0 A.D. Alpha 14 Naukratis

0 A.D. (pronounced "zero ey-dee") is a open-source multi-platform rts game, and one of my personal favorites, has just released its 14th alpha version and announcement of indiegogo campaign ^[1] .

Am not a advent gamer, I play Halo on xbox when visiting friends, get killed multiple times. I play Dead Space 2 co-op, cant even succeed in killing aliens, i play League of Legends at school, get no kills. But, 0ad is where my mediocrity becomes above average, And I really shine... And for that I love this game.

System Requirements

Now, the first thing any of you would want to know is, can my system run it. Yes, probably, maybe. See for yourself. 0ad does not need much to run.

• Processor: 1 GHz Intel or x86 compatible
• Memory: At least 512 MB
• Graphics Card: Any supporting OpenGL 1.3 with 3D hardware accelerated drivers and at least 128 MB memory, e.g., Radeon 9000, GeForce 3, or similar
• Screen resolution: 1024×768 or above^[2]

New features, improvements, Miscellaneous features from 0 A.D. Alpha 14 Naukratis:

Features

• Blacksmiths: A brand new building type for the game, complete with models for all factions. Researches attack and armor upgrades.
• Infinite farms: A farm will now keep yielding food until the end of the match, without need to rebuild it, but with diminishing returns. Only up to 5 gatherers can work on each farm. (Veteran players will notice that more space is now required to produce the same amount of food.)
• Exponential armor and realistic health: Technologies now have the same effect on all units. Also, changes to the way units’ health is calculated in the game allowed us to correct some unrealistic phenomena, like archer damage to buildings.
• Allies can now garrison in each other’s buildings.
• Shared trade gain with allies: When you trade with an ally, there is a +25% bonus over trading with yourself, that is now split between you and your ally.
• Ranged units can hit farther from high places.
• Ranged units had to be within a minimum range from their targets to fire at them. This requirement has been removed.

Improvements

• Hero button: A persistent button in the top left appears when you train your one allowed hero(ine). Clicking it selects the hero(ine) wherever he or she is on the map.
• Game speed controls: In single-player games, change the game’s speed whenever you want to.
• Location hotkeys: You can now mark camera positions and jump back to them later with hotkeys.
• GUI dropdowns support typing for quick selection.
• Sound manager improvements: The game now plays a list of multiple songs per match, instead of playing just one song in a loop. Also, the user interface now responds to the user with sounds.
• Terrain anchoring: Units now move more realistically on hills.
• Saved games can now be given descriptions and deleted or overwritten in-game.
• Several random maps were changed to be more beautiful and playable.
• Fancy water rendering is now faster and improved.
• Ships look better when sinking.

Miscellaneous Features

• Pike elevation tool in Atlas: Allows for making mountains and cliffs more easily.
• Mod improvements: Saving maps in Atlas will no longer make it crash.
• Fixed some common out-of-sync and out-of-memory errors.
• Alert sounds no longer heard by all players, off-screen sounds only heard when appropriate.
• Fixed crash with Nvidia Optimus graphics and some netbooks.
• Walls can be placed along shores.
• Improved hotkey support for non-QWERTY keyboards.
• Several performance improvements.

For a more detailed feature list see play0ad.com/. For support visit there 0ad support page. There are also some features planned, such as: Capturing Buildings, Building construction, Running & Charging. See there Game-play Feature Status. To see the status of said features.

Installing

To install 0 A.D. under Ubuntu, one can just install it via the Ubuntu repository, like so: sudo apt-get install 0ad, but that sports the older alpha 13 version. To get the latest, now, and in the future, copy/paste the commands below in you terminal.

PPA

For other Linux distributions see the Linux download page. Not running Linux? Well 0 A.D. is also available for Windows and Mac OS X.

compiling

If you are impatient, and want the latest right now, well, then compiling 0ad is probably what you want to do. In this part, we will download and install dependencies, configure, make, and test out 0ad binaries, all according to the official 0 A.D. documentation^[3].

Dependencies

Source

Since 0 A.D. is primarily developed on SVN, we will download the code from svn, since its more up to-date then the git repo:

If SVN stops before it downloads all the files, to know this see if it outputs something like: Updated to revision XXXXX.. Otherwise run: svn up 0ad

If the svn repo is to slow for your taste, you can usethe github repo a try, it usually offers faster downloads:
git clone https://github.com/0ad/0ad.git

Building

Testing

Optional, but if you still wanna test your newly build binaries, run the following: ~/0ad/binaries/system/test

Run

When all went well, tests, slow downloads, no suicides, and or broken laptops, then, its now time to run the game: ~/0ad/binaries/system/pyrogenesis

Keeping 0ad up to date

If you wanna keep your 0ad source code up to-date, then you can save the following as a updater.sh.

Image gallery

Game-plays

If you like 0ad, and want it to reach a stable version, please consider to contribute on there indiegogo page.