MegaGlest is a free and open source cross-platform 3D real-time strategy (RTS) game in which you command the armies of one of seven factions — Tech, Magic, Egypt, Indians, Norsemen, Persian or Romans — across 17 hand-crafted settings. It is the community fork of the 2004 classic Glest, and has long outgrown its ancestor.

A match starts from a single base: gather resources (energy, food, gold, housing, stone and wood), raise buildings, train units and push out across the map before your opponents do. Each faction has its own units, buildings and upgrades, so Tech’s mechanical war machines, Magic’s summoned and morphed creatures and the Egyptian or Roman rosters all demand different strategies. Up to eight players can fight cross-platform over the internet or a LAN, with fine-grained AI difficulty levels for skirmish play.

The engine is built for modding: factions, units, maps and tilesets are defined in open data files, extra maps, tilesets and mods can be downloaded from inside the game at no cost, and the free-software engine can even be used as the basis of a different RTS — as the standalone game Annex: Conquer the World does.

Key Features

• Seven playable factions — Tech, Magic, Egypt, Indians, Norsemen, Persian and Romans, each with unique units, buildings and upgrades.
• 17 detailed environments — naturally looking tilesets and hand-crafted unit models with real attention to detail.
• Six resources to manage — energy, food, gold, housing, stone and wood, with distinct production chains per faction.
• Multiplayer for up to 8 players — cross-platform matches over the internet or a LAN, with in-game chat and a master server for finding games.
• Single player skirmish — battle CPU opponents on several fine-grained difficulty levels, with tutorials and scenarios included.
• In-game content downloads — extra maps, tilesets and mods can be fetched from within the game at no cost.
• Moddable, data-driven engine — techs, units, resources, maps and tilesets live in plain-text data files, and the engine can power entirely separate games.
• Runs on modest hardware — a lightweight 3D engine that plays well on older machines, with packages for all major distributions.

Why Use MegaGlest?

It is a mature project with more than fifteen years of development behind it and it is still maintained: the source repository keeps receiving commits and snapshot builds are published regularly. It costs nothing — no store, no account, no telemetry — and you get a complete, balanced fantasy RTS with a genuine modding community. Because the code is free software, you are free to study it, modify it and share it.

Use Cases

• Play a full skirmish against the computer on a rainy evening.
• Set up a cross-platform LAN or online match with up to eight friends.
• Browse and download community mods, factions and maps without leaving the game.
• Build your own faction or total conversion on top of the open MegaGlest engine.

Platforms

Linux and Windows (officially supported) · community-contributed builds for macOS, FreeBSD and other platforms · packaged by major distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and others) · source code

Licence

Free software: the engine is released under the GNU GPL v3 or later (Debian’s packaging records GPL-3+), while the game data — models, textures, maps and tilesets — is licensed CC-BY-SA-3.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0).

Website

megaglest.org · source code

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