Slick free strategy game The Fertile Crescent is getting a new bigger paid version

The Fertile Crescent has been an absolutely brilliant retro-styled Bronze Age real-time strategy game that's currently free and the future of it has been secured.

While it's currently free and a hobby project for the team, it's still a very high quality game that feels like a low-res Age of Empires but with some mechanics that set them apart. Writing in a new update post on itch.io, the team shared that "TFC will be leveling up from a hobby project to a full time job for us thanks to a publishing deal we signed earlier this year". The recent updates to the game have remained free and they've been pretty big, which is thanks to this publisher.

Now they're working on a last free update to the current version of the game, to then move onto building it up into a commercial version. The good news is that this one will stick around and get bug fixes but the majority of the time will be on the upcoming paid-for bigger version that will eventually release on Steam.

Being able to work full time on our own RTS game has long been our dream, and we’ve got big plans for the full version of TFC, with interesting single player content, graphical upgrades, as well as new mechanics and units. — LincRead

Grab it free from itch.io.