Impressive free and open source RTS 0 A.D. gets an essential patch update

Ok I played a game of it. Can't say I was super enthused by the experience. Unit readability was poor. The male/female thing is bad. Just putting completely aside the sexism, the fact that some of your military units can gather resources but some can't is very unintuitive, made worse by the aforementioned readability. And it makes it feel really bad when you have to decide between sending units to fight or build up eco.

I had, and still have, no idea what units are good at what. In Age of Empires 2, I can hover over the skirmisher and read that it's good against archers. In this game...no idea what units do what. You get overloaded with information when you hover over a unit, but none of it is easily actionable. I had skirmishers and slingers and archers but I have no idea which ones should be used when. The information is probably available in a wiki somewhere, but it really should be presented up front and clearly within the game itself.

My enemy was able to somehow convert my dock, shockingly quickly. But then I couldn't convert it back (or couldn't find any option that would allow that), and had to destroy it...which was exceedingly slow. Not sure what happened there. And speaking of enemy...I was playing against whatever the default AI difficulty is, so I didn't expect a serious challenge. But what I got was particularly weak. It put up a mediocre fight once, relatively early, and then after that died I sat back slowly building up an army and exploring all the different units & buildings. During this time, it sent a couple of individual units at me a few times, but never really even tried to pose a threat as big as the one it did early.

Default keyboard shortcuts didn't feel good. Maybe they can be changed, but the out-of-the-box it wasn't up to par with what I'd expect. I could find no way to "attack move", unit building and upgrades were inconsistent. I couldn't find any way to "go to TC".

The fact that it's downloaded by torrent was amusing. I can't help but feel it inherently limits your potential audience though. Torrenting was never properly mainstream, and it's far less so today than back in the '00s.

All in all, the game felt like a UX nightmare. Some of the problems might get better if you're familiar with it, but "better" is certainly not "good". The fact that it's still seeing active development two decades on is amazing, but it doesn't feel like it's progressed nearly as much as one would hope in that time, sadly.

4 comments

I've not played 0 AD for like 15 years. It's honestly amazing that it's still being actively developed. I might have to try it out again. I remember way back then thinking the male/female villager thing was weird. But I do love the idea of an open source aoe alternative.
Ok I played a game of it. Can't say I was super enthused by the experience. Unit readability was poor. The male/female thing is bad. Just putting completely aside the sexism, the fact that some of your military units can gather resources but some can't is very unintuitive, made worse by the aforementioned readability. And it makes it feel really bad when you have to decide between sending units to fight or build up eco.
I had, and still have, no idea what units are good at what. In Age of Empires 2, I can hover over the skirmisher and read that it's good against archers. In this game...no idea what units do what. You get overloaded with information when you hover over a unit, but none of it is easily actionable. I had skirmishers and slingers and archers but I have no idea which ones should be used when. The information is probably available in a wiki somewhere, but it really should be presented up front and clearly within the game itself.
My enemy was able to somehow convert my dock, shockingly quickly. But then I couldn't convert it back (or couldn't find any option that would allow that), and had to destroy it...which was exceedingly slow. Not sure what happened there. And speaking of enemy...I was playing against whatever the default AI difficulty is, so I didn't expect a serious challenge. But what I got was particularly weak. It put up a mediocre fight once, relatively early, and then after that died I sat back slowly building up an army and exploring all the different units & buildings. During this time, it sent a couple of individual units at me a few times, but never really even tried to pose a threat as big as the one it did early.
Default keyboard shortcuts didn't feel good. Maybe they can be changed, but the out-of-the-box it wasn't up to par with what I'd expect. I could find no way to "attack move", unit building and upgrades were inconsistent. I couldn't find any way to "go to TC".
The fact that it's downloaded by torrent was amusing. I can't help but feel it inherently limits your potential audience though. Torrenting was never properly mainstream, and it's far less so today than back in the '00s.
All in all, the game felt like a UX nightmare. Some of the problems might get better if you're familiar with it, but "better" is certainly not "good". The fact that it's still seeing active development two decades on is amazing, but it doesn't feel like it's progressed nearly as much as one would hope in that time, sadly.
- Sounds like it 0 AD really needs some UI/UX work. I've never played it honestly, though I have heard about it and first saw screenshots/videos 15 years ago or so.
- It's like @Shyze3D@feddit.nl said in a thread I can't reply to because my instance hadn't federated that Community (and won't retroactively federate comments):
  it‘s an amount of micromanagment I don‘t want to deal with. There are already so many combat units with special abilities and specific counterunits.
  You could rename them to "serfs" (or some other more period-appropriate term..."slaves" comes to mind, but would carry its own baggage) and "citizen-soldiers" (the latter term actually used in some documentation already) and do away with the sexism. But it wouldn't fix the annoying micro. That's a more fundamental game design issue.