Freeciv Changelog

What's new in Freeciv 2.5.0

Mar 16, 2015

This release includes lots of changes relative to 2.4.x; the significant ones are outlined below. Bug fixes also included in the 2.4 line are not listed. Those who are interested in seeing the detailed changes should check the ChangeLog file, linked above.
What's changed since 2.4
The main changes in Freeciv 2.5 are the inclusion of the 'civ2civ3' ruleset, a new Qt client, and much more flexibility for those creating their own rulesets. The AI has also had some improvements.
As is usual for major releases, 2.5 clients cannot interoperate with pre-2.5 servers, and vice versa. Pre-2.5 savegames can however be loaded into 2.5, and in most cases, the supplied rulesets have not changed so much as to make it difficult to complete a game started with 2.4.x's rules.
SERVER / GENERAL EDIT:
Changes affecting players (supplied rulesets) Edit
A new ruleset civ2civ3 is included, an evolution of the civ2_3 ruleset by David Fernandez (bardo). This has some elements from Civ3, and is also designed to reduce the gap between inexperienced and optimal play, and for the AI to play well. It is suitable for single-player and multiplayer games. See doc/README.ruleset_civ2civ3 for more information. GNAPATCH#3366
This version of the ruleset is similar to previous versions available as modpacks, but does have some changes, including taking advantage of new facilities in the game engine. civ2civ3 or civ2_3 games started in previous versions of Freeciv cannot be continued with this version.
civ2civ3 is planned to become the default ruleset in a future release. The current default ruleset has been renamed to 'classic' and will continue to be available. From now on the name 'default' will refer to whatever ruleset the running version of Freeciv defaults to. GNAPATCH#3216
RULES CHANGES AFFECTING ALL OR MOST RULESETS:
(not civ1/civ2) City tiles are no longer an exception to the rule that the 'Bridge Building' technology is required to build roads over rivers. Cities on river tiles no longer automatically get roads until the technology is acquired. GNAPATCH#3007
(not civ2/multiplayer) Cities suffer random disasters such as loss of population or buildings. A new server setting 'disasters' controls their frequency, or disables them entirely.
(not civ1/civ2) 'Barracks' buildings and 'Sun Tzu's War Academy' are now cumulative: if you have both, new units are created at the Hardened veteran level. GNAPATCH#3062
Bombarder units (such as bombers and helicopters in civ2civ3) no longer gain veterancy from bombardment. GNAPATCH#5835
The maximum number of trade routes per city is now ruleset-dependent. In the classic and (of as RC1) experimental rulesets, the limit on trade routes now depends on what technology you have. You start with 2 per city, and can add one more with each of 'Magnetism' and 'The Corporation'.
In rulesets with nationality tracking (classic, experimental, civ2civ3):
Citizens now gradually convert to the nationality of the city owner over time, at a ruleset-defined rate. GNAPATCH#2365
Units now have their own nationality, which remains the same even if they are bribed or captured. Settler units add citizens of their own nationality when founding or adding to cities. GNAPATCH#3625 GNAPATCH#3635
Changes to what happens if research points go negative (due to transfer costs or tech upkeep):
A new server setting 'techlossforgiveness' controls whether technologies can be lost at all, and if so, how much debt triggers tech loss. Previously this was controlled by the ruleset; of the supplied rulesets, only the experimental ruleset had this behavior. GNAPATCH#3193
When technology is lost, half the bulb cost of the lost technology is now added on to the current bulb balance (this may not be sufficient to make it positive). The proportion is controlled by the new server setting 'techlossrestore'. The old behavior, where any bulb debt was completely cancelled, can be restored by setting this to -1. GNA#21623
A tile with both a river and a fortress now has a lower defensive bonus, as the bonuses are now added rather than multiplied.
When a freshwater terrain (lake) and an oceanic terrain type become adjacent due to terrain change, the ocean now floods the whole lake. GNAPATCH#3478 In rulesets with lakes, transforming a swamp bordering a lake now results in lake, not ocean. GNA#20043
In games where 'startunits' includes a k)ing unit, such units are also given to new players created as a result of civil war. GNAPATCH#3812
RULE CHANGES TO SPECIFIC RULESETS:
classic:
Tracking of citizen nationality is now enabled. See the help for what this means. GNAPATCH#3624
experimental:
New road type 'Maglev', requiring 'Superconductors' and giving unlimited movement to 'Land' units. Regular railroads now give fast but limited movement (each tile takes 1/9 of a movement point). GNAPATCH#3295 GNAPATCH#4008
Citizens of your enemies in your own cities cause unhappiness, with the amount depending on your government type. GNAPATCH#3628
Partisan appearance now depends on how many of the conquered city's citizens had the nationality of the defeated player, rather than the original city owner. GNAPATCH#3762
Paratroopers can now paradrop directly to a transport in the ocean. GNAPATCH#3805
(as of RC1) Caravans are no longer obsoleted by Freight, since they can travel on more terrain. GNAPATCH#5791
Most technologies now have 'root_req' requirements, preventing acquisition of the technology by any means (such as trading) unless some key earlier technology is known.
By default, it is possible to sustain a small research point debt without losing a technology. However, if a technology is lost, the debt may not be completely cancelled.
civ1 and civ2 (to improve their fidelity):
Maximum number of trade routes per city reduced from 4 to 3.
When a free tech is granted, it's now chosen randomly, rather than being whatever the player was researching.
NEW GAME OPTIONS:
'killstack', which controls whether all units on a tile die simultaneously, is now a server setting (previously it was controlled by the ruleset). GNA#18698
'killcitizen' is now a boolean setting rather than a bitfield; exactly which units can reduce city population is now controlled by the ruleset. GNAPATCH#3613
Two new values for the 'diplomacy' setting: "NOAI" which allows diplomacy except between AIs, and "NOMIXED" which only prevents human/AI diplomacy. GNAPATCH#4213
A new setting 'startcity' causes players to start with their first city already founded. GNAPATCH#3495
(as of beta2) New map generation features ported from warserver: a 'fair' island map generator ('generator=fair'), which creates an identical island for each player or team, and 'teamplacement', allowing control of whether team-mates start near each other on the map. GNAPATCH#5146 GNAPATCH#5145
OTHER CHANGES:
Nations:
Added 16 new playable nations to standard rulesets, bringing the total to 555.
The set of 50 'core' nations introduced in 2.4 are now by default the only nations that will appear in games. To play with the full ('extended') set of nations (which might not be translated into your language), change the nation set in the 'pick nation' dialog, or with the server 'nationset' option. GNAPATCH#3448
The pirate and barbarian flags be swapped, so that pirates now have the Jolly Roger, as they should. GNA#22236
In the classic and civ2civ3 rulesets, maps are now generated with scenic tile labels on a few random tiles. These have no effect on gameplay. GNAPATCH#3147
Minor changes to transport units:
Units may now load onto and unload from transports that are themselves inside another transport. GNA#22050 GNA#22190
While there is still no way to choose which transport is used if there are several on a tile, cargo units will now prefer the transport with more move points. GNA#22189
Goto / pathfinding:
You can now set waypoints for groups of units starting on different tiles. GNAPATCH#4418
Improved route planning across 'pontoon bridges' (units bridging water). GNA#21871
Multiple units working on overlapping connect-with-road or similar projects no longer interrupt each other's work. GNAPATCH#2206
CHANGES AFFECTING OTHER RULESETS / MODDERS EDIT:
Ruleset authors can control much more of the game behavior. Existing rulesets need changes to work with 2.5; see How to update a ruleset from 2.4 to 2.5 for a minimal recipe, and comments in supplied ruleset files for documentation and usage examples of new features.
Movement:
Rulesets can now define new types of paths, replacing hard-coded road, railroad, and river behavior. Up to 8 distinct road and/or river types can be defined. Many previously hardcoded behaviors are now configurable. GNAPATCH#2521
Granularity of movement points ('move_fragments') is now specified by the ruleset, rather than being hardcoded at 1/3. Move rate of 'IgTer' units is also configurable. GNAPATCH#3990
The 'Relaxed' orthogonal move mode for rivers (now also available for roads) no longer gives a movement bonus for diagonal moves unless the path actually links the two tiles. GNA#20472
Rulesets can allow units to paradrop directly onto transport units. GNAPATCH#3805
Rulesets have more control over when units can enter and leave 'unreachable' transports (usually air transports). By default, cargo of such transports can no longer embark/disembark unless in a city or a base native to the transport, but exceptions can be made for individual units. GNAPATCH#3804
The game now enforces that no transport unit may contain a unit which could transport it, and that units can be nested no more than six deep, even if the ruleset would allow these situations. This may simplify defining complex transport relations in rulesets without defining many unit classes. GNA#22050
(Some versions of 2.4.x had attempts to enforce this, but they merely caused error messages rather than preventing the situation from occurring.)
Terrain and alterations
More flexible bases:
Rulesets can now define bases which are allowed on city tiles, or automatically added to cities. GNAPATCH#3826
Ability and time to build bases can now be terrain-dependent. GNAPATCH#3152
Owned bases can now display their owner's flag. GNAPATCH#3450
Rulesets can now use effects to change when any of the built-in terrain alterations and transformations can be performed by units (in 2.4, it was only possible to affect irrigation). The full set is:
Irrig_Possible: is building irrigation possible?
Mining_Possible: is building a mine possible?
Irrig_TF_Possible: is changing terrain type with "irrigation" action possible?
Mining_TF_Possible: is changing terrain type with "mine" action possible?
Transform_Possible: is "transform" action possible?
Terrains can now be marked with the 'NotGenerated' flag, so that the map generator will not use them (for use in scenarios, etc). GNAPATCH#4158
Units
The unit 'convert' action is no longer instant; it takes a ruleset-defined time (at least one turn) for suitable units to convert into another type. GNAPATCH#3110
The 'Veteran_Build' effect (used for 'Barracks', etc) can now cause units to gain multiple veteran levels. GNAPATCH#3062
Rulesets are now permitted to contain no city-founding units. GNAPATCH#3352
Combat
Added a general framework for combat value modification based on unit type. The old hardcoded 'AEGIS', 'AirUnit', 'Horse', 'Pikemen', 'Helicopter', and 'Fighter' flags are gone; it's now possible to add similar bonuses with different numeric values, and more of them. GNAPATCH#3548
Whether conquering units reduce city population is now defined by the ruleset, per unit class ('KillCitizen'). GNAPATCH#3613
Units defending while on non-native terrain (that is, ships in harbor) can have a defense penalty applied in this situation, via the unit class flag 'non_native_def_pct'. (This is distinct from the existing 'BadCityDefender' unit flag, which affects firepower.) GNA#20544
Sea units' ability to attack neighboring land is generalized as ability to attack non-native terrain, and controllable at unit class and type level ('AttackNonNative' and 'Only_Native_Attack' respectively). GNAPATCH#3264
Sea units' ability to attack from harbor is generalized as unit class ability to attack from city or transport in non-native terrain ('AttFromNonNative'). GNAPATCH#3333
Cities
Cities can suffer ruleset-defined random disasters, whose effects can be mediated by the requirements system, and whose effects can be implemented by Lua script.
The limit on trade routes per city can now vary during gameplay (up to a maximum of 5). GNAPATCH#3178 Bonuses, ability to establish based on whether route is international and/or intercontinental, and what happens if a trade route becomes invalid are all now ruleset configurable. GNAPATCH#3444
As well as the changes to nationality listed in the gameplay section:
Rulesets can use the "Nationality" requirement in effects to test whether cities contain citizens of a specific nationality. GNAPATCH#3623
Rulesets can control whether and how much enemy citizens cause unhappiness with the "Enemy_Citizen_Unhappy_Pct" effect. GNAPATCH#3684
Rulesets can choose whether partisan appearance depends on the original city owner or the current nationality of the citizens, and if so what proportion is required for partisans. GNAPATCH#3762
The 'Inspire_Partisans' effect can now depend on properties of a specific city, not just player-wide requirements. GNAPATCH#3763
Specialists can now define a fallback graphics tag, so that rulesets with custom specialists can be played without tileset support. GNAPATCH#4239
The image to display for a city (City_Image) is now calculated on the server side, allowing ruleset authors to use requirements for it that the client may not have reliable access to. GNA#19952
The way city size is converted into a (cosmetic) population number is now more configurable. GNAPATCH#3406
Technology
New effect 'Not_Tech_Source' prevents players from having technology stolen from them. GNAPATCH#3546
When a player gets a free technology, the method used to choose it is defined in the ruleset in 'free_tech_method'. Instead of the previous behavior of giving the player their currently researched technology, the ruleset can now specify the cheapest or a random technology. GNAPATCH#3552 GNAPATCH#3553
New tech_upkeep_style 'Cities', where tech upkeep scales with number of cities.
A player will no longer lose a technology (due to tech upkeep, etc) if it's a root_req for another technology the player knows. GNA#19176
The ruleset can request that technology help be popped up in the client when a new technology is acquired, via 'popup_tech_help'. (This can be overridden by the user.) GNAPATCH#3480
Nations
Nations can have an associated color; if the server setting 'plrcolormode' is set to the new value 'NATION_ORDER', players' colors will depend on their nation. GNAPATCH#3443
Rulesets can now define playable subsets of their nations ('nation sets'), one of which can be picked by players during game setup. This could be used for instance to define a number of different balanced sets of nations which have unique traits, perhaps tailored to different numbers of players. GNAPATCH#3448
The list of supplied nations has been split out to a new 'nationlist.ruleset', so that rulesets can use these nations while changing other aspects of 'nations.ruleset'. nationlist.ruleset has its own lists of governments, terrains, etc, so that it can be used by rulesets that are slightly different without errors.
Effects and requirements
'Resource' added as requirement to effects system. GNAPATCH#3322
City effects can now depend on the presence of terrain with certain properties within the city's workable radius, by specifying 'Terrain', 'Resource', etc with 'City' range. GNAPATCH#3740
City effects can now place requirements on the city's own tile. GNA#19874
Expanded the ability to group ruleset objects into sets for requirement purposes with custom flags:
Terrains and technologies now have custom flags, as well as units, enabling limited disjunctive ("or") requirement definitions for these types. GNAPATCH#3487 GNAPATCH#4074
Requirements can test these flags. GNAPATCH#3395 GNAPATCH#4069
User flags now have ruleset-defined help text.
The maximum number of user flags for unit types has increased from 4 to 16 (as these are used for the combat bonuses framework). GNAPATCH#3393
For boolean effects, negative values are now evaluated as 'false', to ease ruleset development. GNAPATCH#3396
Lua scripting
Updated scripting engine to Lua 5.2. GNAPATCH#3230
Scripts can now set tile labels. GNAPATCH#3136
Scripts can now run on a new 'map_generated' signal. GNAPATCH#3135
Misc:
It's now possible to have multiple centers of government for the purposes of calculating waste and corruption, through the 'Gov_Center' effect. The distance to the nearest determines waste. GNAPATCH#3342
When a 'GameLoss' unit is killed, instead of the player's assets (units, cities, etc) just disappearing, the ruleset can cause some of them to be transferred to the conqueror, barbarians, and/or a new AI player ('gameloss_style'). GNA#20577
Rulesets can specify that start positions must be surrounded by a minimum area whose terrain is native to starting units ('min_start_native_area'). GNAPATCH#3614
Rulesets can completely disable civil war ('civil_war_enabled'). GNAPATCH#3818
Technologies with the 'Claim_Ocean' flag lift the normal restrictions on borders claiming ocean tiles. GNAPATCH#3355
The ruleset can define a 'preferred_soundset' which will be suggested to clients. (Only Gtk2/3 clients can ask the user; with other clients the user has to have enabled auto-accept for this to take effect.) GNAPATCH#3226
Tileset authors have a few new facilities. Existing tilesets need changes to work with 2.5 at all; see How to update a tileset from 2.4 to 2.5 for a minimal recipe.
When a unit is building a base or road, tilesets can now display an icon specific to that base/road. GNAPATCH#3305
The layer that darkness is drawn at is now configurable ('darkness_layer'). GNAPATCH#4461
Tilesets can now supply icons for unit upkeep greater than 2 to be displayed in the city dialog. GNAPATCH#3824
In the supplied tilesets, government and specialist icons have been split to separate files, so custom tilesets can replace them while continuing to use other graphics from the standard small.spec. GNAPATCH#4076 GNAPATCH#4422
Scenario creators have a couple of new features available. (Scenarios created with previous versions should continue to work in 2.5.)
Most of the supplied rulesets now include an 'Inaccessible' terrain type, for use by scenario authors to shape the map area. See the France scenario for an example of its use. GNAPATCH#4159 GNAPATCH#4158
Scenarios can now restrict the set of available nations (to those with start positions). GNA#21268
CHANGES AFFECTING SERVER OPERATORS EDIT:
Failure to load a ruleset no longer causes the server to quit; it now reverts to the previously loaded ruleset, or failing that the default ruleset. GNAPATCH#1449
On Windows, the server no longer sets the socket option SO_REUSEADDR on its listening socket. This may fix some issues with clients connecting to the wrong server. GNA#21583
The default database backend for authentication has changed from MySQL to SQLite. GNA#19909
There's no longer support for attempting to save games in formats compatible with previous major releases of Freeciv. The 'saveversion' server option has been removed. GNAPATCH#3188 GNAPATCH#3026
AI EDIT:
There have been some improvements to the standard AI's behavior:
Defense:
Autosettlers are smarter about spotting danger: GNAPATCH#3854
Sea and air units are now considered threats, not just land units.
Military units which can't attack are no longer considered threats.
Cities needing defense are less prone to building walls before units. GNAPATCH#4798
The AI now considers non-land units that can conquer cities (such as Helicopters) a threat to continents it controls. GNA#22225
The AI should more correctly account for travel time when assessing danger to cities from enemy units; previously it treated them as its own, which could be wrong for ZoC, restrictinfra etc. GNAPATCH#3729
(as of RC1) The city the AI has nominated to build wonders is now permitted to build defensive units instead if necessary. GNAPATCH#5588
(as of RC1) The AI now treats players it has never met as potentially hostile; this should make it harder for human players to sneak forces into place before first diplomatic contact. GNAPATCH#5441
Unit handling:
Some fixes to AI's handling of boats as transports.
Terrain improvement
The AI and autosettlers' relative weightings have been tweaked to give slightly better behavior with typical rulesets. In particular, production is now valued less compared to other outputs. GNAPATCH#3692
The AI and autosettlers can now decide to build bases, if they provide any direct output bonus to a nearby city, or enable another base which does so. (Bases are still not built for purely strategic purposes.) GNAPATCH#3341 GNAPATCH#3833
Economy:
When the AI is on a war footing, it now prefers diverting taxes to science rather than luxury. GNA#21640
The AI now considers keeping units in cities for their martial law effect, although it will not yet build units specially for this. GNAPATCH#3959
The AI values coinage less, to balance it compared to gold-producing buildings. GNA#21796
The AI may now create trade routes between continents. GNAPATCH#2963
Research:
The AI now considers more combat bonuses when deciding what technology to research. For instance, it may now work harder towards AEGIS Cruiser when defending against air units. GNAPATCH#3555 GNAPATCH#3563
The AI no longer chases technologies to gain units that are already obsolete. GNAPATCH#4013
The AI no longer remembers its past desire for long-obsolete technologies indefinitely. GNA#22260
Ruleset tolerance:
In rulesets which support ocean cities, the AI now considers building them. GNAPATCH#3533
The AI no longer builds sea-only worker units if the ruleset has them. This is a temporary solution to a previous issue where AI would build only sea worker units when they became available, and not land ones. GNAPATCH#4610
AI BEHAVIOR IS ALSO NOW SOMEWHAT MORE CONFIGURABLE BY RULESETS:
The new traits framework allows AI behavior to be parameterized (current traits are Expansionist/Trader/Aggressive). Traits can be set in rulesets (globally or for specific nations), or by Lua script. GNAPATCH#3001
The 'Cheating' level AI no longer intrinsically ignores tax rate limitations. This is instead left up to the ruleset. The supplied rulesets give cheating AIs this bonus, so there is no functional change. GNA#18232
The following changes are only relevant to AI developers:
'Default' AI logic, which was previously tied to the 'classic' AI type, can now be used selectively by custom AI modules, each with their own instance data.
The default AI type can be chosen at configure time. GNAPATCH#3666
Some progress has been made on the 'threaded' AI variant. It is now functional, but does not yet offer much advantage over the 'classic' AI. The only difference is that cities can make specific requests of worker units. The 'threaded' AI is not included in standard builds.
CLIENTS EDIT:
(as of beta2) The Qt client is now substantially complete, and a Windows build is available. A Qt version of the modpack installer is also available.
The city map size in the city dialog now adapts to the ruleset. This means that the city dialog in the SDL client is no longer unusably small with the classic and similar rulesets. GNAPATCH#4389
The client now only lists scenarios for "Start Scenario Game"; previously it could include ordinary save files that happened to be on the scenario path. GNA#22209
Client options to control whether tileset and soundset suggestions made by the ruleset are automatically accepted. This allows clients other than the Gtk clients to make use of these suggestions. GNAPATCH#3599 GNAPATCH#3605
(Gtk) The pregame nation selection dialog has been rewritten, fixing many small bugs. GNAPATCH#4347
(Gtk) The client can now optionally pop up help for a new technology when it's acquired. GNAPATCH#3608
Modpack installer Edit:
The modpack installer now keeps track of versions of packages it has previously installed. (It does not track changes made manually.) GNAPATCH#3163
A command-line tool for downloading modpacks, freeciv-mp-cli, has been created for use on headless servers. GNAPATCH#4436
The modpack installer can be built into multiple GUI flavored executables simultaneously. As a result, the executables have been renamed.
Modpacks can now have descriptions GNAPATCH#3645 and a 'subtype' field (e.g. to distinguish iso/hex tilesets) GNAPATCH#4394.
TILESETS / ART EDIT:
The activity icons shown near units building roads and bases in Cimpletoon, Amplio2, and Trident are now small versions of the extras themselves. GNAPATCH#4059 GNA#20032 GNAPATCH#5856
(as of RC2) The Trident tileset has been updated for various recently added game elements, including lake and maglev. GNAPATCH#5856 GNAPATCH#5877
Improve colors for global warming / nuclear winter progress indicators. GNAPATCH#4827
The icons for entertainers, scientists, and tax collectors now have both male and female versions. GNAPATCH#4506
Made a few specialist icons available for custom rulesets (worker, farmer, merchant) for use by modpacks. These are not used in the supplied rulesets. GNAPATCH#4467
The Cimpletoon and Amplio2 (as of RC1) and Trident (as of RC2) tilesets have 'outpost' and 'airstrip' graphics for use by modpacks. GNAPATCH#5027
TRANSLATIONS EDIT:
Updated French, Polish, Catalan, Russian, Korean, Scottish Gaelic, British English, traditional Chinese, Spanish, German, Japanese, Finnish, and Irish localizations.
BUILD/PORTABILITY EDIT:
A real thread implementation is now a hard requirement. GNAPATCH#2996
The SDL client now requires SDL_gfx and SDL_ttf libraries. Copies are no longer included with the Freeciv source. GNAPATCH#4088 GNAPATCH#4386
Clients other than the SDL client can now be built against SDL2_mixer. GNAPATCH#4189
(as of beta2) The build is now Clang-clean (with 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5).
For those who've been trying the betas, these are the changes since the last release candidate, 2.5.0-RC2:
Added graphics for civ2civ3's Internet wonder. GNAPATCH#5806 GNA#23379
Updated localizations: Spanish (98.6% core, 97.2% nations), Japanese (93% core, 94% nations), Irish (46% core, 59% nations).
Tweak network protocol developer documentation. GNAPATCH#5908

