Overview

Part of the 0 A.D. Design Document.

Part 1 and 2

0 A.D. is an ambitious project, creating something from scratch that take professional game development studios many years, and to make it at all realistic we need to limit the scope somewhat. Both implementing all the gameplay features we originally wanted, and including all the civilizations we originally wanted would make the project go on forever. As a solution to both those issues we've decided to split the original idea into two parts, one featuring the years 500 B.C. to 1 B.C. and a second featuring the years 1 A.D. to 500 A.D. This both allows us to focus on making sure the included civilizations are fun to play and as well crafted and historically accurate as we can make them, and also to leave some features until later when we think we can implement them in a better way than we would if we tried to include them in part 1.

Postponed features

Both as a help to remember the postponed features when development on 0 A.D. part 2 is started, and to help show that we've indeed considered the below features we've here included a list of some of the main features which were considered for part 1, but that have been postponed. Included is a short description as to why they were postponed.

• Units on walls: The terrain (and thus in effect the pathfinding) is essentially 2D, at least when it comes to unit position, which makes adding the ability for units to exist on different planes of height hard to add.
• Triggers and cinematics: Mostly due to the amount of time needed to fully implement the features and resulting story-based campaigns and scenarios. For e.g. tutorial scenarios scripting can be utilized.
• Story-based scenarios and campaigns: We want everything we include to be as good as possible, and to make scenarios and campaigns the quality we would want would probably mean postponing the release several years. Thus we've decided to postpone the scenarios and campaigns for part 2 when we can start work on them early in the development cycle as most of the basic features will already be implemented.
• Ship boarding/capturing: 
• Seasons/weather: The gameplay value wasn't worth the time needed, so they've been postponed for now. To be reconsidered when 0 A.D. part 2 development starts.