WORK IN PROGRESS PAGE This page describes some basic principles that are used to design the gameplay of 0 A.D.

Terms

Strategy and tactics

In this context, a strategy is a high level plan chosen by the player to achieve victory. It could be something like "I will research the very expensive and powerful technology X which should allow me to dominate the game later. The allied player has to protect me because I'm going to have a weaker army until this technology is researched.".

Tactics are on a lower, more detailed level and define plans to achieve the goals defined in the strategy.

Micro management

Mico management usually means issuing orders to individual units. Often it is used to improve the efficiency of something that would also work automatically, but with reduced efficiency. Examples of micro management:

• Optimizing the distribution of workers across different resources based on the need for different resources.
• Giving attack orders to units or groups of units manually instead of letting them choose the target automatically
• Sorting out wounded units, separating them from the already healed units.
• When hunting, chasing the deer so that it dies closer to the mill or civic centre to improve gathering efficiency.

Design Principles

1. Clever strategy and tactics should be more important than fast and efficient micromanagement.
2. Repetitive tasks with little or no variation should be avoided.
3. There should be as many different viable strategies as possible and it's good if every game plays out differently. If the player does something the same way in every game, that could be something which needs a redesign.
4. Options which are always wrong should be balanced properly or removed.
5. Gameplay mechanics must work well for all major/official game modes (Singleplayer/Multiplayer, Scenarios/Random maps etc.)
6. Every feature should have a concept behind it answering some basic questions like these:
   • What does the player do here?
   • How often, how much does the player do that compared to other things?
   • Why is that fun, how does that improve the game or what are the gameplay reasons behind this feature?
   • Is that sufficient to justify the feature?
   • How is this visualized and taught to the player?
7. Only change things if there are good reasons.
8. Historical accuracy is important, but gameplay takes precedence if good gameplay and historical accuracy can't be combined.
9. Players should have all information available ingame which is required to make good decisions and play successfully. The benefit from looking into the scripts of 0 A.D. and the source code should be minimal. Situations where a player has to do maths to make a good decision don't have to be avoided completely, but should be kept to a minimum and the decision should not be purely maths based. Example: A decision between researching a technology that boosts wood gathering rates by 10% and training more workers has to be made. These 10% should be displayed ingame because otherwise players who looked it up have an advantage. Also this is not completely maths based because having additional workers also increases flexibility and helps protect your base (in case they are soldiers).