 One of my favorite free-and-open source games is a real-time strategy game called Zero AD. I've played it many times on live streams on my channel in the past. You guys have probably seen me play Zero AD if you've been subscribed to the channel for a while, and it's just a gorgeous game. It's just beautifully done. You would almost think it's one of these AAA gaming titles, but it's actually free-and-open source software. It's licensed under the GPL, all the artwork, and the fantastic music that's in the game. All of that is licensed under Creative Commons license, so it's completely free-and-open source. And Zero AD just released Alpha 24, and this is a huge release for Zero AD. Major game changes, major improvements in the graphics, and the gameplay, a lot of bug fixes. And today I wanted to show you guys some of what you can expect in the recently released Zero AD Alpha 24. And just opening up the game, I can tell you immediately there's some new opening artwork here. When you first load up the game, this artwork here, the picture was different on the previous version. Again, this is a new release. They haven't really had a new release in a couple of years, so this is a very big update. I do like the new artwork. I'm going to go into my settings and into options, and I want to go to graphics. And I have turned on all of my graphics to the highest settings, because I want to push this thing a little bit for purposes of this video. Now, if you're playing online multiplayer, you may want to turn some of the effects off for better performance, but for purposes of this video, I'm going to set all of that to the maximums. And I got an error here when I tried to open a game here. I'm going to do a single player game. I'm just going to start a game against the AI here. And one of the things people that are familiar with Zero AD will notice is that there's some new maps. All the old maps that you're used to are here, but they now include some new ones. One that jumped out at me immediately was this farmland map. And I'm going to go ahead and start the game here so you guys can see this new farmland map. Because it really highlights some of the graphical improvements of this game. For one thing, all of the characters now, all the artwork has been redone. These women now, they look completely different than what they looked previously in the game. Same thing with the men. And it looks like they even very with the men look like, even though they're all the same type of soldier. Zoom in here a little bit so you guys can see that a little bit. And the artwork is really improved, especially when it comes to the plants, the flora. So all the trees and the bushes are just are incredible. They look so much better than they did in the previous version of the game. And the previous version of the game looked good. Like if you'd showed Alpha 23 to people, they would have been blown away by if they would have swore that there's no way this is a free and open source game. And they've taken those effects and just made them even better. Again, the game looks gorgeous. It's very smooth even on the highest settings here. My graphics card is an AMD Radeon 7. So I've got a pretty beefy graphics card. And I've got a pretty beefy CPU here. I've got a AMD 12 424 thread thread ripper. So my machine is a bit of a beast. One of the other things that they've changed in the game, those of you that have played the game, now the buildings used to the buildings you could place wherever. And sometimes it was hard to get buildings placed exactly where you want. Now they have a snap kind of feature for the buildings where you can snap them in place. So if I did control and then, you know, put it right up to the next building, it put it exactly up, butt it up to the next building. So there's no gaps of any kind because in the previous versions of the game, you would always have little gaps because you could never get it exactly butted up next to the building. And if you left gaps in between the buildings, sometimes your characters got trapped in between the buildings. And that always annoyed me because then you had to get creative on how you freed that character. If that character could actually be garrisoned in that building, sometimes you could garrison them and then ungarrison them to get them out of that trap. Or sometimes you would just have to destroy the building you built just so you could free your character. And this map here is a new map called Atlas Valleys and it looks gorgeous. This map, I love the shadowing and the shading and everything. It's just just amazing the improvements, the graphic improvements from one version of the game to the next. Now one neat little AI improvement they did. I have my population posted here at the top. It says nine of 20. 20 is my max population, the population limit currently. I only have nine citizens. So, but one neat thing is if I grab all the women here, I send them to cut wood. You see I have four showing off to the side here. That four is telling me out of my nine citizens I have four currently working which means five of them are not doing anything. So that's a good way to immediately spot when you have idle workers. That means I need to go find the idle workers and get them to doing something because in this game being a real time strategy game you never want any workers idle because any downtime is just putting you at a disadvantage compared to your opponents because I promise you your opponents in this game they're not having any downtime at all. Let's go ahead and check out one more of the new maps. This one here is called Obedska Bog. It looks like it's a naval map. I do like naval maps. And this is another temperate climate map and again it looks gorgeous. I'm going to zoom in here so you guys can see some of the artwork as far as the women here chopping the wood, taking it to the storehouse. One interesting effect that they did here in Alpha 24, those of you that like to play multiplayer in Zero AD and multiplayer it's a good idea to set population limits because as your population grows as these very large armies grow it slows down the game. There is noticeable lag once you get an army of two 250 300 players. So typically in multiplayer in Zero AD you set a pop max of 200 tends to be the standard. Sometimes they set it as 150. So imagine in an eight player game you have a 150 pop max that means each of the eight players can have a maximum of 150 citizens. Well in Alpha 24 you now have what is called a world pop limit that you can set. The world pop limit means as players are eliminated their share of the world population limit gets redistributed amongst the remaining players. So in an eight player game you start with everybody having a max pop of 150. Say you get down to only having two players remaining those two players would have a 600 pop limit because of the added population of them eliminating the other players. I hope that makes sense. I'm looking at some of the other maps of Vesuvius. This is a new map and it's actually a volcano and it looks like colored in this weird like reddish hue. That is kind of cool too. I'll definitely check that out in my spare time. That might be a map I played this evening. One of the things that the Zero AD team spent a lot of time on for this release is they really wanted to rebalance some of the civilizations because you've got about 12 or 14 civilizations within the game to choose from and some of them are much weaker than others. So there needed to be some kind of leveling of the civilizations because there were three or four civilizations in the game that are just way overpowered and then there's three or four civilizations in the game that are very under powered. Some of the changes to the late game include that your fortresses no longer can train soldiers. So that's really interesting because it really means that your fortresses now become more of a defensive structure rather than an offensive structure because in previous versions of the game you built a ton of fortresses and you typically built them on the front line so you could spam out soldiers. That's no longer the case. Another thing is your heroes now they can only be trained once per game. So you really need to pick and choose exactly when you want to train that hero. Overall this looks like this is a fantastic release for Zero AD. For those of you that want to try out the absolute latest Zero AD it's free and open source software so it's probably in your Linux distributions repositories. If you're on a rolling release distro alpha 24 is already there. I know it's already there in arch and in most arch based distros if for some reason that you can't get the latest version of Zero AD in your Linux distros repositories you can just go to the playzeroad.com website. I will link to their website in the show description and I should also mention that Zero AD is a cross-platform game. I keep mentioning Linux but it's not just for Linux. You can actually play Zero AD on Windows, Mac or Linux. Now before I go I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Absi, Dallas, Gabe, Lou, Mitchell, Alan, Akami, Arch5530, Chuck, David, the other David, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Scott, Wes and Willie. They are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys this quick first look at Zero AD Alpha 24 wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on Patreon because the distro tube channel is sponsored by you guys the community. Without you guys I couldn't do what I do. If you'd like to support my work look for a distro tube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.