Defending Your Settlement Area

Your opponents have certainly not been idle in the meantime and are bound to attack your settlement area with an army in the foreseeable future. This is why you need to build good defenses. Citizen soldiers see themselves as a militia. In addition, you need professional soldiers and weapons. At the barracks you can create foot soldiers. The stables give you mounted warriors, and the arsenal produces siege weapons such as catapults and battering rams (Figure 9).

Figure 9: Training foot soldiers at the barracks (left), mounted soldiers at the stables (center), and building siege weapons such as battering rams (right) at the arsenal.

These buildings are also where you can research weapons and combat techniques. Different civilizations also have other military buildings or special units. For example, the Romans build military camps in enemy territory. The Britons train war dogs, the Carthaginians war elephants. To protect your settlement area from overly aggressive opponents, you can surround it with a wooden or stone wall and build watchtowers and fortresses (Figure 10).

Figure 10: This well-secured Gallic settlement poses a real challenge to the attacking Romans.

Each civilization comes with three heroes that you train during the game, each of which you can create only once. No more than one of them per civilization can enter the game at the same time. These heroes are based on historical characters. They are especially strong warriors, and if there are soldiers near them, this increases their combat power (Figure 11). You usually create heroes in a fortress, but depending on the civilization, they can also be created in other buildings. In the case of the Gauls, the gathering of princes specific to this civilization serves this purpose.

Figure 11: The heroes in 0 A.D. are based on historical figures. They are particularly strong warriors who lead their soldiers in battle.

Creating Wonders

Each civilization reaches the peak of its development by building the wonder specific to it (Figure 12). For example, the Romans built the Capitoline Temple, the Greeks the Parthenon. Depending on the game settings, one way to win the game is to build a wonder and defend it for a certain amount of time.

Figure 12: The construction of its own wonder marks the pinnacle of development for a civilization. For example, in 0 A.D., this is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for Persians.

Real Politics

If your civilization is in a development crisis or the enemy threatens to overrun it, it's time for politics in the form of various cheats (see Table 1, where you'll also see, as a small Easter Egg, that the game lets you build a P-51 Mustang, a US fighter plane from World War II). To create units, first select any building. If that building belongs to you, the newly created unit also belongs to you. If, on the other hand, the building is under the control of an enemy, the newly created unit will also take on their color.