We have been playing it, discussing about it, dreaming about it. And then it stopped. Age of Empires III has been one of our favourite games and I, together with my friends, we have spent literally nights playing it, dinners discussing about the heroic strategies and laughing about the tricks we managed to pull on each other in order to win.

0 A.D. is not Age of Empires. But it is indeed very similar to it. I have played just one game until now as I didn’t have much time, but it was great. The first difference which I discovered is the fact that in the Town center both male and female workers may be produced and although both are capable of gathering food, chopping wood and mining they differ in their productivity: females are more efficient in gathering and collecting food while males workers are more efficient in drinking beers… err… they are more efficient in mining. Also male workers efficiency is increased by having female workers working with them.

The soldiers are also capable of mining and this is a major difference to Age of empires were you would have had to send troops to protect your workers mining in the middle of the map. In 0 A.D. you may very well send your soldiers to mine, therefore knowing that they won’t fall as easily as mere civilians.

Oh… and I didn’t even mention the best part. The game is free to download as it is an opensource project. Which, from one side is great, on the other one the game is not considered finished and always in development and may still have some bugs or missing feature which may decrease the whole gaming experience. While I was playing though I didn’t notice anything major beside the fact that I was getting owned even by the computer player. 🙂

This the trailer of the current release:

The other very interesting part of the game is the fact that you are not allowed to build everywhere on the map: you may build only in those territories which are within your city’s borders, which get wider as you get more powerful.

I haven’t tested multiplayer games yet: I have seen that there are the required options to connect to each other and I believe that some networking skill may be required in order to connect to others (opening ports probably) but, as I said, I didn’t test it. Any candidate who is available? 😉