New in Freeciv 2.5.0 RC 2 (Mar 10, 2015)

New in Freeciv 2.5.0 RC 1 (Feb 23, 2015)

SERVER / GENERAL EDIT:
CHANGES AFFECTING PLAYERS (SUPPLIED RULESETS) EDIT:
Changes to the civ2civ3 rules:
The Tribal government no longer gives a bonus to movement (this was too powerful, and confused the AI). Instead it increases the chances of gaining veterancy from combat, and martial law that pacifies 2 citizen per unit. GNA#22621 GNAPATCH#5763
Sun Tzu's War Academy no longer increases the chance of veterancy from combat. GNA#23206
Changes to terrain-related rules: GNAPATCH#5564 GNA#23275
Forest can be mined to Grassland; transformation now yields Hills.
Irrigation time for Swamp reduced.
Deep Oceans now produce 1 food rather than none.
Harbors and Offshore Platforms can now be built adjacent to Lake and Deep Ocean tiles, as well as Ocean.
Transports can no longer gain veterancy by cleaning pollution. Engineers' chances of veterancy from work are reduced. GNA#23290
Cities now get their extra defense bonus at size 9 rather than 8, thus requiring an Aqueduct. The risk of fire starts at size 9 also. City map icons updated to match. GNAPATCH#5764 GNAPATCH#5800
Explorers and Partisans see an extra tile; Partisans are now granted based on citizen nationality rather than city's original owner. GNAPATCH#5544
Crusaders no longer cause military unhappiness (to match Fanatics). GNAPATCH#5543
A.Smith's Trading Co. now has no effect during a Communist government; previously in this situation, buildings with upkeep 2 were free of upkeep. GNA#23205
Simplify production waste rules: the unlikely case of a Communist or Federation government without knowledge of Trade no longer leads to extra waste. GNAPATCH#5814
Changes to bombarder units (such as bombers and helicopters in civ2civ3):
Rule change: neither attacker nor defender can gain veterancy from bombardment. GNAPATCH#5835
Bug fix: attempting to move into an empty city with a bombarder now moves, rather than bombarding. GNA#20956
Changes to the experimental rules:
Caravan is no longer obsoleted by Freight; while slower, it can travel on more terrain than Freight. GNAPATCH#5791
Copy trade route rules from the classic ruleset (maximum trade routes varies depending on technology). GNAPATCH#5735
Fix trouble receiving future tech from Darwin's Voyage in the multiplayer ruleset. GNA#23264 GNA#23231
Cosmetic: the multiplayer ruleset (which doesn't support trade routes) no longer displays cities as having "0/4" trade routes. GNA#23253
In the civ2 ruleset, Fanatics are now free of upkeep under a Fundamentalist government; the free shield upkeep under that government has been reduced from 10 to 8. GNAPATCH#3505
Barbarian nations are no longer granted partisans from city capture in any supplied ruleset. GNAPATCH#5454
Changes to supplied scenario maps:
Various changes to small and large Earth maps, including more starting positions, increased player limits, and removal of non-default settings. GNAPATCH#5487
Reduce default number of players in France and North America scenarios so that nations matching the scenario start positions will be used with the core nationset. GNA#21350
Fix a terrain glitch in the France scenario. GNA#23273
With the new 'fair island' map generator, generated terrain resources were ineffective. Saving and reloading the game fixed this. GNA#22981
In rulesets where the maximum number of trade routes can vary, a city with more trade routes than the current maximum could not change them. Now, a single new trade route that would yield more than several of the current ones and bring the number of routes within the new maximum can be established. GNA#22243
Prevent team-mates from withdrawing shared vision from each other. GNA#22992 GNAPATCH#5472
Fix some bugs with visibility of unit movement: GNA#23030
If one of your nuclear units exploded over an enemy city, you could be left with an apparent immovable 'ghost' missile over the city.
Players witnessing paradrops through shared vision could fail to see the unit.
When a technology or similar effect increased city vision radius (such as Electricity in civ2civ3), the benefit was not immediately applied to existing cities. GNA#23254
When an enemy pillages a vision-granting base such as a buoy, the base is now removed from the victim's view of the map. GNA#22863
When a disaster causes loss of production progress in a city, close some loopholes that allowed recovery in some circumstances. GNA#23218
CHANGES AFFECTING OTHER RULESETS / MODDERS EDIT:
script.lua is now evaluated before default.lua, so that rulesets can pre-empt signal handlers set by by default.lua (currently "hut_enter" and "city_lost"). GNA#23101
Previously, only completion of a mine would cause units on adjacent tiles to check whether they could complete their activity (because it could prevent new irrigation in supplied rulesets). This check has been extended to all terrain-altering activities. GNAPATCH#4656
Logic that picks a good defender unit for a city now looks at the ruleset's BadCityDefender flag, rather than assuming that sea units have that flag and others do not. GNAPATCH#4838
If a ruleset triggered an effect off the "disaster" Lua signal, the game engine would still emit the message "We survived the disaster without serious damages", which could be inappropriate. This message has now been removed. GNA#22082
Fix a few cases where a negative value for a boolean effect would erroneously enable it: 'Fanatics' (GNA#23142), 'Unit_No_Lose_Pop' (GNA#23180), and 'Tile_Workable' (GNA#23266).
Fix possible AI confusion in rulesets with sea units with native bases. GNAPATCH#4836
More robustness against invalid rulesets. GNA#23107
Apply patch 3 to the included Lua 5.2.3. GNAPATCH#5839
CHANGES AFFECTING SERVER OPERATORS EDIT:
The --identity option now affects LAN announcements as well as metaserver announcements. GNAPATCH#5436
The /mapimg delete all command did not always delete every definition. GNA#23095
Server tab completion for save file names did not allow .xz compressed savegames. GNA#23105
Log any failure to save a game. GNAPATCH#5739
Fix a possible server crash on quit. GNA#22996
GENERAL EDIT:
Change the networking code on Windows to hopefully resolve "bind failed" errors when starting the server. GNA#22448
Fix a bug that could cause incorrect interpretation of non-ASCII characters in descriptions of nations in the extended set (nationset=all). GNA#23159 This is believed to be the root cause of client crashes on Windows in certain non-English locales with the extended nations. GNA#22638
Some optimization for speed, particularly on the server, some as a result of profiling analysis. GNAPATCH#5633 GNAPATCH#5632 GNA#23093 GNAPATCH#5778
Memory leak fixes. GNA#23169 GNA#23171 GNA#23170 GNA#23174 GNA#23173 GNAPATCH#5740 GNA#23221 GNA#23208 GNA#23209 GNAPATCH#5741 GNAPATCH#5749 GNA#23226 GNA#23234 GNA#23257
Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNAPATCH#5429 GNA#22850 GNAPATCH#5460 GNAPATCH#5473 GNA#22977 GNAPATCH#5453 GNAPATCH#5491 GNAPATCH#5579 GNA#23089 GNAPATCH#5653 GNAPATCH#5682 GNAPATCH#5659 GNA#23292 GNA#23167 GNAPATCH#5711 GNAPATCH#5722 GNA#23172 GNAPATCH#5752 GNAPATCH#5775 GNAPATCH#5780 GNAPATCH#5779 GNAPATCH#5777 GNAPATCH#5817 GNA#23268
AI EDIT:
The AI now treats players it has never met as potentially hostile; this should make it harder for human players to sneak forces into place before first diplomatic contact. GNAPATCH#5441
The city the AI has nominated to build wonders is now permitted to build defensive units instead if necessary. GNAPATCH#5588
The AI could continue trying to build worker units in inappropriate situations, such as where the population cost would cause a city to disband. GNA#22972
AI players could be prevented from ever making any new treaties by failing to remove clauses from an existing failed treaty. This particularly affected diplomacy between AI players. GNA#20761
The AI now better understands worker/settler units that cost more than 1 city population to build (as in the civ2civ3 ruleset). GNAPATCH#5440
Fix possible AI crashes in rulesets with ocean cities. GNA#23046 GNA#23227 GNA#23230 GNA#23250
Changes to the 'Cheating' AI level:
It now costs 20% more to incite cities belonging to the 'Cheating' AI level to revolt. GNAPATCH#5743 GNAPATCH#4754
The civ2civ3 ruleset was missing some of the standard bonuses for the 'Cheating' AI. GNAPATCH#5811
In servers with the threaded AI built in but not in use, a message queue would silt up causing unbounded memory and CPU use. GNA#23146
With the threaded AI, terrain improvement tasks assigned by cities were never dealt with. GNA#23079 GNA#23081
For AI developers: a new configure option --with-ai-lib forces the default AI code to be built in for use by a custom AI, even if none of the supplied AIs are being built. GNAPATCH#5447
CLIENTS EDIT:
New features and bugfixes in the Qt client:
Added on-line help. GNA#23009 GNA#23052 GNAPATCH#5546 GNAPATCH#5747 GNAPATCH#5748
Add bulk selection criteria to the city report. GNA#23033
Added 'Save' and 'Leave game' options. GNA#23011 GNA#23097 GNAPATCH#5600
Ask for confirmation to exit. GNA#23062
Can now change government by clicking on the main map government icon. GNAPATCH#5762
Menu option for unit to help build wonder. GNA#23100
Bug fix: city names with non-ASCII characters were displayed incorrectly. GNA#23007
Bug fix: city dialog claimed city was celebrating when it was not. GNAPATCH#5552
Bug fix: changing tileset did not fully refresh the science dialog. GNA#22935
Replaced some icons to fix a licensing issue. GNA#23094 GNA#23213
Other minor cosmetic tweaks. GNAPATCH#5760
The Windows installer included some unneeded cruft and is now smaller. GNA#23057
The client could crash if the tileset was changed with the science dialog open. GNA#22625
Area selection mode for cities (right-click-and-drag) now works in games with national borders disabled. GNA#23058
Some speedups to map drawing. GNAPATCH#5449 GNAPATCH#5450
Improve diagnostics for unknown client-specific command-line options. GNA#23035
(Gtk2) On Windows, the Gtk2 client could crash whenever windows were moved or resized. GNA#23022
(Gtk3) Fix a consistent crash on some systems whenever a city dialog is opened (for instance, when founding the first city). GNA#21942
(Gtk3) The Turn Done button now blinks if you are the last player to finish a turn in a multiplayer game. GNA#23269 (This functionality has theoretically been present in all clients, but has been more or less broken forever. It now takes into account disconnected players. GNA#23277)
(Gtk3) Make opening page work better on small screens. GNA#21028
(Gtk3) Clicking "Show All Cities" in the Goto/Airlift dialog could cause all cities to be focused in turn. GNA#20624
(Gtk) Minor visual tweaks. GNAPATCH#5456 GNAPATCH#5455 GNA#20772 GNAPATCH#5776
(SDL) It was not possible to withdraw shared vision from someone you were at war with. GNA#23210
(SDL) Correct shortcut key label for transform (to 'O' instead of 'M'). GNA#23162
(SDL) Fix a possible crash if font loading fails. GNA#23195
The Xaw client is now considered unmaintained. GNAPATCH#5504 GNAPATCH#5793 GNAPATCH#5792
TOOLS EDIT:
Fix several serious bugs in the Qt modpack installer that made it largely unusable, especially on Windows. GNAPATCH#5488 GNA#23067 GNA#23141 GNA#23029 GNAPATCH#5706
Fix error messages and possible crashes from modpack installers on Windows. GNA#22966
Fix possible bugs when closing the modpack installer. GNA#23055
Accept GUI-specific command-line arguments. GNA#23102
TILESETS / ART EDIT:
Better support for the civ2civ3 ruleset:
Tilesets can now provide distinct graphics for Tribal and Federation governments and the Internet wonder. GNAPATCH#5804 GNAPATCH#5801
All supplied tilesets now have graphics for all civ2civ3 elements except the Internet. GNAPATCH#5486 GNA#20030 GNA#23134 GNAPATCH#5805
Extra graphics and fixes in the Cimpletoon and Amplio2 tilesets:
Icons for unit upkeep above 2, to support rulesets where that's possible. Notably, this makes more obvious the longstanding behaviour that the multiplayer ruleset's Fundamentalism government has food upkeep 3. GNAPATCH#4486 GNAPATCH#5784
Distinct icons for all unit activities. GNA#20032 GNAPATCH#5840
"Outpost" and "airstrip" graphics for use by third-party rulesets (intended for Fortress and Airbase precursors). GNAPATCH#5027 GNAPATCH#5816 GNAPATCH#5841
Minor glitch fixes. GNAPATCH#5282
The Trident tileset now has graphics for Maglev. GNAPATCH#5598
The Cimpletoon and Trident tilesets now have Inaccessible terrain graphics. GNAPATCH#4160 GNA#23135
