0 A.D. is a free, open-source real-time strategy game which takes place approximately between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D., with beautiful 3D graphics, 12 different civilizations, and a gamestyle which is very similar to the one of Age of Empires, but also incorporating new elements as well.

Codenamed ‘Quercus’, Alpha 17 brings several new changes, and some of them have a great, positive impact over the speed response of the game. Those of you who play 0 A.D. should be familiar with the slow movement of units and low response time from Alpha 16, caused when large number of units were moved across the map. Now this has been fixed, by temporarily disabling formations. Yes, the formations are gone temporary now, but this comes to improve the gaming speed and experience.

Rushing has also received some tweaks now, by making it harder to rush early in the game now, by decreasing the range of cavalry arrows.

0 A.D. couples some technologies (as opposed to AoE) which are related, so that if you research one, you can’t research another. This alpha also unpaired some unrelated technologies.

The fog of war now works similar to Age of Empires. In previous versions, once an area was scouted, you could’ve seen afterwards if any enemy buildings are constructed in that respective area. Now buildings and changes to resources are hidden, so you will have to scout that area again.

Regarding the multi-player lobby: it has received several improvements as well. Now a new profile area has been added, where you can see the rating and games won/lost of other players. The stats have been reset as well, and a leaderboard is present since before A17 (and you can quickly register a username in-game).

Two new maps are included in this release: Siwa Oasis and Schwarzwald. Also, the Petra bot is now the default AI, having replaced the older Aegis.

The scenario editing has been improved with an event triggered feature, so that when an event takes place, a certain action will be performed.

A new mod selector is built-in for this release, which allows you to choose a certain mod created for 0 A.D..

In addition to these, improvements found their way in this release for performance, user interface and graphics, and a refined 0 A.D. sound theme.

Install 0 A.D. Alpha 17 in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and Mint 17

There is a 0 A.D. PPA which provides the latest alpha version. To install the game, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wfg/0ad
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install 0ad

You can also install the latest 0 A.D. release in Ubuntu using UbuTricks.