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.

Comments

Feedback welcome!

[Andreas(R)]

I'm one of the current developers of the Freeciv web client. Feel free to ask any questions about Freeciv in this thread. We are always looking for more developers to help improve the game.

Re:Feedback welcome!

[allcoolnameswheretak]

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.

Re:Feedback welcome!

[hankwang]

in commercial Civ games ramping up the difficulty usually means giving bonuses and cheats to the AI.

It's at least 10 years ago that I last played Freeciv, but I recall that back then, Freeciv AI was also cheating at the higher difficulty levels, by getting resources cheaper and by being able to peek into enemy cities. It didn't matter that much to me, I never got good enough to bother with the higher difficulty levels - and it was still quite a few all-nighters that I pulled playing it.

However, from a brief look at Freeciv AI documentation, I get it that nowadays the AI is not cheating, and just gets handicaps at lower difficulty levels.

Non-gamer hooked

[gwolf]

I was never much of a gamer, so it was surprising I was so hooked into Sid Meier's Civilization in the early 90s. I started toying with Linux by 1995 and using it for serious work starting in 1996. And, yes, FreeCiv was a reason for me to be happy adopting Linux on the desktop.

Thanks a lot for many hours of fun!

Port assignments are a bit harder to get today

[kevmeister]

I'd say that having its own port assignment speaks mostly to the project's age... back when getting a port assigned just required a quick note to Jon Postel.