Multiplayer in Freeciv compared with commercial Civs

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Ozor Mox
Posts: 45
Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2014 12:15 pm

Multiplayer in Freeciv compared with commercial Civs

Post by Ozor Mox »

Well hello all, only just rejoined the Freeciv forums after having made a fair number of posts on the now lost forums.

I just wanted to muse on the multiplayer state of Civilization games. I've been playing quite a bit of Civilization V lately which is an excellent game, but check any of the available forums for that game (2K, Civ Fanatics, Steam...) and you'll find many complaints that the multiplayer really isn't that stable. I've had a lot of success playing games with a friend, but try to play with 4 or more players and most seem to agree that you will run into stability issues.

Also, I've looked into hosting a pitboss server and I've pretty much abandoned the idea already. It must be a Windows server (already there are licensing costs where there wouldn't be on Linux), must be done through Steam in offline mode (doesn't Steam require you to log back in after a month in offline mode?) and the architecture of the game means the server must have the same minimum requirements as the game itself, so a DirectX capable, fairly decent, graphics card!

In contrast, Freeciv allows multiplayer with more than 100 players and you can run the server on a Raspberry Pi running Linux.

Why do the commercial Civs continue to go for the peer-to-peer model instead of Freeciv's client-server model? It doesn't seem to work nearly as well. Or is it, as many people claim, because multiplayer is an afterthought for Civ V?

I almost want to tell everyone having multiplayer issues with Civ V, look, here is a game that does multiplayer well! Ok, it isn't as shiny and polished as Civ V and gameplay-wise is still much more similar to Civ II, but empire builders aren't supposed to care about graphics ;) ... There aren't *that* many 4X games like Civilization (that cover the whole of history at least), you'd think more people would be willing to give it a shot...

Well anyway, just some thoughts!
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