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, that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, is now at version Alpha 12.
The latest version of 0 A.D, Alpha 12, has been dubbed Loucetios and comes with a lot of important new features, including diplomacy, packing siege engines, and “super fancy” water.
The developers of 0 A.D. have also asked their fans to vote for them in the second round of the Indie of the Year 2012 contest, under “Upcoming games of 2012″ and under “Real Time Strategy.”
Highlights of 0 A.D Alpha 12:
• It is now possible to determine if you and another human player are allies, enemies or neutral to each other, and change this relationship in mid-game as you see fit; • Certain siege engines need to be in a “packed” state to be moved from place to place, and in a stationary “unpacked” state to be able to fire; • Giving units several tasks to carry out in order is now possible; • Heroes have been implemented again, but now each player can have only up to one living hero at any time; • All domestic animals are killed with melee weapons, even by other ranged units; • Users can now choose the population cap and the amount of resources players will start out with; • The water rendering has been improved. The new “super-fancy” water includes the white foam of waves crashing onto the shore.
The installation is pretty simple, especially if it's done from a PPA (a source packages is provided by the developers). Just open a terminal and enter the following commands:
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.
Download 0 A.D Alpha 12 right now from Softpedia.