When was the last time you played 0ad? Each release brings new changes to balancing and especially a27 contained a lot of them.

I played whatever is in the Debian 13 repos.

As far as I remember, elephants have always felt overpowered to me. Could be lack of skill on my part.

> My understanding is that the simulation will be bottlenecked by the slowest PC.

That's correct. While 0ad is an RTS, behind the scenes it's still turn-based and in multiplayer games turns can only progress once every participants PC has responded. That's also why the game also feels slow when a player has a bad latency to the player hosting the game.

There is also some exciting work going on to improve the path finding of formations to make them behave more naturally: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8608

Fun fact: 0ad still doesn't support kerning. While I would've loved to see proper kerning support in r28, there is only so much a team of volunteers can do.

If you're interested in progress in this area, I suggest you keep an eye on https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7945

The best players are incredible at microing (although horse rushs are just one of multiple strategies). It's also equally important to manage resources and units in a way that you use all of them all the time. That's especially important in early game.

It crashed for you? You must be running Arch Linux. ;-)

Arch Linux used system-provided SpiderMonkey which lacked a crucial bug fix. This issue should be solved by now, by Arch Linux switching back to vendored Spidermonkey.

Check out https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/0a... and https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/8757 for details.

Making a high quality campaign is quite some effort and the engine still lacks some features, which would be helpful for this. A dialogue system is one of them, which already has a PR available: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8614

There is also a thread in the forum, where people are brainstorming about an official campaign: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/123956-narrative-campa...

Yes of course. I wasn't talking about a high quality campaign: I'm surprised there isn't even a low quality one. Perhaps that would be contrary to the 0ad philosophy.

> I'd def be trying again since they've come out of alpha with this release.. a huge deal for a game that is so many years in development.

We're not calling it Alpha anymore, but we still don't consider it a polished major release. The announcement of the last Alpha, Alpha 27 had a section explaining the motivation for the change: https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/

> Only for really huge end of game final battles with the screen packed with troops did it lag out for us, but being free and all, we'd often gather around one monitor and talk crap at each other while we waited for it to clear up.

I'm not sure when you last tried the game, but a27 notably improved performance and feedback so far suggests that r28 did as well.

> […] the game either halts completely or forks so that they can't rejoin.

When a player looses the connection the game just continues. Usually one of the remaining player then pauses the game until the player who lost the connection returned.

The game state becoming out-of-sync is often a problem of players using buggy mods. That this happens without mods is pretty rare and of course clearly a bug.

> It's also impossible to save and restore in multiplayer.

It seems you haven't played 0ad in a while, as that's possible since a27 (see https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/).

I believe the main reason that Flattr failed was just bad execution. After a successful start and Flattr being used more and more, they just stopped iterating on it, leaving it dormant for years. Partnering with Adblock Plus was the final nail in the coffin.