[HN Gopher] 0 A.D A free, open-source game of ancient warfare
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0 A.D A free, open-source game of ancient warfare
Author : krisgenre
Score : 222 points
Date : 2021-03-23 18:09 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (play0ad.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (play0ad.com)
| j-wags wrote:
| Some of my friends started a weekly gaming group when lockdown
| began. We initially played 0 AD as a joke. One year in, we've had
| stints of Starcraft 2, CS:GO, and Among Us. But at this point
| we've settled into something of a rotation of 0 AD and Overwatch.
|
| It's a good game to play with friends and the jankiness is
| actually pretty charming. Just stay away from naval combat.
| Rendello wrote:
| 0 AD naval stuff can be pretty brutal. I read that some of the
| naval stuff was improves this last update. In any case, I don't
| think I've ever enjoyed naval combat in an RTS!
| yrrr wrote:
| Puzzle Pirates has great naval combat, it's an MMO however
| and requires a bit of investment before you can sail a ship
| into battle.
| selljamhere wrote:
| I've been playing the new Civilization 6 Pirates multiplayer
| mode. It's exactly as it sounds --- travel the seas building
| an armada, burying treasure, and pillaging costal cities.
|
| It's much faster paced than a traditional Civ game, and only
| takes a bit over an hour to finish. 10/10 would recommend
| timvisee wrote:
| Fun game! Actually very well made for something that's open and
| free. Pretty great to play with some friends online during this
| pandemic.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| Anyone know how the gameplay compares to Age of Empires 2?
| tomashertus wrote:
| Because I'm life-long Age of Empires fan and want to hype
| people about Age of Empires IV - the next month is a huge Fan
| Preview event -> https://www.ageofempires.com/news/announcing-
| age-fan-preview...
| tasogare wrote:
| I fell into the game again because of DE and a new friend
| whose into it too. With Youtube videos (explanations and
| competitive games, like Hidden Cup right now) and regular
| updates it got another dimension to it.
|
| The DE of Age of I sucks though, the sprites generates from
| 3D models being less good than in II DE. I would has
| preferred they made a remaster like the C&C for this one.
| eloff wrote:
| Did you catch hidden cup 4? It was an amazing tournament.
| tomashertus wrote:
| Yeah I did; Hidden Cups are always peak for AoE2 e-sports
| scene. Unbelievable matches! I think they hit 100k viewers
| on Twitch, which is amazing for RTS game.
| lostmsu wrote:
| It's pretty similar, but 0 A.D. lacks polish.
|
| I played previous release with friends, it was quite enjoyable.
| AI is super strong for newbies.
| ht_th wrote:
| I always loose in a couple of minutes in 0 A.D. :-(
|
| Then again, I am more interested in exploration and building
| than fighting to the dead. I loved playing Age of Empires on
| the easy setting and then go overboard with the civilization
| building.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Me too. Same story on Factorio. Fortunately both games
| allow you to control the difficulty of your adversaries.
| lostmsu wrote:
| We started 3v3 on normal difficulty, as some of us had AoE
| experience, but quickly had to go down to 3v2 very easy
| until we learned to win relatively consistently (this took
| quite a bit of time).
| jandrese wrote:
| Hopefully it isn't like Supreme Commander or Total
| Annihilation where the AI is more than happy to micromanage
| you to death.
|
| "Ah, I see you can handle attacks, but can you handle little
| groups of 3 attackers going after every resource
| simultaneously and running away when you look at them; all
| the time?"
|
| That crap is no fun to play against. Not unless your own
| units can be programmed with some basic AI to counter it.
| Igelau wrote:
| > That crap is no fun to play against.
|
| Hannibal of Carthage agrees.
| lostmsu wrote:
| 0 A.D. AI does not micromanage. It wins by strategy.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I think of it as Age of Empires 3 but actually good. It feels
| like a nice compromise between AoE 2 and 3.
| rasz wrote:
| gallery: TypeError: m.get(...).style.removeAttribute is not a
| function
|
| cant see more than 1 picture
| jandrese wrote:
| The front page makes it sound like the development is moving
| along at a moderately slow pace and it's still a work in
| progress.
|
| The screenshots are pretty impressive for an open source game
| though. At least all of the buildings. They don't have many shots
| of troops in there.
|
| > Currently, 0 A.D. is still in alpha phase, which means an early
| experimental phase. It is playable, and you can already download
| and test the game, but some features are still missing. When will
| 0 A.D. be released? It is very hard to predict. Even after we are
| done implementing all the features, we will want to conduct
| extensive beta testing, which can take a while. Information about
| release dates will be released at the appropriate time.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _They don 't have many shots of troops in there._
|
| Here's their most recent video trailer:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6scM-nwfhE
| badosu wrote:
| > They don't have many shots of troops in there
|
| You can see some gameplay in action here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6SBLu3TYfg
|
| Keep in mind most competitive players play with graphical
| settings turned down
| marcodiego wrote:
| I'd love to see a modern commercially successful open source game
| with non-free art.
