forum.freeciv.org

I've been experimenting with the tutorial scenario for a couple of days, and thought I was getting the hang of it, but after thirty or forty turns, with five cities on the first continent and just starting to build ships, first one and then a second of my cities turned black and the icon changed from the shield it was, to a skull above crossed swords. I've searched every page of the manual and I've searched on this forum and Google generally and can't find any explanation. What happened and what should I do about it. What should I do to prevent it happening? Possibly rhetorical question: Why isn't this described anywhere?

Are they definitely still your cities? Perhaps they have been taken over by barbarians or pirates? One of those has a black flag with skull-and-crossed-swords motif; if that has replaced the flag of your nation then the city isn't yours any more. If so, you won't be in control of what they build, you'll have to recapture them.

I'm not sure which version of Freeciv you're using (web or desktop client?) so it's difficult to be absolutely sure.

As JTN said, that would be the expected effect for losing cities to barbarians, but normally server option barbarian_onset is 60, and there should be a message one turn before the barbarians actually strike (turn 60 or later). Maybe the classic tutorial script could be improved by an additional warning in turn 50: "You MUST have at least a phalanx and a city wall under construction in all cities you intend to keep before turn 60". (Actually two warriors behind a wall or a "found" legion are also fine, but empty cities are hopeless.)