Freeciv

History

At the computer science department at Aarhus University, three students, avid players of XPilot and of Sid Meier's Civilization, which was a stand-alone PC game for MS-DOS, decided to find out whether the two could be fused into an X-based multiplayer Civilization-like strategy game. The students—Peter Unold, Claus Leth Gregersen and Allan Ove Kjeldbjerg—started development in November 1995; the first playable version was released in January 1996, with bugfixing and small enhancements until April. The rules of the game were close to Civilization, while the client/server architecture was basically that of XPilot.

For the developers, Freeciv 1.0 was a successful proof of concept, but a rather boring game, so they went back to XPilot. But Freeciv was already playable and addictive enough to pick up other students as players, bugfixers and feature extenders. It was useful enough to be picked up by popular Linux distributions, e.g. Debian. Designed to be portable, it was ported to many platforms, which helped its survival.

In 1998, computer players were added that could soon beat newcomers to the game with ease, using only minor forms of cheating. The game grew in popularity. A public server was installed that hosted games permanently, archiving them and publishing a post-game analysis webpage including per-player statistics and an animated map replay.

Subsequent 1.x releases improved the GUI, improved the gameplay, and added many small features, without causing a major change to how the game was best played. Incessant city building turned out to be a critical success factor; developing larger cities did not appear worthwhile. As many regular players reached excellent gaming skills, diplomacy became essential, so team games slowly started to replace free-for-all games from around 2002.

Version 2.0, released in 2005, changed the game significantly: by modifying various costs and benefits and adding some new game elements it made it worthwhile for players to develop only a few large cities, full trade routes, and advanced technologies. This necessitated a distinct phase of rapturing under relatively peaceful conditions; hence, games were almost always played in teams and typically took longer to finish when compared to 1.x games.

In 2006 TCP and UDP port number 5556 was assigned to Freeciv by IANA.

Freeciv is described as an example in The Art of Unix Programming. Some studies and courses use Freeciv as a platform for experimenting with the design and programming of intelligent agents.

Design

Freeciv is very configurable, down to the specific rules, so it can be played in Freeciv (default) mode, Civilization mode, Civilization II mode, or a custom mode. One or several players act as game administrators and can configure the game rules. Typically modified rules are:

In order to play a game of Freeciv, a user must start up a Freeciv client and connect it to a Freeciv server. Initially, the server is in pre-game phase; in this phase, clients can connect and game configuration parameters can be changed. At some point, the server may be ordered to start a game; in response, it creates game players (nations) and the game map, and assigns every player to either a Freeciv client or a computer player, as specified by the configuration. From that point on, the game will run until it ends or is terminated; the server can never get back into pre-game state.

The user can also start a game directly from the client: this automatically starts a Freeciv server, connects to it and starts the game.

Features

Freeciv's graphics system is configurable: originally, map display was always in overhead mode (like in Civ I), isometric mode (like in Civ II) and optionally hexagonal tiling (like in Civ V) were added later. In both modes, look can be further customized by switching to an alternative set of graphics (called a tileset). The sounds can be replaced as well.

Freeciv supports human-to-human multiplayer gameplay and artificial intelligence (AI) computer players. While the game is turn based, human players move simultaneously. The AI players move separately, partly at the start of a turn, partly at the end.

In releases before 2.0, AI players could not engage in diplomatic relationships with human players. Under the current releases, AI players will engage in a very predictable, rules-based diplomacy.

Version 2.2.0 included a map editor, termed Civworld. It can create new scenarios, as well as edit the map currently being played. Basic scripting is available with Freeciv, but is not available in Civworld. Version 2.3 increased the limit of players from 30 to 126.

There are different clients available SDL, GTK+ (version3) and Xaw3D The tests for version 2.5 started in 2014 and include a Qt client.

The Freeciv interface is available in over 30 different languages. The addition of Gaelic was covered on BBC TV.

Ports and variants

Originally developed on IRIX, Freeciv has been ported to many different operating systems: it is distributed with many Linux distributions, offers installers for Microsoft Windows, and has been known to run on Mac OS X, MorphOS, Solaris, Ultrix, QNX, OS/2, Cygwin, AmigaOS, AROS, RISC OS, Maemo, ZETA, SkyOS, various BSDs, and smartphones and tablets running Android.

As of version 2.4, Mac OS X, and as of version 2.3, Windows versions older than Windows XP SP3 are no longer supported. Freeciv is available in the PortableApps format.

