14 DAY TRIAL // 0 A.D., a free, open source, cross-platform, real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare with historically-based war/economy, which allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, is now at version Alpha 16.
The latest build of 0 A.D., Alpha 16, has been dubbed “Patañjali” and features a lot of changes and improvements, just like every other update in the series.
The developers of 0 A.D. have been working on this game for a long time and they managed to build a superb real-time strategy that is completely free and that comes with some pretty amazing gameplay.
Even with all the enthusiasm from the developers, the progress made on the game has been slow, if we just take a look at the version number. This is a stable title nonetheless, but its makers want to have many more features in place before daring to raise it to the 1.0 status.
According to the changhelog, the Testudo formation (for Roman melee infantry) and the Syntagma formation (for Macedonian, Ptolemaic, and Seleucid pikemen) now comes with much better animations, the integrated AI (called Petra) now comes with an aggressive expansion and combat initiative and builds defense towers and fortresses as a human would, and a new “town bell” button to sound an alarm and make your citizens garrison in the nearest structure until the enemy is gone has been added.
Also, users can now set the chance a trader will trade a certain resource, rather than selecting it per trader, if the user sets “Wonder” as a victory condition a counter starts counting down to 5 minutes, an “Explored Map” game setting in which the entire map is covered with Fog of War has been added, the new GUI style seen in the multiplayer lobby in previous version has been added system wide, and animated flying hawks, Ptolemaic ships, Eurasian Wolf, Nile Crocodile, Ptolemaic buildings, and many more art assets have been added.
The installation is pretty simple, especially if it's done from a PPA (a source package is provided by the developers). Just open a terminal and enter the following commands (you will need to be root):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wfg/0ad sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install 0ad
If you get errors about unmet dependencies, check that you have the Universe repository enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list.
A complete list of changes is provided in the official announcement. You can download 0 A.D Alpha 16 sources now from the official website.
