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 games much is going to be familiar, and you might want to read the Quickstart Guide for people who've played other RTS games instead of this guide which is aimed mostly towards players who are new to RTSs altogether.

First steps

After setting up a game (and clicking on the Start game button) you'll 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. 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 them, 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 blackness that covers most of the the map at the start, and the Fog-of-War is the area where you have explored, but don't have a unit or building so you only see what it looked like the last time a unit/building "saw it". This means that new buildings there won't show up unless you send a unit there again/build a building there (but more on that in the build section below), also you will not see if the enemy units are moving through the area.

To explore the map and reveal where resources are, where the enemy is, what the enemy is doing etc, you send units out to scout. At the beginning of the game this is mostly to find where resources are and to get an idea of what the map looks like under the Shroud-of-Darkness, but as the game goes on it becomes more and more important to find out what the enemy is doing. What kind of units is he building, where does he build new buildings to quickly be able to create new units near you, from which direction is he attacking you, etc.

Build

Build/create units

Just using the units you have at the start of the game will not get you far, so you need to create more. At the Civic Centre you can build female citizens as well as three of your civilizations Citizen Soldiers which will be useful in the beginning of the game when you haven't built any other buildings. The Citizen Soldiers can both fight and gather/build. To create a new unit, simply click on its icon which will appear in the bottom area of the screen. Marked by a '3' in the image above, that one shows what the game window looks like when you have a unit selected, but it will look similar when you have a building selected. To be able to train the unit you need to have the necessary resources, if not a message will appear that tells you how much more of the resource (or resources) you need to gather to be able to create that unit.