Freeciv is a single- and multiplayer turn-based strategy game for workstations and personal computers inspired by the proprietary Sid Meier's Civilization series.

The game's default settings are closest to Civilization II, in both gameplay and graphics, including the units and the isometric grid.

The game ends when one civilization has eradicated all others or accomplished the goal of space colonization, or at a given deadline.

At the computer science department at Aarhus University, three students, avid players of XPilot and of Sid Meier's Civilization, which was a stand-alone PC game for MS-DOS, decided to find out whether the two could be fused into an X-based multiplayer Civilization-like strategy game.

[4] The students—Peter Unold, Claus Leth Gregersen and Allan Ove Kjeldbjerg—started development in November 1995;[5] the first playable version was released in January 1996, with bugfixing and small enhancements until April.

[8] For the developers, Freeciv 1.0 was a successful proof of concept, but a rather boring game, so they went back to XPilot.

[9][5] Other players and developers took over; they made the game available on many other operating systems, including Linux, Solaris, Ultrix, AmigaOS, and Microsoft Windows.

[10] The main development goal remained to make a Civilization-like game playable over the Internet, with participants on different continents, even when connected with 14400 bit/s modems.

Freeciv achieved this by using an asynchronous client-server protocol: during each turn, human users play concurrently, and their actions are sent to the server for processing without awaiting the results.

[citation needed] In 1998, computer players were added;[11] they could soon beat newcomers to the game with ease, using only minor forms of cheating.

New team playing features and advanced diplomacy made cooperative gaming more attractive.

From that point on, the game will run until it ends or is terminated; the server can never get back into pre-game state.

Freeciv's graphics system is configurable: originally, map display was always in overhead mode (like in Civ I).

Freeciv supports human-to-human multiplayer gameplay and artificial intelligence (AI) computer players.

[34] Originally developed on IRIX, Freeciv has been ported to many different operating systems: it is distributed with many Linux distributions, offers installers for Microsoft Windows, and has been known to run on Mac OS X, MorphOS, Solaris, Ultrix, QNX, OS/2, Cygwin, AmigaOS, AROS, RISC OS, Maemo, ZETA, SkyOS, various BSDs, and smartphones and tablets running Android Between version 2.4 and version 3.1 Mac OS X was not supported, but returned in March of 2023.

[36] Freeciv21 is a fork of the original Freeciv project started with the intention of modernizing the code and the client interface, and also adjusting the software more to the needs of multiplayer longturn variant.

[42] The game's default settings are closest to Civilization II, both in gameplay and graphics (including the units and the isometric grid).

Freeciv-web supports human-to-human multiplayer gameplay and artificial intelligence (AI) computer players.

Most servers offer multiple varieties of the game: single-player, multiplayer free-for-all, play-by-email and longturn.

Freeciv Longturn is a specialized large-group-multiplayer-online-strategy variant of Freeciv featuring daylong game turns with large amounts of human opponents per map, allowing for optimal timing to build up strategic plans and readapt them to the circumstances of each turn.

[50][51] FreeCivWeb.org[3] also offers longturn games (more than fifty have been played before mid-2021) with a multiplayer ruleset which is documented in great detail.