Hacker News Reader

Comment by xmichael99 | Hacker News Reader

I've gone through my Freeciv spurts over the years, and I must say the developers of this project deserve serious credit for continuing development and innovating. The art has been a bit lacking, but the new 3D version is looking pretty good and getting better. The real success with the game is the immersive detailed game play, the devs. have been smart to add a wide range of features and detailed management while not going over board.

View on HN

I agree 100%, although I've always been surprised that a game like Freeciv wasn't vector-graphics based, because it seems to fit so well. Maybe not Freeciv per se, but something similar. I haven't checked in awhile, though, so maybe they introduced something.

The initial release was in 1996; the vector graphics situation wasn't really the same back then.

I think it was, and could have been a part of the game.

For instance, add one more vector-graphic guru to the team and they could kludge or slice new features in.

Kudos to open software devs! Lots of work.

>I've gone through my Freeciv spurts over the years

Is it still really, really hard unless you use the "one true strategy"?

Not really as you can't play longer than like 100 turns because your browser will be so overloaded thanks to WebGL...

I want to like WebGL, but then I start comparing what I can do with it and the native languages I have on the same systems....

It doesn't even work properly on some OpenGL ES 3.x devices I own, while they work perfectly fine with the native games.

What exactly do you mean by the "one true strategy"?

Possibly infinite city sprawl (Smallpox): http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/City_smallpox

Not really. You'll also want to tweak the ruleset so that it plays more like one prefers.

I used to love playing Freeciv, but whenever I touched it in the last few years, I found that it has become ridiculously hard. It feels like after a few rounds the other civilizations are already building King Richard's Crusade or whatever about 1000 BC, and a few rounds after that they get upset for no diplomatic reason, declare war, and wipe you off the map.

I'm sure some people like the challenge, but when I play games I do like to get a chance at winning :-)

So yes, it's really hard, which would be OK if there were settings that make it easier, but I for one can't find them.

I haven't played Freeciv in a while, but the AI only respects strength. Build lots of ranged units and a few mele units and a lot of mounted units to capture cities. AI is not smart enough to compete with a human player so they give it a lot of bonuses like more science points, etc. AI therefore cheats with rigged bonus points on dice rolls.

I am not sure if it's a browser issue or something else, but the WebGL game just feels sluggish to me. I'm on a MBP retina with Chrome and when moving the units on the board, the sound actually happens before I see the actual unit moving.

Also - chrome has a pretty significant energy impact when playing this game, causing the fans to start up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com