0 A.D. Changelog

What's new in 0 A.D. Alpha 23

Jun 30, 2018
  • Top New Features:
  • New Civilization: Kushites
  • Mod Downloader
  • Cavalry and Spartan Building Models
  • Combine Victory Conditions
  • Attack Range Visualization
  • Diplomacy Colors
  • Destruction Damage
  • Unit Information Dialog
  • AI Behavior
  • Lobby Authentication to prevent impersonation
  • Nomad Mode on all Random Maps
  • New Random Maps: Lower Nubia, Jebel Barkal, Elephantine, Fields of Meroë, Hellas, Dodecanese, Scythian Rivulet

New in 0 A.D. Alpha 22 (Aug 22, 2017)

  • Remake of many models, animations and textures, two new music tracks
  • Configuration-free Multiplayer Hosting
  • Capture the Relic Gamemode
  • Aura and Heal Range Visualization
  • Twelve new maps, including scripted enemies, rising water and a tutorial
  • Espionage Technology, Team Bonuses and Hero Auras
  • Petra AI Diplomacy and Attack Strategies
  • Summary Screen Graphs
  • Cinema Path Editing
  • Buddy System

New in 0 A.D. Alpha 21 (Nov 9, 2016)

  • Herocide/Regicide: You start with a hero and are defeated when he or she dies.
  • Wonder Victory: Now you can change the time from when the wonder is built to when you win. Either set it to 0 so you win as soon as the wonder is built or to anywhere between 1 and 120 minutes for a chance for the opponents to destroy it before the match is won.
  • Last Man Standing: Only one player can win the game. Form temporary alliances to eliminate common competitors. But be careful: as the remaining players struggle for victory, allies are forced to turn against you. This mode can be played with every victory condition.
  • New buildings and champions:
  • The Persian Hall and Hellenic Royal Stoa can train new Infantry Champions in town and city phase.
  • The Briton Crannog acts as a civic center and dock, providing economic stability on both land and water.
  • Romans and Persians benefit from the new Temple of Vesta and Gate of Ishtar, making buildings harder to capture.
  • Patrolling: When clicking the button or pressing the hotkey (P + Right Click), units move along the path you set for them and attack enemy units they encounter along the way, then return to the beginning and continue doing so until you give them another order.
  • Tech Cost Modifiers and Team Bonuses: The costs of technologies can now be modified by Auras and Technologies, demonstrated by faster and cheaper research when a Library was built. Players get a bonus if they are on a team with a player of a certain civilization. For example allies of Iberians have 20% cheaper skirmishers, allies of Seleucids have 20% cheaper civic centers.
  • Stackable Auras: Capturing further Wonders, Libraries or Theatrons increases the building bonus proportionally. Losing a wonder means losing the population bonus, capturing a wonder means further increasing the maximum population, making the Wonder a crucial part of the empire.
  • New Balancing: The aim of the new balancing is to stop players from destroying buildings with infantry and cavalry, enforce the use of siege engines, reduce the spamming of champions by making them more expensive and slower to train. With the addition of town phase champions and the lessening of attack damage of defensive buildings, early attacks are more feasible. Capturing of buildings is only feasible if they are heavily damaged or left unguarded. More details are found in the Balancing section of the changelog.
  • Upgrading System::
  • Buildings and units can now be upgraded. For example the new Sentry Towers can be upgraded to Defense Towers.
  • New Maps:
  • Alpha 21 adds no less than eleven random map scripts and two skirmish maps.
  • Nine of these random maps teleport players to actual geographical regions: Amazon, Mediterranean, Red Sea, Marmara, Pompeii , Bahrain, Howe Sound, Ngorongoro and Rouen.
  • New Fields and Oak trees beautify the landscape. The Gaul Fortress, Tavern and the Ptolemaic Military Colony received new models as well.
  • Objectives Dialog:
  • New Tooltips lift some secrets, like the loot that attackers are rewarded with when killing enemy units or destroying their buildings, the garrisoning- and arrow limit of buildings, healing statistics and assigned hotkeys:
  • Loot Tooltips:
  • Resources of allies are now visible in the tooltip of the top panel and in the summary screen after having researched cartography:

New in 0 A.D. Alpha 20 (Apr 1, 2016)

