), and had to destroy it...which was exceedingly slow. Not sure what happened there. And speaking of enemy...I was playing against whatever the default AI difficulty is, so I didn't expect a serious challenge. But what I got was particularly weak. It put up a mediocre fight once, relatively early, and then after that died I sat back slowly building up an army and exploring all the different units & buildings. During this time, it sent a couple of individual units at me a few times, but never really even tried to pose a threat as big as the one it did early.

Default keyboard shortcuts didn't feel good. Maybe they can be changed, but the out-of-the-box it wasn't up to par with what I'd expect. I could find no way to "attack move", unit building and upgrades were inconsistent. I couldn't find any way to "go to TC".

The fact that it's downloaded by torrent was amusing. I can't help but feel it inherently limits your potential audience though. Torrenting was never properly mainstream, and it's far less so today than back in the '00s.

All in all, the game felt like a UX nightmare. Some of the problems might get better if you're familiar with it, but "better" is certainly not "good". The fact that it's still seeing active development two decades on is amazing, but it doesn't feel like it's progressed nearly as much as one would hope in that time, sadly.

I've not played 0 AD for like 15 years. It's honestly amazing that it's still being actively developed. I might have to try it out again. I remember way back then thinking the male/female villager thing was weird. But I do love the idea of an open source aoe alternative.

Place your granary, sire.

Spent way too much time building castles on this as a kid

We need wood

The only one I played as a kid was Stronghold Legends, the one based in Arthurian mythology. That game's beefy 3D engine could just barely run on my computer at the time. It would take so long to start up that the loading screen music is burned into my brain even today, and in bigger games it would stutter quite badly.

I played the core Stronghold series (both as a kid and in more recent times), never got to try Crusader. Might have to check it out.

Hey @BillSchofield@lemmy.world, just curious, since you never seem to have interacted with this Community otherwise, what your reason for downvoting here was?

I'm just a little concerned about the fact that they call it a "demo", and not "early access". That at least seems to communicate the idea that it's limited in breadth but not depth, which doesn't bode well IMO.

I did really like the "planet to system"...system. It's a simple mechanic, but quite clever.

Hopefully the final version will be a bit more fleshed out.

I haven't tried the demo, but it's on my watchlist.

I downloaded this not long after you posted it (at the same time as Little Kingdom), but only just got around to playing it a day or two ago. It felt like a good early access of a game, but it felt very slow-paced and lacking in content (in a way that didn't seem like it's just because this is only a demo, but I could be wrong there). There's no multiplayer mentioned, but it seems like a game that could work in multiplayer, so it's a shame that it doesn't. I can't see very much replay value in it if it's singleplayer only.

Yup! Retold is pretty fantastic! They've added a new Chinese civ (redone and better than the Chinese from Tale of the Dragon in the Extended Edition), and there's a new Japanese civ coming out soon. There's also a fourth Major God for the Norse providing a much more defensive option, along with a new one-level campaign that explains why the Norse came down to Egypt in the main campaign. And the multiplayer scene is alive and well like it hasn't been since ESO went down! It also comes with some of the nice UX upgrades that the Age of Empires Definitive Editions had.

Looks like the original was compatible with Wine, so I'm looking forward to seeing if the independent mod works as well. https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=246

I didn't know there was an Age of Mythology remaster.

I was watching the video and thinking "that's a really good community HD patch!" :)

As per the actual mod page linked in the article, it's a standalone mod, seemingly dating back further than openRA even, but I'd wager probably by now heavily intertwined with it.

Is it compatible with openra?

The actual combat phase of the game is terrible, the rest of it is great.

I always dream of a better version of this game! It was so much fun playing it as a kid, but it's just got a lot of rough edges.

Not really sure the incest & rape are gonna go over well, but hey, at least we all know how fast travel works, eh? (Spoiler: it's dragons)

Basically just some much-needed rebalancing for the new civs & units added with the last patch.