The editor 'road' tool now has a proper icon. GNA#20536
HELP / DOCUMENTATION EDIT:
The help for the civ2civ3 ruleset has been substantially reworked and expanded. GNAPATCH#4936 GNA#23255 GNAPATCH#5831 GNA#23278 GNAPATCH#5799
Unit help is now more specific about which terrain improvement actions units can do. GNAPATCH#5774 GNAPATCH#5783 GNAPATCH#5006 GNAPATCH#5797
Miscellaneous improvements to in-game text and user documentation. GNA#23039 GNAPATCH#5645 GNA#23197 GNAPATCH#5515 GNA#23074 GNA#23204 GNAPATCH#5751 GNAPATCH#5759 GNAPATCH#5761 GNA#23239 GNA#23240 GNAPATCH#5782 GNA#23241 GNA#23214 GNA#23252 GNAPATCH#5809 GNA#22294
Miscellaneous changes to developer/ruleset docs. GNAPATCH#5128 GNAPATCH#5477 GNA#23163 GNA#23145 GNA#23144 GNA#23200 GNAPATCH#5723 GNAPATCH#5744
Invisible changes to assist localization. GNAPATCH#4762 GNAPATCH#5758 GNAPATCH#5807 GNA#23280 GNA#23274
TRANSLATIONS EDIT:
Updated translations:
Complete translations: French, Russian, British English.
Incomplete translations: Polish (97.7% core, 100% nations), Catalan (96.3% core, 100% nations), Finnish (93% core, 87% nations), Japanese (84% core, 92% nations).
BUILD/PORTABILITY EDIT:
Fix failure to build twice in a row due to missing mkinstalldirs. GNA#22773
Improve diagnostic if configure fails to find pkg-config (previously it was erroneously warning about libcurl). GNA#23133
The shipped Windows installer Makefile is now compatible with the environment that is used to build the Windows installers. GNA#23246 GNAPATCH#5845

New in Freeciv 2.4.4 (Dec 30, 2014)

2.4.4 is a bug-fix release. Notable bugs fixed include serious issues in East Asian locales on Windows, occasional inability to switch governments in the Gtk client, research in games with teams, and premature nuclear explosion.
SERVER / GENERAL EDIT:
Changes affecting players (supplied rulesets) Edit
Numerous fixes to research in games with teams:
With team_pooled_research enabled:
Technology cost now takes into account effects from all players in the team; previously it was picking a random player for penalties such as the Novice AI science penalty. GNAPATCH#5098
Similarly, tech upkeep now takes into account all players in a team. GNAPATCH#5099
If a technology is lost, all team members share the effects (such as losing their government), and all clients can see that the tech is lost. GNA#21935
All clients are kept up to date with accurate progress of current research. GNAPATCH#5100 GNAPATCH#5185
With team_pooled_research disabled: only one player per team was getting the free techs given at the start of the game (e.g., with the 'techlevel' setting). GNA#22522
Other fixes to tech loss:
The server's count of a player's technologies was not reduced. This could cause technology cost to be too high and have other bad effects. GNA#22579
Ruleset effects that survived the global loss of a technology (such as wonder obsoletion) did not survive a save/reload cycle. GNA#22909
Tech upkeep cost was slightly larger than intended. GNA#22912
When following orders into fogged territory, a unit will now abort its orders if it runs into an unexpected unit or city on its last step (rather than blindly attacking, etc). GNA#20618
Transported units or those in cities could fail to be revealed when entering an alliance. GNA#20726 GNA#22851
'unitwaittime' now applies to exploding nuclear units in place as well as to regular attacks. GNA#22838
Investigating an empty city that was previously known to contain units mistakenly displayed the former units as still present/supported. GNA#22498
When the 'foggedborders' server option was enabled, border information was not included in map transfers between players. GNA#22497
Fix a possible server crash when a diplomat is killed after bribing a unit. GNA#22762
Fix some assertion failures when changing player (for instance in edit mode). GNA#19848
Fix bugs with taking AI players and entering/leaving AI or 'away' mode: GNA#22716 GNAPATCH#5046
Taking an AI player could leave the player with invalid tax rates.
Putting a player who'd previously been /away under full AI control could leave them with the conservative 'away' skill level rather than a proper AI skill level.
AI state was not set up and cleared correctly when changing '/away' mode. For the classic AI, this could lead to incorrect defense calculations.
'autotoggle' and 'aitoggle' now work for barbarian players (as 'away' did before). GNA#22724
In the multiplayer ruleset, ensure notifications are sent out about new technologies gained from Philosophy or Darwin's Voyage. GNA#22783 GNAPATCH#5355 GNAPATCH#5358 GNA#22827
Prevent diplomacy with barbarian players in the civ1 and civ2 rulesets (in civ1, it was possible to attempt treaty with pirates but not barbarians). GNA#22727 GNA#22728
Prevent team-mates from withdrawing shared vision from each other. GNA#22992
Remove spurious assertion failures about MAP_MAX_LINEAR_SIZE when generating large maps. GNA#19429 GNA#22640
For the purposes of credit in the rank log, any user detaching from a player (even an observer) was resetting the username used for ranking. For now the ranking rules have been reverted to those used up until 2.3.2. GNA#22458
Fixes to voting:
Do not call votes which will immediately pass (for instance if a user is alone on a server). GNAPATCH#5181
Fix incorrect vote information displayed in a client which connects while a vote is in progress. GNA#22566
The 'surrender' command now does additional sanity checks. GNA#22622
Fix display of team names. GNA#22394
CHANGES AFFECTING OTHER RULESETS / MODDERS EDIT:
Fixes to rulesets with root requirements in their technology tree:
Fix general slowness (sometimes extreme) in such rulesets. GNA#22159 GNAPATCH#5357 GNA#22876
Research could fail to pick the next technology toward a faraway goal. GNA#22789
CHANGES AFFECTING SERVER OPERATORS EDIT:
Patch CVE-2014-5461 in Freeciv's embedded Lua 5.1 interpreter. This could conceivably allow a malicious modpack or script to escape the sandbox. GNA#23031
Fix a possible server crash on quit. GNA#22996
Creating a player midgame (with /create or Lua script) didn't initialize city style and gender correctly. GNA#22832
The /create command now validates the AI type argument better. GNA#22697
When built without readline support, the server could stop accepting input after an empty line. GNA#18254
More robustness against loading invalid savegames. GNA#22523 GNA#21327
GENERAL EDIT:
Several fixes to pathfinding, used for client goto and for the AI:
Units which will be unable to move next turn but still have move points this turn (for instance due to tech loss) are now handled correctly. (This could lead to premature nuclear explosion in rulesets where nuclear units require extra technology to move, such as the civ2civ3 add-on.) GNA#22569
A collection of general fixes which, together with client-specific fixes, we hope will resolve a client crash observed on Windows (GNA#21774), and probably fix other bugs too. GNAPATCH#5190 GNA#22693 GNA#22756 GNA#22755
Other minor fixes and speed improvements. GNA#22636 GNA#21938
Already-built wonders are now dismissed when considering what players can ever build. This affects the client city UI and may also affect AI behavior. GNA#22667
Fix a bug which could cause strings to contain invalid/truncated UTF-8 sequences. GNA#22885
Fix/improve diagnostic messages in error cases, notably including network failures. GNA#22481 GNA#22503 GNA#22462 GNA#22706 GNA#22729 GNA#22282
Fix a possible crash when an --enable-debug build tried to print a very deep backtrace. GNA#22854
Minor speed optimization. GNAPATCH#5154
Memory savings and leak fixes. GNA#21552 GNA#22582 GNA#22583 GNA#22587 GNA#22589 GNA#22626 GNA#22627 GNA#22629 GNA#22630 GNA#22631 GNA#22632 GNA#22670 GNAPATCH#5123
Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNAPATCH#5111 GNAPATCH#5167 GNAPATCH#5182 GNAPATCH#5192 GNA#22824 GNAPATCH#5381 GNA#22781 GNAPATCH#5298 GNAPATCH#5299 GNAPATCH#5297 GNAPATCH#5296 GNA#22955 GNAPATCH#5473 GNA#22977
AI EDIT:
The AI was undervaluing units defined as good defenders in the ruleset, and overvaluing 'OK' defenders. GNA#22617
The AI could continue trying to build worker units in inappropriate situations, such as where the population cost would cause a city to disband. GNA#22972
The AI now considers the effect of the 'diplcost' setting when evaluating the value of a gold transfer clause in a treaty. GNAPATCH#5399
CLIENTS EDIT:
The Windows Gtk client is built against a different Gtk version, fixing major problems in East Asian locales, including inability to use the chatline and other text boxes, and failure to display the online help. GNA#21038 GNA#22607
Fix a longstanding bug in the Gtk client that could make it impossible to select a new government. GNA#18764
The client now supports loading a save file from the command line directly, with the --file command line option. GNAPATCH#3180
The 'Explode Nuclear' command is now more careful; previously, if the nuclear unit was unable to reach the specified destination (or move at all), it would explode regardless (this could happen due to 'unitwaittime', due to another bug). Also, the command now supports setting waypoints. GNA#21934 GNA#22624 GNA#22722
Various fixes to client goto. (Some of these may resolve a client crash observed on Windows: GNA#21774.)
Ignore duplicate waypoints in client goto, and attempts to go nowhere. GNAPATCH#5271 GNAPATCH#5191 GNA#22610
Improve behaviour if a unit moves or is lost while the user is in the middle of specifying a goto. GNAPATCH#5193 GNA#22577
Fix client error messages when manipulating units with a zero move rate. GNA#22571
Some fixes to spy and caravan action dialogs:
Some buttons were active when the relevant action was not available. GNA#22565 GNA#22592 GNA#22593
(Gtk) When multiple spy action dialogs were active at the same time, orders could end up being issued to the wrong unit. GNA#21636 GNAPATCH#4502 GNA#22595
Fix a cause of the client starting a server which it then could not connect to. GNA#22463
Fix error messages and possible instability when the city governor is working on a city that has been destroyed. GNA#16438
Fix some graphical glitches when moving units. GNA#19946 GNA#22770
Fix an error message when observing a player who is building a spaceship. GNA#22933
Map editor fixes and improvements:
Fix bugs in tile copy and paste:
Tiles were pasted in completely the wrong place. GNA#21655
Copying units could cause assertion failures. GNA#22558
The client could remember possibly-invalid tiles from one game to the next. GNA#22553
Prevent setting normal players to barbarian and other unsuitable nations. GNA#22742
(Gtk) With the 'Help' box checked in the science dialog, technology help would pop up randomly at turn end and other times. GNA#19882
(Gtk3) Fix a bug causing the chat window to be minimised after reconnecting, and assertion failures. GNA#21639 GNA#22673
(Gtk3) Various display issues:
Fix problems with flag display. GNA#21373 GNA#22457 GNA#22517
Fix fog-of-war in some tilesets. GNA#21601
Miscellaneous cosmetic tweaks. GNA#22671 GNA#22672
(SDL) Fix client crash when attempting industrial sabotage of a city with no buildings. GNA#22495
(SDL) Fix incorrect background color on some dialogs. GNA#22511
TILESETS / ART EDIT:
The Cimpletoon tileset now includes graphics for a Migrant unit, like other supplied tilesets. This is used for instance in the civ2civ3 add-on. GNA#20029
The Crusader nation was using a large flag by mistake in small tilesets such as Trident. GNA#22653
HELP / DOCUMENTATION EDIT:
Miscellaneous improvements to in-game text and user documentation. GNA#22513 GNA#22623 GNAPATCH#5314 GNA#22825 GNA#22823 GNA#22846 GNA#22869 GNAPATCH#5388 GNAPATCH#5389 GNA#22847 GNAPATCH#5452
Miscellaneous changes to developer/ruleset docs. GNA#22444 GNAPATCH#5183 GNA#22793 GNAPATCH#5356 GNAPATCH#5374 GNA#22848 GNAPATCH#5423
TRANSLATIONS EDIT:
Updated translations:
Complete translations: Catalan, French, Polish, British English, Spanish, Russian.
Incomplete translations: Finnish (97.1%).
BUILD/PORTABILITY EDIT:
Fix compilation with Glib older than 2.32. GNA#22467
Fix failure to build twice in a row due to missing mkinstalldirs. GNA#22773
Fix inability to compile with Python 3. GNA#22705
Fix some compiler warnings. GNA#22886 GNA#22895 GNA#22894 GNA#22915
New configure options --with-desktopdir and --with-appdatadir for finer control of installation locations. GNAPATCH#5047
Add search keywords to .desktop files. GNA#21573

