I love 0 A.D., and I’m endlessly grateful to all the developers and volunteers who made it happen. Your dedication and skill deserve a monument — my genuine admiration.

I install it every few years, and it’s always a blast, somehow, and I do not know why I never do more than experiment with it..

Gameplay-wise, I find that Beyond All Reason is, as far as open-source RTS games go, a few orders of magnitude more fun and mature. I don’t think there’s any commercially available RTS that can compete with Beyond All Reason in terms of fun and performance.

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nylonstrung 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

BAR is incredible, probably best RTS right now

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cess11 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I haven't played Beyond All Reason but looking at the system requirements I'm not surprised it is more fulfilling. 0 A.D. runs on a potato if you look at it threateningly, which makes it a good option to have on a throwaway machine for kids or somesuch.

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harshreality 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Those are lowball system requirements too.

You can easily play or spectate a low-unit count game of BAR on any decent 2010+ quad core.

Such a computer won't allow you to play 8v8 that goes into the late-game stage. Sometimes not even 4v4 or 2v2 with players scaling to high unit counts. Some players try anyway. Ignoring player disconnections, half the drama of large-scale games is the one player who's lagging because they're on a potato computer. If the sim doesn't lag, the game will at least be down to single-digit fps.

That means you can't really play multiplayer comfortably, at least not beyond 2-4 players.

For that, you need a recent ryzen or intel. I'd estimate recent as post-covid.

I don't know what combination of things is important; there's larger cpu caches, faster sustained CPU frequencies (TDP and cooling matter there), hardware mitigations for speculative execution bugs, faster ram, resizeable BAR support... but in my experience going from a 6-core skylake-era cpu to a ryzen 9xxx, with the same gpu, made a massive difference. I saw no massive improvement going from a 4-core 2010-era cpu to a 6-core skylake-era cpu; I'd classify both as potatoes for BAR purposes.

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rand846633 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My experience is the opposite: 0ad will lag on my laptop once thing become big. BAR will warn that it’s not compatible with my low end intel integrated potato gpu, but it works just fine..

	▲	x1f604 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		BAR runs fine on low end CPUs...until you have like 2,000 units on speed metal
	▲	cess11 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I had problems with lag years ago but not lately, though I don't do big multiplayer matches with several players and the like. I'll check BAR out.