bunni

I think one contributor is the project's appearance or presentation to the public. This is the main image on the Wikipedia page, so its what search engines show as a small thumbnail. not flattering. You can update that to a more recent image with lighting and color balance better suited to thumbnails. Section one and two of the user manual carry on without explaining how a traditional RTS works and present video from 2012. Even to me that feels like "oh boy, here we go. 2012? is this even current and correct?" As someone who has watched this develop for 13 years with great interest but cant get into it myself, it looks like an overly technical RTS made by history übernerds who haven't updated their knowledge of game user interfaces since Command and Conquer was cool. It looks out of date, whether it is or not. On 4k displays the 0 A.D. homepage is like a stripe down the middle of the screen with a vast expanse of tiling background. I feel like I'm hitting a homepage for abandoned software left up for historical purposes. The play experience in the early days was a lot of 'not implemented yet' and glitchy things, and when I came back many years later, it was still the same. I cant get a new player into it if its not functional and well documented (in a way a noob groks.) I think it's only inviting to old heads like us that remember when games were played on boards made from dead tree flesh, colored with crushed insect shells and tailings from mineral mines. We're patient, we remember playing StarCraft for 20 years, but these days the market is done with a game in 6 months and pushing the Steam Store's next new thing. How does a game like 0 A.D. attract players or even get taken seriously in today's environment? As an outsider, I think redouble your efforts to make the thing look as polished as it is, take some glam shots of battle elephants under a sky blackened by arrows or something. Make a version of the docs that an RTS noob can understand cuz this is a niche genre today. Make the web site look less 90s... and that UI sucks, it looks like something out of an OpenGL programming manual, not a carefully thought out and organized system for commanding armies. I dunno, direct hate mail to /dev/null idgaf but I don't wanna see this thing die just because ppl didn't deburr the edges and developed in a vacuum.