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Wildfire Games, an international group of volunteer game developers, proudly announces the release of “0 A.D. Alpha 20 Timosthenes”, the twentieth Alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This Alpha features 10 new maps, core functionality for a cinematic in-game camera, the ability to share dropsites with your allies, and more! The skirmish map “Golden Island”, new in Alpha 20 Easy Download and Install Download and installation instructions are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. 0 A.D. is free of charge and always will be. Although you might find some people selling copies of 0 A.D., either over the internet or on physical media, you will always have the option to download 0 A.D. completely gratis, directly from the developers. Moreover, you can redistribute the game and modify it freely as long as you abide by the GPL. You can even use parts of the art and sound for your own projects as long as you abide by CC BY-SA. No “freemium” model, no in-game advertising, no catch. New Gameplay Features in This Release New Random Maps: “Ambush”, “Empire“, “Flood”, “Frontier“, “Hell’s Pass“, “Island Stronghold“, “Lions Den” and “Stronghold“. New Skirmish maps: A 4-player skirmish map named “Forest Battle” and a 2-player skirmish map named “Golden Island“. Use allied drop sites: After researching a technology you can use your ally’s storehouses, farmsteads, docks, CCs, but not Mauryan elephants, to drop off resources your units have gathered. The ally needs to allow it for each drop site, so it can’t be used to “steal” all the resources in the area. Murder Holes: Research a technology to let towers attack units standing underneath the tower. New technologies for fishing: Research technologies to improve the gathering efficiency of your ships. Loot resources that killed enemies carried: Now you will automatically get the resources that were carried by units killed by your armies, in other words: kill wood workers to get wood, farmers to get food, etc. This is in addition to the normal loot you get when killing units. The “Ambush” random map added in Alpha 20 Graphics and User Interface Improvements to game options menu: New graphics quality setting, which allows you to easily change the quality of graphics from within the game (previously you had to use config files), as well as some cleanups and bug fixes. Higher quality graphical effects enabled by default on higher-end computers. If your computer should be able to handle higher quality graphical effects they are now enabled by default. You can of course change to a lower setting manually if you want to improve performance or prefer not to use them for some other reason. Idle worker button is now disabled when there are no idle workers, so you don’t have to press it just to check whether or not you have any idle workers. Credits screen: Check out who contributed to the game, everyone from managers to programmers, from artists to donators, from translators to composers. We have tried to include everyone, but many have contributed over the years, so if you have contributed but don’t see your name in the list please let us know. New trees and variations: There has been new models and textures for the acacia tree, Aleppo pine, oaks, dead oaks, generic dead trees. Plenty of improvements for observer mode and replays: Among other things you can now watch the match from the perspective of a player, see the Summary screen during the match, and now the fog of war is shown in observer mode. Matches also support up to 16 observers now. More information about players in a multiplayer match: Show who lags or has a network timeout. New Seleucid barracks: Under the Hood Cinematic camera for rendering cut scenes: The ground-work has been done to make it possible to control the camera for cut scenes. There is still some work needed to make it easy to use (for now camera paths has to be set by entering coordinates), but it’s a solid foundation to build on for the future. Plus many smaller changes, for a list of all the interesting ones, please read through the changelog. Getting Support Please see the “Get Support” page on our website to find ways to get help from the active and friendly 0 A.D. community. We are well aware there is some room for improvement in 0 A.D. Some known issues are: Lag, visual glitches or textures not loaded, missing animations and more. When you provide feedback, we would ask you to focus on some of the other points that could be improved. Thanks. Please Contribute! We are seeking volunteer contributors in programming, art, sound, documentation and more. Programmers are especially welcome and can get started immediately. Interested? Log onto #0ad-dev on QuakeNet on IRC and meet the developers. Also, you are invited to register on our forums and start participating! Why “Timosthenes”? We name our releases according to development status (“Alpha” or “Beta”), successive release number (1, 2, 3, …) and a word relating to the ancient world, in alphabetical order (“Argonaut” for A, “Bellerophon” for B, …). “Timosthenes” relates to 0 A.D. as it is the name of an Ancient Greek cartographer, and this release adds a lot of new maps. For the next alpha, we welcome fan suggestions for words relating to the ancient world beginning with the letter U. Keep it original and related to the time frame portrayed in 0 A.D. (appx. 500 BC – 1 BC)!

Updated my graphic pilots. Seems to have worked

Are there people around here that would be interested in testing the release candidates from our mods?

