This game is awesome. I also love that they have support for reinforcement learning[1]. I wish all the research in RL and video games was on open source games. Slight bias on my end. :)

[1] https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedReinforcem...

What I am hoping to see is the Petra AI code stubbed out for ML/RL tasks, https://github.com/0ad/0ad/tree/master/binaries/data/mods/pu... ... nearly every manager/function there could have it's actions modified based on what it views or calculates in previous gameplay. One was introduced a few alphas back before the interface, https://github.com/agentx-cgn/Hannibal

Nice of them to include torrents, and I long for the day when the browser speaks it natively, choosing to seed for as long as the page stays open, as a good start

I like both the tone and the content of the torrent FAQ page they made, too: https://play0ad.com/download/bittorrent-faq/

Some old versions of Opera from over a decade ago supported downloading torrents. It sadly didn't catch on.

> I long for the day when the browser speaks it natively

Brave browser

This game changed my mind about what is possible for an open source game.

I'm also wondering when they will stop calling it alpha.

Check out Battle for Wesnoth

wesnoth.org

OpenTTD, is perhaps the most successful open source game, though it largely sidesteps the criticism of "too many cooks" in regards to vision by starting from someone else's vision.

(Freeciv is another example).

From the features page: "As of August 2012, this feature has not been implemented yet."

Hats off to the 0ad team. It is a great game with a fun AI to play against. Give it a try - however, it is pretty addicting.

Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install 0ad

> Hats off to the 0ad team

Agree!

> Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install 0ad

If you want the latest version, you're probably better off with either the development PPA[0] or any of the following distribution models:

- Snap - https://snapcraft.io/0ad

- AppImage - https://www.appimagehub.com/p/1438982/

- Flatpack - https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.play0ad.zeroad

From https://play0ad.com/download/linux/#Ubuntu

- [0] `sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wfg/0ad.dev` and then the apt-get dance

This is one of my favorite games. It's what AOE III should have been.

I still think there should be some kind of Kaggle competition for training AI on this game.

I actually love AoE III but never did much with 0AD.

Does it have much of a multiplayer scene? Are there any sites to look at good build orders. I might have to try it again.

I liked AOE III, as well, it's just that when it came out I was hoping for AOE II but in 3D, but instead got a game that was a bit different but still good in its own way. 0AD feels like AOE II but in 3D to me.

I just play with friends and sometimes against the AI, so I haven't checked out the multiplayer scene. It looks like there are several build order YouTube videos and threads on Wildfire's forums, though.

We always see Hellenized / Romanized versions of other lands (e.g. "Persia", "India", "Africa") so it's nice to see the release nickname reference the eastern name for Ionia.

Yavana¹ is the standard word for Greeks in Indian languages. Heliodorus pillar is a great example of a Greek in India calling himself Yona².

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yona [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliodorus_pillar

I should give it a try again, last time the AI beat me so badly every try...

This is one of the nice things about this game: that it challenges your sense of time value. If you stay in your base and keep expanding without attacking, the AI exponentially grows and takes over easily. But if you sacrifice resources to destroy more resources from the opponent, it will almost feel easy to play.

That's the problem I have with some of these games: they almost always think you want to play as a soldier rather than as an engineer.

I liked it a lot, however to me after the earliest scenarios it becomes really hard even at lowest difficulty levels, so I pretty much gave up on it until the low difficulty lower levels become playable by non gamers like me.

A very different, way simpler, but easier and still enjoyable game is Megaglest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaGlest

The homepage seems dead these days though. I hope they didn't abandon the project.

It's down just for a few days now during server upgrades, give it a couple more days, please. ;-)

Contrary to what some people might say, there was no zeroth year.

This very fact actually inspired the name of the project.

Does someone know of a clone in paradox style?

Can someone recommend a game that has challenging AI? An example would be Starcraft 2.

Challenging how? SC2's inbuilt AI is pretty predictable - at harder levels it can only compete because it:

(a) has advantages the player does not (b) has an APM beyond what most players do

Which is standard for video game AI but you highlight SC2's AI as if it is relatively standout.

I can understand you being good at the game and not finding its AI challenging, but I'm surprised you don't find SC2's AI standout. Compare it to, say, SC1's AI. Or, other games I know well, like, AoE II, Zero-K, Men of War, Combat Mission. It's a qualitative difference for me.