[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Why are you cloning Civ II? (was Re: Migration)

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Thomas Strub [mailto:ue80@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf
>
> You can't grow all the time. There have to be breaks where you can
> breath. Think freeciv is in a phase where it is breathing.
> Many changes
> are made to make the codebase better and clearer. When work
> is finished
> there will be a time where freeciv will grow. But freeciv doesn't need
> to grow only because it is nice to grow.

Fair enough.  The current work on Freeciv does look an awful lot like
stable bugfix stuff.  When are you planning to add new features?  What's
the roadmap?  How "new" are they going to be compared to Civ II?

> Good ideas don't help all the time and they have to satisfy many
> constraints:

That is your guys' problem.  You have overconstrained development.  You
do not embrace any kind of rapid prototyping mentality.

> Realism (most time)
> Playability
> More fun (not more micromanagement)
> Simple (i should be possible to play freeciv with paper and pencil)
> Balanced (the ideas shouldn't prefer a small amount of players)
> The AI should be able to play with the new rule

Also, given your list, you seem to be embracing a Command Economy
mentality.  You feel You Know Best.  I'd reject some of your criteria on
a priori grounds alone.  Realism?  Must be playable with paper and
pencil?

> You are saying that freeciv is static.
> Have you looked into the changelog? Have you seen the big number of
> small changes which are made?

I don't care how many big numbers of small changes you have made.  You
have Civ II.  I've played the game, I know the game.  If you don't see
that all you have achieved is "basically Civ II," you are missing the
forest for the sake of the trees.

You're even closer to Civ II than Civ III is to Civ II.  And considering
the elapsed time, and the budget expended by Firaxis, the lack of real
change in Civ III was pretty sad.  At least the following were added:

- slaves
- forced construction under Despotism (build those Pyramids!)
- culture
- strategic resources
- bigger city radii
- genuinely challenging AI

But steps backwards:

- cruise missiles *suck* now.  So boring!
- nukes don't destroy cities
- revolt rules are ridiculous

> What is a "major" rule change?

- culture
- strategic resources
- bigger city radii
- revolt rules

> I think your "migration" is a minor rulechange.

Glad you seem to think so.  It's major as per the definition of "major"
given above.  I agree it's not major amounts of work to implement.  It
wasn't supposed to be.

> The benefits are marginal when it isn't well-balanced.

Please clarify what you mean.

> With your
> micromanagement idea there wouldn't be a benefit which is bigger than
> the cost for the player and the developpers.

You guys keep saying it's micromanagement, and you're wrong.  It isn't
micromanagement any more than settlers automatically farming squares is
micromanagement.  Sure you *could* do it all manually; you don't have
to, and people generally don't.  Flick the "kill all Refugees" switch.
Military unit runs into Refugee, boom, unit dies.

> Perhaps the rules don't differ that much. But the
> freeciv-engine is much different.
> We have other land-generators

Which is better than Civ II land masses how, exactly?  You certainly
don't generate prettier continents, or more tactically appropriate
continents, or more geographically plausible continents.  Only
improvement I've seen is having poles separable from continents.  You
don't have any continent picker UI ala Civ III.  It's been so long since
I played Civ II, I can hardly remember what it had for that.  I remember
something minimal but functional that provided a few options about the
type of world.

> and the multiplayersystem is concurrent
> against nothing? Or at maximum turn based.

Multiplayer is the one area I haven't looked at.  I do wonder if you
guys spend almost all your time worrying about multiplayer stuff, and
therefore as a single player, I see no improvements at all.  I'm
curious, have you guys solved the problem of Civ games taking forever?
I can't imagine sitting around for all that time with other people.  The
Civ III developers couldn't imagine it either, their first version was
single player only.  Later they shipped a multiplayer which I still
haven't looked at.

> > Why are you cloning Civ II?  What's the endgame for you guys?  Why
> > didn't you just buy copies of Civ II and play them?  Civ II
> > has always
> > been highly moddable, that's part of why it was so popular
> > compared to
> > SMAC.  For all this coding effort that you have done, what
> > feature did
> > you get that's "worth it" over spending $30 for Civ III?
>
> Why are there that many people playing chess?

