An RTS where you could only swap between FPV views of each of your units would be fun. Or at least different. Savage II but there is only 1 player per team, and no overhead view. And you can wrench control from a bot at any time.

This is naive pathfinding that adopts the shortcut of perfect information. Good looking pathfinding simulates realistic terrain ignorance (no "psychic powers"), but it is likely to be expensive enough to require other compromises (e.g. updating paths less often).

> Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best. But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.

It would depend where and when. An army on their own territory might know the terrain. An army on enemy's territory would try to send scouts ahead as opposed to wondering randomly, too.

So at the army level it would almost work out like the they have "psychic" powers because they have scouts. At the individual units it would depend. But it would also be kind of annoying to play if the realism is increased too much. Like they wander into the woods and get stuck in a bog and die of hypothermia.

At some point its a game and needs to be fun to play. If you are directing a group of five units that might work but if you have 200 units on the field i think it breaks down and is less fun.

> But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.

In aoe2 you don't have a full map. I imagine 0ad is similar being a clone

> I don't see why units need pathfinding anyway.

I'm sorry but huh? It's a RTS game, aren't moving units around on the map kind of a fundamental part of the genre and this game?

> Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best

If you implement unit movements in a RTS like this, they'll get stuck half the time you ask them to move anywhere, unless you want micromanagement of unit movement to be 90% of the game, which I don't think anyone would find fun.

Typical armies usually had, if not maps, reliable intelligence and guides. "we've heard this chokepoint is heavily defended" would indeed be a common reason for routing around.

It would be even fancier if there was some logic to take into account the position of your mobile units as well - for example, to avoid massed troops except in favorable conditions.

Pathfinding at scale is pretty much a solved problem. Spring. Recoil. SupCom. Starcraft. You can do that, for 10.000 units before you run into problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wxwIxz4PaY

> […] the game either halts completely or forks so that they can't rejoin.

When a player looses the connection the game just continues. Usually one of the remaining player then pauses the game until the player who lost the connection returned.

The game state becoming out-of-sync is often a problem of players using buggy mods. That this happens without mods is pretty rare and of course clearly a bug.

> It's also impossible to save and restore in multiplayer.

It seems you haven't played 0ad in a while, as that's possible since a27 (see https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/).

This is one of the problems that BAR solves beautifully - a player could leave and rejoin later and the game would continue running just fine. An existing player can choose to take their stuff or not, or take it and give it back when the player rejoins. Truly elegant.

It did save in a27 for me - I had the same forking problem but was able to go back to a previous save and the other player was able to rejoin at that point. This was in a local network game.

The pathfinding algorithm has been decently optimized. The reality is that 600 units finding paths and keeping them up to date is a lot of work.

Some of the pathfinding is precomputed, some cannot be as it involves other units and formations.

Most other RTS games work around this by either relaxing the constraints or implement some amount of parallelism.

> I'd def be trying again since they've come out of alpha with this release.. a huge deal for a game that is so many years in development.

We're not calling it Alpha anymore, but we still don't consider it a polished major release. The announcement of the last Alpha, Alpha 27 had a section explaining the motivation for the change: https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/

> Only for really huge end of game final battles with the screen packed with troops did it lag out for us, but being free and all, we'd often gather around one monitor and talk crap at each other while we waited for it to clear up.

I'm not sure when you last tried the game, but a27 notably improved performance and feedback so far suggests that r28 did as well.

That was my experience as well. My understanding is that the simulation will be bottlenecked by the slowest PC. All of my friends had pretty powerful PCs, but someone among us had a slightly weaker one in terms of single core performance, which means we all have that CPU basically then.

The huge battle toward the end of the game dropping or making the game unplayable was what killed it for us. We didn't want to spend all that time making our army and strategy only to be disappointed. At the time we went back to playing Age of Empires 2 DE.

Starcraft 1 is well known for having an absurdly hacked together pathfinding algorithm that almost stopped the game from shipping and the bugs it created are now expected mechanics of that game, such as "worker drilling", where players can pop through specific arrangements of buildings and units.

They also make heavy use of pre-computed pathing maps (Dijkstra) and place restrictions on how that pathing map can be changed.

It's also worth mentioning it's not just the pathing that is single threaded, it's ALL of the game logic, since it all has to be deterministic. All players must agree on the input, then run ALL of the game logic with the same inputs and same deterministic functions so that they agree on the game state without having to synchronize it.

I don't really know 0ad well enough to know if the game logic is more complex than Starcraft or Age of Empires.

Also, both Starcraft and Age of Empires have struggled with lag once above the unit counts. AoE in specific has always had a lot of lag once players start to get full armies. There are well known patches for Age of Empires 2 before the Definitive Edition (DE) where people just hand optimized the binary and figured it out.

My experience is the opposite: 0ad will lag on my laptop once thing become big. BAR will warn that it’s not compatible with my low end intel integrated potato gpu, but it works just fine..

Those are lowball system requirements too.

You can easily play or spectate a low-unit count game of BAR on any decent 2010+ quad core.

Such a computer won't allow you to play 8v8 that goes into the late-game stage. Sometimes not even 4v4 or 2v2 with players scaling to high unit counts. Some players try anyway. Ignoring player disconnections, half the drama of large-scale games is the one player who's lagging because they're on a potato computer. If the sim doesn't lag, the game will at least be down to single-digit fps.

That means you can't really play multiplayer comfortably, at least not beyond 2-4 players.

For that, you need a recent ryzen or intel. I'd estimate recent as post-covid.

I don't know what combination of things is important; there's larger cpu caches, faster sustained CPU frequencies (TDP and cooling matter there), hardware mitigations for speculative execution bugs, faster ram, resizeable BAR support... but in my experience going from a 6-core skylake-era cpu to a ryzen 9xxx, with the same gpu, made a massive difference. I saw no massive improvement going from a 4-core 2010-era cpu to a 6-core skylake-era cpu; I'd classify both as potatoes for BAR purposes.

Good points, the BAR FAQ's first question is "Best Twitch Stream Settings for BAR (OBS)", and the Gameplay page talks about physics, terrain, economy, units and weapons but answers nothing like: is there a single player campaign? Are there AI opponents? what's even the theme/setting of the game?

When was the last time you played 0ad? Each release brings new changes to balancing and especially a27 contained a lot of them.

I've played perhaps tens of hours of 0AD. I boom early, try to create an unbeatable army, and then go win. When I saw competitive 0AD players on YouTube, they played completely differently: they train cavalry or cavalry archers and go hassle the booming opponents really early. Then retreat to go hunt some chickens for a bit, train some more cavalry, and go raiding again. They simultaneously attacked each other, all the while trying to continually improve their economy meanwhile. It seemed much more fun than the way I played tbh.