How to Play Freeciv21
If you are looking for how to install Freeciv21, look in Installing Freeciv21. If you are looking for how to get Freeciv21 running, look in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
If you have never played any of the retail Civilization games, it is easiest to start by reading the legacy Freeciv Manual, available separately at: http://www.freeciv.org/wiki/Manual
If you are looking for help on playing Freeciv21, then keep reading!
Basic Strategy
First of all, this is not a perfect strategy, but it will get you started playing Freeciv21. Part of the appeal of Freeciv21 is in developing new strategies as you play more games. This guide is mostly based upon the Classic ruleset. There are other rulesets out there that ship with the game, but the base information presented here is the same for all rulesets.
The game is divided into several steps or stages:
Choosing the First City Site
Start the game by wandering around briefly to find a good place to build the first city. Do not feel tempted to investigate any yellow roofed villages yet, they might contain Barbarian tribes. Build the city close to Resources (Fish, Wheat, Wine, or Buffalo) and perhaps close to fresh water (River or Lake). Keep in mind that the first city you build will be your capital! It is advised not to place your capital on the coast. That can open you up to losing it from an attack from the sea.
The idea is to balance the quality of the site you find against getting your first city established as early as possible. You will find that balance becomes a key aspect of playing Freeciv21.
Selecting your First City Locations
In the Classic ruleset, you start the game with 5 Settlers, 6 Workers, and 2 Explorers. Once you have planted your first city as your capital, you need to find a place for your remaining Settlers as quickly as possible. This initial expansion phase of the game is important to establishing your base cities. Cities are everything in Freeciv21. The more cities you have, the more of every type of resource you can produce. Winning in Freeciv21 is a factor of your nation’s ability to out-produce your opponents.
As mentioned in Choosing the First City Site above, you want to try and place your Settlers so you can create cities that have Resources available to them. These tile enhancements give bonuses to help your nation grow.
Selecting your Technological Advance
With your first city built, your nation will start to produce scientific output called Bulbs. Bulbs are used to study technological advances. As your nation learns new technologies, new units, city improvements, and wonders become available to build in your cities.
There are too many scenarios of which technological advance path to take, so make your best judgement. You will probably want to learn a new form of government. You start the game in Despotism in the Classic ruleset. Monarchy or The Republic are good early targets. As soon as you have researched a new government type, start a revolution ( ) and change over to it. Cities operate much better under Republic than they do under Despotism, but note that it is much harder to keep military units outside of city limits under a Republic. Also, do not forget to recheck your national budget after you have changed governments, as the maximums vary for each type.
Depending on the amount of fresh water you have available, you might need to make a push for Construction so you can get your cities larger than size 8 by building an Aqueduct. If you are on an island (see Mapping the Countryside), you might need to expand. Learning Map Making will give you the Trireme unit that can set sail to find new lands (see Exploring the World).
Mapping the Countryside
After the capital city has been built, it will start producing a Warrior unit by default. These units can be used to walk around exploring the countryside. However, the Classic ruleset gives you an excellent unit to explore with. Aptly named the Explorer. Remember, it is risky to leave a city undefended, so perhaps keep the first Warrior in the city, and use the Explorer to explore.
You will come across Huts on the game map. There is a risk / reward with walking your Explorer into one of these Huts. The rewards can be great: gold, free units, free Settlers, and even free technology advances. However, the risk is that you loose Barbarian hordes that swoop through your new, undefended cities like a hot knife through butter. You have been warned.
Defending the Cities
At this point, defend your cities by always leaving a Warrior unit in them. As your civilization develops and new units become available, replace the obsolete units with new ones to ensure your cities have sufficient defense. The units most often used for defense are (in order of strength): Warrior, Phalanx, Pikemen, Musketeers, Riflemen, and Mechanized Infantry.
Keep in mind that with some types of government, military units inside or outside cities can reduce or create unhappiness. Also remember that when a land unit is inside a city, it gets a 50% defensive bonus, as if fortified (). This happens automatically so you can tell the unit to “sentry” ( and watch for enemy units that come through your territory. When a new city is built, the city starts to build the best available defensive unit from the above list by default.
Deciding Which Units to Build First
After building one or two Warrior units, start building Settlers. Settlers take city population, but if you picked a good city site, your city should be big enough by now. The amount of population that it takes to build a Settler is ruleset dependent. In the Classic ruleset it takes 1 population to build Settlers. Settlers are best put to use building new cities, while they can also build infrastructure improvements (see the next section), it is better to use Workers for this when available. You start the game with 6 Workers in the Classic ruleset. It should be noted that unlike Settlers, Workers do not consume food from their parent city. Keep in mind that a large population increases both the amount of productivity and your civilization’s research rate, not to mention that cities secure land for your empire, so building new cities should be a high priority in the early game.
