FreeCiv or Wesnoth?

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PsychoticMuffin
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FreeCiv or Wesnoth?

Post by PsychoticMuffin »

Hey everyone, I've taken a break from Wesnoth for a while to play things like roguelikes(Nethack, Angband, ADOM), Doom, Quake, and other stuff. One thing that I've found is that Wesnoth is STILL the best free strategy game hands-down. Or atleast that's what I thought, until I found FreeCiv. If anyone here's ever played Civilization 1 or 2, they will know what FreeCiv is like, it's basically a free version of Civ 1 and Civ 2 with almost the exact same rules and gameplay.

So anyway now I'm trying to decide which I like better:

Wesnoth is highly customizable, it's a simple game to learn but still involves alot of strategy, the game-times are shorter than other strategy games, the online play is great, and the campaigns are really fun.

FreeCiv is just about the opposite of Wesnoth, it's EXTREMELY complex, the time it takes for a game to be completed is really long, and you can't build custom games for it(which is probably the best part of Wesnoth online play, the custom games are really fun). But there's alot more strategy involved as you have to consider irrigation, mines, you have to keep your citizens happy, advance technologies, and many more other things(including military action).

It's a really hard decision. The fact that Wesnoth can stand up to such a great classic as Civilization and still hold it's own is a testament to the wonderful simplicity yet still great gameplay of the game. I've also been thinking about picking Wesnoth up again, I probably will soon.

If any of you guys want to try FreeCiv, it's at http://www.freeciv.org.
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turin
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Post by turin »

I tried freeciv around the time I tried Wesnoth for the first time. It was enjoyable, but I preferred Wesnoth. Still, that was a long time ago, freeciv's probably come a long way since then... I need to check it out again sometime in the near future.
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Noyga
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Post by Noyga »

I used to like Freeciv much more than Wesnoth (but on these times the wesnoth graphics still sucked)... BTW i liked Nethack more....
Through i do love freeciv, there is one thing that prevent me for playing often is that Freeciv games tend to last a big amount of time. Often you don't have enough time to finish the game :(
One thing i do really like with Wesnoth is you can adjust more easily the lenght of you game : you can plays short games or you can play for hours....
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PsychoticMuffin
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Post by PsychoticMuffin »

The other problem with FreeCiv is that it's not nearly as stable as Wesnoth. The game often crashes for no reason. Just a little while ago, I was playing a game, and then it crashed. So I opened up FreeCiv again and loaded my savefile, but for some reason it had replaced my player slot with an AI player, and I couldn't get it back! I was doing so good too.
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Post by PingPangQui »

What a question. Wesnoth of course, is by far the better game.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

I've tried Freeciv before a few times, and quite frankly, it has always been a load of crap. A horrible and incredibly ugly UI sort of prevents me from even trying to properly play it (either I puke from looking at the screen or I can't figure out how to do anything in a comfortable way).

I tried it just now again, and it was just as bad as I had remembered: hideously ugly, clumsy, lame. I started a new game, moved a unit a couple of tiles and uninstalled the game.

Wesnoth is a real jewel compared to that.
CIB
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Post by CIB »

Yeah, that was my impression, too.
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Post by Woodwizzle »

I would argue that it is possible that the civilization games are better than wesnoth. I really loved all of them I played, 2 thru 4. But I could never get intop freeciv. Freeciv still feels so rough. I don't want to have to start a server to play an AI game. The game should handle that kinda crap for me. The UI needs serious work from a usability standpoint, and the graphics are uuugh. (I wish it were possible to play freeciv in hexes. that would be a new fun twist and we could use wesnoth terrain!).
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Eleazar
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Post by Eleazar »

FreeCiv has been often considered the top OSS strategy game. Now (i believe) Wesnoth is more frequently given that honor. I think this is fair.

While both are strategy games, they are very different strategy game. Wesnoth: quick, simple. FreeCiv: long, complex. I won't try to judge which is a better type of game. I enjoy both (when in the appropriate mood) and have contributed to both.

But Wesnoth is clearly more actively developed, and in my opinion a more polished, and finished product. Which isn't odd since there's a lot more of freeciv to work on. But from a user's standpoint that's not a sufficient excuse to cover the annoyance of the unfinished aspects of freeciv.

