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Freeciv-2.0.0 Stable Released 557

Posted by timothy from the better-than-a-new-vaccine dept.
Settler writes "Freeciv 2.0.0 has been released upon the world! A big thanks goes to the people who made it all come true. Remember to read about the exciting news and hurry up and get it here. To see what this game looks like, check out screenshots here and here. This goes to show what a great game an open source project can create."
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Freeciv-2.0.0 Stable Released More

Freeciv-2.0.0 Stable Released

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  • I've taken a look at the screenshots and this game still looks like it's stuck in 1989. Is the game engine they're using remained the same over all these years ?

    I'm sure the gameplay & strategy is up there but these graphics are not the kind of thing that'll attract users to the platform :(

    • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by segal_loves_pandas ( 849758 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:32AM (#12267667)
      Thats harsh. This is a civ-clone. Civ is not going to attract anyone who cares about graphics to linux full stop. I'm very excited about this.
      • Sorry about that, I was probably a little too harsh as you say. Maybe I should congratulate the dev team for their release and offer up some code instead of complaining.

        • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by EpsCylonB ( 307640 ) <.eps. .at. .epscylonb.com.> on Monday April 18, 2005 @06:33AM (#12267869) Homepage
          Maybe I should congratulate the dev team for their release and offer up some code instead of complaining.

          I don't think code is the problem, programmers might be willing to work for free but professional artists expect to get paid.

          In terms of the game engine there is very little difference between Civ 1 and Civ 3, its just that the latter has much prettir graphics.

          • Artist availability (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:01AM (#12268288)

            Actually, if you look at sites like elysiun.org and deviantart, it's obvious that lots of talented artists are happy to put their work online, just for the hell of it. What we need to do is market Free Software as a place to explore and exhibit their talents.



            Even the artists who use GIMP, Audacity, or other free software are often unaware of how they could contribute to that same cause that helps them. More integration would be great.



            Maybe a standardised link from every free software app that goes to some site which requires talent related to that kind of app would help. You know, like a DMoz of free software projects, but with GIMP pointing to the "Projects in need of Artists" section. It would be even better, if apps let artists automatically update and release their work to a Free repository.

            • It would be even better, if apps let artists automatically update and release their work to a Free repository.

              Obviously beggars can't be choosers, however you seem to be suggesting a randomn hodge podge of art, games these days require an coherent artistic vision. Art is a very important part of game design, artists are often involved long before a code monkey sits down and starts tapping keys.
    • I think most people who play FreeCiv dig out their old Civ2 CD and import the graphics from that. Not quite 1989... more like 1994 :-)

    • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by James_Duncan8181 ( 588316 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:36AM (#12267679) Homepage
      While flashy graphics are often viewed as important in more arcadey genres, you will note that Freeciv is aimed at a different audience. When the game is based around mental concepts the game UI tends to be designed around funtionality, changing far less over time. An example of this is the sucess of Civ 3, which has essentially the same UI as Civ 2. The only thing (and even this is not a priority) that Freeciv needs to come up to the standards of commercial Civ games is to port some of the nicer tile/unit graphics from some of the Civ 3 mods.
      • But graphics can be flashy and functional, take WC3, for example.

        Personally, I believe [slashdot.org] Civ graphics should deliberately be as simple as possible.

        The graphics in a game like this are just as important as the graphics in a FPS. It is important that they are simple.
      • I'll give the new version a whirl, but to be perfectly honest the last time I tried it I found it unusable. Unlike toe others, I don't mind about the graphics, but the basic usability just wasn't there. This from someone who actually wanted to play the thing.

      • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "An example of this is the sucess of Civ 3, which has essentially the same UI as Civ 2"

        Huh? Graphic engine was completely changed in Civ 3.

        Civ 2 had a flat 2D view to the world while Civ 3 is 3D, has animations and other improvements.
        Here is a Civ 2 screenshot [atpm.com]. Here is a Civ 3 screenshot [ugo.com].