Freeciv-web

Freeciv-web is a version of Freeciv playable online in any modern web browser. The game is a fork of the Freeciv project, with the goal of redesigning the desktop game into a version which can be played online. Freeciv-web introduced several new features, such as play-by-email support freely available to anyone online, and support for playing the game on any real-world map location by choosing a map using Mapbox, which is not available in commercial games in the genre. The game's default settings are closest to Civilization II, both in gameplay and graphics (including the units and the isometric grid). The proposal to create a web-version of Freeciv was made 6 April 2007 on the Freeciv mailing lists, and documented on the Freeciv.org wiki. Freeciv-web was originally created by Andreas Røsdal, but is now maintained by several Freeciv developers on Github.

Freeciv-web is free and open source software. The Freeciv C server is released under the GNU General Public License, while the Freeciv-web client is released under the GNU Affero General Public License. Freeciv-web supports human-to-human multiplayer gameplay and artificial intelligence (AI) computer players. Its features are similar to the Freeciv C client, although not all of the user-interface has been ported from the C client yet.

Freeciv-web can be played online at play.freeciv.org. It was previously known and available at Freeciv.net. All the features required to play a full game of Freeciv are in place, including rendering of an isometric map, technology research, and many dialogs for managing cities, units and other players. The game also supports scenario-games, and includes maps of the world, North America, France, Italy, Japan and the Iberian peninsula. While the game is turn based, human players move simultaneously. The AI players move separately, partly at the start of a turn, partly at the end.

Freeciv-web can be played in any web browser which supports the HTML5 standards. In particular, the game uses the Canvas element and WebSocket which are part of the HTML 5 standard. Unlike many other browser-based online games, it does not depend on the proprietary Flash plug-in. Freeciv-web is supported by Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer. The canvas support in Freeciv-web has been used to benchmark HTML5 canvas performance.

Longturn and Greatturn

Freeciv Longturn and Greatturn are specialized extensions of Freeciv featuring daylong game turns with large amounts of human opponents per map, allowing for optimal timing to build up strategic plans and readapt them to the circumstances of each turn. Matches can last anytime from a few weeks to months, and commonly involve 20 to 30 players in each one.

Longturn's first game, now called LT0, started around 2004 on the Polish Civilization fanpage civ.org.pl. It was decided that the game is a bit too slow paced, so a new "3X movement" ruleset was devised – basically, all units had their movement points and vision radius tripled. As of September 2014, the latest game was LT33. Greatturn's first game, GT00, started in January 2013. As of September 2014, the most recent game was GT11 and the Greatturn community generally uses "2X movement." Around 1 July 2014, the Greatturn website and servers were taken offline by its administrator. The website and game data were acquired from the previous administrator and the website was restored around 10 September 2014.

Longturn and Greatturn are strongly focused on online communication. For example, Greatturn provides a website where each player can create and manage a personal private forum and select the membership allowed to access it for reading or writing messages. This infrastructure paves the ground for maximal cooperation between players allowing the arrangement of complex tactics and diplomacy.

Contrarily to the classic Freeciv, the settings of each match are not determined from within the server hosting the match. Rather, in Greatturn any parameter definition or other proposition is published to the website via the Greatturn voting system for public consideration and approbation; this allows everybody to participate in decisions and doesn't force polls to conclude in a rush. In Longturn, although a polls system was previously used, changes to settings or rulesets are now discussed in the Longturn forum.

Golden Age of Civilizations

The Golden Age of Civilizations is an open source time-based MMO strategy game, mostly based on the FreeCiv. Though the game is played in time and through weeks, at the beginning of each units are assigned movement time, which are spent as they move and act. Using up the movement time early may leave a unit without the ability to respond if an opponent approaches later. The units cannot carry extra movement time into the next hours or days, every units has a limit of accumulation of time.

The game's ruleset is derived from the FreeCiv's default ruleset but it was devised to support time-based instead of turn-based strategy; and it is supports the MMO gameplay where you compete against hundreds and sometimes thousands opponents to found cities and use them to support a military, and finally to complete an empire that survives all encounters with its neighbors to emerge victorious. Each opponent is human player, not controlled by the computer!

As in the FreeCiv, achieving success requires a balance between economic expansion, military strength, and technological development. Once technological progress has brought you into the space age, you may launch a spacecraft and the first civilization whose launch it wins. Because of the game is time-based, the game will end after two weeks if no spacecraft have yet been launched, the surviving civilizations are then rated, and the one with the highest overall score is the winner.