New in Freeciv 2.4.3 (Aug 13, 2014)

Changes affecting players (supplied rulesets):
When units were moved in the aftermath of a broken alliance, the client could crash when manipulating those units. The server no longer sends unhelpful information which could trigger the crash in old clients, and the client is robust against this behaviour from old servers. GNA#21899
The server could leak information about how many units were in an enemy city, which a modified client could use to cheat. GNA#22049
Some players could be accidentally given free technologies at game start due to uninitialized memory. This was more likely to be noticeable with multiplayer games; it did not generally happen to the human player in a single-player game. GNA#22056
In team games with the server setting 'team_pooled_research' disabled, the server could crash, and team members' research goals still affected each other. GNA#21160 GNA#21161
A player unfortunate enough to lose their first city before acquiring their second would not get a free Palace in their second city. Also, non-barbarian players now get their free buildings if they acquire their first city by conquering or diplomacy rather than founding it themselves. GNA#22271 GNA#22343 GNA#22340
Games with large numbers of units and/or cities in their history (tens of thousands) could crash. GNA#21950
When a caravan arrived in a coastal city on a ship, the caravan arrival dialog was not being popped up. GNA#22054
When an attack can't be carried out, a reason is now given. GNAPATCH#4445 GNA#21693 GNA#21728 GNA#21733 GNA#21767
A unit could not conquer a city while carrying other units (this could happen with a Mech. Inf. carrying missiles in the experimental ruleset). GNA#20789
Fix assertion failures from a rare case of first contact between AIs triggered by unit movement from alliance breakup. GNA#22245
When a trade route is canceled due to a better one being established, the player whose action initiated this is now notified. GNAPATCH#4526
Diplomats/Spies could not steal Future Tech. GNA#22057
The multiplayer ruleset now defaults to an isometric topology, to match the client default. GNA#22325
civ1/civ2: Veteran Diplomats were vastly overpowered. Reduced their relative strength back to the level they had in 2.3.x. GNA#22202
civ2: Food upkeep for Settlers reduced from 3 to 2 under Communist and Fundamentalist governments. GNA#21519
civ2: Barbarian players without a capital no longer suffer from crippling (or any) shield waste. GNA#21629
Prevent Nuclear units in supplied rulesets from gaining useless veteran levels from Airports. GNA#22164
Barbarian and civil war leaders are now reported with the correct title for their gender (previously they were always created as female). GNA#21853
Changes affecting other rulesets / modders:
Fixed suppression of veteran information for units with the 'NoVeteran' flag. This could affect rulesets with units which can be trained as veteran but can't gain veterancy through experience. GNA#22171 GNA#22199 GNA#22201
Fix trouble loading a savefile from a ruleset where the maximum number of veteran levels for a unit has decreased in more recent versions. GNA#22172
Enable display of mines on all kinds of terrain in all supplied tilesets, to support modpacks with different mining rules from the supplied rulesets (for instance civ2civ3, where Tundra can be mined). GNA#21559 GNA#22424
In rulesets with self root_req technologies, technology loss due to tech upkeep can no longer cause loss of such technologies. GNA#22161
Rulesets containing unit classes other than land units which are subject to zones of control could cause erroneous assertion failures. GNA#21777
The TerrainClass, Base, and CityTile requirement types with Adjacent/CAdjacent ranges were not checking the center tile. Now they do, for consistency with other requirement types. This has no effect on the supplied rulesets. GNA#21470
Units could be left stranded in non-native terrain such as ocean, if they moved onto a tile containing a suitable transport that was itself being transported (loading onto such transports not being permitted). For instance, in the civ2civ3 ruleset, troops moving onto a Helicopter on a Carrier on the ocean could be left dangling over the ocean when the Carrier moved on. GNA#22389
All attempts to enforce restrictions on the depth and type of nested transport units have been removed, as they were broken. 2.5.x will enforce these restrictions properly. GNA#22050
In a ruleset where a nation's first city is granted a free great wonder, clients would not be reliably updated with its effects. GNA#22276
If city removal caused removal of infrastructure (such as roads in a disbanded ocean city), this would not reliably be sent to clients. GNA#22074
A base added to a tile via Lua script would not reliably be sent to clients. GNA#21738
Calling (Tile):has_base() in Lua with a nonexistent base name could crash the server. GNA#22341
Fix trouble with changing an existing tile label on a tile. GNA#21657
Fix trouble loading a pre-2.3 savefile from a ruleset which has since had citizen nationality enabled. GNA#20538
Fix trouble in the client help for nations with an explicit rule_name. GNA#22241
Extra sanity checking when loading rulesets. GNAPATCH#4682 GNAPATCH#4972
Changes affecting server operators:
A game with alternating movement (via the phasemode setting) could, when saved and reloaded, give some players a second chance to move within the same turn. GNA#21632
Loading xz-compressed savegames could fail. GNA#21603
The '/write' command wrote out scripts some of whose settings did not take effect, because the 'rulesetdir' command at the end reset settings set earlier in the script. GNA#22447
A server started with the -e option erroneously sent a message to its metaserver claiming that it would restart soon rather than shutting down. GNA#21504
Failure to set up the multicast socket for LAN game announcements could cause trouble later. GNA#21781
When the server was in edit mode, detached clients could receive unwanted packets and emit warnings. GNA#21468
The script for creation of MySQL authentication databases no longer uses syntax incompatible with recent MySQL/MariaDB. GNA#21315
Newly created savegames contain information to speed up creation of a scenario list in future versions. GNAPATCH#4815
Fix a very minor memory leak in the island-based map generator. GNA#21553
General:
Some optimization for speed, particularly on the server, some as a result of profiling analysis. GNAPATCH#4609 GNAPATCH#4563 GNAPATCH#4672 GNA#21972 GNAPATCH#4678 GNAPATCH#4694 GNAPATCH#4883 GNAPATCH#4934 GNA#22392
Fix logging in a rare situation. GNA#21658
Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNAPATCH#4469 GNAPATCH#4483 GNAPATCH#4626 GNA#21895 GNAPATCH#4693 GNA#22106 GNA#22183 GNA#22277 GNAPATCH#4937 GNA#22345 GNA#22380 GNA#22364
AI Edit:
Fix a crash related to AI diplomacy in a game with alternating phases, and possibly other similar issues. GNA#21616 GNAPATCH#4515
Fix broken AI evaluation of government benefits. GNA#21742
The AI now fears transport units which can carry any units which can take over cities (such as Carriers which can carry Helicopters), rather than land units. GNA#21892
Fixes to the AI's ability to find a beachhead to land troops. GNA#21913
When the AI lost control of a cargo unit, any ferry unit assigned to it could fail to be freed for another purpose, possibly stimulating excessive AI boat production. GNAPATCH#4711
The AI now counts the pillaging of any fortress it owns against the responsible player, even if that caused it to lose the territory on which the fortress stood. GNA#22445
The default AI no longer attempts to read the mind of its ally concerning intentions to declare war -- this could go wrong for human allies, or in principle for custom AI implementations. GNA#21630
Fix a case where an AI sea bodyguard could abandon its charge after meeting it. This doesn't affect the supplied rulesets. GNAPATCH#4864
Allow the AI to consider building-specific benefits with some ruleset constructs (which are not used in the supplied ruleset). GNA#21852
Some fixes to the AI's evaluation of benefits in rulesets using negated requirements. Does not affect the supplied rulesets. GNAPATCH#4451 GNA#22399
The AI's evaluation of improvement benefits was broken in the presence of ruleset effect clauses with zero value. (Should not affect most rulesets, but may sometimes occur when testing a new ruleset.) GNA#22363
Clients:
Goto pathfinding no longer treats transports with orders as potential refuel points -- for instance, an aircraft will not plan to land on a Carrier that's en route to somewhere else and will likely not be there any more when the aircraft arrives. GNA#20625
Fix some possible goto/pathfinding issues for units with more than one turn of fuel, such as bombers. GNAPATCH#4931
Research rates that are negative (due to tech upkeep) or very large were not sent to the client correctly and could cause warnings. Both client and server must be upgraded for this fix to be fully effective. GNA#21549
Improvements to the breakdown of city output in city dialog info popups:
If a city's trade is restricted by the 'notradesize'/'fulltradesize' settings, this size penalty is now displayed separately, instead of being lumped in confusingly with regular corruption. GNA#21409
If the client can't correctly account for city output (may happen with modpacks), it now acknowledges this rather than displaying sums that don't add up. GNA#21442
The client no longer overrides link text in messages from the server, avoiding nonsensical messages like "You already had a city called Helsinki. The city was renamed to Helsinki." GNA#21326
Preparing the list of scenarios can take a while, so the client now displays a message while that's going on. GNAPATCH#4814
Menu music wasn't being played after leaving a game and returning to the main menu. GNA#21635 GNA#22077
Copying and pasting in the editor caused spurious/mangled tile labels to appear. GNA#21656
The editor spuriously prevented setting the veteran level of units with the NoVeteran flag. GNA#22198
(Gtk) The apostrophe key now focuses the chatline in pregame (as it already did during play). GNA#22429 GNA#22453
(Gtk) The client now quits more cleanly in some circumstances. GNA#21806
(Gtk) Fix an assertion failure on quit after opening the Lua console. GNA#22431
(Gtk2) Minor improvement to error reporting when loading graphics fails. GNAPATCH#4478
(Gtk3) Clicking on specialists in the city dialog did the wrong thing. GNA#22366
(Gtk3) Fix some causes of slowness with the Gtk3 client and its default theme. GNAPATCH#4590 GNA#21726
(Gtk3) Client erroneously claimed to support XPM format, meaning it could potentially choke with modpacks containing XPM files (although it's unlikely such modpacks exist). GNA#21604
(Gtk3) Fix some minor cosmetic issues. GNA#22078 GNAPATCH#4786
(SDL) Display real names of veteran levels instead of always saying 'veteran'. GNA#22170
(SDL) Fix unclean shutdown. GNA#22124
Tools:
The modpack installer could become unstable due to incorrect thread usage. GNA#22168
Help / Documentation:
The documentation of the --scenarios option was completely wrong. GNA#21713
Fix generated help text for negated requirements; these were incorrect, for instance for the Aqueduct buildings in the civ2civ3 ruleset. GNAPATCH#3841
Autogenerated help for governments now documents non-integer upkeep factors, and documents veteran bonuses better. GNAPATCH#4450 GNA#21624
Miscellaneous other improvements to in-game text and user documentation. GNA#21631 GNAPATCH#4733 GNA#22150 GNA#22152 GNA#22165 GNA#22246 GNAPATCH#4873 GNA#21446 GNAPATCH#4908 GNA#22281 GNA#22300 GNAPATCH#4125 GNA#21550 GNA#22405 GNA#22416 GNAPATCH#5012 GNA#22427 GNA#22430 GNAPATCH#4400 GNAPATCH#4507 GNA#21712 GNA#22127 GNAPATCH#5016
Miscellaneous changes to developer/ruleset docs. GNAPATCH#4689 GNA#22200 GNAPATCH#4907
Invisible changes to assist localization. GNA#21528 GNA#22322 GNA#22303 GNA#22415
Translations:
Updated translations:
Complete translations: French, Polish, British English, Spanish, Russian.
Incomplete translations: Catalan (>99.9%), Finnish (97.3%), Scottish Gaelic (95.8%), German (95.8%).
Build/portability:
Building with --enable-shared could create an executable which failed for lack of a readline symbol. This trouble could also show up at build time using the 'gold' linker. GNA#22076
Building could fail to link against libintl when needed. GNA#22266
Building with a recent libtool could fail with Lua errors. GNA#21696 GNA#21897
Add a configure check for _setjmp(); without this, building failed for the Haiku platform. GNA#22320
configure now correctly checks for a minimum Curl version of 7.9.7. GNAPATCH#4716
Clarify configure's error message when no client can be built. GNAPATCH#4870
Fix various compiler warnings, many detected by the Clang toolchain. GNA#21495 GNA#21496 GNAPATCH#4492 GNAPATCH#4504 GNA#18872 GNAPATCH#4785 GNA#19307 GNA#21773

New in Freeciv 2.5.0 Beta 1 (Aug 13, 2014)

