14 DAY TRIAL // 0 A.D. is one of the few real-time strategy games that are still free on the Linux platform. It's made by a studio called Wildfire Games and it looks and plays much better than most of the commercial alternatives.
Game developers have started to port their titles from Windows to Linux, but real-time strategies are not really a popular genre. There are a couple of new big RTS titles on Steam for Linux right now, but they are much fewer than you would expect. So that leaves us with the free ones, whose numbers are dwindling.
In fact, it's hard to name another major RTS game that is in development right now and that can even come close to what the guys from the studio that is building 0 A.D made. If you take into account that it's also free, there is no reason users shouldn't try it.
0 A.D. Alpha 17 Quercus is a big release
All of the 0 A.D. versions bring something new, and the latest Alpha 17 doesn’t disappoint. You have to keep in mind that this is a game made by a global group of volunteer developers, who are doing this in their spare time. If we take that into consideration, then the massive improvements that they propose can be seen in a completely different light.
We'll try to cover some of the biggest changes in 0 A.D. Alpha 17 Quercus. For example, the combat in the game has been re-balanced and it's now very important to have multiple types of units in an army if you want to succeed. Archers will fare very poorly in a battle against simple infantry, but an army that is composed of both archers and infantry will be much more successful.
The Fog of War has been redesigned as well and is now used to conceal everything, not just units. "The Fog of War is the part of the terrain that has been scouted already but is not in vision range of your units or allied units. Buildings and changes to resources such as trees or metal mines are now also hidden in the Fog of War, and not just units. Hence, players now need to scout more often to find unclaimed resources on the map, hidden enemy outposts and more," note the developers.
Also, the performance of the game has been improved (better framerate), the user interface has been updated, new skirmish maps have been added, the modding support has received some important modifications, and multiplayer lobby profiles have been added.
Where to get the latest 0 A.D. Alpha 17 Quercus
The developers of this game are making sure that most, if not all, Linux users will able to play and they provide solutions for various distros. If you are using Ubuntu, then you have to know that a PPA is available. All you have to do is to run a few commands in a terminal (with root).
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install 0ad
