Pace of Civ2 vs Freeciv

[vaustein]

Hi all. I'd like to offer an observation. My apologies if this is an old topic.

Last night I played the latest version of Freeciv using the Infinite City Sprawl strategy. My civilization developed faster than it has in any of my previous games, especially considering that I don't know how to cheat at Freeciv. I think I was using server defaults for everything except starting settlers (1 instead of 2) and the map generation parameters.

Well, today I booted up Civ2 for a session against the CPU. The addons "Conflicts in Civ" and "Fantastic Worlds" are installed also, so Civ2 has been updated to some version. I enabled cheats to give my civ a free explorer ala Freeciv and to keep hostile military off my back while I tested the ICS strategy.

Well, it didn't work nearly as well in Civ2. My civ grew about half as fast. I cannot be sure why this happened, but I have two theories:

1) Freeciv provides better feedback on the city screen, such as the number of turns to grow population at the current production rate. I might have made subtle mistakes in labor allocation due to lack of information.

2) Maybe Freeciv grants more production/trade/food per resource square, but I doubt it. Aren't resources handle the same by default in both Freeciv and Civ2?

3) Is the Auto-Settler AI smarter in Freeciv? I remember that my Civ2 settlers seemed awfully reluctant to irrigate squares.

Does anyone have any ideas why exactly the same strategy worked smashingly in Freeciv but produced mediocre results in Civ2?

And by the way, in Civ2 a distant city lost a unit of production (lost a shield) due to "waste". I don't remember "waste" in Freeciv, and corruption reduces trade, not shields. WTF? Please don't respond with RTFM, I'd have to dig TFM out of the basement.

With troubled mind,

Vaustein

[Scouse Gits]

Vaustein - welcome, you have just joined the best Civing community in the world.

?RTFM? - not from these boards - it contains too many errors!

You have not played many large empire games in sub-Democracy governments have you? Corruption attacks not only the trade arrows, but also the shield production - sometimes cripplingly so. This can sometimes (not unfortunately always) be abated by supporting more units - although this is counter intuitive you will sometimes find that a wasted shield will come back as the support shield.

I don't have Freeciv, so I cannot comment directly upon your comparison - but I believe it attempts to mimic the original civ rules as far as they are known.

You use auto settler!!! The civ AI is so dumb this is oftimes the same as throwing the settler away - strongly unrecommended - the ONLY advantage of 'k'ing a Settler is that it will occasionally irrigate an illegal (no water supply) square - and this is generally regarded as an exploit if not an out and out cheat.

Unfortunately, the FW version of Civ is extremely buggy - so much so that it is almost unplayable. Virtually without exception we use vanilla Civ2 v2.42 (patch available in the ACS directory) and/or the MP variant Civ2 MPGE with Patch 3 (also available here)

Once more welcome and, should you wish to learn more about this great game, can I recommend the Great Library - over in the Civ2|Strategy forum - and kibbitzing, or indeed joining, our Succession Games in this forum.

SG[1]

[DaveV]

Resources are about equal between the two versions, IMO. Freeciv has more whales, but Civ2 has more shielded grassland. As SG[1] pointed out, the auto-settler is painfully stupid in Civ2. Don't use it. If you're playing a straight ICS, why are you irrigating, anyway? My settlers almost never build anything but roads and cities when I'm in ICS mode.

I would point at three things in Freeciv that might account for your faster progress. The tech costs don't increase as fast in Freeciv as in Civ2, so your research goes a lot faster as the game progresses. ICS government progression: Despotism , Monarchy , Communism , Fundamentalism . Also, Freeciv gives you credit for "overspent" shields. For example, if a city is producing 6 shields, it can build a horseman in 4 turns, with 4 shields left over. In Civ2, those 4 extra shields are lost; in Freeciv, they are credited toward the next build. This reduces the amount of micromanagement you need to perform to optimize your cities' production. Finally, the happiness consequences of having "too many" cities appear to be less severe in Freeciv than in Civ2 (although the black-to-happy bug in Civ2 can offset this problem, or even turn it into an advantage).

In both games, your population will prefer to work on high-food squares. Once a city grows to size 2, I always move my workers off fish and non-shield grassland to something that will produce at least one shield, so the city can produce a settler faster.