As someone who grew up in the 90's playing games online my favorite thing has been multi player strategy ancient games including Age of Empires, runescape, many other strategy games... recently i had the urge to once more get back into gaming looking to see if there is a community for age of empires/ way to download and play for free. Not finding a way to play age of empires multi player online i decided to look up games similar to AOE and what i came across was a free downloadable open source game called 0 A.D. ..... i thought to myself, this game will fit right in with my idea of using alternative tech having to do with the key words i look for decentrlization, blockchain, open source.... Trusting this would be a good game for being open source i decided to give the game a download to see what it's all about, infact the game was said to still be being built to this day which excited me most meaning there were probably developers working to still improve, make things better with a solid community.
After downloading the game and opening the application brining me to a modern tech built home screen with moving images of a soldier looking Spartan civilization my hopes began to rise about this possibly being similar to what i was looking for a replacement for Age of Empires... and that it is, that it is. The choices on the homescreen offered "learn to play, single player and multi player" of course i am not going to take the time for a game to click learn to play instead i jumped right in to single player mode to see what the game was all about. Brining me to the next screen which showed my personal screen name, options to choose how many ai computer players i would be facing, choosing teams, level of difficulty the ai would be challenging me with.. i started with what they had the setting on automatically "easy" and hit start... starting the game brought me to a very familure setting.
The setting was almost exactly the same as AOE there were some women workers, a horse soldier and a main building which reporduced workers to collect resources with which could be seen on a map such as bushes with food, trees for wood, strone for buildings, metal ( in age of empres the main difference being metal was called gold)... the great thing about the game is all you need to play is a mouse. imidiately i began creating people out of the center building and collecting resources.. i then found once i had collected enough i could build things such as houses, barrocks, wood sheds, food sheds, docks, castles, temples and more.
Collecting and building was only the begging soon came the enemy ai to destroy everything i had built before i could make soldiers, that was when i decided to quit and see if i could go online (this is where the real fun began)
i wasn't sure what to expect clicking multi player mode hoping for the best of things to be similar to AOE and work for me... the loby looked like a blank screen with a chat box of people commenting back and forth with a selection of games being hosted.. i clicked the first game i saw and it brought me into a second lobby filled with players, once in the lobby the host asked which civilization i would like to be, there are about a dozen + civilications to choose from, romans, persians, spartans, gauls to name a few with my now favorite being the class of longbow, elephant soldiers named the Mauryans. the game began and my teamates used our chat to communicate with each other where we were on a map in the game so we could find each other and have a idea that the enemy was not starting the game in that area with the map being completely black until you send people out to make things visable.... anyways i have now been playing the game for around 3 weeks and can say it has become a pretty bad addiction for me to become a better player having come from playing chess my last recent facorite strategy game i knew this would be more exciting and it is.
The community on 0 A.D is small, there are about 10-30 players online at any given time of day or night, sometimes waiting for players to join a game before we can start is a long wait, once you play for a few weeks one begins to recognize the different players screen names within the community and what player levels one another are at/ online chat personalitys. Noticing right away many people speak spanish i am one of the few from the USA who speaks only english playing the game it seems odly enough though most players are bilingual and speak english well enough for what needs to be said, not much chatting is really involved beyond the basics although some players do like to have convorsations about things. Overall i would definetly recomend this game to anyone who enjoys computer games, strategy games, one can learn about the different civilizations to once they see some they may have never heard of before like i did which interests me i found out all kinds of things i didn't know about history out of interest whether the strories are made up of somewhat fiction or not is up to you to believe we all know how stories change over lonng periods of time and how when a certain civilization killed another they were the ones who got to write said story about the past to future... anyways hope to see you there on 0A.D people my screen name is acnudn i chose the screen name cause if you look at the letters i took the word duncan (from duncan yoyo's which i am currently into) and rearranged the letters... if you start from the d and read backwords you can see i wrote duncan.. let me know what you think in the comments below