Wildfire Games has released a new alpha of their open source real-time strategy game. Alpha 17 is titled ”Quercus” and contains numerous gameplay balance fixes and ability to place soldiers on top of walls among other things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eeyrh7G7voI
This release seems to mostly focus on rebalancing the game by making technologies more expensive to research and giving more advantages to armies that consist of mixed unit types. Buildings have also been made easier to destroy and some units' stats have been modified to make them more profitable to train. Group formations have also been removed temporarily but they will return after a more balanced re-implementation.
In addition to balancing, the AI has received some fixes. The AI finally recognizes the need for transport ships on naval maps and it will use them to attack and colonize other islands. This is an important feature as before playing naval maps with the AI was pointless. The AI just hoarded tons of units and tried desperately to find a way to walk them over the sea. However, for now it will only use transport ships and won't try to attack ships with other ships.
Multiplayer lobby profiles were also added in this release. With this feature you can view other players' profiles to see their amount of games they've won and lost and their ratings and rankings. Cool stuff for the people who are looking for an equal to play against.
There is a new feature that might be very important once scenarios or campaigns are being created and that's triggers. What they do is quite simple: they cause actions based on events. For example, if a certain building gets destroyed the trigger might spawn an army of enemies or cause you to lose the game. Alpha 17 includes two maps that utilize the trigger system, so you can go ahead and test it out right now. For me this is possibly the most important of all of these features, as I'd gladly see some campaigns be made for 0 A.D. I'm not much of a multiplayer guy and the AI isn't perfect in the typical skirmish game mode so having campaigns would make the game suit me a lot better.
This release also comes with its typical set of performance fixes and two new maps.
For the full list of changes head over to http://play0ad.com/alpha-17-quercus/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eeyrh7G7voI
This release seems to mostly focus on rebalancing the game by making technologies more expensive to research and giving more advantages to armies that consist of mixed unit types. Buildings have also been made easier to destroy and some units' stats have been modified to make them more profitable to train. Group formations have also been removed temporarily but they will return after a more balanced re-implementation.
In addition to balancing, the AI has received some fixes. The AI finally recognizes the need for transport ships on naval maps and it will use them to attack and colonize other islands. This is an important feature as before playing naval maps with the AI was pointless. The AI just hoarded tons of units and tried desperately to find a way to walk them over the sea. However, for now it will only use transport ships and won't try to attack ships with other ships.
Multiplayer lobby profiles were also added in this release. With this feature you can view other players' profiles to see their amount of games they've won and lost and their ratings and rankings. Cool stuff for the people who are looking for an equal to play against.
There is a new feature that might be very important once scenarios or campaigns are being created and that's triggers. What they do is quite simple: they cause actions based on events. For example, if a certain building gets destroyed the trigger might spawn an army of enemies or cause you to lose the game. Alpha 17 includes two maps that utilize the trigger system, so you can go ahead and test it out right now. For me this is possibly the most important of all of these features, as I'd gladly see some campaigns be made for 0 A.D. I'm not much of a multiplayer guy and the AI isn't perfect in the typical skirmish game mode so having campaigns would make the game suit me a lot better.
This release also comes with its typical set of performance fixes and two new maps.
For the full list of changes head over to http://play0ad.com/alpha-17-quercus/
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
See more from me