Freeciv - History

History

At DAIMI, the CS department at Aarhus University, three CS students, avid players of XPilot and of Sid Meier's Civilization, which was a stand-alone PC game for DOS, decided to find out whether the two could be fused into an X-based multiplayer Civilization-like strategy game. The students—Peter Unold, Claus Leth Gregersen and Allan Ove Kjeldbjerg—started development in November 1995; the first playable version was released in January, 1996, with bugfixing and small enhancements until April. The rules of the game were close to Civilization, while the client/server architecture was basically that of XPilot.

For the developers, Freeciv 1.0 was a successful proof of concept, but a rather boring game, so they went back to XPilot. But Freeciv was already playable and addictive enough to pick up other students as players, bugfixers and feature extenders. It was useful enough to be picked up by popular Linux distributions, e.g. Debian. Designed to be portable, it was ported to many platforms, which helped its survival. Freeciv playing and development continues to the present day, although the spells with little development activity have grown longer and more frequent over time. The development history is strictly incremental: while there have been many serious improvements, the basic design and architecture have not changed since the early versions.

From 1998, the game grew in popularity: a public server was installed that hosted games permanently, archiving them and showing an animated gif replay of each game on its website. Over the following years before the release of version 2.x in 2005, the game remained largely unchanged. As many regular players reached excellent gaming skills, diplomacy became essential, so team games slowly started to replace free-for-all games from around 2002. The release of version 2.x in 2005 changed the game significantly, new tweaked rules favoured large cities with full trade routes as well as wars with more advanced technologies, necessitating a distinct phase of rapturing which required relatively peaceful conditions; so games were almost always played in teams and typically took longer to finish compared to 1.x games.