Some questions about FreeCiv

[Basil]

Here are some questions I have about FreeCiv. I appologize if some of them are answered on your Web site, I have looked at it but I haven't studied it in detail recently.

1. Based on what I've read on your Web site, and here, I gather that the AI follows an ICS strategy. I understand why a strong AI should use an intensive ICS strategy, but trying to out-ICS the AI sounds more like work than play to me .

Is this a correct impression? Are there variants which are not so ICS-intensive? I don't mean variant AI's, which would by definition just be weaker AI's, but variant rule sets in which ICS is not the only sensible strategy.

2. Civilization is an excellent game for scenarios and one would guess that an open-source game, where you could customize the source code for a given scenario, would be even better. Are there many FreeCiv scenarios?

3. Do nations have varying "personalities" or are they all the same?

4. Does one have a choice of the number of AI nations or are there always a set number of AI nations? Is it possible for new AI nations to form during the game?

[Jing]

1. Pardon my ignorance, but what is an ICS strategy? (Invade? Conquer? Subotage?)
One thing to keep in mind is that Freeciv lends itself very well to multiplayer, and playing aginst human players is much more demanding and intense, if not more enjoyable, than playing against the AI.

2. The game is indeed very customizable through the use of rulesets, and it would be easy to make scenarios much like those in Civ2. The problem now is the map/scenario editor is not being very actively developed/maintained while most of the effort
is still being put into perfecting and extending the game itself. The rulesets are under extensive generalization to make it possible to support even more styles of play, with many new features being planned.

3. As it is now, there is not much difference of personality between the AI nations. It may or may not be implemented, depending on whether anyone will be willing and able to do it.

4. Freeciv now supports up to 30 players in total, AI or otherwise. So you can choose 1-29 AI nations to play against in any given game. It also supports Civil War (a nation splits into two) and Civ2 style Barbarians. It does not yet replace dead AI nations with new ones but that should be easy to implement if needed.

[Ari Rahikkala]

ICS = Infinite cit strategy, Infinite city sleaze, Infinite city sprawl. You basically build a helluva lot of settlers and then a lot of cities. And then you have a helluva lot of growing cities. Expanding. Of course there are variations.

And I can't believe two Freeciv developers honestly didn't know what ICS is!

[Jing]

Well, we have CivWorld, which was used to create the earth maps. Admittedly, it's not a real scenario editor yet, but that's where it should be heading. We just need someone to work on it a bit more.

As for ICS, we certainly know the stretagy, just not the name (what's in a name anyway?). Indeed, this is exactly what the AI is using. However, we are constantly looking for ways to enable a variety of stretagies to be used, and thus make the game more balanced and interesting. If you have any good ideas, don't hesitate to speak up.

[Thue]

We have a scenario editor? where?

And I don't have any idea what ICS stratergy is either