0 A.D., an Open-Source Strategy Game
indiegogo.com
indiegogo.com
(1) scripted events, which would allow a tutorial mode and various scenarios. Apparently this is a tough integration into the existing engine.
(2) to make combat formations really work, so there's some sort of tactics to combat. You can do some of that, but it generally turns into a mob fight.
Good news is it looks like they're intending both of these already.
Personally, I'd like to use their engine and assets to create a turn-based combat game; RTS is a bit hectic for me.
Your claim is true for most barbarian, irregulars, and fanatics, but false for regular troops, and some irregulars like Greek style hoplite.
The main things 0ad is missing to reflect ancient combat are:
- Morale, as most fights had been decided by one side fleeing.
- Training, as its a real difference if one side has trained regular legion, hoplites or immortals, and the other side just barbaric irregulars, when it comes to the question if they follow commands, stay in formation, or just fight their own. ( e.g. pursue into a trap )
- Formation, as some troops fight in close formations, others in lose formations.
- Role, some troops are to hold and block, others have a shock of impact (Roman legion) or a shock of momentum (Greek hoplites). Same with ranged combat, as there is a real difference between skirmishers, who charge, throw their javelins or fire their bows, and run away hoping the opponent will break formation and pursue, and archers who stand (behind shield bearers) and deliver.
There are also some weapons missing, e.g.:
- There are no horse archers with bows, witch makes Persian light cavalry feel wrong with their javelins.
- Its not possible to have melee troops with additional ranged weapons, so a typical Roman shock of impact is not possible, as are Persian immortals who are trained with spear and bow, on horse and on foot.
Still, 0ad is one of the best RTS for Linux.
I've put a lot of hours into playing 0AD and it's a joy. Very polished, really good gameplay, addictive, and engaging.
The bots can be ruthless at times, others you can figure out and trump. If you need them, then there are cheats to help whilst you learn.
I just went and tried to give money, and it's going to take me a while, incredibly all my disposable cash is in PayPal and my debit card is linked to an empty account, so I have to do the PayPal > bank shuffle, but I'll be supporting this as soon as I can.
The campaign comment page points you to the 0AD site, where they tell you that:
"Donations via PayPal go to a a private bank account in the US, that is a legacy of the time before we became affiliated with SPI."
But don't explain whether that money actually ends up with them.
They've made it such a problem, all I want is a PayPal address that will get the money into their hands. "Shut up and take my money.".
One thing though: what's the frame-rate supposed to be? I'm getting 2-3 FPS, which is I suppose playable, but pretty jerky when things get hairy. Is it just my system, or is this just the nature of the game? [I guess if it's recalculating the world with every frame...]
Also, your title tries a call to action, that is, the first Help is a intransitive verb rather than a noun. So to is unnecessary there. In which case, Help founding would be a better writing. Of course, if we're to use gerund then the word founding could be better replaced with.
Ah, the pedantry!
[0]: (http://desertbus-game.org/)
Besides, I generally don't like pointing out grammar; I find it a bad taste, especially when you use all jargons and all.
you do have a good point, though. The reason I decided to write the bad-taste grammatical pointing-out was because I was irked out. I thought it was RTS open source but the 'founding' did more, now that I think about it.
Don't worry, I didn't want to call the syntax nazi police on you, neither the grammar police :) I just found slightly funny you overlooked the (for me) clear error but pointed things I wasn't really paying attention to: it was a good reminder that I should be more careful with my grammar ;)
PS: Oh crap, just read your user info... So bad a joke :D:D:D
Bad grammar bothers me a lot in any language, even if it is one I don't speak well. It shows a lack of time spent into the details of things. It is the sort of mentality that causes plane crashes; "I checked the engine last time". Only on a lower level. If you adopt the 'but you know what I meant' argument than we'd all say things like "ain't nobody got time for that". It is funny as a meme, but it makes you sound stupid. Of course you have to take into consideration whether someone is a native speaker or not.
You don't have to care; you are free to sound stupid if you want to.
Oh, and I'm completely happy about sounding stupid when speaking a foreign language (so far no-one has complained about my spoken English or German, only in France I've had "complaints") as long as other people can understand what I try to say and what I say is meaningful to them.
