0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

The game's creators need to focus on fixing core gameplay issues instead of new visual stuff.

I'm really looking forward to playing this! The new logic in Alpha 27, where units don't try to capture enemy structures by default, caught me out, but it was fun getting familiar with siege engines until I worked that out.

As for the new capture attack for citizens, I imagine this could lead to some really risky endgame strategies where a player moves citizens from their base to attack the enemy's supporting buildings while the enemy is distracted.

0ad is a fun game but the last few times I have tried to play it with my friends it lagged very bad once a few units were moving around. I actually was able to get it to play kind of normal by hacking the pathfinding code to give up after a fixed iteration count that was low. It worked kind of, but broke path finding a lot, obviously.

The crux of the issue is that their simulation is single threaded. It's a complicated problem to do both deterministic and multi-threaded, but I feel some of us could help them.

I love 0 A.D., and I’m endlessly grateful to all the developers and volunteers who made it happen. Your dedication and skill deserve a monument — my genuine admiration.

I install it every few years, and it’s always a blast, somehow, and I do not know why I never do more than experiment with it..

Gameplay-wise, I find that Beyond All Reason is, as far as open-source RTS games go, a few orders of magnitude more fun and mature. I don’t think there’s any commercially available RTS that can compete with Beyond All Reason in terms of fun and performance.

Those who like this game may also want to try open-source The Battle for Wesnoth, which is a turn-based hexgrid war game.

This game started slow for me many years ago but I now absolutely love this game. Not just because of all the open source effort that has gone into it, because of the strategy. You have to make yourself vulnerable to get stronger.

Wanna grow fast? Train workers who can't fight, but are resource efficient to make. Risk being badly weakened if getting attacked, for the benefit of the workers giving you much more resources to then raise an army.

Also watch out for the elephants!

Germans are too op in my opinion. Appimage is much appreciated as the game is pain to compile. And it crashes less than previous version that's also good

I played online once with a friend. He immediately rushed to make one soldier and that sole solider obliterated my tiny base immediately.

Lesson learned. Sheep can wait

This is such a high quality game that it is almost unbelievable that it is free and open source. The fact that it is also still seeing active development after more than 15 years shows just how passionate the developers are.

I have been playing 0ad, single player, medium/hard difficulty, round-robing all maps, for years now. Great game. I have to try mods one of these days.

Looking through earlier news, a July 2024 release note proudly proclaims “The git migration is on its way!”. But I’ve had a look around and can’t easily find any active git repo. Anyone know the current status around ‘moving to git’?

Ref: https://play0ad.com/the-git-migration-is-on-its-way/

I had been confusing this game with Unknown Horizons, another RTS but based on the game 1602 AD. Just realized they're totally unrelated.

I really love the iterative progress with 0 A.D. And every time the game shows up in news, it's always amazing to go through the changelog. I just wish I was a but younger with more time to play :) For an OSS project it's quite an achievement!

The devs clearly put in a lot of effort. I'm a little surprised no one's created a campaign yet. I love the game anyway, just seems less effort and more fun to create a campaign (of course a different thing to keep the campaign balanced and up-to-date with new releases).

I once randomly stumbled upon this in GNOME Software (alphabetical sorting). Was very happy to find such a quality title there.

I tried to play this game once and sucked at it. There are people out there who are legitimately good at this, and that's awesome to see for an open source game

Love this game, even if I routinely get my ass kicked on anything other than Easy.

I love 0ad - it has atmosphere. I was chuffed when a28 came out and the gutted when It crashed for me but it just got fixed and now I'm trying not to think about it until 5pm.....

Incredible work folks. Can't wait to try it out. The Germans look cool!

It’s macOS not OS X unless you’re supporting a decade old system

Wow! Amazing work. This is an incredible accomplishement.

I used to like some of its music

Nerfing the Han minister unit makes me sad

gift from the gods

> 0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix

No system requirements. Does it run on Pentium II wirh 128 MB RAM ? Or does it need an 128 Cores Epyc with 64 GB RAM ?

Rant:

I hate those open source (usually clones) games which are 30 years in the development. IMO it makes the gaming experience worse!

Good games comes with final versions and titles such as: fallout 1, fallout 2, fallout 3, fallout NV, fallout 4. fallout 5.

That makes it way better. For example I remember playing some open source games in 2002 on my pentium 1, while the newest version of it requires much much much more memory and cpu, despite being the same game... (freeciv for example).

Rolling versions of all software is awful leading to fragmentation instead of rock solid final release versions.

I mean, good news, but even going down the route of using pre rendered fonts in the first place seems misguided O_o

Unless you prerender every sentence, kerning issues must have been unbearable even for latin scripts