The Widelands Development Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of build 18 of Widelands. Widelands is a free, cross-platform strategy game in which players control the fate of a small tribe that can grow into a big empire, in a style of play that is unique in the open source world. Please visit our homepage http:// www.widelands. org/ to learn more.

Some of the highlights of this build are:

* Seafaring enhancements: expeditions and colonization.

* Eviction of workers from production sites.

* Soldier preference selection in military sites.

* Better in-game stock charts with new information.

* new maps, sounds, music, graphics & animations.

* On demand loading of graphics improves startup time.

* Better performance: Widelands needs less CPU and memory.

As usual, there have been many more improvements to the usability and performance, as well as numerous game-play improvements and bug-fixes.

Widelands is currently translated 100% into the following languages: Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Slovak. It is > 80% translated into the following languages: Gaelic; Scottish, English (United Kingdom), Czech, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Brazilian Portuguese, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish. You can help out translating directly in your web browser: http:// translations. launchpad. net/widelands .

Widelands is distributed for Windows (32-bit) and Mac OS X (Intel, 64bit) and in source code. We no longer ship binary Linux packages because of the poor compatibility between Linux distributions. Instead, we try to make compiling for Linux users as easy as possible. Also, most distributions will pick up build 18 into their repositories very quickly. Both binary and source packages are available from http:// launchpad. net/widelands/ build18/ build18

Simply download the binary package for your operating system and run the widelands executable! If your operating system is not supported, download a source package and try to compile it for yourself. See the homepage for the libraries you need to have installed.

If you like what you see, please visit our homepage, http:// www.widelands. org/ . You may also want to check the forums and our IRC channel, #widelands on Freenode, to arrange multiplayer games with other players.

We especially welcome every helping hand, even if you just want to contribute by helping us find bugs. Also translators for all languages are always needed. If you want to get even more involved in the further development of Widelands, you can subscribe to widelands- public@ lists.sf. net on http:// lists.sourcefor ge.net/ mailman/ listinfo/ widelands- public to keep up with development on a daily basis or meet us in the forum.

Known issues / Notes to packagers:

Lua

Widelands currently depends on lua5.1, and will not build with lua5.2. This is being worked on (https:/ /bugs.launchpad .net/widelands/ +bug/1073932).