Honestly I don't understand the upvotes. It's pedantry at its worst. I was satisfied with the changed title.
SpringRTS is an open source game engine that improved beyond TA and actually had UI features that Supreme Commander has drawn inspiration from.
The multilayer is epic, its totally LUA scriptable. People have re-purposed that engine for all manor of weird RTS type games. I sincerely hope this project is going to use that battle hardened, cross platform, actively developed, open source RTS engine rather than roll their own.
The engine launched back in '06 and has changed developers a bunch of times, which means the code is heavily rotted and it needs a lot of love. It has legacy issues and tooling issues out the wazoo, so it really needs some love from a charity or a google-summer-of-code-style project. The problem is they suck at the organizational stuff so they've never managed to put together anything like that.
The problem is that, even as the best-developed Spring game it still needs a lot of polish and it's never going to be more than a labour of love for a few hundred players and a handful of devs. Their donations just keep the server running and that's about it.
There appears to be a renewed interest, with people playing the original TA on and offline.
Here's a site with information about many of the various mods, remakes, etc: (http://www.tauniverse.com/)
And here's a sub-site with lots of information about online play (http://tazone.tauniverse.com/)
So far I think the best in the series was Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (not Supreme Commander II).
I backed & am greatly looking forward to Planetary Annihilation (though not too excited about the cartoony art-work). Just made a donation to 0AD too.
I particularly recall the good stuff re path-finding that came out of sponsored hacking on 0ad last time:
Jump Point Search (A*JPS) goodness e.g. http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15270...
I think I last checked in on 0AD 2 years ago, before there was AI. Back then AOE II had poor performance issues that I really wanted addressed, like wrong colors (fixable by a user patch), only low resolution support (also fixable by a user patch? I forget), and horrible network management on busy LAN games (6 teams with 150 population each? Players will get dropped once battles start).
Then AOE II got picked up by a contracted company for the pure purpose of bringing an old game into the modern world, and HD got released with lots of fixes. It wasn't perfect, but there was much rejoicing.
Anyone played both 0AD and AOE II HD? Any comparison points?
Plus, Gameranger is a 1-man operation. And he's a really cool man.
With a Kickstarter all-or-nothing approach I can be quite generous (I'd probably go for the $100+ option here), safe in the knowledge that if nobody else offers any funding then I won't be the only one chipping in.
Ideal would be if an online multiplayer community evolves around this game. Does the game feature the ability to track multiplayer win/losses and keep some kind of ELO rating or similar on a server? Is it reasonably safe against cheating in multiplayer? Does it allow setting a handicap for less good players?
Thanks :)
What is currently being worked on is a lobby system so you can create an account and view listings of what games are being hosted. The work is probably going to be added to the game soon, then further improvements like a ranking system can be added in the future.
Age of Empires has this thing where you can upgrade your empire to the Castle age or Imperial Age I wonder if this game has that?
Oh, and by the way, not just electronics, there are real instruments... Blends beautifully.
Out of curiosity, how do developers "stay in business"? Is Wildfire making enough off of donations and kickstarter-like campaigns to keep development going strong?
Yes it is. It looks exactly like it. But no complAint. I will gladly back up this project cause I feel like AoE decided to take another route, while this game takes you back :)
That's kind of unfair.
I think that's Kickstarter's rule, but this is Indiegogo; right under the funding progressbar it has this note "This campaign will receive all funds raised even if it does not reach its goal."
Even well before then the Scythians were known for their horse archer armies and were tricky to defeat.
I know it doesn't seem like a big thing, but if Romans can form testudos while moving, then it seems only fair to have true horse archers. Both so that players can accurately recreate the tactics (horse archers + heavy cavalry were the mainstay of several eastern factions which people might want to mod in) and just because they're more interesting that way. Otherwise the game's horse archers are little more than fast moving foot archers, which doesn't allow for much more creativity.
"Importantly, “0 A.D.” is a time period that never actually existed: In the usual calendar, one goes from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. and skips zero.
This reflects the historical fiction in the game: Who would have won if all the factions were pitted against each other when each of them was at its prime?"