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The History Of FreeCiv
dizzyPhoenix writes: "O'reilly net is running an article on FreeCiv and how the game came about." As is often true on O'Reillynet, the article's well-thought and interesting reading.
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It being one of the more successful projects in the open source community, one would think after being in such active development for so long that Freeciv might rival its commercially-sold counterparts in quality and features. It does not, and similar strategy titles like Civilization II and Alpha Centauri clearly have slicker user interfaces, smarter AI, and generally better gameplay overall.
As anyone who was played Civilization III can tell you, FreeCiv is far superior to its commercial counterparts when it comes to quality. It may be behind in graphics, but most serious players aren't going to care about eye candy. When it comes to music, I think I prefer FreeCiv's silence over Civ3's awful music. The Civ3 sound effects are okay, but some of them are really annoying (some of the ships are too loud).
Two bugs in Civ3 that come to mind immediately are the fact that civilizations on the world map can not be made to start in their historic locations, instead you have stupid stuff like Japan starting in Africa, and Russia starting in California. Just plain stupid. The other bug that has given me problems is corruption is laughably unrealistic in Civ3. A city just one screen away will be practically unusable because of corruption -- a city two screens away is totally useless, even under Democracy. How is this realistic, or fun? It isn't. It's just plain stupid. You can tell that Civ3 is another game that the manufacturer decided to sell while it was still a beta test, rather than a 1.0 release.
So what is my point in all of this? My point is that instead of going to the store and spend $50 to beta test Civilization 3, instead we should help the community effort of FreeCiv. With Civilization 3 the entire user community is stuck with an unplayable game while we patiently wait for Firaxis to release a 1.0-quality version. But with FreeCiv we have the source code so we are not held at mercy to a company that couldn't care less. This is the strength of the GPL and why we should support FreeCiv.
Both Gnu-Darwin anf Fink have easy to install FreeCiv packages. You need X Windows, too.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
It's hard to say, but Freeciv is much worse than any Civilization, when you play in single player mode. Simple reason - there is no diplomacy with AI. So it's war only game. When you play Civilization3 you survive for a long time without single fight. In Freeciv you must fight, you can't trade, you can't share science, you can't have peace, you can only destroy, steal and conquer.
Of course Freeciv is very nice when playing in the Net. Old versions had big problems with lags (one lagged player could destroy whole game!). When you are in multiplayer for a first time - you see that you just can't play - it's completly different game than with AI. And that is bad thing.
Read readme.txt:
I agree with you on a lot of the other stuff. They should probably have waited until they had finished the game to print the manuals. But then, the Civ2 manual had errors too...
It would be nice to be able to mark units obsolete, like in SMAC.
There's supposed to be a patch before Christmas. Not that that's an excuse to ship a shoddy game.