Freeciv 2.6.0 released | Hacker News Reader

Freeciv 2.6.0 released

freeciv.wikia.com

99 pointsjacobr20 comments

You can also play freeciv in your browser here: https://www.isotrident.com/

The old online playing service was shut down some time ago but they found another host.

Thanks to all developers and anyone helping!

Any reason why they claim to be something else ? You say they "found another host" but this doesn't look like an official freeciv property.

Maybe it's them but the presentation is weird. I'm not sure if the license allows you to re-release as another name, it probably does, but then presenting it as "they found another host" sounds kind of disingenuous.

> Battle for Planet Isotrident is an epic empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization. The game commences in prehistory and your mission is to lead your tribe from the Stone Age to the Space Age. Isotrident can be played online in your web-browser for free.

The news on freeciv.org states:

> 9th Jul 2018 - A new Freeciv-web instance has been launched on isotrident.com. This server has working 2D and 3D single and multiplayer games, play-by-email and all other Freeciv-web features enabled.

That's all I know.

> Join Freeciv-web: One Turn per Day game IX Game IX has started and you can join it now! Each player will play one turn every day.

> This will be one of the greatest ever multiplayer game of Freeciv with 150 players on 30000 map tiles!

It's right there on the page ...

I love strategy games, and unfortunately my startup life doesn't really allow me to play much anymore.

However, 1-2 weeks a year, I take a game and play. Sometimes it's an old game like Master of Orion 2.

It might be just me, but most games have a terrible "AI" (it's called AI, even though it just means the computer's ability to play against you), where the only way to get a real challenge is to give the computer unfair advantages.

A while ago a team a Google (open.ai) showed a very promising AI able to quickly learn DotA 2 and beat world-class players [0].

I wish they could do the same for many other strategy games. I would really enjoy playing then.

Perhaps gaming companies could charge a small extra for a "strong" AI, e.g. few cents per hour, and justify the investment.

Or, it could be an open source system, and you could use some extra computing power to let it calculate great strategies.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/25/17492918/openai-dota-2-bo...

Obligatory mention of AI War:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_War:_Fleet_Command

Fantastic! I have never heard of it.

> In a quote from the developer, Chris Park, "'There are a ton of RTS games out there that are fun to play...The key weakness that they almost all share, in my opinion, is AI that falls apart in advanced play."

Exactly this!

Eh, they beat fairly skilled dota players, in a bastardisation of dota2. It had lots of constraints and their reaction speed was faster than human. Next version will have less restrictions and more human like reaction times. But let's not overstate their achievement.

Or they could release mod tools and let players make stronger AI, like they did with Civ IV, Civ V, etc. Mod tools are coming for Civ VI...

Please do not give gaming companies further ideas for monetization. It is thinking like that that has already ruined gaming, and is responsible for the recent Red Shell fiasco.

Too bad there aren't any official torrents, the download is very slow for me and I'd love to help out.

Note that the stable Windows builds aren't available yet. Once they are, we'll also make it available for portable use: https://portableapps.com/apps/games/freeciv_portable

Sigh. If only FreeCol[1] had more activity. The last patch was in 2015, and IIRC it's still hosted on SourceForge.

[1] http://www.freecol.org

Another interesting Civ clone is C-Evo: http://c-evo.org/text.html

For a long time it was small enough to fit on a 1.44 floppy!

Lots of rule changes in there. What is the story behind this? Does Freeciv emulate rules of Civilization 2 or 3 (which are fixed I suppose) or does it have its own rules?

It has it's own default rules but it's quite easy to write your own ruleset. There are rulesets for civ2, civ3 and even alpha centauri iirc.

A sad note is that all the GNAPATCH links go through archive.org. Just a sign of freeciv's slow (but awesome :) release cycle, they have migrated to a new place now.

Still no Mac binaries any more, tho?

Looks like there might be, it's kinda hidden through digging from their download page, to the wiki, to a dropbox folder...

http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Install-MacOSX

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/buypyjprsbvq0hd/AABuisFfBn-WDJgAE...

> brew install freeciv

Volunteers needed

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