Re: [Freeciv-Dev] Everyone is on CTP?

[Robert Donn <squirk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 08, 1999 at 09:38:24AM -0400, lduperval@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> There seems to have been 0 activity here for a while. Is everyone
> playing CTP? How good (bad) is it?

I know I am... It's quite good.  It has a number of new concepts (like
the Public Works pool to do tile improvements instead of settlers, Military
Readiness, sea/space cities and ranged combat), and the graphics are very 
nice... it works
quite well over NFS since the last beta upgrade.

I'm just irritated at the new difficulty in bug reporting - there's a form
on the web site that needs to be filled out with lots of irrelevant data
(CPU speed, video card - and doesn't mention X server last I checked) which
makes me not feel like reporting bugs immediately.  I've got about four or
five that I haven't reported yet - I say 'or five' because if I go to the
reporting page and try to think of them all, I'll forget at least one.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri still has that magic goodness though... VERY nice
piece of design etc (the release version wasn't the greatest in programming
though, and some might say it's a little ugly - at least on the map and
maybe the interface).  A more 'playable' game than any of the Civilizations
so far, in my humble opinion.  I think a major factor in this is the strong
race ("faction") typing... there are only seven, and each has definite
strengths and weaknesses, personality, etc... as opposed to the multitude of
races available for the Civs (especially CTP - something like 42 races) with
little difference between each other.  Yes, there is 'militant',
'expansionist', etc personality types in the Civs, but the
personality/history/etc feel of the factions even makes humans behave (and
to some extent talk!) like the faction leader they represent - so they're
just a 'better AI'!  This is good.

A free SMAC (FAC?) probably wouldn't quite live up to the original, as a
large part of the "feel" of the place comes from the passages read from
various books by the faction leaders (and some Earth people like Plato and
Sun Tzu as well) that accompany each wonder ("secret project"), improvement,
and technology advance.  The sounds would be too big a download for most
people, I fear, and we'd have to write a lot of _good_ material - I'm not
sure how much we could 'cheap' the originals... they've got a great mix of
factions, would it be fair to use those?  Could we come up with better?

Mmm.  That's enough typing for this session.  I'm off to eat.

-- 
Robert Donn
"IBM don't make nonstandard things.  People just cloned them wrong."
        -- Tim Foster