Primarily i mostly stick to Wesnoth because it's more fun and easier to develop this game.
Woodwizzle wrote:I wish it were possible to play freeciv in hexes.
That's been possible for quite some time. I even contributed an unpolished hex tileset called "cartography." and there are others.

Also some of the new-ish tilesets (like freeland) are quite attactive.
Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.
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Post by Darth Fool »

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Herduk
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Post by Herduk »

The big problem for FreeCiv, as someone said, is the stability.
But i cannot compare wesnoth or FreeCiv, they are 2 games too much differents.
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khamul
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Post by khamul »

I've got a lot of good things to say about c-evo.

Fundamentally, it's a Civ clone, but with the design taken back to the drawing board slightly. One of the more interesting features is the AI: it's restricted to exactly the same API as the user interface, so it's completely fair, but it can still take an avergae player (I certainly wouldn't rate myself any higher) to the cleaners.

The graphics, while not as good as wesnoth, are decent, and in my experience it's pretty stable.

That said, it's Windows only, and has a marked combat basis - either of which may rule it out for some players. It's also free as in beer, but I'm not sure to what extent it's free as in speech.
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freim
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Post by freim »

How Freeciv looks are determined by several factors, where the most important might be:

* Which client you use:
GTK2, XAW, SDL, WIN32, ...
These vary a lot in appearance. The GTK2 client is very complex, has a lot of options and looks a bit bland since it uses an application toolkit not geared towards games. XAW is a rather old toolkit, while SDL uses custom widgets made especially for Freeciv. WIN32 uses stock Windows widgets.

* Which version you use:
- The stable branches: 1.x and 2.0.x have more limited graphical abilities
- The development branch: 2.1 has full 32b RGBA support and allows for full use of proper transparency and such.

* Which tileset you use:
Trident, isotrident, amplio, freeland, .... there is a huge number of them. Some are made to give maximum efficiency in large MP games, some are made to be run on low-end hardware, some are made to be more visual appealing. Some are hexagonal, some are square, some are isometric, ....

I will showcase a few of the different clients and tilesets to illustrate how different Freeciv can look.

This is the XAW Client using Jussi's tiles running on QNX . This Client is made for low-end hardware and/or for more or less esoteric architectures which does not support modern UI toolkits.

Image

This screenshot shows some of the terrain in the Freeland tileset. This is a huge tileset with 1296 tiles for the base terrains alone:

Image

Some screenshots of Amplio running in the SDL client. Amplio was made to be a quite simple tileset which had easily recognisable tiles. It features a new set of units compiled by CapTVK and a new city sprite set by Smiley.

Image

Image

This is a screenshot of the older trident tileset favoured by many hardcore MP players:

Image

I would like to show off more of the SDL client GUI since it is imo the best looking client, but as luck has it I get a compile error so I can't make any new screenshots :/

Unfortunately Freeciv development has been very slow going for quite some time as most developers are busy irl so Freeciv 2.1 has been in beta for well over a year now. This together with the prolific fragmentation in different clients, tilesets etc and the fact that Freeciv has no benevolent dictator deciding on common goals and where Freeciv should be heading, which makes it very hard to apply that extra polish to the looks of Freeciv in general.

DISCLAIMER: Since I made most of the terrain in the Amplio tileset and the UI theme for the SDL Client I will refrain from commenting on whether Freeciv looks like crap or not :)
sjm
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Post by sjm »

I haven't played FreeCiv for about 5 years, but it was good fun back then, albeit somewhat unstable on our Sun workstations.

Sid Meier's Civilization (i.e. the original) itself definitely ranks higher on my list of all-time top games than Wesnoth does. That's not a criticism of Wesnoth though; the original Civilization is about as classic as they get, and still evokes fond memories for me :)

In fact, Sid Meier probably has quite a number of games in my top 50 games of all time list!
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Herduk
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Post by Herduk »

About graphic, i don't care too much, but i love the "old pixel school", i litteraly in love with the graphic of Civilitazion 1.
So i'm not a reliable test! :D
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