  • New Random Maps: “Ambush”, “Empire“, “Flood”, “Frontier“, “Hell’s Pass“, “Island Stronghold“, “Lions Den” and “Stronghold“.
  • New Skirmish maps: A 4-player skirmish map named “Forest Battle” and a 2-player skirmish map named “Golden Island“.
  • Use allied drop sites: After researching a technology you can use your ally’s storehouses, farmsteads, docks, CCs, but not Mauryan elephants, to drop off resources your units have gathered. The ally needs to allow it for each drop site, so it can’t be used to “steal” all the resources in the area.
  • Murder Holes: Research a technology to let towers attack units standing underneath the tower.
  • New technologies for fishing: Research technologies to improve the gathering efficiency of your ships.
  • Loot resources that killed enemies carried: Now you will automatically get the resources that were carried by units killed by your armies, in other words: kill wood workers to get wood, farmers to get food, etc. This is in addition to the normal loot you get when killing units.
  • Graphics and User Interface
  • Improvements to game options menu: New graphics quality setting, which allows you to easily change the quality of graphics from within the game (previously you had to use config files), as well as some cleanups and bug fixes.
  • Higher quality graphical effects enabled by default on higher-end computers. If your computer should be able to handle higher quality graphical effects they are now enabled by default. You can of course change to a lower setting manually if you want to improve performance or prefer not to use them for some other reason.
  • Idle worker button is now disabled when there are no idle workers, so you don’t have to press it just to check whether or not you have any idle workers.
  • Credits screen: Check out who contributed to the game, everyone from managers to programmers, from artists to donators, from translators to composers. We have tried to include everyone, but many have contributed over the years, so if you have contributed but don’t see your name in the list please let us know.
  • New trees and variations: There has been new models and textures for the acacia tree, Aleppo pine, oaks, dead oaks, generic dead trees.
  • Plenty of improvements for observer mode and replays: Among other things you can now watch the match from the perspective of a player, see the Summary screen during the match, and now the fog of war is shown in observer mode. Matches also support up to 16 observers now.
  • More information about players in a multiplayer match: Show who lags or has a network timeout.
  • New Seleucid barracks
  • Under the Hood:
  • Cinematic camera for rendering cut scenes: The ground-work has been done to make it possible to control the camera for cut scenes. There is still some work needed to make it easy to use (for now camera paths has to be set by entering coordinates), but it’s a solid foundation to build on for the future.
  • Plus many smaller changes, for a list of all the interesting ones, please read through the changelog.

New in 0 A.D. Alpha 19 (Nov 30, 2015)

  • Building and Siege Engine Capture: Non-siege units can now capture buildings and siege engines. When you hover your mouse over an entity that can be captured, two crossed flags appear so you can issue a “capture” order. If you do, you will start gaining some of that entity’s “capture points” at a certain rate. (On screen, you will see your color taking up a greater proportion of the width of the entity’s capture bar.) Once you gain all of these points, you capture the entity, and it is yours! (Note: You can still specify a regular attack on buildings and siege engines by holding CTRL when right-clicking on a target.) There is currently no animation for the units which are capturing, that will be added in a later version.
  • New Victory Modes: “Conquest Structures” (destroy or capture all enemy structures to win) and “Conquest Units” (destroy all enemy units to win).
  • Ceasefire Game Mode: The game can be set so that all players are completely unable to attack their enemies for a predetermined time at the start of a game.
  • Attack Coordination: Players can request allies (including bots) to attack a specific enemy by clicking a button next to the player name in the diplomacy window. Also, Petra AI now supports attack coordination.
  • Petra AI now warns its allies when it needs a tribute and lets them know when it advances to a new phase.
  • The Ptolemaic lighthouse now has its special feature implemented: It reveals the shore on the entire map.
  • New Skirmish Maps: Tuscan Acropolis (for 4 players; map preview), Northern Island (for 2 players; map preview), and Alpine Mountains (for 3 players; map preview).
  • Graphics and User Interface:
  • Increased Maximum Map Height: The engine now supports an eight times greater range of terrain heights, allowing for the creation of maps with more diverse and impressive landscapes.
  • Visual Replay: Re-run a game and understand what took place in real time.
  • Aura Visualization: Units affected by an aura are now marked with an icon when the aura giver is selected.
  • New animals: New mastiff and wolfhound units have been added as well as a new rhinoceros.
  • The Roman units now have voices in Latin. Voice actors and people with knowledge in ancient languages are invited to contribute more voices to the game!
  • Under the Hood:
  • New Pathfinder: The pathfinder is the component of the game engine that picks a route for a unit to move along from its current location to its target location, so that it does not collide with other units or with structures or with impassable terrain. The new pathfinder improves performance, but at the same time, it also introduces some new bugs. We have done as much as we could to ensure it was bug-free, but please report anything unusual!
  • XML Validation: In 0 A.D., the behavior of units, buildings and other world objects is defined by their components, such as cost, health and more. All of these are described in XML files. The “grammar” of the XML files is now checked for correctness before being used by the game engine, which helps prevent technical problems.
  • The generic Hellenic and Celtic factions have been removed.
  • Linux users, please be advised that SDL2 is now enabled by default on Linux.

