You can also play freeciv in your browser here: <a href="https://www.isotrident.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.isotrident.com/</a><p>The old online playing service was shut down some time ago but they found another host.<p>Thanks to all developers and anyone helping!
I love strategy games, and unfortunately my startup life doesn't really allow me to play much anymore.<p>However, 1-2 weeks a year, I take a game and play. Sometimes it's an old game like Master of Orion 2.<p>It might be just me, but most games have a terrible "AI" (it's called AI, even though it just means the computer's ability to play against you), where the only way to get a real challenge is to give the computer unfair advantages.<p>A while ago a team a Google (open.ai) showed a very promising AI able to quickly learn DotA 2 and beat world-class players [0].<p>I wish they could do the same for many other strategy games. I would really enjoy playing then.<p>Perhaps gaming companies could charge a small extra for a "strong" AI, e.g. few cents per hour, and justify the investment.<p>Or, it could be an open source system, and you could use some extra computing power to let it calculate great strategies.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/25/17492918/openai-dota-2-bot-ai-five-5v5-matches" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/25/17492918/openai-dota-2-bo...</a>
Note that the stable Windows builds aren't available yet. Once they are, we'll also make it available for portable use: <a href="https://portableapps.com/apps/games/freeciv_portable" rel="nofollow">https://portableapps.com/apps/games/freeciv_portable</a>
Sigh. If only FreeCol[1] had more activity. The last patch was in 2015, and IIRC it's still hosted on SourceForge.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.freecol.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.freecol.org</a>
Another interesting Civ clone is C-Evo:
<a href="http://c-evo.org/text.html" rel="nofollow">http://c-evo.org/text.html</a><p>For a long time it was small enough to fit on a 1.44 floppy!
Lots of rule changes in there. What is the story behind this? Does Freeciv emulate rules of Civilization 2 or 3 (which are fixed I suppose) or does it have its own rules?
A sad note is that all the GNAPATCH links go through archive.org. Just a sign of freeciv's slow (but awesome :) release cycle, they have migrated to a new place now.