0 A.D. Alpha 25 enters feature-freeze soon, get a sneak-peak of what's coming

0 A.D. Alpha 25, the very impressive free and open source RTS is closing in on the next release and it's entering a Feature Freeze soon to focus on stability. The last release back in February took a very long time, partly as some major internal upgrades were done so now they're hoping to be a bit more regular.

In June they're proposing to enter Feature Freeze, to then focus on bug fixes. So what to expect from the upcoming 0 A.D. Alpha 25? In a blog post they noted a few new features coming:

• Single Player Campaign Support:
  The ability for 0 A.D modders to create their own single player campaigns will be added. Alpha 25 will only include the base functionality for this with full campaigns scheduled to be added in later iterations.
• Improved Multiplayer Responsiveness
  A technical improvement that players may ‘feel’ rather than see, this is another progressive improvement step to smoothing out multiplayer gameplay and enhancing unit pathfinding. Before commands in multiplayer were processed twice per second, now five times like in single player.
• Ongoing Balancing Changes
  Numerous changes to balance of the game by way of micro adjustments to various civilisations, buildings, and units.

Head over to their wiki and you will see there's quite a bit more including better animal AI behaviour, domestic animals will flee when attacked, structures can be toggled to auto-produce units, improvements to tutorial and random maps text and more.

I actually played a bunch of it recently and wow - it sure has come a very long way. Reminds me of the early days of Age of Empires but free and open source.

Check it out on the official site.