wieder wrote:Yes, there is really no Freeciv development with longturn.org. We are basically using the software so that people can play online against other human players on games that will last very long time.
Right. Could you provide a general figure as to the average daily number of players on Longturn.org, as well as how it is organized as a community?
For comparison, Andreas reports that on a daily basis, Freeciv-Web could expect an average of 1200 unique players. This number -- coupled with what became manifestly evident, namely, that a single person cannot manage Freeciv-Web in its entirety -- is what has been underlying my sense that Freeciv-Web will probably need to follow a different trajectory than both the core Freeciv project and Longturn.org, namely, by creating for itself something like an internal "government".
This is going to be hashed out. Caedo, Fuzzydunlop and I are basically thinking in tripartite terms: those responsible for developing and maintaining the underlying game infrastructure (developers), those responsible for the gaming experience itself (gamemasters), and those responsible for the social, out-of-game communal aspects ("administrators", for lack of a better term).
wieder wrote:In addition to that the only "development" is pretty much modifying the ruleset files for the games. That's currently pretty much all that can be done there. Hopefully one day the rulesets played there can be used for contributing back something to the actual Freeciv project. That however is not the goal at the moment.
Very cool. The gaming experience is really the center of everything, and the rulesets are the center of the gaming experience. You guys seem more experimental than Freeciv-Web has heretofore been, I'm sure you will turn up something eventually.
(For myself, I still love my idea of a Eurasian Steppes-inspired ruleset: one settler, one worker, 10 horsemen, randomly spread on an enormously flat map with sporadic mountain chains and rivers, and raging hordes of barbarians with very weak technology growth. The Northwest Alliance from Game X was trying to play this as PBEM right before Freeciv-Web was shut down.)