I've had a lot of challenging fun with this great game. The learning curve is basically perfect no matter how ambitious your gameplay is.
Atm. my pref. game is a civ2civ3 fork, geared towards a 3-5 hours game against 3 hard AI's, here's some of the .ruleset lines:
Code: Select all
"generator", "RANDOM"
"topology", "WRAPX|WRAPY|ISO"
"mapsize", "PLAYER"
"tilesperplayer", 99
"startunits", "ccwwwxf"
"citymindist", 4
"flatpoles", 14 (leaving a lane open for adventurous triremes)
"specials", 81
"animals", 2
"foodbox", 88
"shieldbox", 82
"sciencebox", 88
This weekend a 12 year old kid I know, brought up on 3D gaming boxes, jumped right in as well to my surprise.
Barbarians killing our Explorer got him fired up. Finding a Legion later on made up for that though. At the end I gave him a few rounds with absurd back from the future weaponry to goof out with.
Now we've made shared docs for basic rules and a dictionary for all the stuff he's learning about while playing; phalanx, diplomat, armistice etc.
I've modified nations.ruleset to the ones he's familiar with and added some current leaders he seems to be very agitated towards to \data\nation\x
So it's great bonding and learning for both of us
Thanks a lot to everyone who made this game possible through your time, effort, skills.
I sneakpeaked at retro purchasing some of the CIVs I never got around to back in the 90s - but for now Freeciv is perfect.