0 A.D. Alpha 26: Zhuangzi
play0ad.com
play0ad.com
As an old school Age of Empires/Age of Mythology fan, I've bought my kids up on 0ad.
With the roughly annual release, I always book a LAN gaming session with my kids and we gather resources, build historically acurate armys and battle!
So many good memories.
The new Han civilization looks amazing and also really excited to see there is new music.
Im not part of the project but I encourage everyone to download the game and play some local LAN games.
Especially time that I manage to coordinate with my friends and dedicate to a LAN party is very limited.
I think the biggest departure is the citizen-soldier feature. AoE for the most part has pure eco units (villagers, trade carts, etc) and pure military units with nothing in between (barring a few unique units or techs). 0AD has citizen-soldiers which can both fight and gather resources, and professional/elite units which can only fight and are only available later in the game.
This sounds nice on paper but IMO the system doesn't work very well. Essentially it heavily discourages early game raiding: there is very little early-game trade-off between developing your eco and developing your military, so you can't really catch your enemy unprepared (such as in AoE if they were going for a greedy eco boom with no military backup). On top of that, since your soldiers are also workers, you cut into your own eco if your citizen-soldiers go on the offensive. So you have to do massive damage to make a raid worth the cost and risk.
On top of that, your eco grows too fast because every military building (which are cheap) can produce workers. In all Age games, you need to age up to build additional Town Centers, and TCs are really expensive, so it takes a while before your worker production can really take off. Building a TC costs so much that doing it creates an opportunity for your opponent to do a timing push: if they invest the same amount of resources in military, they have an advantage in the field while you are waiting for your TC investment to pay off. In 0AD you can build new barracks straight off the bat and they're not expensive, so you can produce workers from multiple buildings from the very start of the game with no risk.
The result of this is that in the games I've played with friends, your main base is safe for most of the early game and players just slowly mass up huge armies. The action really only begins when the resources in your base start to run out and you need to fight for control of the resources in the center of the map. But it turns out that's how people like playing RTS casually anyway. So for casual play with people with different levels of RTS experience, I'd almost say it's better than AoE because the one player in your friend group that can pull off a rush build order can't wipe the floor with everyone, and every player can contribute at least a little bit. But for competitive play between experienced players I expect it to be stale compared to AoE. But perhaps a more experienced player would contradict me on that.
Appreciate the detailed answer.
There used to be a UK television program (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0386245/ Time Commanders )with this basis, they had historians to describe the actual battle and the positions of the two sides, their armour, tactics, etc. And, two teams to fight the actual battle (in a modified Rome: Total War).
Anyway, 0ad with scenarios of realistic geography and armies sounds awesome!
The key is to take a risk early in the game to break the bot's exponential growth with an attack. Then even the hardest difficultly becomes easy. It's interesting how sudden and aggressive that growth is.
A nice tweak will be to make them more effective against gates but less effective against a fortress wall.
Building a new civic center near the enemy territory early is a good way to bleed off enemy workers. Same for ships on level with some water.
Still find them fun, most recently I got annihilated by tanks and 5 air squadrons, playing Civ V. For some reason my charioteers and pikes didn't hold up well.
A great example for using fewer multipliers and improving AI instead is the Civ V mod Vox Populi (which is also the reason why Civ V is far superior to VI)
The mantra "us RTS players are the hardest crowd to please in gaming" is probably true. I've tried BAR. It has all the ingredients that in theory, that should make it superior to TA but in reality it just feels "less grandiose" and less fun as a result.
When a late game attack commences in TA, your radar turns a different color from all the units moving into position. The sound of an all out aerial assault goes from a cacophony of explosions to a crackling mess as you can hardly see from all the units amidst the pure chaos unfolding on the frontlines. After all these years it still makes me go "holy shit, that was brutal".
I have a couple theories as to why it feels better. I think it has to something with the fact that there is no zoom in TA. The contrast between a tiny robot and massive ear splitting explosion is ever present, whereas in post SupCom RTSes you have the luxury to distance yourself from the battle with the scrollwheel. Same goes for audio, the raw (and admittedly pretty coarse) sound of expensive late game turrets immediately strike fear into your enemy's heart.
He is at school now but heard about the new release. I bet he can't wait to get home and try it! THANKS TEAM!
I spend a lot of time playing KeeperFX. A group of enthusiasts are rebuilding Dungeon Keeper from the DLL (https://github.com/dkfans). It's super cool to report a bug or feature on the discord and then have it fixed a few hours afterwards. (https://discord.gg/TeUREpV6N3)
There's of course also OpenRA https://www.openra.net
However, I've since moved to a Mac, so when I use a Linux, it's remotely over a terminal. Running remote GUI Linux applications isn't as smooth.
AFAIK the main reason the game is in Alpha is that their code for internet based multi-player needs an overhaul.
If anyone here has expertise to contribute to internet based multi-player that could be pretty useful to help them finally get out of alpha after all these years.
https://trac.wildfiregames.com/query?group=status&component=...
Sorry, this is barely gameplay related, just interested if that could be kept synced.
How historically-accurate is this game? Will a child learn Chinese history?
There's a scale of realism, and I'm not quite sure where this falls.
It is probably the most well-known free and open source turn-based game.
Edit: I think I misremember. You can set a waypoint and PCs will go there, but I there was still a lot of micromanagement that slowed things up too much for me.
There's Globulation, in which you set the tasks/goals and your units strive to achieve them the best they can.
Never heard of Globulation (& Globulation2 it seems) but they appear to be not turn based but RTS. Still, got good reviews, thanks...
Another that I've heard of but not played is the wargame series, which I think is set a bit further back in the cold war than world in conflict. Both alt-history obviously.