New in Freeciv 2.4.0 RC 2 (Sep 2, 2013)

New in Freeciv 2.4.0 RC 1 (Aug 20, 2013)

Server / General:
Gameplay:
City centre tiles now lose their automatic irrigation bonus if a mine is built on them, since mines and irrigation cannot coexist on a tile. GNA#20932
Similarly, in the supplied rulesets, cities on a tile with a mine can no longer get a farmland bonus.
Fix a pathfinding bug where aerial units would stop to refuel at any city or airbase they passed through, regardless of need. GNA#20786
Cities were erroneously enjoying martial law benefits from unlimited numbers of units, even under governments with a Martial_Law_Max specified (such as Monarchy and Communism in the default ruleset). GNA#20971
Auto-settler units would revert to manual control when moving between adjacent landmasses through a transport. GNAPATCH#3904
When a city chose food-consuming units to disband due to starvation, it could choose units not actually consuming food currently, for instance due to government-type related free upkeep. For instance this could lead to cities disbanding all their units in the 'civ2civ3' ruleset. GNAPATCH#3902
Unit transport related fixes:
Fix assertion failures and similar problems associated with loaded transports of allied players (with whom you don't have shared vision) going out of sight. GNA#20774 GNA#20727 GNA#20837
Prevent units in nested transports (which can't disembark) from being chosen to attempt to defend a tile. GNA#20747
Fixes for undisbandable units in destroyed transports:
If such a unit was teleported to safety and immediately died (for instance due to auto-attack), the server could crash. GNA#20626
Such cargo on non-boat-like transports are now saved in more circumstances (this does not affect the supplied rulesets). (part of GNAPATCH#3856)
If a city becomes landlocked due to terrain change, its ocean-requiring buildings should now correctly be sold. GNA#20902
When 'tinyisles' was disabled, the map generator was overenthusiastic about removing 1x1 islands from the map; it could also remove peninsulas from continents in some circumstances. GNA#20847
Clerical:
Do not prohibit loading a savegame where the number of surviving players has fallen below the server's 'minplayers' setting. GNA#20835
When loading a savegame with automatic 'mapimg' image saving enabled, do not overwrite an image created previously at the start of a turn with a new one. GNA#20079
The Windows packages now include support for saving map images in formats other than PPM (such as PNG and JPEG). GNAPATCH#4095
When a unit is created in the or, assign it a homecity appropriate for its type more often. (part of GNAPATCH#3856)
Fix a possible infinite loop when logging character encoding conversion errors. GNA#20721
Fix a possible crash when sending server details to the metaserver. (part of GNA#20778)
Fix a minor memory leak. GNA#20788
Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNAPATCH#3891 GNA#20777 GNA#20903
Clients:
Speed up movement drawing of city-building units (the client was redrawing more than necessary). GNA#20905
Fix a possible crash that could occur in circumstances such as viewing the terrain activity popup. (part of GNA#20778)
Fix a minor memory leak. GNAPATCH#3896
(Gtk3) Fix an assertion failure / crash when closing the unit selection dialog. GNA#19486
(Gtk3) Refactoring which should have no visible effect. GNAPATCH#3550
(SDL) In tilesets with unit orientation (such as Cimpletoon), do not use randomly-oriented unit sprites in the unit orders or production display. GNA#20998
Tilesets / Art:
Remove technology root_reqs from the experimental ruleset for now, due to bugs hindering their use. GNAPATCH#3912
In the civ1 and civ2 rulesets, the Oracle bonus was too generous in the rare case where the player gained the Oracle by conquering without knowing Mysticism; it should (and now does) double the effect of Temples, which in this case means +1 content citizen rather than +2. GNA#20616
Other rulesets:
Prevent units being spawned to terrain to which they are not native:
Partisans GNAPATCH#3869
Settlers and mercenaries from huts GNAPATCH#3895 GNAPATCH#3909
Ruleset sanity checking could erroneously emit warnings about valid effects combinations if negated requirements were used (such as a base that could not be built on either mountains or hills). In addition, warnings are now emitted if a requirement and its exact negative are simultaneously specified, as this is probably a mistake in the ruleset. GNAPATCH#3835
The Lua definitions const.TRUE and const.FALSE (new in 2.4.0-beta1) have been removed; the const module remains. GNAPATCH#3937
AI:
When assessing the threat from enemy units near cities, fear any unit that can take over a city (such as helicopters), rather than just land units. GNA#20785
Reduced the weighting of the AI's assessment of defence strength, so that it defends its own cities more convincingly, and is less fearful of its enemy's defenders when attacking their cities. GNAPATCH#3960
The AI now tends to keep a unit constantly defending each of its cities even in the absence of an obvious threat, rather than relying on being able to acquire one when a threat appears. GNAPATCH#3958
Remove some assumptions about units' ability to attack from/to non-native terrain. Most likely to make a difference with unusual rulesets. GNAPATCH#3837
Military land units with nothing to do were seeking coastal cities to defend rather than just the nearest, for no good reason. (part of GNAPATCH#3856)
The AI no longer hardcodes a food_cost of 2 when assessing potential city sites. This makes no difference to its behaviour with the supplied rulesets. GNA#20856
Fix a possible crash when starting the (experimental) threaded AI. (part of GNA#20778
Help / Documentation:
Remove some redundant information from online help for ocean-going units. (part of GNAPATCH#3815)
Miscellaneous improvements to developer/ruleset docs. GNAPATCH#3883 GNAPATCH#3929
Translations:
Updated translations:
Complete translations: Catalan, French, Polish, British English.
Incomplete translations: Scottish Gaelic (95%), German (91%), Finnish (84%).
Build/portability:
Fix a pthread-related build failure observed on MinGW. GNA#20950
Windows builds using the Crosser framework will no longer use pthread even if it appears to be present. GNAPATCH#4001
Fix a build failure on OpenBSD due to failure to find intptr_t. GNA#20946
Fix a build warning (which could prevent building with --enable-debug due to -Werror). GNA#20973
Fix a build warning in non-debug builds. GNA#20750

New in Freeciv 2.4.0 Beta 2 (Apr 29, 2013)

Server / General:
Gameplay:
Bug fix: if the server had to retry map generation, no resources would be generated.
Bug fix: various trouble with unloading transports if the server had been built without assertions enabled (--disable-debug option to configure).
Bug fixes in unit destruction :
When a transport unit was lost, loss of nested transports and their cargo was not handled correctly, leading to assertion failures and other misbehavior.
A loaded transport lost to causes such as autoattack could cause an assertion failure.
Many more cases of unit loss now contribute to the final score, notably including units on board a transport unit when it was lost.
The "unit_lost" scripting signal was not emitted for units on board a transport unit when it was lost. (This bug had no effect on the supplied rulesets.)
Cases where a unit was killed due to a custom script could have led to crashes/instability.
In complicated cases of nested transports, it was possible for non-allied units to occupy the same tile.
Bug fix: when a unit was automatically moved to a transporter to save it from drowning or running out of fuel, other players could continue to see the transporter as empty.
Nuclear units no longer autoattack.
Bug fixes in unit conversion and upgrade:
Prevent cases where units could be converted or upgraded to a type only capable of carrying different cargo to the current cargo.
Prevent conversion of a unit to a type that could not exist on the current tile.
Units of types the owner cannot build are no longer prevented from upgrade.
Bug fix: during long activities, such as a single Engineer unit transforming land to or from ocean, a network value could overflow, causing the client's display of remaining time to become too large. Both client and server must be upgraded for this fix to be effective.
Bug fix: quell spurious "No diplomat action possible" message when an ordinary attempt to move a diplomatic unit failed.
Bug fix: assertion failure when many autosettlers try to work on the same project.
Bug fix: when a border source such as a fortress is occupied by a unit of a nation other than the owner at the time a treaty between the two players breaks, or a ceasefire runs out, ownership now transfers to that of the occupying unit.
When acquiring a technology such as Philosophy which gives further techs by an unusual route (such as through a hut), all progress toward the current research target was lost. Now it is preserved (although 'freecost' is applied).
It is now possible for bulb count to become negative, due to tech loss.
Bug fix: in tech loss situations, future tech would fail to be removed from a player, with an assertion failure.
Bug fix: when a city is traded and hence units change ownership, it wasn't checked whether those units provided diplomatic contact to a new nation.
Fix assertion failure when city radius changes.
Bug fix: the full range of the 'trademindist' setting (1-999) could not be transmitted over the network to the client. This caused a cosmetic problem in the help for the 'civ2civ3' ruleset.
Bug fix: assertion failure during map generation when no unit in the ruleset satisfied the first role in 'startunits'.
Freeciv now infers that ruleset effects are possible in more cases where incomplete information is available. This is a low-level change whose effects are hard to quantify, but should be more correct; it is most likely to affect client behavior and the AI.
Clerical:
Bug fix: if the server was started with one ruleset and then another with a different number of governments was loaded (e.g., 'default' then 'multiplayer'), it could crash.
Bug fixes and improvements to the '/delegate' function (GNAPATCH#3743), including:
If a previously detached user used '/delegate take' to temporarily control a player, the server would crash when they relinquished control.
Admins can now forcibly '/delegate cancel' an active delegation (previously an attempt would cause a crash).
A user observing a particular player then using '/delegate take' to take over control of that player now works.
More documentation.
Changes to scorelog/ranklog:
The ranklog format has changed; it now includes individual players' scores, and can be parsed more unambiguously.
A ranklog is now generated when the game ends without a victory condition (due to reaching endturn or /endgame, for instance); in this case the player or team with the highest total score is considered to have won.
Player deletion was logged incorrectly in scorelog, causing warnings when resuming the game from a save file.
When a new user took over a player from another user, the old username could persist in the ranklog file.
Taking over a dead AI player no longer changes their username in the ranklog.
Bug fix: enabling scorelog twice (for instance by loading a game with it enabled to a restarted server) caused an assertion failure.
Bugfixes and improvements to map image support ('/mapimg'):
Automatically generated images are now saved to the savegame directory, rather than the current working directory.
Bug fix: attempting to save a map image before the map has been generated no longer crashes the server.
Better error reporting
An internal 64kbyte limit on string length has been removed. Among other things, this allows longer Lua scripts in scenarios.
When a new nation is created in the or, city style and leader sex are now set appropriately (previously they were always European and male).
Bug fixes to the maxplayers setting
When near the limit of 128 total players, there could be trouble at the point of needing to create a new civil war or barbarian player.
The /create command in mid-game did not honour the maxplayers setting.
maxplayers could be set incorrectly when loading a saved game, leading to errors later.
Bug fix: assertion failure when loading a pre-2.3 savegame with a unit on an allied transport.
When a scenario is saved, scenario information is included earlier in the file, to speed up the 'Start Scenario Game' dialog.
Give an error when the --auth (-a) option is given without also specifying --Database (-D), since it will do nothing useful.
Stop an internal counter in savefiles increasing needlessly for sentried units. This should have no functional effect.
More robustness against malformed network packets.
Fix some minor memory leaks.
General robustness improvements not known to be related to specific symptoms.
Various internal changes which should only affect developers.
Clients:
The client could crash when your name was mentioned in chat but you had set the 'highlight your player/user name' setting to no color. This could also prevent any connection to a server with the event cache enabled if your player name had been mentioned in the past.
Older clients can work around this bug by setting a highlight color in their local options (you may need to start a local game in order to access the configuration dialog).
Fixes to the notification of new Freeciv versions:
The client could crash when checking the latest version on the metaserver (shortly after clicking "Connect to Network Game"). This is likely to start manifesting in existing 2.4.0-beta1 clients now that 2.4.0-beta2 has been released.
2.4.0-beta1 would erroneously consider itself to be newer than 2.4.0, when that is released. 2.4.0-beta2 and later will get this right.
The latest version from the metaserver is always logged if verbose logs are enabled.
The Gtk clients could fail to wait for their internal game server to start fully after front page buttons like 'Load Saved Game' were pressed, leading to symptoms such as '/load: Name "./citizens.sav.gz" disallowed for security reasons.'
Fix a couple of issues with units with a zero move rate (no such units exist in the supplied rulesets):
The 'exhausted' icon was always shown for such units; now it is never shown.
Such units are now not skipped when focusing on the next unit.
The client could fail to keep track of transported units correctly, leading to issues such as a unit still appearing to be on a boat when in fact it was not.
Fix a possible assertion failure when an enemy unit occupied one of your cities.
Pathfinding (goto) now tends to take a more direct route for the last step of a path when it doesn't matter how many move points are left (e.g., an attack). Previously it could prioritise movement points and leave the attacker in a vulnerable position. The previous behavior can be forced using waypoints, if desired.
Add a client option to automatically accept a tileset suggestion for the current ruleset.
Bug fix: after loading a new tileset, viewing the map with terrain disabled would not display correctly and cause numerous assertion failures.
Bug fix: on new installations, the client could fail to pick the highest-priority tileset; for instance, if both 'amplio' and 'amplio2' were installed, it could pick 'amplio' instead of 'amplio2' despite the latter's higher priority.
Bug fix: for tilesets which specify both orientation-specific and "icon" sprites for units, the orientation-specific ones were ignored.
Fix possible instability when loading some tilesets.
Bug fix: when the 'native tiles' map view option was selected, the forbidden tiles for the selected unit would be shown on the city map, which was confusing.
In the Gtk clients, when using a tileset with rotatable unit sprites such as Cimpletoon, the worklist would show units with a random orientation, changing on mouse-over. Now a fixed orientation is displayed.
In the or, the player vision control in the tile dialog has been disabled. It had never worked, and caused numerous assertion failures while using the or in 2.4.0-beta1.
Bug fix: if for some reason the client couldn't gain full control of its locally started server, it would fail to shut that server down.
The client now performs stricter validation of filenames received from the server.
Sources for the old win32 client (which has not built for years) are no longer included in the distribution.
Font styles were not being applied in several places; for instance the city dialog did not correctly use a fixed-width font when configured to.
The initial state of the chatline toolbar is set correctly
The origin of the unit popup menu in the city dialog has been moved to not cover the unit icon.
A batch of changes to use more modern features of the Gtk3 toolkit and remove deprecation warnings when compiling. These mostly do not affect functionality, although the appearance of some parts of the client has changed since beta1.
Tilesets / Art:
The Cimpletoon tileset now has sprites for Elephants and Crusaders, making a complete set of sprites for units in the supplied rulesets.
The 'native tiles' map view option now has a new graphic in all supplied tilesets.
Some internal SVG format fixes in some of the supplied flags to allow their use in web browsers; this has no effect on Freeciv itself. Note that not all flags have been fixed in this release.
Gameplay / Rules Changes:
Supplied rulesets:
The supplied "Earth (classic/small)" (earth-80x50-v3) scenario could not be loaded at all in a release build.
In the 'multiplayer' ruleset, the ability to build buoys has been removed, as they do not work well with national borders disabled (the default for this ruleset). It is expected that they'll be re-enabled in a future major release.
The default map topology for new games has been changed to isometric, to match the default Amplio2 tileset.
Bug fix: in the 'multiplayer' ruleset, players could gain free techs multiple times by rebuilding Darwin's Voyage.
Quell some warnings when loading the civ2 ruleset.
Various fixes to leader titles.
Other rulesets:
Bug fix: the tech upkeep with tech_cost_style 2 or 4 was much lower than intended; it only took into account a single tech rather than all preceding techs. As a result, tech upkeep in such rulesets will greatly increase.
The downloadable 'civ2civ3' modpack has thus been updated to disable tech upkeep (as of version 2.4-3). If you had downloaded this modpack previously, you should probably fetch the new version when upgrading to 2.4.0-beta2 or later.
The give_technology() Lua script function now returns 'nil' if the player already has the technology, as documented; previously it returned the Tech_Type 'None'.
Remove impediments to rulesets having a start year other than -4000:
The MinYear requirement can now be a year before -4000.
A hardcoded start year of is no longer sent to the metaserver in pregame.
Some previously accepted badly-formatted ruleset constructs now cause hard errors, to make typos and other errors in rulesets more obvious to ruleset authors:
Unknown effect requirement types (previously these were silently interpreted as "None").
Errors in requirements lists.
Unknown unit type/class and improvement flags.
AI:
The city governor logic has been reworked, fixing various issues such as unexpected tax collectors in cities with many buildings, and a need to set minimal gold surplus to a lower target than expected.
The AI's workers/settlers, and human players' autosettlers, will now automatically stop what they are doing and go elsewhere if threatened by an enemy unit and there is no defender on their tile. (Currently only threats from land units are considered.)
Improvements to AI settler management:
The AI now considers worker units' food consumption (e.g. Settlers) to be less of a factor when deciding whether to build such units, to encourage it to do so.
Fix poor handling of rulesets containing boats which can only carry a single unit. Previously, the AI would generate settlers with the intention of sending them out on such boats, but then refuse to do so due to lack of room for a bodyguard, regardless of whether one was needed, often hurting expansion and leaving useless settlers. Now it only insists on room for a bodyguard if one is actually needed.
Improvements to AI city defense:
Reduced the tendency of AI city defenders to be lured out of their city by nearby targets even in the presence of threats.
Cities in grave danger of invasion with no defending units were tending to build City Walls, uselessly. They will now prioritise acquiring a defender.
Improvements to AI caravan management:
Caravans in transit are now taken into account when a city is deciding whether to build more caravans. Previously, a city could end up building endless caravans if existing ones did not complete their trade route.
Fix bugs with evaluation of units' defense ability:
The additional defense bonus of CanFortify units (e.g. land units in the default ruleset) over other units was not considered when evaluating units as city defenders.
All units were assumed to get a defense bonus from terrain, rather than just units with the TerrainDefense flag.
Fix some incorrect inferences about the ability of transported units or units in cities to defend; these are most likely to affect unusual rulesets (e.g., those with ocean cities).
Fixes for some server crashes:
In rulesets with tech upkeep, division by zero could occur when evaluating the value of 'Tech_Parasite' effects (e.g., Great Library), players who are losing bulbs are no longer considered.
Division by zero could occur when evaluating poor city locations.
The server could crash if a caravan became homeless. Such caravans now look for a new home city before they do anything else.
The server could crash when a barbarian leader died.
Fixes for some assertion failures:
In rulesets with paratroopers and ocean cities.
When the server 'phasemode' setting was set to an alternating-move mode.
Value logic was considering effects with negative value as enabling boolean effects when choosing between governments.
AI behavior is likely to change as a result of GNA#20304.
Help / Documentation:
The online help for each terrain type now shows which types of units can traverse it.
A new file doc/README.AI_modules describes how to configure and use the new AI modules feature.
A new file NEWS-2.4 in the distribution lists differences between minor revisions.
A manual page is now included for the 'freeciv-manual' utility.
Other minor improvements to user documentation and in-game text.
Miscellaneous improvements to developer/ruleset docs.
Invisible changes to assist translation.
Translations:
New translation: Traditional Chinese (40%)
Updated translations:
Complete translations: Polish, Catalan, French, British English.
Incomplete translations: Spanish (99.2%), Scottish Gaelic (93%), German (79%).
In the Finnish localisation, sentences now start with capital letters in more cases.
Build/portability:
Use intptr_t, fixing an issue on LLP64 platforms such as Windows native 64-bit builds.
The configure script could fail to detect SDL_mixer, for instance on Fedora with hardened build options set.
The embedded Lua build now respects the --without-readline configure option, fixing a possible failure to build on systems without readline.
No longer unconditionally try to use pthread; this was causing './configure' to fail on MinGW.
Include correct header for basename().
Fix some possible SQLite configuration errors.
Fix a PostgresQL build failure.
Fix a Lua-related build failure on Mac OS X.
Fix failure when cross-compiling with MagickWand support. Fix a warning leading to build failure when compiling with MySQL and --enable-debug=yes, seen on OpenSUSE 12.3.
Future-proof against automake versions which ignore ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS.
Some fixes to the supplied Debian packaging material.
Fix various compiler warnings. It's now possible to build Freeciv with GCC 4.7 optimisation level -O3 without any warnings.
Miscellaneous autoconf build system / portability fixes.

