My FreeCiv Page

This page is dedicated to minor projects I've done that relate to the game FreeCiv. In writing this I assume familiarity with FreeCiv and that you are using (or at least know) Linux - if you feel clueless, check out the FreeCiv home page to familiarize yourself.

The FreeCiv Project is the work of a team of very talented people, and the game has turned out to be quite addictive. Anyway, I have my own ideas for FreeCiv, though unfortunately I have neither the time nor the programming skill to implement most of them.

I have recently created a Cherokee rule set.

One thing I have managed to accomplish was the creation of this Mod-Pack I call "Detailed" - which I formerly called "Ancient," not to be confused with the more original "Ancients" pack by Bobby Bryant and Moses Lei, which inspired me to create my own. The name was slightly misleading - my "Detailed" mod is not purely ancient though it tries to enhance the portreyal of ancient units and to focus on earlier eras. You may read the README file (HTML enhanced) or your can click here to download my Detailed (1.3.0) as a gzip'ed tar-ball.

I've also added (rescaled) units from the HiRes and Ancients tilesets to the classic Trident set. This is really just a spec file and some simple rescalling of other peoples work, but is it has some very nice uses. First, it is needed to really get all out of my Detailed mod, and can also allow use of the Bryant and Lei's Ancients mod with a trident backgound. Also, the extra unit tiles leave plenty of spare tiles for your own mods. The down sides are that it will lead to extra tiles being loaded into memory that may not be used and that it require a high or full color display. (I can see no decrease in performance, though.) If you would like this, click here to download a gzip'ed tar-ball of what I call "Trident+".

I have also, several months ago, began working on code modification probably a fork, but don't have the time (by far) to do much of this nature. Nor have I had a chance to try to integrate what little I've done with the main code, let alone come up with any kind of a patch. However, in case anyone cares, I'm including a gzipped tar ball of my tinker directory, all based on the FreeCiv 1.13.0 code base (not 1.14.0, I know I'm behind).

All of these projects are derived from material released under the the GNU Public License (GPL) and are thus under the GPL as well.

I've also toyed with several other ideas, which unfortunately would require re-writing the games source code myself - something I have nietheneitherime nor to skill to realistically do (at least not now) - some of these ideas would probably not be embraced by the main project and would thus require me to fork it into a project of my own, besides. Notably I would like to:

• Make rivers navigable, at least to some boats, which is actually popular in the FreeCiv community.
• Create a way to keep track of who you have declared war on and who has declared war on you, and how many. This would be used to modify the maximum level number of citizens a city could have before additional citizen are unhappy. Why? Well its a pain to have cities going into rebellion every time you move troop or need to fight of babarians. Real lifebarbarians that a Democracy, even with high luxury, can be divided if over war, leading to social unrest; yet the same Democracy can be quite ready to fight if you attack it. So whats the difference between Pwhat'sHarbor and the World Trade Center from Vietnam? I can think of no easy way to model selling the idea of a just war in FreeCiv, but differentiating a defensive war from a war of conquest shouldn't be hard. Thus, I would like to be able to decrease the effect of "agressive" units under "nice" goveaggressive say allowing one per city in Democracy or two under the Republic - but added a penalty to the number of citizen a city can have without unhappiness for being at wars that you decrared (with the potential of making declarede negative). So, if a penalty is added for having any declared wars, plus a per war penalty, unhappiness could be caused by actual aggressiveness, rather than troop location. I've also considered making citizen unhappy because of "aggressive" units content based on the number nations that have declared wars on the democracy, but am less certain of this idea.
• I would like to have ranged attacks (call them "fire" or "bombardment" or whatever). My idea for this is simpler than the way it works in Civilization III. When attacking at range (limited mostly to artillary-type units) the attack would woartilleryme as any other, with one important difference: it would last until the attacker lost. The attacker wouldn't take any damage, but as soon as one round was lost, that would be it, the attack would be over. This would also be given to naval units capable of bombardment, and attack to or from the sea would be handled that way (including being able to shoot back at ships with your cannons). Units would have a value called "range": units capable ofr anged attack would have a range of 1 (for the nfor tile) or more, and units that were not would have a range of 0.
• If a nation ever had over half of its cities in disorder (or, actually, if the {cities in disorder} minus {cities celebrating} were ever greater than half the number of cities, there would be an immediate chance of anarchy, or even civil war. (Note, that many unhappy would be an extreme case, but you can only push the people so far.) If the above condition were ever met on a given turn, then the civil war chance for the nations government would be checked (unmodified) to determine of anarchy will begin the next turn; if anarchy is to begin and the number of cities is greater than the minimum for civil war, a second, identical check would then be made to determine if a full-fledge civil war has broken out.

Unfortunately, I don't think much of this would go with the FreeCiv community, as I envission the game as more simulation while most other seemed to think of it mostly as a war game - and I lack the skill (and time) to fork the project. Actually, I've started working on code for this, but am having trouble integrating it. But, oh well, that life....