What kind of Freeciv is freecivweb.org?

The internet is a "wild west" of anonymous individuals with contradicting desires and dispositions. To survive, a community game server needs leadership and to be clear on its identity: what it is and what it's not. Along with other sources, this page tries to publicly clarify "What kind of Freeciv is freecivweb.org?" To answer this question, we first have to ask...

What is Freeciv?
Freeciv is not a game. It's a general ruleset engine. It can run an infinite number of different games. Any game that uses the Freeciv server is a Freeciv game.

But the Freeciv project started as a single game ruleset trying to emulate and improve the commercial Civilization game. It was one game, one ruleset.

Over a THOUSAND COLLECTIVE YEARS of work from hundreds of developers and thousands of players, became the singular Freeciv game: the Classic ruleset and its Multiplayer derivatives. This is what most people think of when asked, "What is Freeciv?" Later, Freeciv became a general game engine.

Because of the above, Classic Freeciv and its Multiplayer derivatives have a right to call themselves "Freeciv" more than one-off rules made by single creators. The lessons learned from years of collective playtesting and development can be thought of as "Freeciv DNA" -- standard Freeciv game rules. Freeciv DNA has a pedigree other rulesets lack:


 * 1) Being a standard game with a standard following and community.
 * 2) Years of tuning from professional development teams in the commercial series, which became the most successful National Leader strategy games ever.
 * 3) The collective knowledge and work of hundreds of open-source developers, building on the above and putting checks and balances on each other.
 * 4) The experience of countless expert-level games over decades, feeding the above.
 * 5) An astronomical amount more playtesting, collaboration, and balancing than other rulesets.

What kind of games should a Freeciv server host?
"If the Freeciv engine can play infinite types of games, what kind of games should a Freeciv server host?" The short answer is, whatever the server community wants, as long as it can survive, avoid "factional ruleset dilution", and remain popular. But, that's the catch. While that seems quite open, it's really not. A server must make its identity clear and decisive, or else it will evaporate, factionalize, and die off.

At present, there are two models of server in the Freeciv community. FCW is a dangerous hybrid of the two and must carefully balance the vulnerability from that. The two "normative" models are:

1. "Anything Goes" Servers: The CREATIVE ANARCHY model.
This type of server exists as a free-for-all to tinker with the infinite variety of games the Freeciv engine allows. Members invent new rules and play each game under new rules. Rules are created by lone individuals or small collectives. These servers are ideal for people who prefer to play a different game every time, instead of mastering a standard game. These servers appeal to another type of individual: those who wish to try their creative skills in making a better ruleset than the THOUSAND COLLECTIVE YEARS of countless developers and play-testers. Such hubris usually leads to tough lessons, like 100x more work involved than originally thought, and "re-inventing the Wheel" to re-discover why certain design decisions were made decades ago. On such a server, people get a free laboratory for learning these lessons. Such communities are a hotbed of creative new ideas that sometimes spark improvements for the larger Freeciv community. The creative anarchy model generates a large number of new ideas, a few of which are good enough to potentially improve Freeciv. On the other hand, rules disagreements lead to player abstentions from certain games, and a small community dilutes itself even further. Most experts prefer to master standardised rules, and go elsewhere. Bad rules remain unvetted by expert players, and get copied and become customary in new variants. Good ideas seldom get a chance to be tuned and matured into well-balanced finished products. The "creative anarchy" format leads to endless competition to replace the rules of the last game with the rules of the next game. New individuals take the stage to propose an entirely different set of "better rules." It's impossible for an improved standard set of game rules to come out of such a server. On the positive side, different ideas intermingle can learn from each other, and feel out new potentialities. Such a server is an archaeological dig of undeveloped abandoned ideas for the Freeciv Community to explore: there are unrefined treasures buried in the cemetery of failed experiments. These servers allow lone individuals to have the creative experience of making their own ruleset (and discovering no one wants to play it twice.)

2. Traditional Servers.
The other normative model of server is the "normal traditional server." A community of players wants to compete against each other using standardized rules that can be learned and mastered from one game to the next. Occasionally they may report a bug or inconsistency which eventually gets updated in the DNA; but otherwise, the idea is for Freeciv to be something more like chess: a single standardized "game of a lifetime."