        If Freeciv would have Civ 3 style graphics, it would be a lot more attractive to the new players.
        • Civ 3 is not 3d, it merely has flat, diamond tiles (like Civ 2) that are again sprites, just drawn in a 3d style. Hence my comment that Freeciv would just need to get some of these from a freedom loving member of the Civ 3 modding community.

    • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by omicronish ( 750174 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:37AM (#12267681)

      Yeah, it's sad that a lot of gamers concentrate too much on graphics. I'd take Civilization 2/3 over most FPS games out there (1 is pushing it :). I actually like the simple graphics and windowed mode. Makes it easy to treat Freeciv and Civilization 1/2 as just another application you're doing work in.

      Another thing to note is that even if it had excellent graphics I think a lot of people would be put off my its turn-based nature.

    • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CleverNickedName ( 644160 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:38AM (#12267688) Journal
      I've taken a look at the screenshots and this game still looks like it's stuck in 1989.

      You could say the same about the excellent Advance Wars 2 [advancewars.com].

      Personally, I think the basic, "icon-like" (As opposed to "iconic") graphics enhance the strategic element. The pieces are not living characters, deserving of our empathy. They are simply abstract tokens representing various statistics, strengths and weaknesses. This abstract nature promotes the cold, logical reasoning required for the game.

      My 2c.

      • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Orkan ( 850188 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @06:22AM (#12267831)
        At the same time let's get rid of such concepts as sea and land, simply have 2 different colours to distinguish between different types of square. Any why have named units? After all, the important thing about a unit is its stats. Hills, Mountains, Forests? Let us not think we are actually talking about real features, replace them with abstract concepts such as squares of type A, B and C. Continue this process to it's logical conclusion and what do you get? A game with identical gameplay but which is blander and less fun to play. As an intellectual exercise this would have merit, but as a game? There is more to graphics in civ than to simply provide a convenient shorthand for the different statistics of each element of the game. Provided the graphics do not obscure the gameplay mechanics I cannot see why they cannot be used to improve the game. In summary, I'm sure I'm not the only person who would rather order a persian warrior to attack a fortified german spearman than to make a 1-1-1 unit of Team 1 attack a 1-2-1 unit with a defence bonus of Team 2. The concepts from the second part still apply in the first, but there's more to it than an abstract intellectual exercise.

        • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:3, Interesting)

          by lawpoop ( 604919 )
          This brings up an interesting point -- I think that even if you had a game of circles vs. triangles, people would naturally anthropomorphize them ("My circles are attacking the triangle base"). There was an experiment where children where shown a film of circles being knocked around like billiard balls. When asked what when on, they gave responses like "The ball got hit" or "the ball bounced". Another group was shown a film of circles moving on thier own, knocking each other, knocking back, etc. All of a su

        • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Sparr0 ( 451780 )
          Your extension does not follow. The difference in $100/hr designer graphics and free sprites is completely different from the difference in free sprites and abstract tiles. Yes, the game would technically be the same with A B C tiles, but it would be harder to play because you would have to dedicate (human) memory and brainpower to keeping track of the unit types. By using recognizable units you can build on things we "all" already know. A tank wont work in the water, and wont be able to aim through a f
    • .. game engine and game graphics?

      Clearly, you are clueless. The engine has nothing to do with the graphics.

    • It looks nice enough not to be offended by it. Really, it's the gameplay that makes FreeCIV such a nice game, not the looks. Compare it with a tabletop game - that's pieces of wood and carton as well. Yet, many people play tabletop games.

    • AI? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by leuk_he ( 194174 )
      Does it now have a reasonable ai for singleplayer use? or is it still "ther is an computer player, but th eAI still has many limitation".

      • From what I know, FreeCiv always had a very strong AI (stronger than CIV 2 and CIV).

