Freecol – open source colonization game | Hacker News Reader

Freecol – open source colonization game

freecol.org

70 pointsgalfarragem26 comments

Interesting thread about the evolution of this project.

http://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/141200/thread/19...

I came to know the existence of this project because it listed it's translation messages on TranslateWiki.net, the platform where MediaWiki software (software that runs Wikipedia) got translated. But I never tried to go on and play the game. Maybe I shall try this out sometime.

How is this different than Freeciv? (http://www.freeciv.org/)

Well, for one it appears to be based on an entirely different game. Not sure where to go from here to continue answering your question.

The full name of the game Colonization is "Civilization IV: Colonization"

No, that was a later release. Colonization was a Micropose game in its own right designed by, imho, the real genius behind the series, Brian Reynolds who later designed Alpha Centauri.

So who made "Civilization: Call to power"? Or was that just the publisher still owning the civ name at that point, and neither SM nor BR were involved with that?

Correct, different developer, same publisher.

Call to Power was the result of some fairly convoluted boardroom-slash-courtroom warfare conducted between 1995 and 1998.

In the mid-'90s, legendary boardgame publisher Avalon Hill noticed that MicroProse was doing well with computer games named Civilization, remembered that they had published a board game way back in 1980 with the same name (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_%28board_game%29, https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/71/civilization), and observed that their board game and MicroProse's computer games were, at least thematically, similar.

Based on that similarity, AH argued that MicroProse's Civilization games had ripped off their IP. MicroProse and Sid Meier disputed this, with Meier saying he'd never played the board game before designing his Civ, but AH stuck to its guns. Since they'd published the board game, they argued, and since (they asserted) MicroProse's computer game was just a derivative work based on it, all rights to the Civilization name for both board and computer games belonged rightfully to them.

They then licensed the name to Activision to use in developing its own computer Civilization games, to compete directly against MicroProse's in the marketplace. MicroProse responded to this by buying the company owned by the original designer of the board game, Francis Tresham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Tresham_%28game_design...), arguing that if the board game gave anyone claim on the Civilization name it was Tresham, not his publisher AH, and that in acquiring Tresham's company they'd also acquired not just any computer-game rights the board game would confer, but the rights to the board game itself too.

AH was in pretty desperate financial straits by this time, so in 1998 they caved and paid MicroProse $411,000 to settle the dispute, yielding to them all rights to the name and stopping publication of the board game. (See http://home.earthlink.net/~pdr4455/fah.html) MicroProse then gave Activision a limited license to the Civilization name so they could publish their work-in-progress game as Civilization: Call to Power.

Call to Power came out to mediocre-at-best reviews and sank like a stone, ending Activision's dream of taking over the franchise. But MicroProse's victory was short-lived, because their own financial situation by this time wasn't great either; just a couple of months after the Avalon Hill settlement the company was sold to Hasbro, at which point it was more or less dismantled and became just another zombie brand.

Thanks for that, I find these stories of the games industry remarkable in how cut-throat the whole industry seems, but perhaps I just don't see enough of the business level of my own industry to recognise it.

> Call to Power came out to mediocre-at-best reviews and sank like a stone, ending Activision's dream of taking over the franchise.

Eh, it did well enough that Activision made a sequel. What really prevented them from taking over the franchise was that their license was a one-game deal: the sequel was released as simply Call to Power 2, without any reference to Civilization. Of course, they never made a third one because the second game sank (aside from the criticisms of the original, the sequel didn't even have name recognition going for it).

Activision also did something really cool and released the sequel's source when they EOL'd it, too.

> just a couple of months after the Avalon Hill settlement the company was sold to Hasbro, at which point it was more or less dismantled and became just another zombie brand.

Oddly enough, this doesn't go far enough in summarizing the insanity of the acquisitions of that time period. Hasbro actually bought both MicroProse and AH at the same time, and then they turned around and sold off their entire video game business to Infogrames (now Atari) three years later. In fact, it was actually Infogrames/Atari who killed MicroProse: Hasbro was perfectly willing to keep them around as a subsidiary.

This is a severe distortion of what really happened. The co-designer of Civilization was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Shelley, who worked at Avalon Hill for six years before moving to MicroProse. The similarities were not coincidental. Civilization (the board game) was extremely successful and well-known, and is still influential on video games, being the origin of the "tech tree." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_tree

Alpha Centauri is the only game of the whole genre I could get into. The SF setting, the faction leaders and their personalities, voiceovers, music, atmosphere... That game is basically my reason for installing wine and playonlinux.

Me too. I plan to try another TBS game in the future but Alpha Centauri was only one. And excellent. I loved all the options of gameplay and strategy that didn't exist in an RTS. Plus, the technology tree was well thought out and even gave me ideas. :)

> That game is basically my reason for installing wine and playonlinux.

Alpha Centauri has a Linux native port though! I'm not sure if it's still available somewhere however (there's probably a torrent somewhere).

There's actually a native Linux version of Alpha Centauri. One of the old Loki ports.

Colonization is an old Sid Meier classic that co-existed separately to Civilization, sharing similarities with it.

http://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_colonization

Colonization was originally released as a separate game. It was in the same genre as Civilization ("4X": Explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) but otherwise shared nothing in common but its creator.

Colonization was recently re-released as a mod of Civilization IV. It was built in the Civ IV engine, but for the most part was just a re-skinned Colonization.

The Civ IV mod plays differently in detail (esp "Founding Fathers") and to me lacks quite a bit of the charm of the original. It's more like a Civ reskin than an modernisation of Colonization.

It's a different game, but it seems to be in the same genre. The blurb even describes it as "similar to Civilization". It's reasonable to ask for two games in the same genre, and with the primary description of one as being similar to the main influence for another, "what are the differences? Why would I want to play this game over that game?"

To answer that, you can click through to the "About" page (http://www.freecol.org/about.html), which spends most of its time answering exactly this question (which demonstrates that this is a reasonable question to ask):

  In Civilization the objective was to build a nation that 
  could stand the test of times and that could also do one 
  of the following: conquer the world or be the first to 
  launch a spaceship. In Colonization things are bit 
  different ...
  
  A Colonization game starts in 1492 and the objective is 
  to colonize America. You begin the game with one vessel 
  and two colonists.

Not like civilization - - but is it like Seven Cities of Gold? Anyone remember that?

Hosted on sourceforge ugh. Seems quite a few of these open source revivals have been written in Java (possible mild confirmation-bias here.)

FreeCol is a relatively old project (I think I recall giving it a spin way back in 2006 or 2007), dating back to when SourceForge was not-evil and that's where everybody was.

At the time, I'm not sure there really were better options than Java for a cross-platform open-source game like this. Maybe Python with PyGame.

Qt became available under GPL in 2000, so that would have been a potential match. Anyway, technology choices are of course very dependent on the project founders' skills and preferences.

There's a bunch of old, mature, projects that were started at a time when Sourceforge hosting made sense.

I agree that sourceforge is a scumbag company now, but what's the alternative for people who want a place to host binaries, source code, and user forums?

Github has binary/release hosting support now, but doesn't do user forums or mailing lists.

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