Improving the Land
Each city has an area of land around it that can be used for growing food, producing goods, and generating trade. This area is called the Working Radius. This output can be increased by using Workers (or Settlers, and later Engineers) to improve the land close to your cities. The land can be improved with Irrigation (increasing food output), Roads (allowing units to move faster and in some cases increasing trade), and Mines (increasing production), among other improvements. The ability to do some improvements on some tiles may require a technology advance to be learned by your scientists. See Help –> Terrain –> Terrain Alterations for more information.
Deciding Where to Build Cities
The best location for a city is a matter of taste. A city which is placed near the sea is easier to spot by opponents, but can also serve as a port for seagoing units. They also usually need a Coastal Defense city improvement later on for defense against an attacking navy. The best strategy is to build a few of both, but keep in mind that your opponents will find it harder to locate your city if you do not build it by the sea.
Now is a good time to talk about city planning strategies. There are many strategies to city planning that are good to discuss here in the early game.
Note
There are a few different kinds of Tilesets available in Freeciv21. For sake of example we are talking about
the Hex(agonal) type of Tileset in this section. The concepts are very similar with the Square tilesets as
well. If you are looking at Square tiles, you can change to Hex tiles by going to
and picking Hexemplio from the list.
Let us first talk about two concepts: Vision Radius and Working Radius. Each city has a vision radius and a working radius. The vision radius is the tiles that the citizens of a city can see on the map. If an enemy unit comes within the vision radius of a city, a sentried unit inside of the city will wake up and alert you. Within the vision radius is the smaller working radius. When thinking of city planning, you should be most concerned with the working radius of a city. These are the tiles that the citizens of your cities manage to extract Resources (Shields, Food, and Trade). When the working radius of a city overlaps with that of another city, only one city at a time can manage that tile. This is another one of those balance items in playing Freeciv21.
When you have a Settler selected, it will have a red outline shown on the map. This is the city’s working radius if you placed the Settler at that spot with the command.
This image represents a city with its working radius. The bolded hexagon represents the city center.
Fig. 14 City Center Working Radius
There are two approaches to positioning cities: Smallpoxing and Largepoxing. In Smallpoxing you fit as many cities as you can anywhere you can place them. Right at the minimum distance from each other. Here is an example of what that looks like:
Fig. 15 Smallpoxing
Notice the overlap in the working radius of all the cities.
With the Largepoxing strategy, you give maximum space to all cities with no tile overlap. Here is what that looks like:
Fig. 16 Largepoxing
The two strategies are antonyms of each other. In Largepoxing your cities can get very large in the late game, but at the beginning of the game you will have a lot of land that is not being used. Another challenge is it takes more moves for your Settlers to reach the planned city center of the city. In Smallpoxing you only have to move a few tiles. With Largepoxing you have to move twice the distance and time (in turns).
There is a third strategy. It is not called “Midpoxing” per se, but the strategy is similar to a middle ground between the Smallpoxing and Largepoxing strategies. Here is an example of a Midpoxing strategy:
Fig. 17 Midpoxing
Recall that there are a number of factors to consider when it comes to city planning and placement:
Distance from the Capital.
Available Resources on tiles around the potential city centers.
Locations of freshwater from rivers and lakes.
No wasted tiles. Force overlap of any kind so that every tile is available.
Taking Care of the Cities
Every city has a group of citizens. The number of citizens depends on the city’s population. When you click on a city, the City Dialog will open and show how the land around the city is being managed. You can assign the city’s citizens to manage the land, or they can be specialists that contribute to your civilization in other ways. Especially at the start of the game, care should be taken to ensure that the citizens are employed so that they maximize food, trade, and then production.
If too much food is being generated, a citizen can be taken off the land by clicking on the occupied land tile. This citizen can then be transferred to a specialist. There are three specialists: Taxmen (collect gold), Entertainers (create happiness), or Scientist (create bulbs). By default, Freeciv21 will add an Entertainer when you take a citizen off the land.
