Immerse yourself in living history with 0 A.D.

Ancient Times Reloaded

Article from Issue 263/2022
Author(s):

Steer the fortunes of ancient civilizations in the real-time strategy game 0 A.D. and revive history.

Maybe you liked history at school, or maybe you just found the subject boring. But in any case, it's worth taking a look at the 0 A.D. real-time strategy game [1], which takes you back to the year 1 (there is no year 0 in our calendar) and puts the fate of an ancient culture in your hands. Buildings, units, and technologies are based on real history. The game brings history to life without players getting bored.

Installation

The beginnings of 0 A.D. are rooted more than 20 years in the past. Strangely, the development of the game has still not progressed beyond the alpha phase, although this does not detract from its fun factor. The current version (at the time of testing), Alpha 25 "YØauna," was released on August 8, 2021. The successor, Alpha 26, had already entered the Feature Freeze phase (the point at which new features stop being added to the current alpha version) by April 2022.

0 A.D. is one of classic Linux games, and all popular distributions have it in their package sources. But if you install the game via your distribution's package manager, you will probably not get the latest version, which is why I would recommend downloading the latest release from the project's website [2]. You will find packages for various distributions along with matching installation instructions. 0 A.D. is also available in the AppImage and Flatpak package formats. (AppImage is a distribution-independent package format for Linux. Programs can be started immediately after downloading without installation. Flatpak is a cross-distribution alternative package manager.)

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