0 AD Alpha 2 out!!!

[gameboy]

Wildfire Games proudly announces the release of "0 A.D. Alpha 2 Bellerophon", the second alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This release comes with victory conditions, fog of war, formations, a new in-game GUI and many other features that make 0 A.D. feel more like a real RTS than ever before. Who will emerge as the victor? Download and play to find out!

New features in this release:
Gameplay: Added fog of war; group movement and basic formations; victory conditions; health bars; hunting and fishing; population limits; repair command.
Performance: Improved pathfinder performance greatly. Moved data files into a zip file for faster loading. Added automatic texture compression; Added streaming music decompression.
GUI: Completely new in-game GUI. Improved minimap, added unit-following camera mode, added building rotation keys.
Art: Savanna biome (terrain set, flora and fauna such as baobab and giraffes); All Celtic buildings revamped or remodeled; Greek fishing boat; Theban Sacred Band; Hellenistic Spartan Phalangite; Eyecandy such as broken and fallen columns, unfinished Greek temple, Royal Stoa, stone fence, etc.
Multiple new maps and scenarios to play.

Room for improvement:
There is no computer opponent AI yet. In single-player games the enemy does nothing.
There is no random map generation yet.
Many unit stats are still unbalanced.
Many planned gameplay features are not added yet: There is no research, no auras, no rank upgrades, no settlements and territories, no resource dropsites, etc.
Many bugs and small missing features.
There is no multiplayer matchmaking service. You have to connect by IP address. (More convenient ways may be implemented in the future).

Click here for more news:
http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/page.php?p=13665#comments

[Omega]

Sweet! Been waiting on this. Still no AI (aw), but I'll check it out anyway.

[ElimiNator]

Cool, but I have Ubuntu 9.10 and it wouldn't work.

[gameboy]

no, it doesn't support 9.10. 10.4 and 10.10 are ideal.

[Psychedelic_hands]

Thanks for keeping us updated with this gameboy .

[gameboy]

my pleasure

[Mark]

I haven't downloaded, but it looks cool.  However, I think it still lacks these crucial features (in my mind):
   -An AI.  I know you know, but still.  I can't use my fast computer to play over an internet network.
   -Large numbers.  50 slows the game down terribly.  You have historical accuracy in everything else, so why not try for realistically large numbers, or something close?  Having a couple hundred units on the screen would be fantastic.  Probably hard to do, but if you could somehow get that many, battles could become quite exciting.
   -Formations.  I think you still have units going in strange formations, not blocks. 
   -Charging.  You said someone was working on getting that done, but I don't think you have that yet.  Nothing is more satisfying than pinning an enemy's infantry an iron curtain phalanx and a thundering charge!

I am impressed, though.  You obviously have tried hard (and succeeded) in making the game beautiful to look at-from awesome textures to intricate flora and interactive fauna, it looks very cool!

[gameboy]

yes, i know abt the AI. Since we don't have anyone actually skilled in that area its gonna take awhile.
We've improved the pathfinding system so its much faster, hopefully this will allow a lot more units on the screen.
know, we've got two basic formations implemented. A box formation and a column formation. at the moment u cannot choose between the two, but u have the box at default and column when traveling long distances(which i think is quite cool ).
i don't remember saying that someone was working on it, it'll prolly take sometime since there are some more important things to do before that.

thanks for words! we appreciate it