Wrong counter-question.  The rules of chess are known, how to make a
chessboard is known.  People buy chessboards when they want to play
chess.  Or if they're really poor, or simply lacking one, they draw
them.  Similarly, rational people who want to play Civ II go buy Civ II,
for probably $10 now.  Surely, you do not propose that the point of all
this engineering effort for Freeciv is / has been to save someone a
lousy $10..$20?

> Or other games. Think of
> freeciv as a game. People want to play a game. And when you do major
> changes between 2 releases people will ask why the game doesn't behave
> like in past. And they will hate you and use the old version.

You can still buy the old version.  When you can no longer, I guarantee
you it'll be available on www.the-underdogs.com .  Or some other
Abandonware site.  You have taken an incredibly labor-intensive way to
solve the problem of abandonware.  We really don't *need* an open source
implementation of Civ II.  We need *a different game* than Civ II.  Civ
II itself is easily obtained and that's not going to change.

Are you guys just thinking that up-to-date network compatibility is The,
single, dominant, fundamentally overriding problem?  A rather limited
set of priorities, but maybe that's what's going on here.  It would
explain a lot.

> Why should we try something new? We know that freeciv is
> successful and we know that it is.

Because you are wasting your time reverse engineering something that is
easily obtained for $10..$20?  A US citizen could buy that for 4 hours
of minimum wage labor, worst case.  Maybe 10 hours if you're an illegal
alien picking grapes.  A computer programmer could make that money in
anywhere from 1 hour to a mere 12 minutes.  Any way you slice it, the
economics of your proposition are fundamentally irrational.  There is
*no point* to reverse engineer *the same* game when you could easily buy
it for so little.  You are going to spend more than 4 hours at the
reverse engineering effort.  *Collectively*, you are going to spend more
than 4000 hours at the reverse engineering effort.

Did you just want to make sure everyone in the world could get something
exactly like Civ II without having to pay for it?  That would add up to
a lot of $20's.  And, that's the basis of copyright lawsuits.

> The current maintainers are the 3rd or 4th generation of
> maintainers and
> they haven't change to much. I think that is great work. Freeciv has
> nothing to do with feauturism. It is slowly developping.

I guess professional game developers just don't think straight up clones
/ copyright violations of their games are "great work."  If you actually
had some features significantly different from Civ II, then we could
call your game rules something other than Civ II with a straight face.
It wouldn't take much: look at what a ripoff "Civilization: Call To
Power" was!  Such a rip they even tried to steal the name, until Firaxis
shut them down with a lawsuit.  Now it's just "Call To Power."

Thus, it is surprising you have done so little.  Sure you have your own
UI, your own artwork, your own AI, and engine, etc.  You haven't stolen
the software.  But I wouldn't be surprised if a court could pin you on
blatantly thefting the Civ II game rules.  Game rules *are* copyright
protectable entities, after all.  It's ok to have a game "in the same
genre as Civ II, fairly similar to Civ II."  It's not ok to have your
game rules 99% the same as Civ II rules.

I've had this conversation with you guys before, possibly 2 years ago if
memory serves.  Back then I didn't have any respect for you, I just
wrote you off as a bunch of uncreative thieving weasels.  It's only the
accident of my own project developent, which put me on a quest for open
source approaches, that led me to reevaluate your project.  By
conversing here, I realized you guys actually *can* think deeply about
Game Design.  That makes your behavior all the more shocking: you *talk*
at great depth about possible major game improvements, but you don't
*do* any of it.

I mean really, why haven't you made a bold move to solve ICS by now?  Or
at least try out a variant that might solve it?  What's holding up the
works?

> What is "4X TBS"?

Oh... my... god.  I hope people just use different terms in Germany.

The 4 X's are: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.

TBS = Turn Based Strategy.  As opposed to RTS = Real Time Strategy, FPS
= First Person Shooter, RPG = Role Playing Game, MMOG = Massively
Multiplayer Online Game.

Language caveats aside, if you do not know these things, then you are
unaware of history, of genre, and not overly qualified to talk about
Civ-style game design.  Of course, anyone can be somewhat qualified
merely by virtue of playing a game a lot.  But "Why should we try
something new?" juxtaposed with "What's a 4X TBS?" takes this
conversation for quite a Surreal turn.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.