Software update: Freeciv 3.0.0

Gamers who spent a lot of time on Sid Meier’s Civilization, which was released for DOS by Microprose in 1991, should be careful not to get addicted again. Since 1995, a group of developers has been working under the name Freeciv to make an open source version based on this turn-based strategy game. The players of this game start in the year 4000 BC with a handful of settlers and try to establish a successful civilization. For more information, we refer you to this one and this one pages. The developers released version 3.0.0 a few days ago. The long list of changes in this release can be found on this page be viewed. This is the announcement of version 3.0.0:

Welcome to Freeciv 3.0.0

This release is a major upgrade which with some changes can support backward compatible rulesets. However, in its capabilities are support for massive new capabilities in rulesets via actionenablers and ruleset effects. This is a major upgrade and if you develop rulesets you should learn more about it.

This release includes lots of changes relative to 2.6.x; the significant ones are outlined below. Bug fixes also included in the 2.6 line are not listed. Those who are interested in seeing the detailed changes should check the ChangeLog file.

This release is still in a beta stage, so there are some known issues (see below†

WHAT’S CHANGED SINCE 2.6

The major changes in Freeciv 3.0 are civ2civ3 being the default ruleset, addition of the alien ruleset, hex maps as the default topology on new installations, and a whole lot of extra flexibility to create custom rulesets.

As is usual for major releases, 3.0 clients cannot interoperate with pre-3.0 servers, and vice versa. Most pre-3.0 savegames can however be loaded into 3.0, and in most cases, the supplied rulesets have not changed so much as to make it difficult to complete a game started with 2.6.x’s rules.