0 A.D, one of the best free, open source real-time strategy (RTS) games, has reached the alpha 12.





For those not familiar with 0 A.D., this is a historical war and economy game that works on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. It features great graphics and sound and it has both single-player and multi-player functionality (multi-player uses peer-to-peer networking, without a central server and there's no matchmaking service yet).









0 A.D. alpha 12 "Loucetios" has been released with interesting new features such as diplomacy, packing siege engines, heroes, new match setup options, improved graphics and user interface and more.

Diplomacy: you can determine if other human players are your allies, enemies or neutral and change this any time you want

Heroes are back, each player can have only 1 living hero

New match setup options: you can select the population cap and amount of resources used when starting a new game

Five new random maps have been added

Formation order queueing: you can give units several tasks to carry out in order

Packing siege engines: certain siege engines need to be in a “packed” state to be moved from place to place, and in a stationary "unpacked" state to be able to fire. Moving a siege engine between these states is called "packing" and "unpacking"

Unit training hotkeys

Improved water rendering

Post-processing manager: enable features such as distance fog, bloom and more

New song: "Calm Before the Storm"

More!

Distance fog

As usual, the 0 A.D. developers have released a video, demoing the new features available in the latest 0 A.D. alpha:

vote for it (under Upcoming games of 2012 > Real Time Strategy). And speaking of 0 A.D., the game has reached the second round in the Indie of the Year 2012 awards - if you like 0 A.D. HERE (under).

Install 0 A.D. game in Ubuntu

Ubuntu users can use the official 0 A.D PPA to install the latest 0 A.D. alpha - copy and paste the following commands in a terminal to install it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wfg/0ad sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install 0ad

The voting continues until the end of the world (December 21st) :)