| badosu wrote:
| Great to see 0ad featured here!
|
| I collaborated on some mods and reviews so I have some context on
| the high-level (scripting) part of the game, which comprises
| mostly everything that is not engine related. Feel free to ask
| any questions.
|
| It's a passion project with a lot of attention given to
| historical acuity.
|
| This release saw a lot of balance fixes (that didn't get much
| love in the trailer) and a process to release in faster
| (6-months) cycles - compared to 2 years taken from a23-a24.
|
| It established a baseline for great improvements coming on the
| next version, in particular faction (civ) differentiation and
| faster gameplay.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| I hope they start to charge something to support this game.
|
| No reason not to offer a paid version of an open source
| project.
|
| I know the donations are there but paying for a copy now that
| it's so stable would open up support for paying customers and
| further help legitimize the open source RTS game development
| process IMHO.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I like the Mindustry way of doing this. Game can be
| downloaded freely but costs a few bucks if you want to buy it
| on Steam.
| dgrin91 wrote:
| Anyone know how 'Alpha' this game is? I'm looking at their news
| archive and their first post is from 2003, then jumps to semi-
| regular posts starting 2011. Is this a reasonably stable game? Is
| this like Dwarf Fortress and will just forever be in some alpha
| state?
| joecot wrote:
| The biggest problem in this game is the networking. It seems to
| have the same sort of networking issues Age of Empires did
| before the HD revamp, except worse. Once you hit a 100+ units
| for each player, the gameplay slows down dramatically. If the
| multiplayer desyncs, the game is over and there's no way to
| continue. The unit pathfinding is pretty janky as well.
|
| I've played it, we liked it, but the multiplayer issues made it
| a non-starter for us. And while other changes have been made,
| it doesn't seem like any real networking optimizations have
| been made in years. The only recent change that might help is
| them adding a global population max in addition to a per player
| one, so you can keep the lag from getting too bad but add more
| units per player as other people get eliminated. But it's not
| enough.
| badosu wrote:
| You can consider it indefinitely alpha at this point, unless
| dev adoption gets traction, especially engine/graphics
| specialists.
|
| That said, as a huge RTS and ancient history fan I can
| definitely say its mechanics/art/units make it stand out from
| other games - and have had lots of fun playing it continually
| for years.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| many previous discussions for various releases over the years
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=play0ad.com
| iameli wrote:
| Hah, I'm only familiar with this because it always shows up
| alphabetically at the start of a lot of Debian package lists e.g.
| https://salsa.debian.org. Cool project though.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| While it's not as polished as AoE2 or other games for playing or
| competition, the reinforcement learning interface is great fun in
| and of itself. It's nice to practice on a "real" game that isn't
| OpenAI Gym or similar teaching tool.
|
| https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem...
| normaler wrote:
| For me the biggest marketing factor for this game was shell
| autocompletion for package managers.
|
| 0ad is the first package in archlinux.
| Igelau wrote:
| A modern version of the zzt trick!
| vbtemp wrote:
| I will wager that since development began in 2001, and this is
| still in alpha stage, that this game will still not be ready by
| the year 2041. See also: Lindy Effect
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| Rendello wrote:
| Myself and other have argued it should stop labeling itself as
| Alpha for years, it's a completely awesome (if not totally
| balanced) RTS
| rkimb wrote:
| I worked on this game when I was in High School and at the time
| we were just entering the first alpha release (amazing to see
| it grace HN!). Most of the team then and still today is
| comprised of part-time volunteers, students - people who are
| simply passionate about game development, art, history or some
| combination thereof. Many of the contributors actually were
| sourced from Age of Empires/Age of Mythology fans that wanted
| to build something that paid proper homage to the things they
| liked and overcame the things they didn't. Though my
| contributions are quite distant at this point, I can say that
| as this is our collective passion project they likely never
| intend to "release" the game because they're simply having too
| much fun making it. That would imply a finality that we can
| instead avoid by passing the project to the next generation of
| ambitious developers and artists as I once did to my
| successors. The game is actually quite stable now, supported on
| all three major OS's, and has a small but devoted modding
| community. Even though it's free, I've felt that the limited
| budget (exclusively donations) has always made marketing the
| game its biggest challenge to finding a broader audience.
| Hopefully landing at the top of HN will help! We just want
| people to enjoy the game - if you're an RTS fan, give it a
| shot!
|
| Big shout out to any of the current or past contributors
| reading this post - you all deserve immense credit for your
| work over the decades:
| https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/dat...
| vbtemp wrote:
| Fair points all, and I thank you for your illuminating
| comments.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I really enjoy 0 A.D., so thanks!
| atum47 wrote:
| Back in college we had lan parties aS much as we could. Some
| fried chicken, some pizza, a lot of energy drinks and 0ad. Great
| game.
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(page generated 2021-03-23 23:00 UTC)