        Also, it extends the gameplay from CIV2 by adding networked multiplayer game.
        • Maybe am i too long arround then. Last version i checked out (quite some time ago i must admit) the ai supported alsmost nothing and network play was the way to play it.
      • The AI completely thrashes players who are new to freeciv, even old civ players, and without resource cheating. It has even turned into a problem by itself, sort of, because in most difficulty levels, the AI does well, only differently.

        However, the AI has problems adapting to special settings(islands, min/full tradesize) and strategies that are prevalent in the online games, which means the AI does well especially when it has land contact with you or when it got a little economic lead to make up for its in

    • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:59AM (#12267758)
      Exactly, FreeCiv is a great game. But the truth is FreeCiv is not the best game to show off how great Open Source Software (OSS) can be. It is like using some version of Tetris to show off any gaming console past the original Nintendo or Gameboy. Sure they are great games but if the OSS community wants real acceptance in the gaming market they will need to show the consumers that uses a bit more juice then FreeCiv. Dont get me wrong I like FreeCiv but unfortunatly it is one of those games that are on the OSS see what we can do list.

      • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by WankersRevenge ( 452399 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @07:53AM (#12268225)
        Why does everything these days have to be about the "power of OSS" or some like minded politco statement? I'm willing to counter that the reason this project has been so successful is because they rather focus on their passion as opposed to the politics of their development method. Reminds me of an article from The Onion's "Our Dumb Century" ... Normandy Invasion Force Crippled by Nostalgia - Thousands of GIs Die as They Pause to Reflect on the Momentous Day.

    • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mr Europe ( 657225 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @06:09AM (#12267788)
      It's not the graphic engine. The grahics are 2D and any engina can do that with decent speed.

      The problem is the lack of artists and animators. Copy the unit-pics from the original and you will quickly get a cease and desist letter.

      Also good free sound-files are hard to find.

      If YOU have free above mentioned content, pls publish it under a free license!
    • but these graphics are not the kind of thing that'll attract users to the platform

      Considering your nickname, I'm sure you can contribute some nice graphics to the game that will attract users... :-)

    • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by m50d ( 797211 )
      How about you and me write an opengl frontend that looks nice and is completely rotatable? The server and client are completely separate so you don't need to know any game logic, just good programming.

      • Re:I don't get it .. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by perrin ( 891 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:55AM (#12268704)
        You are not the first to think about this. Making an OpenGL client of Freeciv is harder than you might think, and for different reasons. While the client-server design is very clean, and the common client code is neatly separated from the client specific front-end, making a graphical design that would work with a Freeciv map is non-trivial.

        Rotating a flat map would look odd. Adding elevation makes it very hard to add units, cities, terrain improvement and so on. Not to mention that doing the elevation in any sane way is difficult, as well, since you are pretty restricted as to how you can do it (if you use only existing freeciv maps). A lot of other games (SimCity eg) of elevation by sacrificing some tiles to slopes. We cannot do that. SMAC has smooth slopes but no mountains. We can't do that. One person tried to make a mapview that had rugged mountains that had sharp mountaintops. We can't do that - we might have to draw cities, mines, and so on on it. Some games solve this by having mountains (and rivers) as items between tiles. We can't do that. So if you manage to jump through all those difficulties, can you make it look good?

        That remains to be proven. If you have ideas, try making a map demo first to test them out and show us.

        See http://www.freeciv.org/index.php/OpenGL in the Freeciv wiki once our web site is un-slashdotted to learn more about this, and add your thoughts.

        - Per
        (freeciv dev)

  • Coral Cache (Score:5, Informative)

    by trublaha ( 650819 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:30AM (#12267655)

    Let's go easy on their servers, eh?

    http://screenshots.freeciv.org.nyud.net:8090/galle ry/ [nyud.net]

  • /.'ed (Score:5, Funny)

    by ceeam ( 39911 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:31AM (#12267656)
    Yes, it looks good, but does it run under.... Windows?! :-)

  • what a great game an opensource project can create (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thetzar ( 30126 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:32AM (#12267661) Homepage
    ...by blatantly copying a commercial product.

