Is this game marketed?

Does this game do any advertisement, or is the only source of new players are inviting/forcing (hehehhe, all my friends) into playing this?

iirc, it is the latter
I learned of ZK through other spring games.

Yeah, getting advertised is hard enough, getting people to actually play is even more so...

The only reason I even know this game exists is because I had no access to a Windows computer for a month and ended up googling for Linux compatible RTS games as a temporary substitute for SC2.

Over time I started liking it more than SC2.

Just as many very old players, i have migrated from BA.

Im not entirely sure how i found BA. I think i was reading up on wikipedia's list of free RTS games, as it was during the time no new RTS games were on the market for ages.

I do remember my first game though. It was a 3-way FFA on CCR. I rushed some nab, then started expanding aggressively. Being a Starcraft veteran, i then started building more factories and pumping some cheap generalist units like warriors at the enemy. Which kinda stopped working when my opponent started spamming DDMs.
The fact the game felt so intuitive and natural, and at the same time weird and unintuitive really got me hooked.
I remember the [K] clan often stomping nabs on Tabula. Learning their strategies and trying to beat them was fun, although futile because my teammates were usually random nabs. Regret, Tsuyosa, Jazcash, Dizekat - i still remember the fuckers by the names. As far as i know, Jazcash still plays BA sometimes, and Regret used to be very active in ZK.

Sometimes i got bored of BA, and sometimes the only available room was 8v8BADSD which i couldnt play on my old rig, so i tried to play other games/mods. I think i have at least 2-3 games played in every major mod, like NOTA, XTA, KP, 1944, ComShooter, Kapital, EE, EvoRTS.

I think the final switch for me happened during the first Planet Wars. Damn that was fun. Certainly not balanced, but we had great small community, 3v3-5v5 battles were common and great fun.
There actually was a decline in playerbase after the PW finished, there were dayss with literally 0 CA games played. But slowly the mod somehow grew, it was developing rapidly - the push to remove OTAContent, the name change, the 1faction change, introduction of communism and overdrive. It is a bit sad that quantum and det stopped contributing to the development, the current rate of progress is nowhere close to those old days.

Fuck, i feel old now.

[EDIT]
Oh hey look what i found! CA 2006!
https://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=11156

Yogzototh: w.r.t. development speed: Game development will typically go faster at the start, since a lot of systems need to be built and there are a lot of bugs. As the bugs get fixed and the systems solidified, stuff gets more bottlenecked by a few things (often presentation related). At this point, Zero-K pretty much only needs improved visual fidelity (highly time consuming and bottlenecked by artists we have few of) and the new lobby (not as time consuming, but possibly held back by not being easily built and tested with any text editor). The game systems are pretty solid overall, so any changes happening at the pace of early development would be detrimental to quality.

quote: http://urc.tauniverse.com/

Love how that 11 year old Staber unit is tagged as "new"

I kind of bumbled into it since I have been playing ta since I was two years old. What a glorious year 1997. I still own and play TA. And there is still a community of people dedicated to it. However I kind of ran into zero-k when I decided to finally take a look at this "spring project" I had heard of for such a long time. XD It only took me until a year ago to start playing ZK and having a blast ALL The way. "I enjoy coming up with REALLY oddball stratagems".

We're free, we don't have a marketing budget. How would we market it?

So yeah, we allow on word of mouth and people like shadowfury333 kaen and lightman making content about the game.

Given that I seem to get ~50 views on each ZK video, and I'm pretty sure those come from existing players, I'm not sure I'm helping that much.

Having Planetary Annihilation: Titans content might help that, though. PA forums are how I realized Zero-K was worth my time (thanks to GoogleFrog discussing its UI and systems). Here's hoping the game is good enough for more than just one hour of flailing-about FPVOD footage.