New in 0 A.D. Alpha 18 (Mar 14, 2015)

  • Nomad Game Mode: Players start with only some citizen soldiers and female citizens, and no civil center, and must build a base from scratch.
  • In-Game Technology Tree: Allows players to see which faction can research what technologies, when and for how many resources.
  • The default AI, Petra, now supports saved games.
  • Toggle groups of units between marching in formation and breaking formation.
  • New Seleucid buildings:
  • The new buildings are the house, storehouse, farmstead, towers and temple. The Civic Center is a placeholder for now and will be updated before the Seleucids are finished.
  • Performance Improvements and Other Changes Under the Hood:
  • ​SpiderMonkey upgraded to ​v31: The Javascript engine SpiderMonkey has been upgraded to version 31. This greatly improves performance and reduces memory usage a bit. We have also adapted our code to support new and advanced memory management techniques and features of SpiderMonkey such as Exact Stack Rooting, Moving GC and Generational GC. In addition, this version of SpiderMonkey includes a new and improved version of the performance profiling tool called “Tracelogger”, which has helped us identifying and fixing different problems and further improving performance.
  • C++11 upgrade: C++ is the main programming language used for our Engine and we now support the C++11 standard, which was finalized by the ISO committee in 2011. It took a while until the standard was supported well enough by the third party tools we are using, mainly C++ compilers. Last but not least, we dropped support for older C++ compilers in order to move to the new version. As a consequence, we have also been able to remove some workarounds for bugs and missing features in these old compilers. C++11 brings many new and useful features our programmers can use and it was a requirement for the SpiderMonkey 31 upgrade.
  • More Efficient Fogging and Visibility Calculations: These calculations keep track of what each player knows about all objects in the world. For example, you might see a tree with half of its resources remaining in the Fog of War. Another player might have more recent information because of scouting and knows that this tree has already been collected completely. This kind of information is now stored and processed more efficiently, which improves performance a lot.
  • New Wildfire Games Server: The new Wildfire Games server hosts different services such as the multiplayer lobby, our IRC bot, the website and also the newly implemented autobuilder. The autobuilder builds 0 A.D. from source code for artists, players and other people who should not have to build it manually, and can now check itself with automated tests. (The payments for the hosting plan and server license are made possible thanks to our donors!)
  • Selected other improvements: Several AI optimizations, reduced lag when selecting units, and more.
  • Improvements to the Atlas Editor:
  • Right-Click Rotations of Multiple Objects: Normal behavior: Rotate objects in circle, Ctrl+Right-click: Rotate each of the objects individually in place, Shift+Right-click: Keep rotation but move in circle.
  • Atlas now checks for unsaved changes when closing a map.
  • Atlas now shows when objects are placed in invalid locations by highlighting them in red.
  • Show template names of selected objects.
  • Copy and paste added to Edit menu.
  • Numerous bug fixes.