    Not that I'm not on the edge of my seat for FreeOrion, though. :)

  • Classic games. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Oscar_Wilde ( 170568 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:38AM (#12267687) Homepage
    I just can't get enough of remakes of classic games, there are some real gems out there.

    My personal favourite is Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe [openttd.org], it's multiplayer gameplay [openttd.org] makes a nice change from the shoot everything that moves action of most things people play over the net.

    Anyway, I'll end this post now, I'm feeling the urge to go play freeciv.
    • Wow, thank you about pointing out this, Transport Tycoon Deluxe for a time was a my favorite game number one, I will sure check this out ;)
    • OpenTTD is even worse example of an open source game that FreeCIV. Okay, so it runs and does what it says on the tin, but only because it uses the original Transport Tycoons data files! It's literally just a new front-end for an existing game.


      It's understandable why it came about (TT is a great game & Chris Sawyer seems to write code which never works properly on newer systems), but even so...

      • Re:Classic games. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Oscar_Wilde ( 170568 )
        It's literally just a new front-end for an existing game.

        Actually, it is a new back end for some existing graphics and sounds.

        You could replace all the graphics if you liked, but nobody has bothered yet.

        You can get the complete source from the project's svn repository [openttd.org].

        You might be confusing OpenTTD with TTDPatch, an inferior game that will be forever dependant on the original game and graphics.
    • While I realize it's not free, I'm curious as to whether you played Locomotion, the kinda-sequel he wrote around the same time as Rollercoaster Tycoon 2. I received it in a bundle pack along with RCT2 and all expansions for $20 at Walmart. I don't quite get it, but then again, I didn't really understand the first Transport Tycoon.

    • Re:Classic games. (Score:4, Funny)

      by aziraphale ( 96251 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @08:08AM (#12268351)
      Open Transport Tycoon? A game that lets you experience the realistic thrills and spills of building up your own business empire in the exciting world of classic Mac OS networking drivers [apple.com]?

      Where do I sign up?

  • the freeciv advantage (Score:4, Interesting)

    by juventasone ( 517959 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:40AM (#12267692)
    While I think FOSS stuff is cool, is there any actual advantage for Windows/Mac users to play freeciv over Civilization 3, besides the price tag?

  • Great open source game (Score:4, Informative)

    by mr_Spook ( 458791 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:42AM (#12267698) Homepage
    Freeciv is neat and all, but as of late, I'm quite partial to the battle for Wesnoth [wesnoth.org] when it comes to turn based strategy. Great community, excellent game, yet not well known. It's getting closer to a 1.0 release, albeit slowly.
  • Now, if I could get Settlers to work under Linux (not that I've tried), I would be a happy man.
    Can anyone out there tell me if they have?

  • Boycott Norway (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18, 2005 @05:58AM (#12267757)
    Bloody Norwegians naming one of their cities 'Reykjavik', clearly trying to confuse the international community and steal our fish.
    Thieving bastards the lot of them.

    Concerned Icelander.

    • What? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18, 2005 @07:55AM (#12268241)
      It's our fish. We can't steal what belongs to us.

      And since everything belongs to us, we can't steal at all. That makes us the most honest people on the planet.

      Honest Norwegian.
  • Being a civ2 clone, I hope this doesn't get a cease-and-desist order like http://freecraft.org/ [freecraft.org]. So far it's been out of the radar. It would be a pity if the big guys went after such a great game like this. No, freeciv isn't just a copy. I actually like it better than its commercial counterparts. It's one of the best open-source games out here!

  • Changelog text (since it seems to be slashdotted) (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18, 2005 @06:00AM (#12267761)
    NEWS-2.0.0
    From Freeciv
    (Redirected from NEWS-beta)

    WARNING: This is a tentative list, by no means exhaustive. See the NEWS or ChangeLog files contained with the source for more information.

