FreeCiv or Wesnoth?

[unsung]

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!

Look out! Pirates! They have an Indian canoe!!!!!1

Seriously, I consider wesnoth more fun than free civ, probably because of the bad combat in civ games.

[PingPangQui]

The thing is, Wesnoth is an original, thus it can develop "freely". Developers can be creative in any direction and are only constrained to limits they set. It is difficult for a clone to compete with the original, because you have to be better than the original in order to be really successful.

[OzorMox]

The thing is, Wesnoth is an original, thus it can develop "freely". Developers can be creative in any direction and are only constrained to limits they set. It is difficult for a clone to compete with the original, because you have to be better than the original in order to be really successful.

I agree with this. I began playing Freeciv a long time before Wesnoth, it was probably the first open source game I played, but now I play Wesnoth a lot more. Though I like both games and think that they are very different, there are some important reasons for this...

1. Wesnoth is an original game, so people don't say to me that the commercial game is better if asked to play a game!
2. There are more ways to play Wesnoth...single player games against the AI, hotseat, LAN, public server, internet, I can host my own server, official campaigns, community campaigns, multiplayer scenarios...in random maps or designed maps...plus I can create maps, scenarios, campaigns, units, and so on... Freeciv only really has a standard game, with a lot of rule customisation. Thanks to rulesets, it is possible to create units, techs, civs etc. though.
3. Hotseat is properly supported and doesn't require running two clients at once.
4. If I host a server, it's actually a lobby that several games can be created and run on by players, that's really good!
5. There is a public server, not just user-hosted servers, and it is very active (tens or possibly hundreds of players, not half a dozen). Freeciv's user-hosted servers are better published as a flag on the server puts them on the metaserver where everyone can see them, whereas Wesnoth requires you to add them to a wiki page...this would be a good feature for Wesnoth actually, though with the public server it isn't as important as for Freeciv. User-hosted servers are important I think though, so the reliance and burden on the Wesnoth servers can be lifted a little.
6. The most important reason part 1...it doesn't take hours and hours to play a full game! I like to play with other humans where possible, with AIs too sometimes, more than just playing by myself. Finding people who want to play Freeciv is very difficult because of how long it takes to play...people just don't have the time. Longturn is a possibility (1 turn a day) but then people forget.
7. The most important reason part 2...it is not massively complex! Finding people to play Freeciv who have not played it or the commercial civ games is hard because they don't want to take so long to learn all of its intricacies. Wesnoth can be picked up and played by almost anyone, but it takes a long time to master. This means many more human players willing to play with me!

Again, I really like both these games (as well as many other open source games), just pointing out some fundamental reasons why I spend more time playing Wesnoth than I do playing Freeciv.

[DDR]

My beef with freeciv is the tech tree... other than that it is a good game. I like wesnoth better because of its graphics and UI, though.

Herduk, if you like old-school pixels, try out "The Ur-Quan Masters"!

[irrevenant]

My beef with freeciv is the tech tree...

In what way?

Herduk, if you like old-school pixels, try out "The Ur-Quan Masters"!

Seconded - UQM rocks!

[billdoor]

Hey, there are still quite few free games, so why do we have to make such a choice as freeciv or wesnoth?

[energyman76c]

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!).

you haven't played freeciv in years, do you?

You don't need to start 'a server' anymore. For a long, long time.

Just type 'civclient' or click on the freeciv-icon in the start-menu (right below the wesnoth icon) and voila, there is freeciv.

I play both. And at the moment I am playing freeciv, but not wesnoth.

I played all official and a lot of the inoffical campaigns over and over and over, so I am waiting for 1.3 to become 'non dev', before I play it again.

Btw, I game of freeciv against a standard AI does not take more time than Heir to the throne or any other big campaign. I would even say, that freeciv is faster to get to an end, if you know how to play it.

[energyman76c]

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.

I haven't had a freeciv crash in years.

Are you using gentoo? Some ricer-flags maybe?

You can change the AI status. Also, if you quit the game, and have the 'automatic ai status' option checked, the game sometimes does an extra round, where you get the automatic ai (the later in the game, the more that happens). That is why you always load the second-to-last savegame - the one you saved manually and not the automatic one after that *g*

[PingPangQui]

I've tried freeciv again after I saw that new screen shots in this thread. Though the graphic have increased a lot since I've played it the last time (two years ago), game play feels still a bit clumsy and isn't more interesting then in previous versions. It feels still like a poor clone compared to the original. What freeciv really needs is a more intuitive and simple control of units, this is what is really well done in wesnoth, and some new ideas beyond the original game - just cloning stuff, even if perfectly done, is a poor approach and will lead definitely in a blind alley.

[Dave]

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.

To even compare Wesnoth to the Civilization series of games is an incredible compliment to Wesnoth.

The Civilization games are sheer brilliance; an excellent game concept developed by Sid Meier.

I'm not sure I could honestly say I think Wesnoth is even close to the same level.

David

[Becephalus]

Another big disadvantage of freeciv, is that for a tiny amount of money you can just buy a game which is better and more polished and has a ton of mods.

Meanwhile you do not have that option with wesnoth.