This tips are for the actual balance (Alpha XIX). Keep in mind that later it will be outdated. Is not a Pro guide. Overview tip: - This is a strategy game and if you have a deep look, it's all about economics and numbers: The player with a better resource avaibility, should win in most cases in a long run. So strategies games are wars for resources control. General tips in the first minutes: -You want always a continous flow of new units to have a better economy (and in this game, also a better army cause male units are also soliders). Try at first to establish a good food and wood economy (females only need food and you will need wood for houses). -Try to use berries and animals before going to farms (unless there's no alternative). Farm is slower and need wood investiment. Cavalry are very fast when working on animals, and females are better on berries and farms than men. Use ranged units to hunt (saving domestic animals) -Try to never get housed. That means that you can train a unit because you have the resources but you can't cause you need more pylons houses. Some factions have more expensive houses, but with double population capacity, and some are cheaper with less capacity. Use the houses like a wall protecting your Civic Center (CC) or whatever you want. -Always build your farms around your civic center. I've seen players that build the granary away and then the farms. This makes you more vulnerable to raids. *First objective: Establish an CC flow: With the first 9 females and your cav hunting you can train women in batches without worry until berries and chickens have depleted. Men to wood building first a house later a storage center. Other females created goes to wood that you will need for more houses and... *Second objective: ...farm transition. Also it's very important to make barracks: Then you can double your productivity. As always, try to have a continous flow of women being created on CC, and now soldiers on barraks. Then it's up to you. You can make more barraks, go to second phase and research economical techs. Right now, the most used strategy it's to get to 3 phase quicker than your enemy, mass champions (they can't work but have very good stats) being trained in the barraks with the appropriate tech (not all civs have it) and maybe train an heroe (usually the heroes that enhace champs stats. Remember that all heroes give a conquest bonus when capturing or resisting a capture when garrisoned) Some armoury and special techs can make the differance. Some other tips Garrisoned CC and fortress can stop a lot of citizien soldiers (c-s) (and some champions). Women don't add arrows. If you see your base overwhelmed with c-s try to garrison soldiers. Also towers, specially when upgraded. I don't have the numbers, but establishing a trade route with a market or a dock (better with an ally) is very good for your economy. You can change the resources you get in the upper icon. Allies get an additional share. Protect them. Healing champions with temples are a good idea (inside healing is faster) Walling is useful, but difficult and more expensive than other games. Don't chase ranged units with slower units. Cavalry is fast (with corral tech), but isn't heavily armoured. Some other strategies Cavalry archer rush: Go to second phase and mass cavalry archers. If you stop the enemy to reach the 3 phase, you can easily win. Countered with towers. Only ptolomies, seleucids and persians. CC rush: Reach second phase. Sell food and some wood for metal and stone. build a CC near your enemy, specially near wood lines or in a place for controling metal. If you mange to finish it, then build towers. Try always to stop them to reach 3 phase. For the next level, search build orders, youtube videos and recording games from pro players. Keep in mind that the game is in alpha status, and it lacks features, it can be buggy and it's unbalanced.

Man, you can't even imagine.

@Trionkali : as often said, don't forget that the game is still alpha, so balancing has no real sense (a feature can change all). Speaking of britons, they have good champs, good eco, but poor buildings. Don't forget that the aura is local (in a18 it was global), without the hero, iberians champs are bettter.

Graphics quality is currently not autodetected and it is always set to low by default. Some work is needed before adding autodetection, i.e. adding on the fly change, see ticket #3737. If you are curious you can see how autodetection works here. EDIT: Only the "graphics quality" option is not set to high based on detected hardware. Most of everything else it is, including GLSL, postprocessing, smooth los, water effects and shadows. I.e. if you have a high end gpu everything except "graphics quality" in a20 is set to max quality.

i am making this gaint forest map:

I don't believe walls are overpowered at all. I am one of the first players to use the turret spam bug, (which I no longer use), but overall, one (normal) set of walls around a weak players civ only gives them about 20 seconds to prepare even if you attack with about 20 champions. 40 for Carthaginians. So no, I do not think walls are overpowered, only turret spam. As BadMonkey showed, 1000 champ deaths, only because of turrets not walls. And could that not be solved by limiting the amount of arrows which could be fired in a certain radius?

Because of the distance above the ground from which you are looking at your civilization, there is going to be fog when you have the camera up that high. When you are lower, you are "under the clouds" so to speak. This is normal in every map which I have played, and can be disables via the first checkbox in the middle column of your settings.

Please see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths for where you can find the logs. If you have to kill the exe you might not get a crashlog, but you should at the very least have a system_info.txt file.

