Part of the 0 A.D. Gameplay Manual

This document is WIP (work in progress), and will undergo big changes in the coming days. It should be ready in time for the Alpha 4 release though.

Basic Gameplay

This guide will introduce you to the basic concepts of 0 A.D. If you've played other RTS (Real Time Strategy) games much is going to be familiar, and you might want to read the Quickstart Guide for people who've played other RTS games.

First steps

After setting up a game (and clicking on the Start game button) you see your first units and buildings. In most cases it will be something like in the image above: you will have a 'Civic centre', perhaps a few houses or similar, and a couple of basic units (units=people and siege weapons, and ships, etc). You may want to take a few moments to experiment moving the units around and selecting things etc. See the HotKeys page for all ways you can use your mouse and keyboard to interact with the game, but here are some of the most important:

• Left clicking: Selects the unit/building/object under the mouse (see the outline at the base of the object to easier see what is going to be selected when you click).
• Right clicking: Order the unit to do something. If the mouse is over an empty piece of ground: the unit will move there, if over an enemy: it will attack it etc.
• Move the mouse towards an edge of the screen: Will move the camera in that direction and you will see more of the game world.
• Arrow keys: Press the arrow keys (or the w, a, s or d keys) to move the camera in up, down, right or left direction and see more of the game world.

Gather, Build, Fight

There are three things which are important to win an RTS game: gathering, building and fighting. All are needed, and they cannot be done separate from each other. To make things easier to understand in this guide they will be listed separately from each other though. To be able to fight you need buildings and units. To be able to build, both units and buildings you need resources. To get resources you need to gather, so that's what we'll start with.

Gather

Gather resources

In 0 A.D. you can gather four different resources, food, wood, stone and metal. You can see how much of each you have by looking in the top left of the top bar (the top bar is shown by the number 1 in the image above). To gather food select one or more of your units and move your mouse over, let's say a chicken, and you'll see the cursor change to the food symbol (the same as in the top bar) then right click on the chicken. Then the unit will move to the animal and, after having killed it, start collecting the food. It can only carry so much however, so after a while it needs to drop off the food somewhere, for that there are resource dropsites (the Civic Centre you have from the start is a dropsite for all resources, later you'll build other dropsites where your units will only leave some types of resources) where the units will go and drop the food they've gathered. Then they will go back to gather the rest, after they've gathered all food from an animal or a berry bush they will try and find another nearby and start gathering from that. If they cannot find any they will return to the nearest resource dropsite and wait for new orders from you there. You gather the other resources in the same way, wood from trees, stone from rocks and metal from metal mines. The cursor will change to the food, wood, stone, and metal symbols when over an object that will give you that resource, so if you have trouble finding metal move the mouse around until you see the anvil shaped cursor for example.

Gather intelligence

In order to win a game you need to gather something else as well: intelligence. What that means in this case is: you need to find out where new resources are, where the enemy is and what the enemy is doing. At the start of the game you can only see what's right around your starting Civic Centre and your units, the rest of the map is covered by Fog-of-war and Shroud-of-Darkness. The Shroud-of-Darkness is the black area