    WHAT'S CHANGED SINCE 1.14.2

    Rules changes:

    * (Beta2) Research cost has doubled, effects of science buildings doubled. SETI now improves Research Labs instead of giving free Research Labs to every city. Isaac Newton's College now improves all the player's universities.
    * New units: AWACS and Workers.
    * New option: national borders. Units inside your borders do not cause unhappiness under Republic and Democracy.
    * It is no longer possible for one player to be in alliance with a player who is at war with another player you are allied with.
    * The Civ2 ruleset now has waste. Default ruleset does not.
    * Incite costs changed, now cities closer to capital, with units and with buildings have much higher incite cost.
    * Killing a defending diplomat now costs you 1 movement point.
    * Units now have multiple, configurable veteran levels.
    * Team mates now pool their research. You may opt out and research individually by cancelling the 'Team' treaty.
    * Server has voting on commands and options. You need over 50% of votes.
    * When moving a unit from a transport on an ocean tile to a land tile, you lose all movement points.
    * You can specify a list of players that you would like to share victory with, using the 'endgame' command.
    * Nations added: Swiss, Afghanistan, Ethiopian, Assyrian, Columbian, Elvish, Galician, Hobbits, Indonesian, Kampuchean, Malaysian, Martian, Nigerian, Quebecois, Sumerian, Taiwanese, Austrian, Belgian, Phoenician and Mexican.
    * New wonder: The Eiffel Tower. Makes AIs love you and improves reputation.
    * The building requirements of several buildings have been changed.
    * The whale special is reduced to 2 food, 1 shield and 2 trade.
    * Settlers / Workers / Engineers can never get veterancy.
    * Trireme's high sea loss now considers veterancy level (green 50%, veteran 25%, hardened 5%, elite 0%) before being divided by 2 if you have Seafaring or 4 when you reach Navigation (previously only fixed at 50% before being divided).
    * Glacier terrain is now unsafe for land units (15% chance per turn of being lost). Also doesn't count as coastline for Trireme safety or Fish and Whale generation. Roads/railroads can be built but all unit (worker too) get 15% chance per turn of being lost any way!
    * King Richard's Crusade now made obsolete by Robotics (previously Industrialization).
    * Fixed tech costs based on the number of prerequisites of the tech in the tech tree.
    * Nations have preferred nations to fork off when civil war occurs.

    Gameplay changes:

    * AI is much improved, and does not use 'double-move' any more.
    * AI now conducts diplomacy with you (and against you).
    * New difficulty level: Novice. It severely handicaps the AI players.
    * Smarter autoexplorer and autosettler code.
    * Modpack options vastly improved: You can customize buildings, add buildings as requirements to units, restrict technologies to certain nations, have split technology trees, gold upkeep for units, new units and terrain flags and lots of other options. (This is still done by editing configuration files with a text editor.)
    * Fewer popups (eg choose the new government from the menu directly)
    * Alternative map topologies, e.g. real support for isometric and hexagonal maps, "donut" map wrapping.
    * Incomplete support for drawing civ3 graphics. See the civ3gfx (ftp://ftp.freeciv.org/freeciv/contrib/tilesets/ci v3gfx/) tileset.
    * Global observer can observe the entire game.
    * New method of settings map dimensions: Just use 'size'.
    * Modified map generators.
    * Initial units can be selected with a server option.
    * 'Home' key centers on

  • Oh dear. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @06:01AM (#12267763) Homepage
    People do seem to have missed the point, probably because it's not FreeCiv 2008 Super-charged Turbo Hyper Championship Platinum Edition.

    Games do not suddenly become non-games because they are old. In fact, I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years. Games are not just eye-candy, expensive system requirements and physics-driven. Games are fun.

    "Chess? Cor, that game's just ancient. You should be playing Super-hyper Chess 2005, it's got cool 3D pieces, seven hundred different pieces, two-hundred new rules, every piece has 'hit-points' now and there's fifty types of board."