New in 0 A.D. Alpha 17 (Oct 15, 2014)

  • Top New Gameplay Features in This Release:
  • Major Core Combat Rebalance: Now, if you send only one unit type to battle, it fares poorly against regiments of the same size that mix more than one type, e.g. melee and ranged units. Technologies as a whole have been made more expensive and unrelated technologies have been “unpaired”. Some stats have been adjusted to make training some units viable. Buildings are now a bit easier to destroy. Temporarily, we have removed formations, and we plan to re-implement them again in a more balanced way.
  • Naval Map Support: The computer opponent now uses transport ships to colonize other islands and attack enemy bases, but naval combat (i.e. ships against ships) is not yet implemented.
  • Improved Fog of War: The Fog of War is the part of the terrain that has been scouted already but is not in vision range of your units or allied units. Buildings and changes to resources such as trees or metal mines are now also hidden in the Fog of War, and not just units. Hence, players now need to scout more often to find unclaimed resources on the map, hidden enemy outposts and more.
  • Units On Walls: Units can be garrisoned in wall segments, and appear on the walls at predefined prop points. (Importantly, while the units can attack and be attacked individually, they cannot walk around on the wall.)
  • Multiplayer Lobby Profiles: Users can now view profiles of other players from within the lobby. Profiles contain user statistics such as rating, games won and lost, highest rating, and ranking that can be accessed on-demand.
  • New Maps: Siwa Oasis (skirmish map) and Schwarzwald (random map).
  • Scenario and Mod Design:
  • Triggers: A “trigger” makes an action occur in the game if a specified event takes place. For example:
  • If you build an outpost within a certain area (event), your enemy’s walls are destroyed (action);
  • Alternatively, if a timer runs out (event), an army spawns on the border of the map and marches towards your city (action);
  • Or, if a certain building is destroyed (event), the player who owns it loses the game (action).
  • The new trigger system is perhaps the most important feature that was missing to make narrative campaigns and scenarios possible. Triggers also make it easier to design custom victory conditions, or even multiplayer maps with unique gameplay aspects. Events and actions are easily extensible with some Javascript knowledge and offer a huge set of new possibilities for creative map designers.
  • Two new maps make use of the trigger system in Alpha 17:
  • Survival of the Fittest: Each player has one female citizen in the middle of the map where treasures spawn from time to time. The main bases are on isolated spots with no resources and some buildings are restricted. Enemy attack forces spawn regularly and attack your main base. The goal is to survive as long as possible by collecting treasures, recruiting troops and defending your base. (Map type: Random; Map Filter: Standard)
  • Treasure Islands: Search treasures on small islands and on the water. Collect more treasures than your opponent to win. You can use fishing boats to garrison infantry and send them to other islands. Trade ships can be used to collect floating treasures, but you need to advance to Town Phase before they can be built. (Map type: Scenario; Map Filter: Naval Maps)
  • Mod Selector and Improved Mod Support: The new Mod Selector allows users to enable or disable mods, save them or just restart into them to test them out. This way, it is a lot easier to test and play mods. This can be reached at: Main Menu -> Tools & Options -> Mod Selection. Also, modders can now easily make small changes to the game without having to copy and modify many files.
  • Performance Improvements:
  • Several parts of the game and the engine have been improved for better performance. Comparing with Alpha 16, you’ll notice significantly higher framerates at the beginning of the game. There are also some improvements observable later in the game, but also additional overhead from new features. Improvements have been made in these areas:
  • Simulation: Dynamic message subscriptions;
  • Rendering: Optimise silhouette rendering, new unit renderer, optimisation for non-animated units;
  • AI: Building placement code, handling of unreachable targets (i.e. for builder or gatherers), Defense — finding defending units;
  • Scripting: Using new Javascript Map objects at some places.
  • Graphics and User Interface:
  • Improved Culling for Shadows and Reflections: This fixes ugly pop-in effects for shadows and reflections while scrolling.
  • Improved Water Rendering.
  • Improved CJK text input using the Windows IME.
  • Music: Omri has created a new and improved version of Honour Bound — the 0 A.D. main theme.
  • Miscellaneous: Hellenistic ranged siege animations added; Carthaginian ballista added; Iberian barracks replaced; Rotary mill added; Ptolemaic blacksmith modified; Gaul farmstead modified; Ptolemy I hero for the Ptolemies; Snow wolf modified; Iberian wonder added; New Iberian tower models added (see screenshots above).