@Pandor: What you see is perfectly normal. You can disable the fog by turning off 'Prefer GLSL' in the options menu (though I personally like the fog, I always did)

Give more infos like your os or attach some logs.

Sounds good to my ears too. We'll go with Brytenwealda then!

Do you want to make some Atlas-only units?

I like wackyserious' suggestion.

Brytenwealda - "Wielder of Britain" A moniker given to any Anglo-Saxon ruler who manages to dominate or issue overlordship to the other kingdoms.

I wonder why the walls have not been implemented in alpha 20? There were just perfect.

To be really accurate the biggest change would have to be food. Food would be a resource continually consumed by all units, instead of just buying a unit for a fixed amount of food. If your food production is interrupted and you run out of food reserves your units would begin to starve, suffering lower stats and losing HP until they die. 95% of people around 0 A.D. were farmers so this is really important. Why was the starvation method of siege effective? Because the defenders needed very large fields to get food for themselves, and they couldn't afford to build and defend walls around that large area. This was an essential part of military strategy. Fields should be huge, covering large areas of the map, and hard to defend. Corrals would require large fields too (sheep have to graze).

Hastein - Visual actor

The Battle of Salamis was a naval battle opposing Greek allied forces (mainly Athens and Sparta) to Persian float in 480 BC. The battle did set in the Saronic Gulf, very close to Athens and especially Piraeus (the actual marine dock of Athens). The battle is famous in that despite largely outnumbered (the float was 5 time less), the greek allies did win the fight. Here is the area of the Battle: And here is my map: The battle did begin in the start of the dawn. It has been described by classical authors to happen with this configuration: So I decided to reproduce the battle as close from this. Beside Persians battleships, some Egyptian (Ptolemaeus) warships did support the fight against the greek faction, by holding position in the north area of the battle to intercept any greek ships eventually trying to escape the battle zone. I just had to reduce the number of total ships for technical reasons, but the ratio is the same. Some screenshots of my scenario: Because of the unbalanced ratio between the greek allies and the persians allies, I did use a garrison system in order to have some greek battleships more powerful compared to persian battleships (that was a nightmare, but thanks @fcxSanya for the procedure ). I still need to set up some nice scripts to make an interesting naval fight. Is there any published scripted battle in some scenario yet, to get inspiration ? Or maybe will there be some new maps like this in the next A20 ? Also, I have some display issues with such actual environment settings (I needed to set up a dawn atmosphere): because I need a very low sun inclination, I have some artifacts (a large shadow that comes from the out limits of the map area), in the east and in the north. Is there any way to fix it ? Will there be any new features in A20 that would allow some interesting naval fights too ? Thanks for the information and feedback.

I like the idea of making palisade walls build able in neutral territory. That is pretty realistic to the time (Alesia). But I would suggest that maps should be bigger and catapults should have 200-300 range like in actual life. The range of arrows can keep at 100 because that is historically accurate. Also how come this problem never happened in Age of Empires, or Rise of Nations?

A multiplayer subforum in the general discussions & ideas section would also be nice, so that players online can easily navigate the forums.

Kefalonia & Ithaka are two Mediterranean islands, located on the west coast of the Greece, a bit in the south of the more famous Corfu island. The islands offer some beautiful insularian landscapes like this: But the topography of the island is also nice to set up some game battles! Here are the islands (Kefalonia is the big one, Ithaka is the smaller one): And here is my map: The map is intended to be a skirmish map, with just a CC and a few units at start. Each player is located on the cities indicated on the map, Lixouri, Argostoli, Sami & Vathy. There are some main roads linking each players, situated in natural areas (at the bottom of mountains/valey, etc). Player 4 on Ithaka (Vathy) start on an isolated island, (so he should be left in peace for more time) but will need to move quite fastly in from of the island, because of a lack of space and resources on Ithaka. The natural landscapes allow some nice games. Here are a few screenshots: (***, I can't edit the screenshots..)

How about this?

The list of reachable/unreachable games may be useful by itself (to indicate the host status in the lobby games list), but to notify user about an issue with his host, bot can just send him a XMPP message. Also the game itself can send such a message when it fails to connect to someone. If we will use ICE for #2305 (UDP Hole Punching / NAT Traversal) (which is the current plan), then I think local ICE agent also can notify user when candidate negotiation with a peer fails (what itself should happen much more rarely than now).

0ad is far better because almost every aspect of the game is thoroughly examined by both players and developers. It is amazing that the game is doing so well despite being in alpha and having a solely volunteer development team.