Freeciv

[Thorin]

Okay, I got the Civ itch and looked around.  Freeciv is frikkin' awesome!  Like Civ II, only with 10+ years of open source bug fixing and enhancements!

[Darren Dirt]

Okay, I got the Civ itch and looked around.  Freeciv is frikkin' awesome!  Like Civ II, only with 10+ years of open source bug fixing and enhancements!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeciv#References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCol#References

[Thorin]

Can a mod please split off the stuff about Freeciv into its own thread?  I'd like to say more about it, but I don't want to pollute the Civ Rev thread...

[Lazybones]

Split and moved, chat away.

[Thorin]

So in Freeciv you can specify all kinds of settings; how long it takes for various actions like creating irrigation, how long it takes to research things, how close together cities can be built, how many settlers and workers and explorers and defenders you start with, how many techs you start with, how big the map is, what kind of shape (for instance, it could wrap at the left and right, top and bottom, both, neither, be isometric like Civ II or hexagonal like none of the Civs).

In Freeciv you can also join a game in progress and observe or take over nations that don't have a human player.  If you need to quit because your baby's crying, you can set your nation to AI and someone else can take it over for you.

Well, some very inventive people have taken all those changeable settings and made a Freeciv game called LongTurn.  What they do is they have the timer set to 24 hours, and you play your turn once a day.  This gives you much more time to sit and consider your moves, rather than being rushed through the game.  Of course, this makes the game really long, so they cut into third the length of just about anything, and made all the units move three times as far so you can explore faster and build faster.

Oh, and there are city-specific worklists and global worklists.  A worklist is simply a list of things you want the city to build.  Whenever you're looking at a city you can tell it to build these next xyz things, and that's the city-specific worklist.  You can tell the city to just use one of 16 global worklists that you define.  I found the worklist makes things a lot[/] easier to manage once you have, say, ten big cities and three new ones.

[Thorin]

I do warn you if you intend to try this game out, I've already renamed it Freecrack.

[Melbosa]

Hehe, I know how you feel, as I was totally addicted to Civ Rev while on Med Leave.