If you click on the central tile of the land (the “City Center”), the citizens will be rearranged to maximize food production. You will also want to look at the level of food in the Granary and the amount of surplus food the city is producing each turn. The city will lose excess food at turn change. For example: The Granary in the city has 18/20 food (needs two food to grow to next city size) and the city is currently producing +4 food surplus each turn. This means that at turn change you will lose 2 food as waste at turn change. This is a good opportunity to move the citizens around to get food to +2 surplus. This could be accomplished by taking a citizen off a tile producing 2 food and turn it into a Taxman for a turn to get gold. At turn change, open the city and restore the citizen to farming. This kind of individual city management style is called “micro-management” and is a very powerful mechanism of game play.
The golden rule of taking care of a city is that there should be at least as many happy citizens as unhappy citizens. A city where this is not the case falls into disorder. Such cities are labeled with a raised fist or a lightning bolt (depending on the tileset). Take care not to let this happen to any of your cities, as cities in disorder produce nothing, and are prone to revolt.
Interacting with Other Players (Diplomacy)
When one of your units first meets a unit of another nation, or finds one of their cities (or equally if they find you), a basic contact is established between the two nations. This provides each with basic intelligence about the other, which can be accessed from the Nations and Diplomacy View.
This communication will lapse after a ruleset defined number of turns with no contact, which is one turn for the Classic ruleset. Establishing an embassy will give a more permanent communication channel, as well as more advanced intelligence such as details of technology. Embassies are one-way, the nation hosting the embassy receives no benefit and once established, cannot be revoked.
If you are in contact with another player, then you can arrange a diplomatic meeting. From the Nations and Diplomacy View, this is done by selecting the nation with whom you wish to meet and clicking Meet. If the entry under the embassy column is not blank and the other player is connected (or is a server AI) then a treaty dialog will pop up.
In this dialog you can negotiate an exchange of assets (maps, vision, advances, cities, or gold), embassies, or relationship pacts such as a Cease-fire or Peace. The list of items that can be traded through diplomacy is ruleset dependent. There is no need to trade like for like. You can trade, say, an advance or city for gold, you can consider this buying and selling. Each player builds a list of offered items. To remove an item from the list, double-click on it. When both players indicate satisfaction, the pact is concluded.
Pacts affect where your units can go and what they can do, and a pact with one nation can affect your relations with others. Under authoritarian governments such as monarchy you can break a pact at any time, but the representative governments (Republic and Democracy) have a senate which will block the unprovoked cancellation of a treaty, unless a foreign Diplomat or Spy sparks a diplomatic incident. The only way to dissolve a pact in this situation is to dissolve your government by going into anarchy. The details of pacts are described in the Help –> Diplomacy section.
A few notes:
You cannot give away your capital.
You can only request property that you know about; so you cannot request technology unless you have an embassy, and if you cannot see a city on your map, then you cannot request it. Of course, the owner of that city can still offer it to you, in which case the area around the city is shown on your map before you accept the treaty.
One important thing to note: when a city is transferred, any units in the field and supported by that city are also transferred, except those sitting in other cities. So make sure the other player is not getting a better deal than you expect.
Exploring the World
After you have fortified your cities with troops, build Triremes in the cities near the sea. Use the Triremes to map the world in search of your opponents and new lands. If you are on an island, you should spend less on military and more on expansion. Or if you are located close to an opponent, it is truly a good idea to make a Peace treaty and share the advances you have made. Diplomatic units are very useful here, and will pay off later.
Things to Keep in Mind
What the next advance you will need is.
What your tax, luxury goods and research rates are currently set to.
Treaties are often broken, so do not neglect defense!
Some wonders can be made obsolete by a new technology.
Production Phase
At some point you will have a large number of cities and your nation has learned many technologies. As you move into the industrial age you can build Factories and Power Plants in your cities. You want to get as much production as possible out of each city. Pollution becomes a problem. As soon as you can, try to research Mass Production for Mass Transits, and Recycling so you can build Recycling Centers. Once you have got all your cities going strong, you must build military units.
Note
If you come into contact with another player, you should immediately build a few attack units, and at least one defense unit per city.
When you want to begin thinking about attacking someone, set science to 0%, and raise taxes as high as you can without provoking disorder. Remember, money can build units too!
Annihilation of Your Opponents
This can happen at any time, but it is more fun with the advanced weapons.
Pick a relatively weak enemy, and send over a few ship loads of troops. Take over their cities, and use them to build more units to take out the rest of them with. Show no quarter! To the death!
Repeat as often as necessary!
Note
For pacifists: Freeciv21 also allows a player to win by building and launching a spaceship which arrives at Alpha Centauri before anyone else. It is known as the Space Race victory.