Some of my friends started a weekly gaming group when lockdown began. We initially played 0 AD as a joke. One year in, we've had stints of Starcraft 2, CS:GO, and Among Us. But at this point we've settled into something of a rotation of 0 AD and Overwatch.<p>It's a good game to play with friends and the jankiness is actually pretty charming. Just stay away from naval combat.
Great to see 0ad featured here!<p>I collaborated on some mods and reviews so I have some context on the high-level (scripting) part of the game, which comprises mostly everything that is not engine related. Feel free to ask any questions.<p>It's a passion project with a lot of attention given to historical acuity.<p>This release saw a lot of balance fixes (that didn't get much love in the trailer) and a process to release in faster (6-months) cycles - compared to 2 years taken from a23-a24.<p>It established a baseline for great improvements coming on the next version, in particular faction (civ) differentiation and faster gameplay.
Note that the free software definition does not require game assets such as art[0], data[1], world maps, etc. to be free. Those are data, not software. They are for appreciation, not functional use. Stallman only asks the code to be under a free license.<p>Selling a license to the art and game files (how many hit points does the enemy have?) and keeping the software free is a potential business model for freedom-respecting videogames.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/funding-art-vs-funding-software.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/funding-art-vs-funding-softwa...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.en.html#non-functional-data" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli...</a>
I will wager that since development began in 2001, and this is still in alpha stage, that this game will still not be ready by the year 2041. See also: Lindy Effect <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect</a>
Hah, I'm only familiar with this because it always shows up alphabetically at the start of a lot of Debian package lists e.g. <a href="https://salsa.debian.org" rel="nofollow">https://salsa.debian.org</a>. Cool project though.
The front page makes it sound like the development is moving along at a moderately slow pace and it's still a work in progress.<p>The screenshots are pretty impressive for an open source game though. At least all of the buildings. They don't have many shots of troops in there.<p>> Currently, 0 A.D. is still in alpha phase, which means an early experimental phase. It is playable, and you can already download and test the game, but some features are still missing. When will 0 A.D. be released? It is very hard to predict. Even after we are done implementing all the features, we will want to conduct extensive beta testing, which can take a while. Information about release dates will be released at the appropriate time.
So I gave this a whirl tonight and it was better than I expected. I'm actually impressed at how well it plays.<p>I started on Easy since people were saying that the AI is brutal, but on the next game I went Normal. It seems like the AI prefers to build up and launch a big attack roughly around the time you upgrade your town to level 2. If you survive that you're pretty much golden. I lost a couple of times and won three times against the AI on Normal. The deciding factor is if I managed to build a Defense Tower in time. Those are basically impossible for regular troops to hurt at that point and the AI will fixate on it and let itself get cut down. Actually, garrisoned buildings are really deadly. I don't see a way to zerg rush your way to victory except possibly as an economic victory where you kill all of the workers and then keep them from spawning new ones until you've built your siege engines. Your troops just can't hurt the town square, even when they have it fully surrounded.<p>I found controlling the troops to be difficult at times. The healers love to run away at the first sign of danger and other troops will rush at towers and fortresses no matter how many times you tell them to stay away. You can also bait the AI into sending a steady stream of lone troops into a meatgrinder (massed archers are murder) while you casually build up your army.<p>I only ran into one bug. On one map I wiped out the enemy base but it didn't declare me a winner. I searched high and low for a lone troop or something but there was none to be found. I even filled the map with blue just to make sure it wasn't some building thing.<p>Performance was not an issue for me, even when I was moving maximum size armies around. There were a handful of pathfinding quirks but nothing too major. Mostly units getting stuck on other units and being left behind. It was pretty rare, but when it happened it tended to happen to big expensive units which makes it a little more annoying. I'd have to carefully separate them to get them moving again. I couldn't get the AI to build any boats so naval combat went untested.<p>One UI thing I couldn't find that I'd like is a way to select all combat troops currently harvesting and tell them to switch to combat mode and rally somewhere. It can be kind of hard to pick them out, especially when you're under attack. Even better if after combat I could tell them to go back to their previous job.
While it's not as polished as AoE2 or other games for playing or competition, the reinforcement learning interface is great fun in and of itself. It's nice to practice on a "real" game that isn't OpenAI Gym or similar teaching tool.<p><a href="https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcementLearning" rel="nofollow">https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem...</a>
many previous discussions for various releases over the years<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=play0ad.com" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=play0ad.com</a>
Anyone know how 'Alpha' this game is? I'm looking at their news archive and their first post is from 2003, then jumps to semi-regular posts starting 2011. Is this a reasonably stable game? Is this like Dwarf Fortress and will just forever be in some alpha state?
I still feel like Empire Earth 2 is the best RTS I've played, and it's hard to determine why I always went back it it instead of continuing with all the Age of Empires.<p>whats the real difference? I can not say really. Maybe the mechanic of have priests that can convert people? I think that was in populace on the Amiga..<p>Anyhow I look forward to trying out this open source similar thing and wonder what it takes to get graphics made for the various parts - maybe I could make some or get some others to make some for it and make it more similar to EE.
The requirements page is interesting. For Linux they require a 1Ghz processor and 512MB of memory. For video it requires a Geforce 3 or better. So basically anything that still works.<p>For Windows the requirements are a 3Ghz machine and 2GB of memory. Is the Windows port running on an emulation layer? The disparity in the specs borders on the absurd. Or is it including Windows 10 vs. a Linux version running on TWM?