New in 0 A.D. Alpha 13 (Apr 3, 2013)

  • New Gameplay Features:
  • All-new and unique Mauryan Indian civilization, including new units, from war elephants to Brahmin priests; and new buildings, reflecting this culture’s original architectural style.
  • The default AI, Aegis bot, has been greatly improved, be it at defending, attacking, or building a strong economy. It now supports researching technologies and should work much more reliably than most other AIs before. (Known problem: Aegis now has some issues with saved games. Sorry, we hope to fix this in A14.)
  • Aegis can now play at several different difficulty levels, so beginners can easily learn to play, and more experienced players can get more of a challenge.
  • Attack/move command: If you select units and then Ctrl + right-click on a location, they will go to the location, but also stop to attack enemies they meet along the way.
  • Graphics and User Interface Improvements:
  • Helpful messages appear when a building can’t be placed somewhere. (See screenshots below.)
  • When you select a place to build a building, the building preview always shows the precise final variation that will be built.
  • When some buildings are built, they now rise from the ground, and some also have lifelike scaffolds surrounding them.
  • Tribute stats added to the summary screen.
  • Players are notified when any tributes are given to them.
  • Music and Sound:
  • New Celtic songs: “Cisalpine Gaul” and “Celtica” (the latter featuring Jeff Willet’s percussion),
  • New Hellenic song: “The Hellespont” (also featuring Jeff),
  • Combat music featuring taiko drums “First Sighting” and “Elusive Predator” by Jeff.
  • First Mauryan song: “Land Between the Two Seas.”
  • New and improved animal sounds for lions, tigers and bears.
  • Development Updates and Miscellaneous Features:
  • User mod support: See our modding guide to learn how to create your own mods for 0 A.D.
  • The new Javascript Debugger supports the basic features of debuggers (breakpoints, continue, step calls…), and allows 0 A.D. developers and modders to debug Javascript scripts used by the game, saving a lot of time to understand some unexpected behavior or issue. 0 A.D. uses Javascript in many different areas like gameplay logic, UI, AI and random map scripts. Thanks to mmayfield45 for contributing the web GUI. (See screenshot below, and the documentation wiki for more details.)
  • Improved OS X build process, without need for MacPorts or Homebrew.

New in 0 A.D. Alpha 12 Loucetios (Dec 17, 2012)

  • New Features:
  • Diplomacy: Determine if you and another human player are allies, enemies or neutral to each other, and change this relationship in mid-game as you see fit. If you downgrade the relationship, the change is automatically mutual (i.e., by turning someone into your enemy, you automatically become their enemy); But if you try to upgrade relations, as in forging an alliance, you need the other side to explicitly agree. (As of Alpha 12, AI players will not react to diplomacy changes at all. We hope to add this in the future.)
  • 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”, and takes time, during which the siege engine can neither move nor fire. (This is important for both realism and balance, as siege engines can inflict lots of damage.)
  • Formation Order Queueing: Allows giving units several tasks to carry out in order, e.g.: (1) Build a house here, then (2) move near to the other player’s territory, (3) build a army camp there and then (4) attack the fortress first and then (5) go straight for the civic center. All these orders can be given in one sequence by pressing “shift” and right-clicking the relevant parts of the map in order.
  • Heroes are back, but now each player can have only up to one living hero at any time.
  • Slaughter Attack: All domestic animals are killed with melee weapons, even by otherwise ranged units. This speeds up meat harvesting.
  • Unit Training Hotkeys: If you select a building that can train units, and then hit “Z”, it is as if you clicked the first unit training button on the left on the GUI; “X” for the second button from the left, “C” for the third, etc., up to the letter “M”.
  • New Match Setup Options: Choose the population cap and the amount of resources players will start out with.
  • Five New Random Maps: Nomad, Syria, Corinthian Isthmus, Belgian Uplands, and English Channel.
  • Graphics and User Interface Improvements:
  • Improved Water Rendering: The new, “super-fancy” water includes the white foam of waves crashing onto the shore, it can be much wavier, and it casts surface and underwater shadows.
  • Post-Processing Manager: Recent changes enable features such as distance fog, bloom and more. No less importantly, the post-processing manager is extremely moddable, so from now on, developers can very easily add new visual effects to 0 A.D. using existing code from other projects. For an example, see the Bokeh Depth of Field effect shown below.
  • Rubble appears when you destroy a building.
  • We have also added icons to the tooltips, instead of names of resources like “Food” and “Wood” and time units like “seconds”.
  • Music and Sound:
  • New song: “Calm Before the Storm”, meant to be played in menu screens.
  • Recent changes to the audio improve the way music sounds, and ensure it is heard in stereo.