New in Freeciv 2.3.4 (Feb 18, 2013)

Gameplay:
Bug fix: when a unit was automatically moved to a transporter to save it from drowning or running out of fuel, the transporter could continue to appear empty. GNA#20454
Bug fixes in unit conversion and upgrade GNA#20452:
Prevent cases where units could be converted or upgraded to a type only capable of carrying different cargo to the current cargo.
Prevent conversion of a unit to a type that could not exist on the current tile.
Units of types the owner cannot build are no longer prevented from upgrade. GNA#20460
Bug fix: quell spurious "No diplomat action possible" message when an ordinary attempt to move a diplomatic unit failed. GNA#20150
Following on from a fix in 2.3.3, when a border source such as a fortress is occupied by a unit of a nation other than the owner when a ceasefire runs out, ownership now transfers to that of the occupying unit. GNA#20348
When acquiring a technology such as Philosophy which gives further techs by an unusual route (such as through a hut), all progress toward the current research target was lost. Now it is preserved (although 'freecost' is applied). GNA#20362
Bug fix: when a city is traded and hence units change ownership, it wasn't checked whether those units provided diplomatic contact to a new nation. GNA#20431
Bug fix: assertion failure during map generation when no unit in the ruleset satisfied the first role in 'startunits'. GNA#19886
Bug fix: the tech upkeep with tech_cost_style 2 or 4 was much lower than intended; it only took into account a single tech rather than all preceding techs. As a result, tech upkeep in such rulesets will greatly increase. GNA#20063
The currently downloadable 'civ2-3' modpack (2.3-2c) thus has tech upkeep disabled. You may want to update your copy.
An unknown effect requirement type in a ruleset now causes a loading error rather than being silently interpreted as "None". GNA#20462
Clerical:
When a new nation is created in the editor, city style and leader sex are now set appropriately (previously they were always European and male). GNA#19313
A hardcoded year of -4000 is no longer sent to the metaserver in pregame, as it is ruleset-dependent. GNA#17862
One code tidy-up with no user-visible effect. GNA#20458
Clients:
The client could crash when your name was mentioned in chat but you had set the 'highlight your player/user name' setting to no color. This could also prevent any connection to a server with the event cache enabled if your player name had been mentioned in the past. GNA#20478
Older clients can work around this bug by setting a highlight colour in their local options (you may need to start a local game in order to access the configuration dialog).
Fix possible instability when loading some tilesets. GNA#20055

New in Freeciv 2.3.3 (Dec 10, 2012)

Gameplay:
Bug fix: players' endgame scores could be too high due to the future techs state not being initialised correctly at the start of the game; this could lead to incorrect ranking. The fix will only help with games started with a new version of the server; in-progress games will continue to have incorrect scores. GNA#19745
Bug fix: allied victory (enabled by default) never occurred. GNA#17986
Freeciv now infers that ruleset effects are possible in more cases where incomplete information is available. This is a low-level change whose effects are hard to quantify, but should be more correct; it is most likely to affect client behaviour and the AI. GNA#20304
More types of units are now permitted to auto-explore - only those with fuel or which lose hitpoints are prevented. In particular, Triremes in the 'experimental' ruleset can now auto-explore. GNA#17958
Bug fix: goto planning could erroneously consider it impossible for a unit to move to a city on non-native terrain. It was still possible to make such a move with the cursor keys. (Does not affect supplied rulesets.) GNA#19611
Bug fix: following on from 2.3.2, more assertion failure fixes when many autosettlers try to work on the same project. GNA#20240
Bug fixes in unit destruction:
Many more cases of unit loss now contribute to the final score, notably including units on board a transport unit when it was lost. GNA#20300 GNA#20301
The "unit_lost" scripting signal was not emitted for units on board a transport unit when it was lost. (This bug had no effect on the supplied rulesets.) GNA#20221
Bug fixes for border sources such as fortresses:
When a border source within range of a city was invaded, tile ownership from the first source did not change hands correctly. GNA#19831
When a border source changed hands and the new owner did not know all the territory in range, the old owner could erroneously retain some tiles. GNA#19983
When a border source is occupied by a unit of a nation other than the owner at the time a treaty between the two players breaks, ownership now transfers to that of the occupying unit. (partial fix for GNA#20348)
Bug fix: with foggedborders enabled, tile ownership could appear to change back to an old owner when it went out of sight. GNA#18588 GNA#19627 GNA#19637
Fix possible trouble when upgrading a highly-veteran unit to a type with fewer veteran levels. GNA#19913
Bug fix: in tech loss situations, future tech would fail to be removed from a player, with an assertion failure. GNA#20220
Bug fix: the full range of the 'trademindist' setting (1-999) could not be transmitted over the network to the client. This caused a cosmetic problem in the help for the 'civ2-3' ruleset. GNA#19977
Bug fix: server-side AI assertion failure in rulesets with paratroopers and ocean cities. GNA#20230
Clerical:
Security fix: malformed network packets could cause denial of service (memory exhaustion or CPU-bound loop). GNA#20003
Bug fix: if the server was started with one ruleset and then another with a different number of governments was loaded (e.g., 'default' then 'multiplayer'), it could crash. GNA#19800
Bug fix: ordinary save files from a game started from a scenario file could themselves be saved as scenario files, and thus be listed as unwanted options when starting a new scenario game. GNA#19919
When a scenario is saved, scenario information is included earlier in the file, to speed up the 'Start Scenario Game' dialog. GNAPATCH#3497
It is now possible to save games with names containing dots - previously, everything after the first dot was stripped. GNA#18781
Bug fixes to scorelog/ranklog:
Player deletion was logged incorrectly in scorelog, causing warnings when resuming the game from a save file. GNA#20069
When a new user took over a player from another user, the old username could persist in the ranklog file. GNAPATCH#3526
Taking over a dead AI player no longer changes their username in the ranklog. GNAPATCH#3547
Tab-completion on the server command line has been improved; notably, enumerated and bitwise options are now completed. GNAPATCH#3436
Fix a possible crash when the '/cmdlevel' server command is issued. GNA#19878
More robustness against malformed network packets. GNA#20107
Minor performance improvements in certain specific situations. GNA#19823 GNAPATCH#3334
Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNA#19585 GNAPATCH#3205 GNA#15743 GNA#19564 GNAPATCH#3081
ClientsEdit:
Bug fix: assertion failure in get_internal_string_length() on client start on some platforms. GNA#17373
Fix a couple of issues with units with a zero move rate (no such units exist in the supplied rulesets):
The 'exhausted' icon was always shown for such units; now it is never shown. GNA#20270
Such units are now not skipped when focusing on the next unit. GNAPATCH#3567
Reduce memory usage after game start with large tilesets. GNA#16995 GNA#19605
The default metaserver URL has been updated in line with future plans. (The old URL will continue to work for the foreseeable future.) GNAPATCH#3453 GNA#20014
Saved configurations now correctly save the default metaserver URL as "default", so that future changes to the default will be picked up. GNA#20015
(Gtk) Fix migration of chat/message window arrangement settings from 2.2.x. (This will not help you if you've ever run a previous 2.3.x version; you'll have to restore your preference manually, if you haven't already.) GNA#19888
(Gtk) Fix possible colour inaccuracy. GNAPATCH#3344
Additional robustness in the face of odd server behaviour. GNA#13701
Tilesets / ArtEdit:
Bug fix: in the hex2t tileset, the fogged parts of the minimap were far too dark. GNA#16900
In the supplied Amplio2 tileset, the 'Refugee' graphic has been enabled, for the benefit of custom modpacks such as civ2-3. GNA#3455
Gameplay / Rules ChangesEdit:
The supplied earth-80x50-v3 scenario could not be loaded at all in a release build. GNA#20050
In rulesets with a 'watchtower' vision bonus for fortresses, the bonus now only applies to ground units in the fortress, not to air units flying over it. GNA#19866
Bug fix: in the 'multiplayer' ruleset, players could gain free techs multiple times by rebuilding Darwin's Voyage (fixed by GNA#19852).
Bug fix: in the 'experimental' ruleset, Triremes could not attack outwards from a city. GNA#19828
The script.lua files for the civ1/civ2 rulesets had been accidentally omitted from the distribution, although this had no functional effect. GNA#19907
Ruleset tidy-ups with no functional effect. GNA#20020 GNA#19991
Other rulesets:
A custom ruleset effect can now have both Oceanic and Land requirements in a single list. GNA#19916
The give_technology() Lua script function now returns 'nil' if the player already has the technology, as documented; previously it returned the Tech_Type 'None'. GNA#19852
The total Max_Rates effect value is now clipped to its legal range, so it's no longer necessary for custom rulesets to take care to keep the total value below 100% to avoid server misbehaviour. GNAPATCH#3343
The MinYear effect now allows years earlier than -4000. GNA#17862
AIEdit:
Fixes for a couple of server crashes (division by zero):
In rulesets with tech upkeep, when evaluating the value of 'Tech_Parasite' effects (e.g., Great Library), players who are losing bulbs are no longer considered. GNA#20234
Division by zero could occur when evaluating poor city locations. GNA#20239
AI behaviour is likely to change as a result of GNA#20304. For instance, it might be more likely to research a tech to allow it to build a kind of building without being certain that that building's other prerequisites will ever be fulfilled.