    "No thanks. Checkmate."

    People who think that "games" can only ever mean whatever is on display at your local videogame store are severely out of touch. Games are fun. These people like FreeCiv because it is, to them, fun to play, engaging, interesting, challenging.

    There are not many games that have been released in the past few years that I would call engaging or interesting once the sheen wears off or the next game is released. I've seen people with cupboards full of games that they've bought, completed and never played again. That's not the sign of an engaging game.

    There are 20-year-old games that I played then and still play now and still get as much enjoyment out of. My brother and I, both in our late twenties, the primary game market, love to play Age of Empires 2 and OpenTTD precisely because they are engaging games that have lasting appeal. In fact, we still even have the occassional game of Chaos, via the magic of a Spectrum emulator, because we enjoy it.

    My brother recently invested in Half-life 2, which I must say looks fantastic. I played about half an hour of it while I was round there and already the sheen had worn off. Yes, I would still play on today if I could because the story was engaging, it's quite good to have a little experimentation with the engine etc. but once I've completed that game, there'll be next to no incentive to go back and play it.

    Counterstrike, however, is a different story. Counterstrike I could still see myself enjoying playing when I'm 90.

    Projects like FreeCiv and OpenTTD and the UFO remakes are existing precisely for this reason. They are/were great games, they are not just eye-candy and hype that lasts for about a week, they are based on good principles with well-balanced gameplay.

    The fact that I can still play TTD on my modern Windows machines, my Linux machine, even a Mac, if i had one, increase the utility of the games. The fact that OpenTTD allows me to plug-in new, clearer graphics, even change the code and interface to suit myself like I couldn't do in TTD, that's the reason these sorts of projects exist.

    Eye-candy is extraneous, gameplay is vital, being able to play an old favourite without compatibility issues, with customisations, bugfixes, with features that the game "should have had" in the first place, that's what it is all about.

    Now go back to telling all your mates what your latest waste of $100 was at your latest game store.
    • Amen! There is a reason why some old Nintendo, Atari and Sega games are still fun to this day. They had to put effort into making the game fun itself back then, not just "super 3-d graphics + celebrity + music = profit!". Katamari Darmacy and Snood are two (fairly) recent games that have given me much more enjoyment and playtime then Halo 2.
    • I think you missed the point. Freeciv is about people who love a game maintaining and extending it for as long as they are interested in playing it.

    • Re:Oh dear. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Woy ( 606550 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @07:25AM (#12268080)
      "Eye-candy is extraneous, gameplay is vital"

      That is so very true, but its only news to the crowd that started gaming when it became "cool". Cool demands cool graphics, cool explosions and a quick turnaround - you want the next new thing because its cool and you don't wanna be left behind.

      Having said that, i believe the true gold, la creme de la creme in gaming occurs when a game comes out, its patched to stability, and then a brilliant mod comes out. Mods to stable, 1 or 2 year old games are in my opinion the best thing to play. Mods is also where i believe the open-source community should work on gaming, at least for now. Just get the engine at the game store instead of licensing it at the original software house. Many mods are much much better than the original game, often addressing its shortcomings that become obvious some time after launch. Of course, mods require another installation and looking it up in the first place, so once again there are some technical barriers to what are IMO the best gaming experiences. Desert Combat is an amazing game/mod and on a totally different style there are great mods to the totally scriptable Warcraft 3.

      Right now buying a game at a store without having tried a "trial" version off edonkey is like gambling with really bad odds.

    • That's a bit exaggerated (Score:5, Informative)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @10:24AM (#12269742) Journal
      You say, "In fact, I would argue that there hasn't been a decent PC game put out in years." I suspect you were going for hyperbole to illustrate a point, but still... that's wrong.

      Now we could aggree that on the average the chance to pick a good game has went down, and doubly so for the chance to pick an _original_ game. But claiming that no game in years even came to the level of "decent", no, sorry, that's just not true.

