Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Freeciv gameplay

[Greg Wooledge <wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel Burrows (Daniel_Burrows@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> * freeciv does not inform you when a structure is completed in a city.
[etc.]

All of this stuff is displayed in the Messages window.  This window
pops up if it doesn't already exist, whenever a sufficiently important
message is sent out.  At least in the Xaw client....

> * Balance.  In 1500 BC (or thereabouts) musketeers were dropped outside
> my cities.  This doesn't seem so good to me.

Perhaps the single biggest difference between Freeciv and Civ1/2 is the
lack of barbarians.  This means that attackers will never appear out of
thin air -- they always get produced by some real (human or AI) player,
and have to travel to you.  This in turn means that you do not need to
defend all your cities.

Thus, at the beginning of the game, you shouldn't be building defenders;
you should be building settlers and growing.  More settlers = more
cities = more trade = more technology = win.

In the middle/later stages, you still don't need defenders in cities
which are sufficiently far from the AI.  Build attackers and begin
the onslaught.  When attacked, the AI plays "turtle" and spends all
its resources stockpiling defenders in its cities, so your homeland is
safe from whoever you're pounding on.  Only keep enough of a defensive
border to keep the others at bay while you finish off, or at least
cripple, whoever it is that you've currently selected as your victim.
I recommend taking whole islands at a time, because the AI is quite bad
at inter-island combat.  It's really only good at over-land fighting,
so keep it off "your" land (even if you only acquired that land in the
last couple turns ;-).

Check some of the tutorials at <http://www.freeciv.org/> for more
specific tips.

-- 
Greg Wooledge                    | Distributed.NET http://www.distributed.net/
wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx             | because a CPU is a terrible thing to waste.
http://www.kellnet.com/wooledge/ |