Make female units generally stronger

[dg1727]

This enhancement request is related to #1699 (up through the first half of ticket:1699#comment:16; after that, #1699 seems to change to a different issue).

The predominant way that players win this game seems to be to use lots of females to collect food.

The problem with that is that (in apparently all but the Spartan civ) the females are pretty much defenseless. And the player's town (unless maybe it is one like the Iberians with strong walls) can be attacked at any time (unless maybe the player wipes out the enemy with a phase-1 rush, but victory in that phase prevents the player from getting to enjoy the technologies & units from phases 2 & 3). Therefore, the females in many scenarios are subject to a high death rate.

I personally have a high regard for human life (someone could ask why I play 0AD then, but I don't want to discuss that now), and if I were playing the role in real life, I would be loath to recruit defenseless units that would be subject to enemy attack. Because I feel strongly about this, I have set the request priority to "Should Have."

As stated in the summary line, my request is to "Make female units generally stronger."

A few more notes about the realism of this:

• In real life, the unarmed or lightly armed support personnel are typically separated from the battle zone by a significant distance, which provides their defense. As noted, many scenarios in 0AD don't have this feature - the entire population of the player is subject to attack (in practice, it can be infeasible to get all the females into garrison by the time the enemy is next to them). Providing more defense capability for the females would compensate for this, thereby in fact increasing realism.
• Besides the proposed increase in female strength, there are various other things in 0AD that "bend" realism:
  • fields with infinite food
  • Celtic Britons can fight in India, Ptolemies in France, etc.
  • Technologies such as "serfs" and "sentries" involve implied personnel who aren't visible in the game
  • etc.
• There are some references in the history text in 0AD itself to a greater level of female combat competency than units in the game currently possess:
  • Mauryans are said to have had "fierce female warriors" but this seems to refer to "Maiden Guards," which
    1. aren't available until phase 3, and
    2. are costly, and
    3. probably (I'm guessing because I haven't used them in a game) are so warlike that (as with high-ranking male soldiers) they aren't good at collecting food; for all these 3 reasons, they would defeat the purpose that I'm getting at.
  • The civ of the Britons had Boudicca, a woman who is described as a formidable combatant.
• There may also be more references in real history. For instance, I thought that some of the major characters in Greek mythology were huntress(es) and female warrior(s). I therefore hope that it would "bend" realism only slightly for women recruited into a warzone from any Greek civ to have self-defense (the Spartans can have more than the others).
• I think that if a woman in this game can chop down trees with an axe or swing a mattock to mine stone or metal, it is at least as realistic for her to wield a weapon to defend herself.

To prevent AI players from having too strong a defense (in that the women wouldn't be as vulnerable to human players anymore), the following could be done:

1. a female with low-ranking combat ability could cost more than, say, a female with just a knife (or a "defenseless" female, but I'm not sure I really said that :-), so the AI would tend to recruit more of the knife-only females (there would be 2 kinds of female gatherer units in some civs).
2. only some civs (e.g., those mentioned above) would have semi-combatant females (but more than just the Spartans, please), so a human player could select an AI civ with less-strong females if they want.

About recruitment cost: The Mauryans, for example, have in alpha 18 ...

• Female costs 50 food
• Male archer costs 50 food & 50 wood

A female with a weak archery attack could therefore cost something like 50 food & 20 wood, since the whole point is to have units that don't require the player to devote a lot of them to chopping wood in order to recruit more of them. This also would meet AI point 1 above.

It should go without saying that the female units in question should have the same food-gathering bonus as the "defenseless" females.

I agree with the following original statement in #1699:

Because a melee attack requires close range, which is dangerous without any significant armour against true soldiers, I opted for the ranged attack.

Therefore, I mentioned archery (for the Mauryans and possibly others) just now. Also, I disagree with retrogressing the Spartan female-gatherer attack from a slingshot to a knife as mentioned in ticket:1699#comment:7. Maybe the Spartan female actor with a knife can be used as the weaker of 2 types of female gatherer unit, or the knife animation can be moved (with different clothing) to a different civ.

As well, I would like somewhat stronger females than the following (again from #1699) implies:

A group of female citizens can now deal with a small amount of competition

... I would like even a single female gatherer (in some civs) to have a chance against a badly wounded enemy, for instance.

There may be civs (I'm thinking of the Britons due to Boudicca) for which we want an intermediate level of female-gatherer strength for realism (not all civs may have had highly military women; I assume Boudicca's type wasn't the norm among Britons) or so players can experience various difficulty levels. To restate:

• The Spartans and Mauryans, for instance, could have the strongest female gatherers (re-instating the Spartan female ranged attack as suggested above);
• The other Greeks and the Britons, for instance, could have an intermediate level, and
• Still others such as maybe the Iberians [due to their walls] could have a level similar to the existing level, as in AI point 2 above.

So I suggest having female gatherers armed with spears in one or more civs to implement this intermediate level of strength. To support this, I'll comment on the following statement made at the beginning of #1699:

a small ranged attack (e.g., slinging stones that are usually available anywhere) would be most realistic

(Emphasis added.) I think that is OK, but I also think that it's entirely plausible for a woman who's gathering food, chopping wood, etc. in a warzone to have a spear with her while she works. When male units are asked to gather inanimate resources or to build something, their weapons (except archery quivers) disappear while they are doing this, but the moment those units are targeted at an enemy or a food animal, their weapons reappear.

The way to have a spear provide an effective defense against melee soldiers seems to be to make the female/male strength ratio be higher for spears than for a ranged attack. The example given in #1699 is that the female/male strength ratio for the slingshot is 7/17, or about 40%. A female with a spear could have an attack that is, say, 60% as strong as a male with a spear. This way, as mentioned just now, a woman with a spear has what amounts to a semi-ranged (i.e., effective) attack against swordsmen, since the latter have a shorter melee range.

[leper]

Balancing changes and such are better discussed on the ​forums where the relevant and other interested persons are more likely to see them.