New in Freeciv 2.4.0 Beta 1 (Aug 13, 2012)

Gameplay:
The maximum theoretical map size has increased from 128,000 to 2,048,000 tiles; the maximum linear map dimension has increased from 512 to 32,768. GNA#18087
If map generation fails (for instance the common failure to allocate start positions), it is now retried with a different random seed. GNAPATCH#2402
A couple of new server settings have been added to customise gameplay:
'revealmap' allows the map to be shown to all players at game start, or to dead players. GNAPATCH#2379
'first_timeout' allows the first turn to have a different timeout from subsequent turns. GNAPATCH#1967
Clerical:
Player authentication has been revamped. Database access is now mediated by a Lua script that can be customised by server operators, and uses Luasql, enabling a variety of backends: MySQL (the only backend supported previously), SQLite, and PostgreSQL. See doc/README.fcdb for details. GNA#13643
Support is included 'out of the box' for SQLite and MySQL databases. SQLite uses a simple file as a database, and is recommended as being entirely adequate for Freeciv authentication and much less hassle to set up than MySQL.
The Windows packages include SQLite support, so it's possible to use player authentication on Windows without recompiling for the first time.
The server now supports a 'delegation' feature similar to that in Longturn, where one user can nominate another to temporarily take over control of the game. This is controlled by the '/delegate' server command. GNAPATCH#2121
mapimg replay:
There is a new "map image" feature to save an overview map as an image. This is a much expanded version of the previous --Ppm server feature, which has been removed. Compared to --Ppm, the new feature can distinguish units, cities, borders, terrain colors, hex tiles, and more. Saving images can be triggered automatically (turn-based) on the server, or on demand on the server or client. See the '/mapimg' server command. GNAPATCH#1391
A series of these images can be assembled into an animation to replay the progress of the game. A shell script 'mapimg2anim' is provided to help with this.
PNG/GIF/JPEG output is only available if built against the ImageMagick library. The Windows 2.4.0-beta1 packages only support the basic PPM format.
Player colors are now assigned centrally, and can be changed with the '/playercolor' server command. There is a new server setting 'plrcolormode' that controls how colors are assigned, including a mode where all players on a team have the same color. GNAPATCH#2062
The set of default player colors in the supplied rulesets has been reworked to enhance visibility of borders against terrain, etc. GNA#19778
The colors used to represent different terrain types on the minimap have been reworked. GNAPATCH#2069
The 'autosaves' setting gives finer control over when savegames are generated. GNAPATCH#2536
To disable autosaves entirely, instead of '/set saveturns 0', it's now necessary to use a command like '/set autosaves ""'.
The scripts 'ser' and 'civ' have been renamed to 'fcser' and 'fcgui' respectively. GNAPATCH#2830
A Lua script can be read from a file with the '/lua file' command. Direct Lua input is now via the '/lua cmd' command. GNAPATCH#2338 GNAPATCH#2869
New server option --Bind-meta to control which network interface the metaserver connection is made from. GNA#14106
The server can be built with support for .xz (LZMA) compression for saved games, etc. See the 'compresstype' option. GNAPATCH#1810
The freeciv-modpack utility supports more modpack types, more options (see --help), and uses the Curl library for network access so should be more robust.
Clients:
There is a new client, freeciv-gtk3, based on version 3 of the Gtk+ toolkit. This is fully playable and has largely identical UI and functionality to freeciv-gtk2. Currently it is experimental; however, it is expected that it will become the default client in the next major release.
The first time you run this client, it will copy any Gtk2 client settings you have set. Thereafter, Gtk2 and Gtk3 settings will remain separate.
(In the code there is also the start of a Qt client. However, at this point it is just a stub and is unlikely to be of interest. Development will continue in 2.5.)
A server spawned by the client now only listens on the local network interface, so clients on other machines cannot connect to it. This improves security for single-player games, but means that a multiplayer game can no longer be hosted by the client; you must start a separate server instead (see the FAQ). GNA#18530
It's now possible to display a map overlay indicating which tiles the currently selected unit can enter ("native" tiles), with the Shift-Ctrl-N keyboard shortcut. GNA#13620
The research speed in bulbs per turn is now available with other research information from popups/tooltips on the main window. GNA#17685 GNA#16481
For rulesets where different nations have unique gameplay attributes (different initial governments, techs, units, or buildings), this information is now available when picking a nation in the pregame, and in the online help. GNAPATCH#3066
The client now displays the current stable version of Freeciv and whether that's newer than the running version (this information comes from the metaserver). GNAPATCH#2735
(Gtk) The client now has a Lua scripting console. GNAPATCH#2515
This is currently something of a proof of concept rather than a finished feature, as a comprehensive API suitable for the client-side has not been provided. Notably, there are not yet any signals from which client-side scripts can be triggered.
However, client scripts do have access to the client's view of most of the same game data that server-side ruleset scripts do (map, units, cities etc); see the Lua reference manual. This should be sufficient for some useful work. For example, it should in principle be possible to implement an on-demand optimal trade route calculator with these facilities (although we haven't tried).
(Gtk) The unit selection dialog has been revamped to allow browsing and selecting units by combinations of location and activity, anywhere in the world. GNA#17236
(Gtk) A bribe cost is now shown in the popup for units (for enemy units, this is estimated). GNA#17489

New in Freeciv 2.3.2 (Apr 2, 2012)

Server / General:
Bug fix: the city bribe cost could be negative (i.e., you would be paid for inciting a city!) -- this was particularly common with the 'multiplayer' ruleset. This fix may also cause previously positive city bribe costs to increase. GNA#19272
Bug fix: in a game with many players (such as the current maximum of 126), the server could crash when the game ended. (To see an accurate endgame report in this situation, both client and server must be upgraded.) GNA#19241
Bug fix: for games with more than 40 players (or, in rare cases, fewer), information about the parts of the map known to some players was saved in the savefile in a platform-dependent way. This could in principle lead to information loss on some platforms, or savefiles created on one platform not loading correctly on another, although on tested platforms (Linux x86_64, Solaris) the information was merely disarranged in a compatible way, causing no observable failure. From 2.3.2, the server will save this information in a platform-independent way, although it will attempt to recover information from old savegames. GNA#19029
Bug fix: upon learning a new tech that replaced a unit with a more expensive one, obsolete units being built in cities at the time could disappear entirely from the city worklists (rather than being replaced by another unit). GNA#18736
Allow the '/remove' server command to be issued after the game has started. GNA#18641 GNA#18776
Bug fix: in a deep fiscal crisis requiring forced selling of multiple buildings, insufficient buildings could be sold, leading to a negative gold balance. GNA#19494
Bug fix: quell error messages when a unit changed owners in the middle of working on an improvement such as Railroad, when the new owner did not possess the requisite technology. GNA#16429
Bug fix: assertion failures associated with many auto-settlers trying to work on the same project. GNA#19512
Bug fix: assertion failures on loading non-standard rulesets which use a Max_Rates effect with a Tech requirement. GNA#19450
Bug fix: possible server crash in rulesets with barbarian nations with only a single leader defined. GNA#19554
Bug fix: '/reset game' may have restored the wrong setting values on some platforms. GNA#19345
Bug fix: the trading_tech/gold/city settings did not appear in any of the server setting categories. GNA#19346
Fix the authentication database setup script, setup_auth_server.sh, to allow space for IPv6 addresses. (Existing databases would have to be upgraded manually to fix this issue.) GNA#19485
The embedded Lua scripting engine has been updated to version 5.1.5. GNAPATCH#3166
Robustness improvements in the face of malformed files. GNA#19348 GNA#19446
Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNA#19015 GNA#19170 GNA#19228 GNA#19297 GNA#19349 GNA#19389 GNA#19398 GNA#19539
Clients:
Add a confirmation popup when disbanding units. GNA#19459
Bug fix: the client could crash immediately after connecting in some circumstances with some non-standard rulesets (notably, for players with A. Smith's Trading Co in the Longturn LTeX23 ruleset). GNA#19219
Bug fix: the "in progress" unit counts in the units report did not take account of multiple city build slots, for instance in the 'experimental' ruleset. GNA#19339
Bug fix: the total unit upkeep in the unit report could get out of date when changing a unit's home city while the report was open. GNA#19405
(Gtk) All diplomatic meeting popups now open in a single tab, to improve usability in games with many players. GNA#18835
(Gtk) Fix a minor scrollbar display glitch with some system themes. GNA#18607
(SDL) Several UI bug fixes:
In the units report, "under construction", "soonest completion", and "totals" displayed no information. GNA#19403
It was impossible for diplomatic units to establish an embassy in a city; attempting to do so caused the city to be investigated. GNA#19246
Nothing happened when a Spy was ordered to steal a random technology. GNA#19246
When a Spy was given a choice of building to sabotage, many options were omitted. GNA#19288
In the foreign intelligence report, the nation flag could hide information about the nation's technologies. GNA#19290
Nation selection dialog:
▪ Only the first 256 of the available nations could be selected (up to the Omanis). GNA#19065
▪ The next/previous buttons for leader selection did not redraw properly. GNA#19068
Minor bugs with password entry to an authenticated server. GNA#19259
(Xaw) Fix an assertion failure when the game ends. GNA#19399
Tilesets / Art:
Bug fix: in the Amplio2 tileset, when not using the city bar, resize the "city occupied" graphic to match the flag size. GNAPATCH#2525
Gameplay / Rules:
As a side effect of the fix for GNA#18736, if a unit is bought in a city in the same turn as it is made obsolete by an advance, you always get the obsolete unit rather than an upgraded version (regardless of the relative costs of the units).
Bug fix: in custom rulesets, it was not usefully possible to make a technology unreachable by giving it a root_req of itself (this should make it reachable only by national init_techs or by scripting); such technologies could not be used at all. GNA#18394
In custom rulesets, the Unit_Recover effect can now apply to specific unit types and units; previously, it could only take effect on a per-player basis. GNA#19467
AI:
Improvements to AI diplomat behaviour:
The AI's diplomats were not dodging enemy units when travelling from place to place. GNA#19014
The AI could stack many diplomats next to an enemy city when they had nothing to do. Now it sends them to different cities. GNAPATCH#2978
The AI could mistakenly consider the effect of Barracks and Sun Tzu's War Academy on unit veteran levels to be cumulative. GNA#19447 GNA#19466
Help / Documentation:
Improve Unix man pages. GNA#19167 GNA#19173
Other minor improvements to documentation and in-game text. GNA#17776 GNA#19383 GNAPATCH#3119 GNAPATCH#3148
Translations:
Updated translations:
Complete translations: British English, Catalan, French, Japanese, Polish, Scots Gaelic, Spanish.
Incomplete translations: Finnish (98.6%).
Build/portability:
Fix compilation with newer versions of zlib. GNA#19501
Fix failure to compile with compression disabled at build time. GNA#19347
Change configure script handling of compiler flags, fixing some warnings about compiler flags when building with clang. (Note that Freeciv is known not to build cleanly with clang yet.) GNA#19008
Use Lua include path set by configure script, to assist packagers. GNA#19397
Running autogen.sh from a release tarball failed due to looking for an absent file. GNA#19456
Update Gtk client dependency documentation. GNAPATCH#3109

New in Freeciv 2.3.1 (Dec 14, 2011)

Server / GeneralEdit:
Bug fix: when loading pre-2.3 savegames (including the supplied tutorial scenario), the server setting "onsetbarbs" was accidentally reset to 0, causing immediate barbarian uprisings which would tend to wipe out players before they could get established. (The default behaviour, which has been restored, is for barbarians and pirates not to appear for sixty turns.) GNA#18472
Bug fix: the server could crash when units were set to auto-explore. GNA#18796
Bug fix: the server could crash when starting the game on a map without special resources. GNA#18533
Fix a server crash associated with ocean cities; this showed up with the Alien World modpack. GNA#18557
Bug fix: games started with identical parameters including random seeds could allocate start positions in varying orders. GNA#13679
Bug fix: turn timeouts greater than about 60 hours were not being displayed correctly in the client, although they took effect correctly on the server. Both client and server must be upgraded for this fix to be effective. GNA#18687 GNA#19004
Prevent starting games with map areas greater than the maximum supported (128,000 tiles) -- this was causing trouble when such games were saved. GNA#18537
Prevent generation of maps with odd ysize with iso/hex topology -- this was causing assertion failures while the game was running. GNA#18875
Bug fix: if /remove was used, the server could crash on saving/or loading a game, and some players' explored territory could be forgotten. GNA#19007
Bug fix: bases were not being saved or loaded with playerless scenarios. GNA#18930
Bug fix: a scenario saved after the start of a game could have an invalid format. GNA#18652
Bug fix: if a game saved after a player had been removed was reloaded, the order in which players' turns took effect could be incorrect for that turn. GNA#18886
Robustness fixes when loading invalidly formatted savegames. GNA#18546
Make Freeciv generally more tolerant of Unix/DOS line ending differences in rulesets, save files, etc. GNAPATCH#2843 GNA#18434
Fix assertion failures when server LAN announcements were disabled with "-A none". GNA#18511
Bug fix: misplaced '/' in unknown command response from server to client. GNA#18678
Allow server settings to be specified in rulesets with similar syntax to the server command line. GNA#18328
Improvements to the checks made when a ruleset is loaded. GNA#18514 GNAPATCH#2925
Bug fix: units on sentry duty could sometimes fail to wake up when an enemy unit moved into a neighbouring city. GNA#18388
Bug fix: remove lingering effects from bases when a city replaced them on the same tile GNA#18529 or when the underlying terrain was transformed GNA#18513.
Bug fix: move/disband units on a tile when their native base is pillaged, and they have no other means to remain in that tile. GNA#18528
Bug fix: disband boats when surrounding terrain changes would leave them trapped in a landlocked city. GNA#18613
Bug fix: don't allow a unit to move from a transporter into a city where it should not be able to exist. GNA#18675
Fix various inconsistencies with when the roads built in to a city were and weren't removed from a tile. GNA#18553
Limit the maximum amount of calculation the citizen governor will do for a city. This could cause the server to spend many minutes between turns, particularly with large city radii, for instance when auto-arranging citizens after city growth. This is only a partial solution; in this situation, the governor will not make an optimal decision. GNA#18407
Cosmetic improvements to the freeciv-modpack utility:
Add icons on platforms other than Windows, and .desktop files for Unix desktop environments. GNAPATCH#2810 GNAPATCH#2948 GNAPATCH#2928
Add a window title. GNA#18589
Add --help/--version command-line options. GNAPATCH#2808
Add a man page. GNAPATCH#2890 GNAPATCH#2928
Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNA#18491 GNA#18464 GNA#18418 GNA#17846
ClientsEdit
Changes to science dialog:
The "turns/advance" display is based on the total number of bulbs for the current advance, as in 2.2.x, rather than the number of bulbs remaining. GNA#18499
When calculating the number of bulbs required before the long-term goal will be complete, discount progress already made on the current advance, if it is a prerequisite of the goal. GNA#18547
Add an option controlling combat animation speed. GNA#18770
Bug fix: in rulesets containing immobile units, the client could crash if an attempt was made to give such a unit a go-to order. GNA#19001
(Gtk) Bug fix: clicking Previous/Next City buttons as a player observer could cause a crash. GNA#18608
(Gtk) Bug fix: crash when started with no usable theme. GNA#18952
(Gtk) Bug fix: the text cursor misbehaved when changing the Scenario Description in the editor. GNA#18536
(Gtk) Bug fix: keyboard shortcuts for buttons in the Messages dialog clashed, rendering them non-functional. GNA#18500
(Gtk) Bug fix: on Windows, reordering items in the worklist by dragging should work again. (This is actually a function of the Gtk version, so the issue may still be seen on other platforms.) GNA#18517
(Gtk) Workaround to make various menu bars (including ones essential for diplomacy) not disappear when using Ubuntu's Unity window manager. (This workaround has been included in standard Ubuntu packages since 2.2.7.) GNA#18260
(Gtk) Remove various 'Address' fields from the editor in non-debug builds, as they are only of interest to developers. GNA#18584
(Xaw) Rewritten connection dialog, restoring metaserver and authentication support. GNAPATCH#2813
(Xaw) Bug fix: the unit count in the city report was incorrect. GNA#18486
Tilesets / ArtEdit
Bug fix: the hex2t tileset would not load due to a spurious dependency on the removed amplio tileset. GNA#18458
Bug fix: tiny glitch in one of the Amplio/Amplio2 city graphics. GNA#18935
Gameplay / RulesEdit
Supplied rulesets
Multiplayer ruleset: fix a script error when researching future tech. GNA#18710
Changes to the experimental ruleset:
Rule changes to make the effects of plague more bearable in the early game GNA#18535, GNAPATCH#2998:
Aqueducts now reduce illness by a further 20% until Industrialization is researched.
Temples now reduce illness by 20%.
Triremes no longer move at triple speed along rivers. GNA#18590
Updated earth-160x90-v2 scenario with more start positions and a few terrain tweaks. GNAPATCH#2949
AIEdit
Autosettlers were miscalculating the worth of tiles with resources, leading to them not working valuable resources. GNAPATCH#2840
Autosettlers never considered improving city centre tiles. GNA#17767, GNAPATCH#2866, GNA#18549, GNAPATCH#2957
Help / DocumentationEdit
Add Freeciv client version and name to built-in help. GNA#18198
Bug fix: the "Strategy and Tactics" help menu item was broken in some locales. GNA#18425
Other minor improvements to documentation. GNA#18512 GNA#18552 GNA#18424 GNA#18677 GNA#18897 GNA#18920
Invisible changes to assist with translation. GNA#18451 GNA#18934
TranslationsEdit:
Updated translations:
Complete translations: British English, Catalan, French, Polish, Spanish, Scots Gaelic.
Incomplete translations: Finnish (95.4%), Ukrainian (82%).
Many typo fixes in English strings. GNA#18416
The Windows installer now lets you choose the interface language at installation time (so you don't have to set it by hand). GNA#19019
Build/portabilityEdit
Fixes for portability to OpenBSD on sparc64 (and probably other platforms):
Fix crash on launching server. GNA#18482
Fix network header inclusion order. GNA#18468 GNA#18501
Compilation fix for platforms where AI_NUMERICSERV is not defined (such as Mac OS X 10.5). GNA#18871
Compilation fix for platforms which define min() and max(). GNA#18963
Remove spurious requirement for C++ compiler. GNA#17488
Add a configure option --with-mysql-libdir. GNAPATCH#2867

