20-03-2001 00:38									#1
	First impressions of a Civ2 player Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

I know the game isn't striving to be a straight clone of Civ 2, but I noted the following differences in several hours of play:

1. Building a road or city on a special that yields 1 or more trade arrows provides an additional arrow in Civ2, no extra arrow in FreeCiv.
2. In FreeCiv, my cities seemed to grow as soon as the food box filled; Civ2 fills up the box and loses extra food. Example: 18 food in the box, 3 food surplus. In FreeCiv, the city grows to size 2 with one food in the box; in Civ 2, the box is filled to 20 food, and the city will grow next turn.
3. In Civ 2, units with no attack factor (e.g. settlers and explorers) can occupy undefended cities. Since AI explorers didn't occupy my empty cities, I assume that doesn't hold true in FreeCiv.
4. Once you select an advance to research in Civ2, you can't change it.

General comments: I liked the carry-over of extra shields; it removes a lot of the micromanagement burden. Delaying settler production until a city grows is a nice touch. Initially, I had trouble recentering the screen, but it worked fine once I figured it out.

I missed the bar graph displays for gold, food, shields, etc. in the Civ2 city screen. All of the same information is presented numerically in FreeCiv, but I find the pictures in Civ2 easier to read at a glance.

The AI seems to share the Civ2 AI's preference for food above all else. Since shields seem to be rare on the FreeCiv map, I think there should be a greater emphasis on production. I played the early stages of several games, and was able to outstrip the AIs by using forests and plains to build lots of cities while the AIs were concentrating on building up population in their few cities. The AI seems to share the Civ2 AI's indecisiveness about wonders, constantly starting a wonder and then changing its mind.

I didn't play a game far enough to have any real combat with the AIs, but once I built Sun Tzu's I wouldn't expect them to put up much of a fight.

I don't mean this post to sound unduly negative; this is a remarkable programming effort. The game seemed commendably bug-free, and is better than Civ2 in some aspects. It's different in enough small ways to frustrate a veteran Civ2 player somewhat, but I think I could learn to like it.

	20-03-2001 01:02									#2
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

This is 1.11.4, no?
You really, really should try the latest CVS versions; it has some nice improvements and errandumNotBug fixes . Unlike civ 2 freeciv is not static; new features appear!
Also, most of the changes in CVS versus 1.11.4 are mine .

Even if freeciv doesn't have better gameplay than civ 2 the open source is a huge advantage IMO. At least that is why I like it.

The AI does need some work; the problem is that the code is very ugly so none can understand it and so modify it . At some point we will probably do a rewrite. One nice thing about it is that it doesn't cheat very much.

I just have to mention some other stuff freeciv have over civ 2:

[*]FoW shown on the map.
[*]Build queues!
[*]You can give orders to settlers with no moves left.
[*]Goto that actually works. Did you try to do a goto with an airplane to a city far away ? (but the one in CVS is even better...). Does it show I am "the freeciv goto guy"?
[*]What diplomacy options are possible between human players in civ 2 multiplayer (never tried MGE)? Freeciv has many. (CVS has shared vision)
[*]I am sure there are more.
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	21-03-2001 01:15									#3
	Put an end to popups!

Thue - I understand your enthusiasm for FreeCiv. If this had been around 20 years ago when I was taking AI courses and had a lot more free time, I would have spend most of that free time hacking the game. Don't worry too much about the AI cheating; there should be a "really, really, hard" AI difficulty level where it's impossible to win. Then, eventually, people will figure out how to beat the AI at that level.

	30-03-2001 02:10									#4
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

More impressions from a game with the default settings: I really think the tech rate needs to be made slower. Techs just comes way too fast. I have a research rate of three turns/tech in 75BC, in Communism with NO improvements, and 29 sleazy cities. I've built Leo's, Lighthouse, MPE, SoL, STWA, and will soon finish GW. The AIs have managed Colossus, Pyramids (Mongols), and Great Library (Greeks). The AIs have the following techs I lack: Pottery, Seafaring (Australians, Greeeks, Danish), Astronomy, Navigation (Greeks). I'm researching Medicine, on my way to Explosives.

I tried a game at the equivalent of Civ2 Deity settings, but it seemed to impede the AIs a lot more than it did me (I just built HG and kept expanding). I reached a phase in that game where I could produce any of the wonders I wanted, with no competition from the AI.

	30-03-2001 13:42									#5
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

Yes, the game mechanics like techtaye needs some tuning. I personally would like to see many of the civ 2 inbalances fixed too in the freeciv ruleset, but I don't have much time for freeciv rigth now to do so.

note that freeciv currently ships with 3 rulesets:

[*]the civ 1 ruleset
[*]the civ 2 ruleset
[*]the freeciv ruleset, currently mostly compatible with the civ 2 one, but with some of the most glaring errors fixed.
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It is that last one I would like to see modified even further.

Oh, and it doesn't help to set the settings diety-like. The only reason that helps the AI in civ 2 is that they are not influenced by them , indeed they have an advantage over normal settings. But as the freeciv AI doesn't really cheat that much...

Did you set the AI difficulty to hard by writing "hard" in the server?

Note that the most serious freecivers plays the game in multiplayer; as you have noticed the AI is not quite capable of challenging a skilled civ player.