0 A.D.
FreeAn open-source ancient-warfare RTS in the spirit of Age of Empires
A free real-time strategy game from the volunteer team at Wildfire Games, set among the wars of ancient civilizations. Gather resources, build a city, train an army and advance through phases, in the same vein as Age of Empires. It has 15 playable civilizations, AI opponents, LAN play and an online lobby. Code is GPL, art is CC-BY-SA.
Why we picked it
Code is GPL-2.0-or-later; art, sound and documentation are CC-BY-SA 3.0. The source moved from SVN to Wildfire Games' own Gitea in August 2024, and the 0ad/0ad repository on GitHub is an archived old mirror.
Release 28, "Boiorix", published in February 2026, is the first version without the "Alpha" label. It adds the Germans, bringing the total to 15 playable civilizations. The same release renders fonts directly through FreeType, so Chinese, Japanese and Korean no longer need an extra font package, and Windows now has a 64-bit build that eases memory problems on large maps.
Anyone who knows Age of Empires will barely need to learn anything: citizens gather food, wood, stone and metal, houses raise the population cap, and you advance from village to town to city phase. The differences are in the details. Buildings and units follow historical sources for each civilization, and formations, unit counters and walls carry real weight.
Ways to play:
- Single-player against AI, with adjustable difficulty and both random and scenario maps.
- LAN or direct IP connection, with no account.
- The online lobby for finding strangers, which needs a lobby account registered in-game and used only for matchmaking.
- Mods download from the in-game mod.io page, and the community has several large, well-developed ones.
To be clear about:
- Large battles lag. The official download page says so itself: many units moving at once, or very large maps, cause slowdowns.
- Release 28 drops Windows 7 and 8.1 because the bundled SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine moved to version 128. macOS needs 10.15 or later.
- Polish still trails commercial RTS games, balance shifts noticeably between releases, and saves and replays are not guaranteed to work across versions.