      I'll also argue that judging a game _only_ on replay value is a piss-poor criterion. That excludes from the start any story-based game, and a lot of us actually like those. Pick your own favourite movie or book: could you see that movie or read that book, again and again each day, for years? Probably not. Does it make it automatically a bad book or movie? I'd say definitely not. Well, then I'd say the same ought to apply to games.

      Anyway, if we're talking about no good games being released in years, just off the top of my head (and bearing in mind that my favourite genres may not match yours), I can think of games like:

      - Tropico (and more recently Children Of The Nile, as a clone of it set in ancient Egypt). Very nice game, and very nice job of simulating your subjects as living beings instead of building statistics.

      - Knights Of The Old Republic. Not only a very nice RPG with a very good story, but also a better prequel to Star Wars than what George Lucas ever made. I'm not even a SW fan at all, and I found the game to be worth every cent on its own merits as an RPG.

      - Fable (ok, so it's not yet released on the PC.) I was _very_ weary of buying a PM game again, after the shameless fiasco that was Black & White, but I can honestly say that Fable was one of the most entertaining things I've ever done with my pants on.

      - The whole Europa Universalis/Victoria/Hearts Of Iron/Crusader Kings series. "Real Time Strategy" doesn't only mean "Dune 2 clones", you know. Paradox's games are actually about _strategy_ and at a strategy level. Very welcome change, if you ask me. (And BTW, they still have 2D graphics.)

      - Vampire Bloodlines. You know, this is one game which I really didn't play because of the graphics. See, I had the resolution set to 1600x1200, 8x FSAA and 16x aniso, so the game engine compensating by a piss-poor texture resolution and polygon-count level-of-detail, to keep the frame rate playable. So I had graphics that looked debatably worse than in some Playstation games, if the PSX character had stuck his/her face in a clogged toilet. Even in that context, I found the game most entertaining to play.

      - Die Gilde ("Europa 1400 - The Guild"). Very nice take on the business strategy sim genre, and probably taking third place as number of hours played among the games I've played. (Right after The Sims and Fallout 2.)

      - "Rome: Total War". If you ignore the RT combat (i.e., skip them and let the AI play for you), it _is_ a turn-based Civilization-type game. A very nice one, too.

      Etc.

      I realize by now I could go on for hours. (That's what not having a life and buying almost every game released will do to one.) So let's just say, a lot of us _do_ find good games to play, among all the crap being released.

  • The greatness of freeciv. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JollyFinn ( 267972 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @06:14AM (#12267800)
    Is in its configurability.
    What about standard size planet filled with great AI and slow research, no huts giving random military units. I just loved it. 2 settlers you start with, find a place to start then, its war for expansion immediately.
    Basicly freeciv lets me hack with options that can change the gameplay of old game a LOT, and make it even more interesting. You can alter the population growth rate so that you get different variations on what will happen.

    I can change the game options to play WAY different way compared to original civ. And there are lots of minor differences that make it different from CIV & CIV2 atleast in way of the strategies goes.

  • I wonder how the AI is (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sarin ( 112173 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @06:34AM (#12267870) Homepage Journal
    I remember in the commercial civ games, the ai's winning strategy was knowing the complete map and a big cash bonus every round, so a little bit lame.
    I wonder how the freecivs ai compares to that

    • Informative? (Score:3, Informative)

      by juuri ( 7678 )
      You remember incorrectly.

      Please read some of the FAQs on CIV, the AI while not overly complex, is many times more complex than you state... perhaps in the first CIV that's the way it worked but it has not been that way in many years.

  • Create (Score:4, Insightful)

    by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:13AM (#12268937) Journal

    This goes to show what a great game an open source project can create.

    More like, this goes to show that an open source project can clone a great game. Isn't FreeCiv just a free remake of a game created by non-free developers?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 18, 2005 @09:35AM (#12269192)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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