The 'Big Balance Update' is out now for Warzone 2100

After many years of upgrades for the free and open source Warzone 2100, the team hacking away at the code have issued a fresh update to focus on balancing issues. Info: Warzone 2100 was originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive and was release in 1999, much later it was open sourced in 2004 and the legacy of it continues on as a completely free game. To this day it's still one of the most innovative RTS games around.

Something that often needs to be address in many competitive games, balancing is a difficult thing to do with so many different pieces and especially so for a strategy game with so many ways to play it.

Here's the highlights of the Warzone 2100 4.1.0 release:

• Merge of the “camBalance” mod that revamps campaign balance and fixes numerous issues
• Numerous multiplayer balance tweaks (see full changelog for details)
• Fix fog, add an option to toggle it on
• New design menu stats delta display
• Add a single player quit confirmation screen
• Allow building modules/derricks in a row (with drag & build)
• Add support for binding same keys to multiple actions in non-conflicting contexts
• Allow assigning key bindings to mouse keys
• Add “selection without group” hotkeys
• Move the whole group to the target location, not only the command droid
• New cheat makemehero makes selected units hero rank
• General improvements to Cobra AI / accounts for new balance changes
• Fix: Muzzle flash effects for Gauss, laser, and all kinds of weapons
• Fix: Several crash & UI soft-lock issues
• Fix: Various save-loading issues
• Fix: Do not handle RMB click while panning the camera
• Fix: Unclosable panels and flicker when using the Intelligence map and Design menus
• Fix: Heavy CPU usage on the Intelligence map
• Fix: VTOL collision with ground units
• Fix: Normalmapping of 3D models in menus / buttons
• Many other bug fixes

If you want to run the Linux version on Steam, you can try out the Luxtorpeda project which enables downloading game engines that support Linux for games on Steam that don't have Linux builds up.

See more on the official website.