Freeciv

If you're looking for ideas on playing Freeciv, then keep reading!!

Now that you have Freeciv running, you'll want to play your

few times, so that you can get a feel for how things work, but this is

the AI.

Q: Can you give me a basic strategy?

First of all, this isn't a *perfect* strategy; it's not

Part of the appeal of Freeciv is in developing new strategies.

The game is divided into several stages:

Initial Expansion:

seven or eight at the least.

The name of the game is to tie down as many squares of land as

further apart they are, the more difficult they are to defend and

Now that you have a city or two, you'll want to set the science

the tax rate, since you won't be building any improvements to drain

have; the more cities you have, the faster you gain tech; the faster

cities as your corner of the world will hold, turn the settlers to

irrigating and building roads.

too many settlers, and you can't rearrange people to increase it, then

player, don't worry about building military units just yet.)

All this time, you have been gaining techs as fast as

then "Democracy", then "Railroad", and then "Industrialization".

you've researched a new government type, start a revolution and change

under Despotism, but note that it's much harder to keep military

recheck your rates after you've changed governments, as the maximums

vary for each type.

When you get Democracy, you are equipped to go into the Second

Democracy, making all cities build temples, and setting the luxury

celebrating, and will grow at a rate of one per turn as long as

Expansion phase.

The down-side to this is that setting luxury to 100% means

grown, and you put science back up to 50% or so, you will again gain

exploring, and are not immediately threatened by another player, it

can be a good idea to keep science at maximum until techs start to

take too long to generate.

Second Expansion Phase:

When you get your cities to a good sized population, wean them

luxury or so, put as much of the taxes as you can into science, while

roads into rails, or at least the squares used for production, or

used by a city into a road/rail, it increases that city's output.

There's no need to upgrade the very centre square - that's done

automatically).

Now is the time to develop industrialization, and military

and do some serious exploring if you have not already done so. You

Production Phase:

Now you're building factories and power plants in your cities.

You want to get as much production as possible out of each city.

Production for Mass Transits, and Recycling so you can build

must build military units. (Note: If you come into contact with

another player, you should immediately build a few attack units, and

at least one defense unit per city.)

When you want to begin thinking about attacking someone, set

science to 0%, and put raise taxes as high as you can without

Utter Annihilation of Your Enemies Phase:

advanced weapons.

Pick a relatively weak enemy, and send over a few ship-loads of

Repeat as often as necessary! ;-)

and launching a spaceship which arrives at Alpha Centauri before anyone

else.]

Q. In multiplayer games, what timeout should I set?

there are more than two, or if one of the two is going to be away from

their terminal at random intervals and you don't want to halt play, a

however, as things get more complex, you may want to extend the

seems comfortable, but remember that going above 300 will tend to

bother people.

Q. What size map should I use?

The map size depends upon how many players there are, and how

enough for a fairly quick two player game, but will result in a *very*

fast game if any more than three people are participating.

Fast games tend to be frustrating for everyone but the winner,

have five or more people, you probably want to consider one that's

100x100.

Q. What is that "generator" option?

a few times without changing this setting, you are sure to hear of (or

coders installed the generator option.

- When set to RANDOM, it creates the map using a random height generator,

with islands of different (and potentially unfair) sizes.

generator. This means that the mountains and the hills will be

placed according to everlasting mathematical figures.

- ISLAND generates islands of equal size (sometimes with some smaller

account of that d**ned island."

- SCENARIO is used for premade maps. (Load a map by typing in

/load /dir/savegame.sav.gz in the input field at the bottom of the

If you are inexperienced, and are playing with inexperienced

people, probably no one will object to an increase in the amount of

and makes it more difficult for you to learn how to cope with the

and if they know how to cope with it and you don't, you are going to

go the way of Atlantis.

Q. What about those other settings?

The rest of them mainly have to do with what sort of world

a high chance of resources/square, and huts determines how many

explorers one starts with makes the game go faster, and allows people

to survive "those $#@! barbarians" which sometimes live in huts.

Q. How do I get _____ tech?

technologies you need to get first.

You could read the technology ruleset in

and what techs are necessary to get them.