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Huge congratulations to all the volunteers and core team at Wildfire Games. As an old school Age of Empires/Age of Mythology fan, I've bought my kids up on 0ad

Huge congratulations to all the volunteers and core team at Wildfire Games. 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.

tomashertus 4y ago
How would you compare the 0AD's gameplay to Age of Empires/Mythology? Is that faster pacing than AoE?
- pelasaco 4y ago
  just play it. It is open source and free.
  - yreg 4y ago
    Time isn't free so it is a perfectly valid question. Especially time that I manage to coordinate with my friends and dedicate to a LAN party is very limited.
    - pelasaco 4y ago
      you can play it alone, against the CPU. Prefectly valid question, right.
- ookdatnog 4y ago
  It's been a while since I played 0AD so perhaps not everything I say is up-to-date. In my opinion it's very fun for casual play but not nearly as tuned as the Age series for competitive play. 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.
  - tomashertus 4y ago
    Thanks for the summary. These game mechanisms sound interesting. However, I've played AoE(M) games competitively for almost 10 years on a very high level and the fact that the game has such a turtling mechanism doesn't make it that appealing for me :/ I will give it probably a shot. It's always fun to try new types of games. Appreciate the detailed answer.
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
>we gather resources, build historically acurate armys and battle! // There used to be a UK television program (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0386245/ 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!

tomashertus 4y ago

How would you compare the 0AD's gameplay to Age of Empires/Mythology? Is that faster pacing than AoE?

pelasaco 4y ago
just play it. It is open source and free.
- yreg 4y ago
  Time isn't free so it is a perfectly valid question. Especially time that I manage to coordinate with my friends and dedicate to a LAN party is very limited.
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    you can play it alone, against the CPU. Prefectly valid question, right.
ookdatnog 4y ago
It's been a while since I played 0AD so perhaps not everything I say is up-to-date. In my opinion it's very fun for casual play but not nearly as tuned as the Age series for competitive play. 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.
- tomashertus 4y ago
  Thanks for the summary. These game mechanisms sound interesting. However, I've played AoE(M) games competitively for almost 10 years on a very high level and the fact that the game has such a turtling mechanism doesn't make it that appealing for me :/ I will give it probably a shot. It's always fun to try new types of games. Appreciate the detailed answer.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

>we gather resources, build historically acurate armys and battle! // There used to be a UK television program (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0386245/ 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!