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Freeciv Founded 20 Years Ago Today (freeciv.org)
Andreas(R) writes to note that the Freeciv project today turns 20. The GPL'd project "was founded on November 14 1995, by Peter Joachim Unold, Claus Leth Gregersen and Allan Ove Kjeldbjerg. The three Danish students created this open source strategy game while studying computer science at Aarhus University. Today, 20 years later the founders of the project have been interviewed to find out about the early history of Freeciv."
Not that many games have their own officially designated port numbers, which says something about Freeciv's tenacity.
Not that many games have their own officially designated port numbers, which says something about Freeciv's tenacity.
Hi Andreas,
I'm a big fan of Civ games, and I think I have played them all, from Civ 1-5 to the Call of Powers, Freeciv, AlphaCentauri and C-evo. One thing I often wonder about is the striking disparity between the quality of the AI's in these games. Strangely enough, it seems that for some reason the AI of the community games is usually much, much stronger than the commercial versions. Experienced players can get a good challenge on even ground playing Freeciv or C-evo, whereas in commercial Civ games ramping up the difficulty usually means giving bonuses and cheats to the AI.
Why are game companies so bad at writing a decent AI for a civ game? Or why is the community so good at it?
Freeciv is open source - and all Civ games are very similar in the core aspects. You'd think the problem of implementing a good AI has been "solved" for this type of game. Yet the AI of the latest game in the series Civ-5 is again ridiculously incompetent.