my feedback

[The Alchemist]

After trying the web variant i now downloaded the client (mainsteam one)
My first impressions on comparison to civ3: (the game seems to be a mix of civ2 and civ3 concepts, but i barely played civ2 and very intensively played civ3)

Positive

• I like the units having not 3-5 hitpoints but 10 or 20. It reduces the randomness.
  I believe changing jungles or swamps is much faster and thus feasible to do early game, which is a good thing.
  I like it being impossible to enter the land of peaceful neighbours and disbanding units inside territory when you declare war.
  The AIs dont seem very willing to trade me their maps and techs early on. Probably a good thing since that makes it too easy to dominate them.

Neutral

• It being impossible to mine grasslands early on i dont know yet. In civ3 grasslands were king and plains were meh. Now its reversed in the start but grassland will get its value when you changed govs. May be more balanced.
  Corruption is only based on distance, not like in civ3 the order of founding them. This eliminates CRP. Which i dont know how i feel about
  Units taking support from an individual city. I believe this was a civ2 thing. Upside: harder to mass huge armies and overrun the entire map with chariots. Downside: its more of a hastle and still possible anyways.
  I tried remaking maps till i got grain on grassland to make a settler factory. Didnt happen. Maybe i had bad luck, maybe it is programmed like that. If so: neutral, settler factories are OP, but they are also fun to run.

Negative

• I dont see how many turns a worker has to go before completing its job
  I cant see tile info
  The flags on the city name (and with that the hight of the whole label) should be cut to 25% of its size. I can only find the option to change font size, but not flag size. I feel forced to play without city names now and turn them on and back off when i need the info. The label is way too obtrusive as it is.

Minor issues

• Quite a lot of stuff needed to be selected or deselected in the options menu. I think it would be worth reconsidering what should be default. Most importantly, of course i want some form of message when a tech is researched. I also want a message when my town finishes a production rather than it silently starting a courthouse. Didnt find the option for that yet though. Also quite clearly i want to my map within the city screen to be full size rather than have scroll bars. Similarly, i want my minimap on the top left not to have scroll bars but didnt find the option there. If you fear the low res screens, make the default setting depend on the users screen resolution. In the map generation window, when a player selects x and y sizes or tiles per player, let there be some AI that adjusts to what the player selected. The game seems to remember in the options window what difficulty setting you used last game. Yet this does not show in the text update unless you change it to something different and back.

If its appreciated i could give more feedback when i played more. I imagine people here are deeply involved and might have grown used to how certain things are and feedback from a fresh new player could be useful maybe. If not, just tell me to shut up or ignore me :p
As i am both educated to be a C++ programmer (but never took a job in it) and was a very avid civ3 player (WackenOpenAir on the civfanatics forums) I like this project. Who knows maybe ill get myself more involved some time. For now just casual play... (trying to not get myself too involved in anything game related anymore)

[cazfi]

After trying the web variant i now downloaded the client (mainsteam one)

gtk2? We have clients based on gtk2 & gtk3 and qt (qt5) widgets, as well as one built on top of sdl-library (freeciv-2.6 has also sdl2 based client).

Units taking support from an individual city. I believe this was a civ2 thing.

Yeah, that's because the support is in shields which is a city-specific resource. In Freeciv units are always tied to their homecity (so you may lose units far away when you lose the city), but with ruleset-level configuration it's possible to have it in gold. There's actually two ways to do that - simply defining gold upkeep for a unit type (so it affects those units always), or by having Shield2Gold -effect active at some situation so that the shield upkeep is actually paid in gold. Latter is used in experimental ruleset at later stages of the game.

I dont see how many turns a worker has to go before completing its job
I cant see tile info

Middle-mouse, keep it pressed (unlike in civ2 where you click to open and click again to close - freeciv way is quicker for competitive multiplayer)

The label is way too obtrusive as it is.

View -> City Full Bar -> toggle off. That's what I do myself, but the default is what most people consider nicer. About the flag part, we have a ticket about supporting multiple flag sizes in one tileset but have had no time to work on it. I use customized tileset myself (this part requires just the .tilespec to refer to the small flag icons, no gfx file editing required)

Most importantly, of course i want some form of message when a tech is researched. I also want a message when my town finishes a production rather than it silently starting a courthouse.

Everything you need should be in Game -> Options -> Message view

In the map generation window, when a player selects x and y sizes or tiles per player, let there be some AI that adjusts to what the player selected. The game seems to remember in the options window what difficulty setting you used last game. Yet this does not show in the text update unless you change it to something different and back.

I don't quite get what you mean to say, but this is probably related to the fact that client saves the settings it has requested from the server in its own settings. Then it tries to request those settings when ever it connects what ever server. That's not very clean solution and if you look the forums a bit more you'll find many many times this has been talked about. That's a feature I don't use myself (controlling the server directly instead) -> not prioritized as my own itch & hard to figure out how exactly it should work.

[The Alchemist]

Oh wow, many different clients it seems. Seems i got gtk2.
I was trying to be the 'plug and play" user that i thought it was also was intended for. Seems its more intended for the user who likes modding or even developing stuff though :p

Awesome, i just took the dutch flag pic in paint and reduced it to 50%, that makes the game much more playable
The middle mouse button advise also helps me out a lot.

thanx

[GriffonSpade]

Even that's not required if you're using one of the larger tilesets (like amplio). Simply go into the data directory, open up the .tilespec file of the one you're using and find the
"misc/flags-large.spec",
line, and replace it with
"misc/flags.spec",
doing so will reference the smaller flags used by the smaller tilesets.