0 A.D. (Zero A.D.) (160Mb)
Wildfire Games has released the second Alpha version of the game called "0 A.D. Alpha 2 Bellerophon", 0 A.D. is a free, open-source cross platform game of ancient warfare. This release comes with victory conditions, fog of war, formations, a new in-game GUI and many other features that make 0 A.D. feel more like a real RTS than ever before. Who will emerge as the victor? Download and play to find out! :)
In short, it is a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, focusing on the years between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. The project is highly ambitious, involving state-of-the-art 3D graphics, detailed artwork, sound, and a flexible and powerful custom-built game engine.
The game has been in development by Wildfire Games (WFG), a group of volunteer, hobbyist game developers, since 2001. The code and data are available under the GPL license, and the art, sound and documentation are available under CC-BY-SA.
Gameplay:
• Unique civilizations: In 0 A.D. each civilization will be unique in its appearance, units, structures, and technology trees.
• Citizen soldiers: There will be no standard villager unit. Instead, regular infantry and cavalry have not only military capabilities, but also economic, making them substantially more versatile than in typical RTS games.
• Unit auto-upgrading: Citizen Soldiers will gain experience and automatically gain promotions. With each rank, they become stronger, and don a unique appearance but also get gradually worse at civilian tasks.
• Units on structures and ships: Gone are the days of units disappearing into buildings and transport ships. Some garrisoned units will be visible on the battlements of structures or the decks of ships, and capable of firing on opponents at range.
• Realistic naval warfare: No more tiny ships sinking other ships with arrows. Ship gameplay will include a variety of new features in RTS games, like much larger ship sizes, ship capture, sea rams, and a modular design that allows catapults to be stationed on the decks, and units to fire from the bows.
• Choices, choices, and more choices: Technology trees branch out in a pair-based hierarchy. For example, when you are given the option of techs 1A and 1B and you choose 1A to research, 1B is no longer available. Some of the techs that are higher up on the tech ladder will require that tech 1A is done, while others will require tech 1B. This adds a level of strategy and 'randomness' to picking your techs, as availability of higher level techs will depend on your choices earlier in the game. Similar choices are available with unit formations and battle tactics.
• Provinces and territories: In some game types, the map is subdivided into provinces that must be captured and annexed into a player's territory in order to reap their valuable resources and construct forward bases in these areas. If the host wishes, a player's starting province can also be surrounded by attrition borders to reduce early rushes.
• Real world map realism: Random maps are based upon geographical regions where the civilizations of the ancient world lived. These will be generated with biome specific-to-location features that replicate the look and feel of the world as it existed 2,000 years ago: flora, fauna and terrain.
Miscellaneous:
• Multiplayer networking: Peer to peer, no central server.
• Includes a level editor (Atlas) integrated with the Pyrogenesis engine.
• Extreme moddability: WFG started out as a game modification team, and true to our heritage and the FOSS philosophy, we believe being able to tinker with a game contributes to lasting fun and learning. Aspects of the game like game logic, artwork, and data can be tweaked with tools or by modifying XML and javascript files to totally change the game.
Reference accessed HERE Nov 2010
WARNING: The game is currently under heavy development, and many features are currently missing. This release is an alpha version, not a completed playable game - please check the 0 A.D. site and forums for future updates!There are several ways to be notified when a new release is out, as well as getting notified on other updates, either by subscribing to the email list, following 0 A.D on Twitter or Facebook or using an RSS feed. You can find links to all of these HERE. You’ll also find download links to different platforms including Mac, Linux and Windows HERE
Images:
See a slide show of about 30 images from the game HERE. You can see more official screenshots including the ones I’ve posted in this post with explanations and comments about each image taken HERE.
Video:
You can watch several videos HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE. You’ll find more when you follow any one of the links to the right hand side of the video.
Download:
You can get Zero Anno Domini HERE. There are lots of mirror sites to download from, but I found it difficult to find one that worked. Once I did get one to start downloading, the download progressed at a very slow rate, dropping to as low as 20Kb per second. The total file size is 160Mb at this time but could be prone to change because the game is being updated regularly. I’ll post more download links when I have the time to find them.
