 Probably my favorite free and open source game is ZeroAD. ZeroAD is a real time strategy game, free and open source software, great graphics, great gameplay, fantastic music, and every few months it sees a new big release and they just had a release. This morning I fire up my terminal, I do an upgrade here on ArcoLinux, which is an Arch Linux based distribution. I noticed Alpha 26 has finally been released and reading the release notes on PlayZeroAD.com, which is their official website. It is a huge release with a ton of new features, including a brand new civilization that you can play. So let's explore some of the new features in Alpha 26 of ZeroAD. So if I go into matches, the first thing you'll notice is when you're choosing your civilization, if I go to the information button here for the civilization overview, we used to have 13 different civilizations to choose from. Now there are 14 because you now have the Han Chinese civilization. So if you look at the structure tree, you can see the unique buildings and the troops and everything that you could train from the Han. I've noticed that there are some unique things about this particular civilization. I was noticing some of the upgrades. For example, from the fortress, you have this poison arrows upgrade, which will of course give you increased damage for your ranged unit, so your bowman. And you also have poison blades, which does the same things for your melee units. They didn't just focus on the Chinese civilization. They also gave us some Chinese maps as far as some new maps. One of the ones is this one here called the Tarim Basin. So this is a region in northwest China. And of course it's a very desert like region. So that is a brand new map, but we have a lot of maps available. And many of the maps that have been here for a while, like the standard Acropolis Bay map and the Corinthian Ismus and things like that, they have been reworked a little bit as far as they're still the same map, but the graphics should be a lot more striking. They've really worked on making the game so much more visually appealing than it already was. It was already a gorgeous game, but now you can really see some of the details. Let me actually load up a game and I will actually play the Han Chinese because I'm actually curious about this new civilization. So I'm a few minutes into this particular game here. You can see the very unique building structures here for the Han. You can see it's very asian-y, right? It's a lot of Chinese themed buildings. And you can also see the very unique fields where every other civilization, it looks like they're farming wheat for the most part. We are farming rice here for the Chinese civilization. I've already got some barracks and I'm already training some crossbowmen. I have crossbowmen and I have spearmen to start the game. I've been playing for about eight minutes now. I probably am getting close to being level two here, but I'm not too concerned. I really just wanted to look around the map. This is the standard Acropolis Bay map and you can see some of the graphics. It's very minor, but you can see just the detail and things like the rocks and the trees and the shadowing effects and everything. It is just fantastic. You can also immediately spot new music. This asian themed music, according to the release notes for Alpha 26, there are 26 new music tracks. And the music for Zero AD has always been fantastic, but I can tell you I'm really digging the new music soundtracks. I may actually have to just download the MP3s because I wouldn't mind occasionally just listening to this music other than listening to it in-game. Yeah, the music is that good. And of course I'm talking way too much and I'm kind of getting behind on my economic development. I probably should go see what the AI, what the enemy has been doing. It's probably time to go to go do something. What I probably will do, let me go ahead and take my calf and take whatever units I have here. Let's go see what my competitor is doing. That's going to be the AI set to the very hard level. I better take these guys too with me. I wonder if I can go ahead and level up. Yeah, I can move to level two now as well. Go ahead and queue up more troops. Let's see what our enemy civilization is and see how their buildings look. I can't really tell just yet what we're playing against. One of the things I can say that the troop movements are a little different. The troops now have some acceleration to their walking and running as far as they do speed up a little bit when they go towards your enemy. So that is a new effect that has been added. There's also new formation effects as well. So if I do, well let's do the box. You can see the formations have been improved. They look good. Of course I got them out of formation when I went on the attack there. So the formations have always been kind of neat. You have all these various formations like box and forced march and battle line and everything. But they've never, I've never found them very useful to be honest. All right that first group of troops I sent that didn't work out too well. I'm gonna go ahead and try a second group. Let's try a different formation. Let's do the battle line formation which would look really cool. I don't have a chance to get into it properly because the battle has already started. Let's back up a little bit and now you have the battle line. Man that that does look gorgeous especially with somebody in the middle carrying the banner while they're marching in the battle line. That was very very cool. Let's get some more troops out. Get some more cavalry coming out as well. Let's train from Civic Center as well. Really running kind of low on things although it does look like this battle was working out for me just fine here. Back in the battle line and now that I've wiped all of that out you can see yeah the battle line. Yeah