New in Freeciv 2.3.0 (Oct 22, 2011)

New in Freeciv 2.2.6 (Jul 5, 2011)

Server / General:
Fix server crash when an AI-controlled missile failed to eliminate its target. GNA#16451
Bug fix: the server could crash with rulesets where gold_upkeep_style=2 due to ending up with a negative gold balance. Previously, if there was not enough gold, at most one unit and one building would be sold per turn. Now, as many units/buildings are sold alternately as necessary to restore a positive balance. GNA#18221
Bug fix: pillaging a road (or removing it in the or) under a road-native unit (such as a Big Land unit in the experimental ruleset) could cause a server crash. GNA#16281
Bug fix: clients were not always updated when a city was lost (for instance, due to civil war); the loser's client could still show units in the city as owned by that player. GNA#18194
Bug fix: it was impossible for existing users to log in to servers with authentication enabled running on big-endian machines (such as sparc64). GNA#18170
Apply latest lua-5.1.4 patch (9).
Various internal changes which should only affect developers. GNA#17812 GNAPATCH#2630
Clients:
Bug fix: the client could potentially behave as though it had made a successful connection to a server when in fact the connection had failed. GNA#18211
(Gtk) Bug fix: cancelling the "build city" name dialog by pressing Escape could make it impossible to issue the build order again for some units. GNA#18163
(Gtk) Bug fix: reinstate the Shift+Ctrl+R shortcut to start a revolution. GNA#18296
(Gtk) Possible performance improvement in minimap scrolling. GNA#17878
Tilesets / Art:
Allow more match_with entries in tilesets. This should allow the third-party Freeland tileset to work without a patch. GNA#17095
Fix a number of minor glitches in the Amplio tileset. GNAPATCH#2732
Gameplay / Rules:
Supplied rulesets
Rearrange implementation of the Hanging Gardens wonder so that it is not mentioned twice in the city dialog happiness popup. GNA#16471
Help / Documentation:
Remove spurious incorrect text about government effects on the chance of migration from help on governments. GNA#17919
Invisible changes to assist with translation. GNA#18031
Translations:
Minor corrections to French, Polish, and Japanese translations.
Build/portability:
Suppress some build-time warnings from GCC 4.6. GNA#18217
Use Lua path set by configure script, to assist packagers. GNA#18263

New in Freeciv 2.2.5 (Mar 7, 2011)

Server / General:
Fix bug where a game saved while a civilization was in revolution would not save the target government correctly. GNA#17363
Fix server crash with invalid arguments to "/show" command. GNA#17672
Forbid meaningless negative values for the 'endturn' option. GNA#17564
Fix for building with IPv6 support on OpenBSD. GNA#16458
Declare IPv6 support as no longer "work in progress". GNAPATCH#2282
Make "maintainer-clean" build target cleaner. GNA#16380
Apply latest lua-5.1.4 patches (7 and 8). GNAPATCH#2229
Windows: display meaningful message for winsock error #10060. GNA#16788
Stability improvements. GNA#17677 GNAPATCH#2541
Clients:
Fix incomplete list of buildings in Spy sabotage dialog. GNA#17280
Better handling of the situation where multiple Settlers are selected and the "Build city" order is issued. GNA#14702
Do not save "gameseed" or "mapseed" settings in client config file (this would cause the user to get the same game/map every time they started the client). GNA#17122 GNA#17751
(Gtk) In diplomacy dialog, remove current diplomatic status from list of allowed proposals. GNA#16557
(Gtk) Allow type-to-search when picking a nation. GNAPATCH#2459
(SDL) Avoid a crash when an attempt is made to use a missing sprite. GNA#17146
Fix a few memory leaks. GNA#17716 GNA#17719
Improve alignment of fixed-width tables in some character sets. GNA#17215
Tilesets / Art:
Added "Electric Age" city graphics to the Trident-based rulesets. GNAPATCH#2444
Gameplay / Rules:
Supplied rulesets:
The effects of notradesize / fulltradesize are now calculated separately from the normal corruption calculation; this gives a more consistent effect, and prevents building Courthouses to circumvent those settings. GNA#17348
Fix bug where civil war rebels never got a capital city. GNA#17201
Remove misspelled Aztec ruler title. GNAPATCH#2549
Other rulesets:
Allow non-military paradroppable units to drop into peaceful territory. GNA#17285
Make the SaveSmallWonder flag actually have an effect; previously, all small wonders would be rebuilt if lost. This didn't matter for the default ruleset (where the Palace is the only "small wonder" and this effect is desired), but it does affect the "rewonder" ruleset. GNA#17333
gold_upkeep_style=2: when gold runs out, buildings and units are alternately sold (rather than selling all buildings before selling any units). GNA#16413
Fix trouble with technologies with a "root_req" specification. GNA#16852
AI:
If the server setting 'citymindist' was changed from its default, the AI was not taking this into account when planning its cities. GNA#17745
Help / Documentation:
Minor improvements to in-game text. GNA#17198 GNA#17302 GNA#17161 GNAPATCH#2240 GNA#17510
Minor improvements to comments in ruleset files. GNA#17428
Fix contact details in man pages. GNA#16922
Several invisible changes to assist with translation. GNAPATCH#2289 GNAPATCH#2300 GNA#17422 GNA#17507 GNA#17509
Translations:
Updated translations:
Complete translations: Polish, Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, French, Italian.
Incomplete translations: Danish (99.9%), Brazilian Portuguese (99.6%), Finnish (93%), Ukrainian (92%).

New in Freeciv 2.2.2 (Aug 6, 2010)

New in Freeciv 2.1.10 (Dec 16, 2009)

Added commandline parameter to set hostname visible on metaserver. PR#40755
Restored http://meta.freeciv.org/metaserver.phtml as default metaserver. GNA#13407
Record players total score to civscore.log. GNA#13403
Put spaceship state to civscore.log instead of score given by spaceship. GNA#13402
Write civscore.log in the beginning of the turn, immediately after values are calculated. Write also final values when game ends. GNA#13419
Show correct Requirement and Obsolete by tech for wonders in win32-client help browser. PR#40765
Fixed sdl-mixer support. GNA#13444, GNA#14751
Improved access levels ported from Warclient. GNA#13433
Fixed a bug that even if wonder set as improvement requirement for unit was built, unit was not buildable. PR#39530
Fix lost hack access in single player mode. GNA#13494
Fix bug causing wrong player nation select. PR#40773
Added proper error message to case where user tries to add Settlers to city owned by ally. GNA#13539
Avoid crash due to corrupted worked field. GNA#13498
Improved voting code ported from Warclient. GNA#13515
Make GTK2 client more small-screen friendly. GNA#13524, GNA#13525, GNA#14100
Fixed Hydro Plant help text. PR#40805
Added ruleset loading time check that MAX_NUM_REQS is not exceeded. GNA#13600
Fixed help browser crash when ruleset has fuel using unit for which there is no suitable carrier unit. GNA#13649
Show ping of actual player connection instead of player's first connection, which may be observer. GNA#13725
Fix bug in tech score when player has no techs. GNA#13733
Hide production part of full citybar from enemy cities for player observers. It used to show all enemy cities always building "Airport". GNA#13723
Added support for units taller than 1.5 x terrain tile height in isometric tilesets. GNA#13671
Backport of improved goto code from trunk. GNA#13736, GNA#13742, PR#40536, PR#40563
Fixed creation of GGZ page. GNA#13791
AI does not ask for help against players not met. GNA#13559, PR#39700
Display flags at start page player list. GNA#13726
Changed ggz profile to point to freeciv.ggzgamingzone.org instead of non-functional pubserver. PR#39923
Fixed partisan appearance to require Guerilla Warfare to be known by someone. GNA#13944
Fixed a crash when lua script triggered by "tech_researched" gives another technology to player. GNA#13819
Fixed a crash when unload all command is issued to multiple units. GNA#14031
Fixed a team play crash when ruleset defines global init techs. PR#20855
Leave no units to current tile when bouncing them. GNA#14078
Fixed a crash when several members of the same team have same initial tech. GNA#14259
Fixed /cmdlevel bugs. GNA#14237
Prevented /rulesetdir after savegame of already running game has been loaded. GNA#14230
Don't navigate through unaccessible territorial waters. GNA#13928
Use amplio electric ages sprites for cities. Use modern style as alternative for other tilesets. GNA#14376
Added /cancelvote command, ported from Warclient. GNAPATCH#1292
Make notify.all and notify.player working in lua scripts. GNA#14221
The loss of the last human player doesn't transform the game into an autogame, causing the clients freezing. GNA#14036
Sharing vision when the fog of war is disabled don't let black square over vision giver units. GNA#14275
Disallow embassy creation if Marco Polo's Embassy is built. GNA#14448, GNA#14548
Do not bounce units on empty enemy cities on terrain changes. GNA#14532
Consider that AI explorers moved when they changed tile instead of if their moves decreased (could be wrong on railroads for example). GNA#14533
Loading a scenario begins at turn 0 and not -2. GNA#14658
Display trade route lines at map and infos in city dialog even if the trade route doesn't give trade bonus. GNA#14745
Added support for Haiku OS. GNA#14715
Fixed clicking of technologies on research report. GNA#14812
Updated translations: ca.po da.po de.po es.po fi.po

New in Freeciv 2.1.9 (Jul 2, 2009)

New in Freeciv 2.1.6 (Sep 15, 2008)

Updates to bootstrap. (PR#40268, PR#40275, PR#40287, PR#40301, PR#40345, PR#40391, PR#40416)
Fixed compile warnings. (PR#40265, PR#40281, PR#40366)
Fixed bug that AI tried to get unreachable techs from treaty. (PR#38372)
Made only human players count toward minplayers. (PR#40206)
Set minimum number of human players to 0. (PR#40288)
Use Mysql port information from authentication config file. (PR#40293)
Refresh cities after shared vision gained from another player. (PR#40262)
Make message about paratrooper dying on paradrop more likely to appear to user. (PR#40295)
Handle empty http_proxy environment variable correctly. (PR#16526)
Fixed global observer crash in GTK2 connection dialog. (PR#40303)
Fixed lables and sensitivity of button in GTK2 connection dialog. (PR#40234)
Fixed the "non-blocking socket operation could not be completed immediately" bug. (PR#40297)
Fixed crash when continents are renumbered. (PR#39472)
Go straight to the network page when autoconnecting to a server that needs a password. (PR#38354)
Don't reset the wrong player name when a player is /cut in pregame. (PR#39503)
Show total buy cost for selected cities in the city report. (PR#40291)
Fixed visual corruption in flag images. (PR#40246)
Separated mandatory and optional capabilities in the capstring for GGZ. (PR#40308)
Fixed printing of obsolete wonders. (PR#39982)
Fixed bug that prevented building Hydro Plant in city placed on one tile river. (PR#40347)
Fixed GGZ handlers for error and spectator events. (PR#40357)
Disabled hack challenge when in GGZ mode. (PR#40311)
Improved memory handling in warmap queue. (PR#40352)
Do not mark buildings redundant when they allow building of unit. (PR#40359)
Fixed crash when loading saved game when tech leakage is enabled. (PR#40027)
Fixed potential problems when city starves. (PR#40367)
Made the internal server store savegames in the user's home directory on Windows. (PR#40341)
Fixed city report size calculations. (PR#40328)
Added ggz-style savegame support. (PR#40317)
Fixed crash in the SDL worklist dialog. (PR#40378)
Fixed /take assert when all player slots are in use. (PR#40354)
Fixed error message about illegal auth port parameter. (PR#40385)
Fixed client crash in the end of turn in altering movement mode. (PR#40384)
Fixed changing of specialists at resolutions higher than 640x480 in SDL client. (PR#40387)
Fixed bug causing false tax rate exceeded messages. (PR#40389)
Already built great wonders show "never" instead of "1" for turns-to-build. (PR#40382)
Added Esperanto translation.

Freeciv Changelog

What's new in Freeciv 2.5.0

New in Freeciv 2.5.0 RC 2 (Mar 10, 2015)

New in Freeciv 2.5.0 RC 1 (Feb 23, 2015)

New in Freeciv 2.4.4 (Dec 30, 2014)

New in Freeciv 2.4.3 (Aug 13, 2014)

New in Freeciv 2.5.0 Beta 1 (Aug 13, 2014)

New in Freeciv 2.4.0 RC 2 (Sep 2, 2013)

New in Freeciv 2.4.0 RC 1 (Aug 20, 2013)

New in Freeciv 2.4.0 Beta 2 (Apr 29, 2013)

New in Freeciv 2.3.4 (Feb 18, 2013)

New in Freeciv 2.3.3 (Dec 10, 2012)

New in Freeciv 2.4.0 Beta 1 (Aug 13, 2012)

New in Freeciv 2.3.2 (Apr 2, 2012)

New in Freeciv 2.3.1 (Dec 14, 2011)

New in Freeciv 2.3.0 (Oct 22, 2011)

New in Freeciv 2.2.6 (Jul 5, 2011)

New in Freeciv 2.2.5 (Mar 7, 2011)

New in Freeciv 2.2.2 (Aug 6, 2010)

New in Freeciv 2.1.10 (Dec 16, 2009)

New in Freeciv 2.1.9 (Jul 2, 2009)

New in Freeciv 2.1.6 (Sep 15, 2008)

New in Freeciv 2.1.3 (Feb 6, 2008)