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.

Comments

The REAL history of Freeciv

[autocracy]

It came with my Mandrake distro. I played it. Then I went online, and played against other people. I got my ass whooped. Then I got beat again (and again, and again, and again). That's the history of Freeciv (from where I'm sitting).

2nd attempt to post - thanks invalid formkey!

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't pass up this obvious error in the article:

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.

Why freeciv?

[Naum]

I recently bought Civ3 but I still find myself playing freeciv as much if not more. Civ3 is a "pretty" game as far as graphics go (with the animations and all, though I still have a hard time distiniguishing gold from barbarian villages and a few other nuances) and there's been some nice improvements strategy wise. OTOH, Civ3 has evolved into "Civ for the masses" and to me thus far, there seems to be less variation in strategy (Age of Empires style tech tree, corruption, unforgivable bugs like tech trade exploits, air superiority bugs, etc. ...).

Anyway, here is a list of reasons why I'm still playing freeciv over civ3.

• Performance - my box is well above the "recommended" civ3 requirements and it generally runs good UNTIL the map is loaded up with units. Then it is a dog and I really miss the rapid keystroke progression possible with freeciv. I can complete a game in freeciv in the fraction of a time of a similar civ3 game.
  
• Superior user interface - I'll probaly get flamed here, but I prefer the freeciv interface. The civ3 GUI is "pretty", but civ style games are all about information. I hit F1 in freeciv, it pulls up a city report where I can easily examine and edit worklists, center on any city, sort by any possible report category and customize report, briefly scan for cities in state of disorder, instantly pop in the help browser informing me of what benefits of potential city improvments or what unit stats are for build consideration. Yes, it's sort of there in civ3 - but a lot of space is devoted to giving rows of bread icons instead of giving me a simple readout. And finding cities in civil disorder is a challenge - especially when I have a message log in freeciv, but that's all gone in civ3. And the civlopedia deal is nice in civ3, but it hits the CD drive and there is a second or two delay - not a lot but not the instant retrieval I'm accustomed to in freeciv. And not all of the unit commands are even labeled in freeciv or on the civlopedia. I guess it's a part of "safecopy" protection or something, but a lot of the unit commands are only available in the manual.
  
• Infinite customization - 61 civs to play with (current count), and you can easily add any tileset, ruleset, techset desired. The graphics are not the greatest, but you can easily change them and there are a variety of tilesets available now - and you can go with the isometric view or the old-style civ1 flat view. Instead of selecting from a general parameter palette (60%, 70%, 80% ocean coverage), you can set whatever generator percentages you desire - sure, some of the settings might be really wacky, but hey, it makes for much more replay value. And if you don't like something that can't be changed or added on by creating a new unit, building, tech ruleset, then you have the source so you can dive in and change however the game works for yourself.
• It runs on Linux - I usually am in Linux but reboot into Win-doze (like many others) for games - however, with freeciv available it allows me to play without rebooting. Freeciv is also available for a bunch of other platforms (Windows, BeOS, etc.), though I've not had experience with them.
  
• Improved multiplayer - freeciv was setup to be multiplayer. The AI is good - the "easy" AI is probaly too good - will smack down the inexperienced player, and the "hard" AI probaly isn't enough of a challenge for the expert player. Only negative is that the AI doesn't do diplomacy so it's either conquest victory or race to space (if enough map space for the number of opponents).
  

If I had the time, I would love to contribute to the freeciv project (I don't know current state of developers - I know that it is a dynamic deal, with new developers joining and old ones departing ), so I'm not sure if there is enough dedicated enthusiasm for development of a civ3 ruleset and/or revising the AI.

Freeciv is long-term fun...

[DocSnyder]

Freeciv was the project to teach me how free-software development works, especially in a quite complex piece of software.

I remember playing Freeciv about three or four years ago: the client was based on libXaw, which is far from the GTK+ eye candy, and the AI was uncomparable to what it is today (yet still being improved). It even crashed and behaved obscurily. Since there wasn't any game of this kind running on GNU/Linux, I gave it a try. Nonetheless it was fun to play, and I was really happy when I won in a 100x60 map against three AI players for the first time, after playing for two weekends.

Some time later, the client has been ported to GTK+, matching my desktop theme and looking like most other applications. The AI became better (and harder to beat, as it behaved differently after a major upgrade), worklists and some other useful stuff went in. Freeciv got the space race and finally the isometric tiles.

The special fun on Freeciv is seeing it evolving over several years, getting a new version and see the differences, following the discussions on the developer mailinglist, even just "playing Lego" in single player mode with a 200x100 map is really fascinating.

It is rather wrong comparing Freeciv to any closed-source Civilization-like game, as most of the fun with Freeciv isn't available on proprietary games. If all you want is eye-candy, go with one of the eat-or-die Civ* variants. If you want to be in between the "making of" a great, complex and fascinating game, you're welcome to give it a try. :-)

This is not flamebait

[chazzf]

At the risk of losing any karma that I might have, let me make a few points here:

Freeciv is a very nice game, and very fun to play. However, all things considered, it is nothing more than a souped-up version of Civilization II-minus the graphics, sound, and impressive documentation. Building queues and simultaneous turns are great, but really don't represent evolution.

As far as the eye-candy goes, I consider it to be PART of the gameplay experience. I have played the Heroes of Might and Magic series for a long time not just because the gameplay is good but because the game is visually pleasing.

Finally, I have to ask why the Linux/GNU/FreeBSD/Open Source/Free Software community is so obsessed with trumping the "closed" community by producing open source replicas of hard work. Don't you think that Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds, or Jeff Briggs are geeks, hobbyists, innovaters. They created this game. You've reverse-engineered. The open community ought to dedicate itself to creating something original, something that it can call its own.

Sensible replies please, no flames.

Hey quote whore, how's the whoring?

[jorbettis]

As is often true on O'Reillynet, the article's well-thought and interesting reading.

I don't know what's worse, that Hemos is quote whoring* for O'Reilly now, or that he's so bad at it. I mean, god damn, show some tact man! It's like when Jon Katz tried to claim that an Afgani emaied him from a war zone, everyone knew he was full of it from a mile away. If you're going to be so obvious about blasting away your journalistic integrity (does slashdot have any left?), you might as well get a job reviewing movies for the LA times or something.

*For those who don't know (and will probably moderate me down for using a 'naughty word') a "quote whore" is somone in some imagined place of authority on a subject who is paid by a cooporate entity to say good things about it. Like a film critic being paid off by a movie studio.

Freeciv is much worse in single player

[Jacek Poplawski]

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.

What I like most about Freeciv...

[mfarah]

... is that is open source.

What really annoyed me about Civ/Civ II was the fact that the nations's cities lists were SMALL (20 names or less) - considering that I like to build large empires (and that I have the nasty habit of renamig the cities I conquer), it was really annoying to have to think of a new name each time. Even nations (my favorite being Spain) with lots of cities available in any decent map were prone to this problem.

In Freeciv, nation rulesets are as open as the source code. So I made LARGE lists of cities for several of my favorite nations (the spanish ruleset's list has 200 entries, thanks to several days worth of work), and now I play happily.