Some ideas (I might be down to help contribute)

[JDSweet]

Okay, so I have some ideas, and I'd love to help contribute to making them a reality. They are:

1. A possible real-time mode, where things take more turns, but turns pass in real-time (sort of like in a Paradox Interactive game).
2. The ability to terraform terrain (like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri had).
3. Dynamic civilization generation would be an interesting feature - instead of having only pre-defined civs, having randomly generated civs have a chance of appearing would be super interesting.
4. Alongside dynamic civilization generation, another interesting feature would be a civilization designer, so you can create your own civs (sort of like Stellaris' empire creator).
5. Finally, the other main thing we could add to make the game more interesting is, allow multiple planets. There's no real reason to limit players to Earth (from a performance perspective, turns might process a little slower, but turn-times have never really been an issue, so I don't expect them to become one). It would be super cool if we could land on the Moon, Mars, Venus, etc and build specialized habitat cities to continue expansion beyond Earth in a no-victory-condition sandbox-mode. Maybe make cities rebelling and starting their own civs more likely in a sandbox mode.

[Molo_Parko]

I don't understand what is meant by "dynamic civilization generation"? The nations/tribes in Freeciv are identical at base except for name and flag, with the exceptions being barbarians and pirates. After bringing a nation / tribe into the game, choices of technologies to research, buildings to add to cities, units to create, alliances if any, and trade routes are the only real difference between the tribes -- aside from geographic location.

Freeciv is designed around having only a single map per game. Perhaps "multiple planets" could be faked to some degree with one large map split into quadrants, each of which contains a separate "world map" on 1/4 of the actual map. So for instance Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars each in a quarter of a single enormous Freeciv map. That's an interesting idea... I might try making a Freeciv scenario with both Earth and moon, and "teleport" units between them.

[cazfi]

I'd love to help contribute to making them a reality.

Great! Feel free to open tickets about the changes https://redmine.freeciv.org/projects/freeciv/issues/new ("one atomic change / code patch" per ticket, not huge cover-it-all tickets)

[JDSweet]

I don't understand what is meant by "dynamic civilization generation"? The nations/tribes in Freeciv are identical at base except for name and flag, with the exceptions being barbarians and pirates. After bringing a nation / tribe into the game, choices of technologies to research, buildings to add to cities, units to create, alliances if any, and trade routes are the only real difference between the tribes -- aside from geographic location.

Yeah, so instead of using pre-scripted stylized empires/civilizations (like the Civilization series), you could create completely random nations procedurally, not based on real-world nations. So, instead of playing as Maria Theresa of Austria, AI countries would play as <random ruler name> of <Random nation name created from a list of possible names>. Sort of like how procedurally generated empires in Stellaris or Galimulator work. You could select random bonuses and maluses for these random civs that conform to some rule or point system (to make sure nobody is too handicapped or overpowered mechanically).

Freeciv is designed around having only a single map per game. Perhaps "multiple planets" could be faked to some degree with one large map split into quadrants, each of which contains a separate "world map" on 1/4 of the actual map. So for instance Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars each in a quarter of a single enormous Freeciv map. That's an interesting idea... I might try making a Freeciv scenario with both Earth and moon, and "teleport" units between them.

As far as multiple maps are concerned, I'm not exactly sure how hard it would be to simulate multiple planets with the current code-base (I haven't really looked at the source code yet). I don't imagine, in theory anyway, that it would be too terribly hard to encapsulate and render the game-state's data a bit differently, though obviously that's subject to how the code itself actually currently works (i.e. if the code is too reliant on static/singleton variables, that could be a problem).

[Molo_Parko]

I used the Earth 80x50 scenario map, and added the moon onto the bottom, isolated by "Inaccessible" tiles. Then I added Lonee Muks' "LunaLink" Earth to moon teleports. Unfortunately the Earth map is a bit small, and the moon is roughly 1/3rd of the size of Earth, so the look of the moon area is not great since it is only 26x13 tiles. But, it is possible to include the moon or another planet isolated within a single map and teleport units between the two. The "minimap" gives away the secret that something is below Antarctica.


^ Earth and moon on a single map.


^ The moon image used to create the too-small moon area in Freeciv.


^ In game after using the Antarctic LunaLink to teleport to the moon.


^ And with the map revealed.

V1.1 of the scenario adds the ability to extend irrigation from cities built on the moon.