FOSS strategy game OpenHV gets a release two years in the making

Do any of you remember OpenHV? Back in 2020, it was announced as an OpenRA-based free and open source RTS, based on designs from Daniel Cook that never made it into a game planned to be called Hard Vacuum but now it's here and it has a massive upgrade.

This is the first proper stable release for nearly two years, and the list of changes and upgrades is ridiculously long that you can see on their GitHub releases page with all the pre-releases over the last couple of years. What they're trying to do is basically create a good and fully free real-time strategy game, for people who loved the classics from Westwood like Command & Conquer and Red Alert.

Since it uses the OpenRA game engine, it works great cross-platform.

The resource economy in this one is interesting. You have to scout out for resources, to then deploy a mining unit on each individual resource node which then morphs into a mining tower. Over time this tower will gather resources, and then send out a transport with those resources to your main base but these transports can be destroyed so you have to guard them. It's a nice little spin on the gathering found in classic RTS games.

You might recognise some of the art from another 2D RTS called Rusted Warfare, since they both use share some free assets.

I have to admit some of the gameplay here caught me by surprise. There I am building up a little base, sorting out my resources and along comes an enemy aeroplane and suddenly a whole bunch of pods drop across my base containing little nuisance machine gunners. I think I'm going to really enjoy this one.

All links for it can be found on the website.