This class of server considers the popular success of the rules as they already stand. The rules as they have evolved over decades have resulted in a great enjoyable game that has been finely balanced. Most proposed changes have probably already been tried. Why invite the chaos of throwing in changes by some lone individual who can't possibly be aware of the "THOUSAND COLLECTIVE YEARS?" Why deal with community factionalism and players quitting as they argue that new rules favor some playstyles more than others? These servers want to avoid the pandemonium of tinkering with rules. They stick with an existing standard and enjoy trying to master it by competing against each other. If, in several years, a more popular standard evolves, then they can switch to it.

3. Dangerous Hybrid Servers: trying to have it both ways.
The evolving class of traditional server seeks to carry the torch that built Freeciv into what it is. Freeciv owes its current status as a truly special game, to this kind of server. This kind of server seeks to evolve the standard rules  slowly  and  conservatively  toward better standards, often taking inspiration from modern developments in other strategy games.

However, this model of server has to be especially careful, as it will constantly live on a tightrope of danger! Players of different playstyles will not agree on most proposed changes. Like in politics, there will be radical conservatives and radical progressives. Finding a happy median to prevent the dissolution and evaporation of the community is a rough and tiring political job that is always flirting with rebellion, strife, and dissolution and evaporation of the community. As for what rules should be changed and how simple it seems to improve them, it's simply not the case.  It can't be overstated that how no matter how good a rule change seems at first, it usually has more bad side effects than good . Once people become aware that rules changes are allowed, Pandora's box is cracked. People at all levels of expertise, all sides of conservative/progressive, and all sides of various playstyle and culture debates, will get passionately ugly with one another. The great majority of people have private opinions on what should change for the better, and believe their own pet preference is a special exception that will be all good improvements with few bad side effects. They feel angry hurt pride when the topics of conservatism and holistic side effects arise. They are not aware that the majority of changes are still fixing side effects from some "good idea" from the past, and the holistic system can only take a limited amount of stress from novel elements, while at the same time getting the older elements under balance and control. No single person proposing a change can possibly be aware of the checks and balances from years of testing by Freeciv developers and the creators of the commercial series. In both branches, most changes still focus on trying to re-balance the side effects from "good ideas" that got accepted earlier.

In spite of all the above danger, FCW tries to be this type of dangerous hybrid server. To keep things intact, it absolutely has to use slow conservatism and a special arcane "Pyramidical Process" for presenting, debating, and tuning potential rules changes. Whenever strife and community conflict arise, it has to lean closer to the traditional type of server, and move farther away from the creative anarchy model.

If done right, the game can somehow remain standardized while also evolving into new rich depths, and truly be the game of a lifetime.

What kind of Freeciv is freecivweb.org?
FCW is the third kind, the dangerous hybrid, the evolving class of traditional server. It is the only server carrying the torch of the Multiplayer ruleset branch, which is the branch that evolved from Classic rules for massive multiplayer games.

Those who prefer servers under the Creative Anarchy model can find them elsewhere. Those who like the idea of evolving standards are welcome at FCW, but please, take heed about the conservatism and selectivity for how changes are matured and approved. At FCW, the goal is a standardized game that feels like the natural evolution of the original rules, a game that feels like the original but with all the tiny flaws, limitations, overly simple restrictions, and imbalances smoothed out. The goals that this standard religiously seeks to fulfill are published elsewhere.

If you are an expert player willing to spend dozens of hours splitting hairs on holistic balance, you can become intimate with the rules evolution process at FCW. If not, you are still encouraged to propose new ideas and critiques. Be advised, the majority of ideas even by experts must be rejected or significantly altered after testing and maturation. This is a serious project to make a standard set of rules that feels like what the original game was supposed to become. Lots of superb ideas that would be excellent in another game aren't suitable for a game that aims to be the apogee of standardized classic rules adapted for massive multiplayer.

The difficulty of getting a new idea approved makes some people speculate that the ruleset evolution process is just "a clique deciding only their own rules preferences." Restrictive selectivity actually forces the exact opposite. Those who make decisions on rules are severely limited by the goals of the standardized game and the requirement for collective approval and the critique from developers and from expert players of diverse playstyles. To the degree we're imperfect in this, we beg apology for the hundreds or even thousands of hours required to vet and develop even a minor release that can pass the test of being universally accepted as a better standardization of the goals.

A final note: people who think that a server could simply host different preferred rulesets for different player factions, haven't thought carefully about the phenomena that such a culture has spawned in other game communities. Ruleset factionalism leads to dilution into subcommunities, which then results in no single rules variation reaching a critical mass of players, skill levels, and differing playstyles. This in turn leads to inferior evolution of anything that can be a super standard for all styles of play. Then, no set of rules ever reaches a large enough following for it to take off and gather a global following.