I'm loving the new formations. Let's try skirmish. Yeah that looks cool too how they spread out in a line. Very cool. I'm loving the new shadowing effects and textures on the metal mines which have these gold veins running through them now but they didn't used to have that I don't think and then the stone mines have some really great detail to them as well. I'm not going to be able to capture their Civic Center just yet. We are not that strong because I'm still in phase one. I don't have any champion units. I don't don't have a hero yet as well but I have greatly irked the AI here. Go ahead and build a market. I could also build the forge which is our blacksmith where we get our weapons upgrades and for a third building I would like a temple but I don't have any stone I haven't started mining yet so let's just build a second forge. I can find a empty spot somewhere up here for it and then once I have those three buildings created I can start thinking about moving to phase three. I think I've put the AI so far behind. I think we are in good shape here. Now let's just start spamming some troops. I'm going to get some spearmen and I'd like some archers or we'll do the infantry crossbowmen I think is what I've been going with here. Now this is not much of a group here. This is not as bigger group as the one I had before but I want to keep the pressure on my opponent so I'm not going to just throw them away trying to capture a tower this time but I do want to make sure that I don't let up. I don't want to let him back into the game. I don't want to get in range of the tower. I want to hang back and let my archers for the most part do the work. For me to really win the game at this point I'm going to have to go ahead and get to phase three. Let's see if I can phase up. I need more metal. I don't have anybody mining is the problem. We need some folks on metal. We need some folks on stone. I'm assuming the hero for the Chinese is trained from the fortress. Most heroes are but some are trained in other buildings such as the civic center. I could check the civic center if I click on it. Now it's the same troop options as before. He has expanded. You see his territory is further out now so he has possibly made it to the city phase as well. All right we have three different heroes. We have a hero cavalry spearman, a cavalry swordsman, and a cavalry crossbowman with different bonuses. I need some metal to hire any of them. Let's go with Wei Qing or Wei Jing. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. He's the cavalry crossbowman hero. And then when he comes out it's going to be go time. Yeah the AI has done pretty well here. He has definitely come back in a big way. But my hero is out now so that's good. Let's get within range of the fortress just in case. Another rice field. Let's go ahead and garrison the fortress just to have it shooting some arrows. I want to put all 20 people that it would hold. Probably not but I want it definitely firing something. Also a garrison fortress is much much harder to capture than an empty one of course. A fully garrison fortress is almost impossible to capture. I mean you need heroes and siege weapons and elephants and you need a lot to capture a fully garrison fortress. So that battle went well. Everything he sent there he lost completely. I think with the hero I should easily now be able to capture one of these towers and if I could capture a tower within his territory and garrison it that would be bad news for him. Of course he was going to be able to garrison that tower. Now that's going to give us some problems. The AI is definitely trying to bring us from capturing that. Yeah that's not going to work. That was going to be a really ballsy play but I don't think that was going to work for us. Oh I heard women dying. He's expanded all the way over to this side of the map as well. That's dangerous. That is very dangerous for me so let's no longer have those women chop trees on that side of the map. Let's move them somewhere safer. There's good trees over here. This has been a really interesting battle with the AI. Because the AI just has not made this easy. I have put some pressure on the AI from the beginning and this AI has really come back nicely. So let's go ahead and get a battering ram. Once again I have no metal. I have nothing though. Let's go ahead and try it. I'm going to send one battering ram toward this tower. Just to see if I can actually do something with one battering ram. Maybe they won't notice that I sent a lone battering ram toward the tower. Actually they did notice. I don't know if they've got the right troop units that can stop the battering ram. So that was just a quick look at the new release of ZeroAD Alpha 26 and I am so excited because I love this game and if you guys love this game as much as I do you can understand how many hours I'm about to waste this week playing this game. Now before I go I need to think of you special people. I need to think the producers of this episode and of course I'm talking about Gabe James Matt, Maxim Mitchell, Paul West, Why You Bald? Homie, Alex, Armoredragon, Chuck, Commander Ray, Adaiyokai, George Lee, Merstrump, Nate, Nurian, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Archon, Vador, Polytech, Realities for Less Red Profit, Stoolen, Stoolen, how about Stephen? Toolen, ToolsDivler, Willie, I messed all of that up. I really should go back and rerecord this but you guys know I don't retake stuff, right? I'd leave all the mistakes in the videos but these guys, these names you're seeing on the screen, these are my high-steered patrons. They are the producers of this episode. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, free and open source games like ZeroAD, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace guys. We should have a ZeroAD tournament for Linux content creators. I'd stomp them all.