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The thing is, we have several competing ideas of what constitutes Alpha, Beta, Early Access, et al. And what exact milestones are necessary for each of those terms. i think for the longest time, the idea was that to come out of "alpha" to "beta" would require a working full-featured single player campaign and surely a multiplayer environment where we're no longer arguing over what constitutes cheating or not (the mods). Also, where the civ designs are rather solid and complete and the tech tree not in flux. Then with Beta, we can balance all of those things and fix anything that crops up. That's an older view of game development, but the industry has moved on to a more "perpetual development and balancing" environment, in an odd way meeting Wildfire Games where it's at with its development of 0 A.D. So, I'd advocate we get rid of the old view and embrace where the industry and gamer expectations are at today rather than how we wish they'd be or where they were 15 years ago. Having said that, I'd still like to tunnel down and get some things ready to go before officially boosting the game to Beta. I'd still like a single player campaign even if it's not full-featured and "complete," and I'd like to get the rest of the civs differentiated on the level of the Athenians, Romans, and Spartans are in Alpha 27. And lastly, we need to get the multiplayer community under control before we can legitimately go to Steam or wherever we can go after claiming we're in Beta or Early Access. So, I'd say let's make Alpha 27 the final "Alpha", and after that change our mindset and goals toward the next release being "Beta 1" or whatever we decide to call it.

I agree that the specific verbiage and underlying reality the the game is unfinished are probably not a big factor in preventing people from trying 0AD, but I suspect they might be significant factors in low retention and engagement depth. As FOSS, there are few good reasons not to install the game and give it a try if you are interested. However, playing around for a few hours will quickly clarify the meaning of those labels. The game is clearly missing some key ingredients of the value proposition of a full-featured RTS (which wowgetoffyourcellphone just listed), and the verbiage of its "unfinished alpha" state communicates that these features are coming, just be patient. Thus if you are bothered by the lack of any of these features you will say to yourself "this is promising, but I'm not going to waste more of my time trying to get enjoyment from a prototype; I'll come back when it is finished." Thus that notional user never goes on to become a regular multiplayer competitor or a content contributor. They simply lurk, until eventually they forget 0AD exists, or they realize that the timeline for these features to be delivered is not weeks or months like most commercial early-access or games-as-a-service products, but years or decades. The end result being that yes, you got a new user for a few days or weeks, but they did not "join the community," and therefore the community remains small. Dropping the alpha labeling might help with retaining some of those players, who enjoy their initial experience of the game, but anticipate a better value proposition if they wait to full invest their time. It would at least encourage them to make their own assessment of whether the value proposition of the product is enticing enough for them to stay engaged, rather than defaulting to the word of god that the product is not ready yet. However you are likely correct that the benefit will be small. I think the bigger benefit will come from how that change would affect the project's development priorities. 0AD can't keep coasting along on aspirations of eventually delivering a complete product in perpetuity. If the project can't deliver on a "full-featured single player campaign," and "a multiplayer environment where we're no longer arguing over what constitutes cheating or not," and "where the civ designs are rather solid and complete and the tech tree not in flux"; then it would at least be healthy to give some thought to what sort of optimal value proposition can be delivered in the immediate future, and focus more effort on developing that. Dropping the "it's sill in alpha" excuse might help motivate that change of mindset.

Every civ in vanilla 0ad is broken or incomplete with fatal vulnerabilities that can end the game. This is because almost every civ is missing something, so the player cannot respond effectively. Here is a list Athens - spear cav raid. Athens has no cavalry units that can counter such raids; sword and jav cav will get decimated. Brits - champ spear cav, champ archer cav, camel spam Gauls - the only one with no fatal weakness, but seriously lacks siege and archers - will get sniped by archer civ or die to turtle player. Romans and Spartans - no long range at all - will get sniped or stuck Ptols - lack mobility, lack cavalry, lack effective antiram Kush, Carth: dead if no additional metal mine. Only archers as ranged infantry is too weak. Maurya: archer only civ again, die to champ cavs Persians: no great flaw but infantry melee is weak Han: farming bug, crossbow units lack mobility, no javs or slings, have to train champions from special building... needless to say more xD Seleucids: will get sniped by Ptols A mod which fixes these problems is Leif @Emacz's historical-rebalance mod. We should play more games on this mod because it's more complete than vanilla and fixes these problems. Download here. https://github.com/Emacz2/leifs-sparta-patch

I addressed this in DE with mercenary camps. Don't have Archers in your standard roster? Capture a mercenary camp and hire them.

This. I’ve said before that when I initially downloaded the game I played for a week or two until I realized how bad AI was. After that it wasn’t fun to play against the computer. Then I stopped playing for a month or two until I randomly decided to reopen the game and do MP (where I realized how green my kills were). If AI is only good enough to beat a brand new player for a week or two that’s a problem and means you can’t retain most single players for more than a brief few weeks. So I imagine the typical experience is 2 days of “this is impossible with how hard AI is,” followed by 2 days of “I’m getting the hang of it—this is fun,” followed by 2 days of “this is fun and I’m beating AI all the time now,” followed by a day of “is there anything new? This isn’t a challenge anymore.” That’s a really fast lifecycle for a game. A smarter AI is needed to build out the SP mode.

If the lag was fixed this game would be as good as the best RTS games out there. As it is I have to stick with smaller and more open map types, which really limits how much I play it. Is progress being made on fixing the lag? Is there anything a modded can do to affect it?