Dunedan

No, you don't have to buy anything. You can continue to run it on localhost and create a self-signed TLS certificate as well. See the instructions at https://github.com/0ad/lobby-bots?tab=readme-ov-file#choice-b-self-signed-certificate.

In general the instructions in https://github.com/0ad/lobby-bots should still work, although I haven't set up a multiplayer lobby using them in quite a while as using https://github.com/0ad/lobby-infrastructure/ is just much more comfortable. Regarding your specific error, I can only guess based on the limited information you provided, but somebody had the same problem in the past using SleekXMPP (the predecessor of Slixmpp currently used by the bots): https://github.com/fritzy/SleekXMPP/issues/250. So my guess is you try to connect without TLS encryption, which Slixmpp doesn't allow with PLAIN authentication out of the box.

How do you run the bots? Do you use https://github.com/0ad/lobby-infrastructure/?

So you can login with other users, e.g. when using 0ad, but login fails for the lobby bots?

I know you're tired of hearing it, but I feel I have to repeat it here once more: Using smurf accounts is a violation of the Terms of Use. If you encounter smurfs or players using duplicate accounts for other reasons, please report them to a lobby moderator.

The next release of 0ad won't have this requirement anymore. See https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/7742 for details.

In theory it might be, but unless there is a way to automate that, that sounds like an absolute microing nightmare.

One merchant ship with five garrisoned traders has the same efficiency as two merchant ships, however 1 ship + 5 traders costs 500 food and 500 metal, while 2 ships only cost 200 metal. As all the units count towards your population limit, 2 ships aren't just significant cheaper, but they only incur a population of 2 instead of 6, you'd have with 1 ship + 5 traders. Therefore garrison traders in merchant ships usually doesn't make sense at all and might be only helpful if you have land based trade at first and switch to merchant ships later on.

We keep having an eye on the rating disputes and take action if necessary.

That's wrong. You might have been thinking about interpreted languages which use a Global Interpreter Lock (GIL), like CPython, which results in them not being able to utilize multiple CPU cores when using threads, but that's a limitation of such languages and doesn't apply to C++. And as a side note: Even in languages which use a GIL, multiple threads can be faster than multiple processes, depending on the kind of work to be parallelized. Check out for example the commit linked below, where I speed up validation of entities. I compared using multiple threads vs. multiple processes, but as more time is spent loading data from disk than doing actual CPU heavy computation, using multiple threads instead of using multiple processes was significantly faster, thanks to threads having a much lower overhead than processes. https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/commit/e755ef715565409b93cecdb2d84b5098a518fef6

You're probably looking for the multiplayer lobby. "Join Game" is for directly joining a game, "Game Lobby" for the multiplayer lobby.

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7979 maybe?

yes

If you believe a moderator is abusing his privileges, please report that in a private message to me instead of accusing somebody publicly.

The most recent release of 0 A.D. is Alpha 27 and can be downloaded here: https://play0ad.com/download/ The link posted by @Stugna points to unreleased code, which might be buggy and break stuff. It's not meant to be used instead of Alpha 27 for regular playing, but rather for testing upcoming changes. Unless you really know what you're doing, don't download anything from there. If you want to test upcoming changes, please report your findings as described here: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/ReportingErrors Once there is a new release of 0 A.D., it'll will be an announced and you'll find updated instructions how to install it on https://play0ad.com/download/