On the left there is a ranged attack command. If you click on it, you can see the range that your unit can do. Yes, I didn't realize this right away either, but it helped a lot as soon I found out about it.

There is also an promotion that makes you able to shoot over otherwise blocking targets, which helps a lot. :)

Some micromanagement before Civ IV was quite annoying. There was no overflow mechanics, so if you had a building that had 78 out of 80 production done, and you gain ten hammers, you lose eight of them. And to get around this, players micromanaged out of the wazoo. Same was true for income and beakers (science progress). Thankfully Freeciv added the Civ IV style overflow to at least production, which is why i tend to prefer Freeciv when I want to go for Civ II gameplay style. :)

Civ IV and V also keeps track of "cents" in the money system I believe, just isn't shown to the player.

And not to even mention, the "trade" system in Civ II. Which was removed cause of excessive (unfun) micromanagement. Moving those caravans all over the place wasn't fun. It's in Freeciv too annoyingly, but at least they removed the supply/demand system (which lead to even more micro).

Civ IV and Civ V have their micromanagment, but they feel honestly more productive in terms of tradeoffs. While in the older games, you would lose anything that overflowed or didn't round off right.

Civilization II is like Simcity 2000. Both games are heralded as being the best in the series by many people, but most fans I meet (that have tried out the newer games, and learned them) seems to prefer the fourth game in the series.

Simultaneous turns are pretty much obligatory if you're playing multiplayer, especially with more than two players involved, FreeCiv always been biased towards multiplayer, unlike the commercial games which all mostly focused on singleplayer (and I play both Freeciv, Civ IV, and Civ V :) ) which is why it's on default too. I think infact Freeciv was orginally meant to clone CivNet, which apparently introduced simultaneous turns.

The Freeciv AI seems to move all their units immediately too, so Freeciv feels turnbased when only AI opponents are involved.

Simultaneous turns are used on Civ IV and V multiplayer as well. Making it wholly turnbased can make the games take awhile, but on the other hand, it's perfect for play by e-mail games. See Freeciv longturn games.

Freeciv gameplay is pretty much Civ I/II, expect more balanced for multiplayer but I honestly prefer Civ IV/V for their depth.

There is also a registry value you can change to fix a drive (CD or HD, usually CD drives) that is stuck in PIO mode. Didn't even require a restart! This is just some "override" bitmask that Windows sets after enough reading errors, which can only be changed back with regedit (idiotic).

Loose cables or a bad disc, and Windows insists on using the slow reading/writing mode.

Reinstalling the disk controller helps too since you're basically removing the troubling registry values and let Windows recreate them from scratch. Probably the easier way out for most people too. :)

Atari made the orginal Marble Madness, I think Rare ported it over to NES.

I suspect the Marble Madness engine was either reused (very uncommon back in those days), or experience from it was reused in the Snake Rattle n Roll game later on.

If it's even meant to backfire, if there was a group I wanted to discredit I would spread a virus in the name of said group instead of the group I take part.

I don't believe it's the case in the situation though. Experience tells me that most people don't realize that protesting through destructive means rarely works well...

Valve never said that the game was "open source", just that the source code for the "game logic" is available, similar to how it is with HL2. At some point, people (and press?) got confused and keep calling it open source, despite that it's not really different from the other moddable Source engine games that you can use as base. The intent being opening up avenues of modding, but the game still depends on large binary blobs to compile and is releases under a restricted license.

Valve probably didn't intend to mislead people, unlike the whole "Shared source" crap by Microsoft.

Bit funny that you use "Steam-junkie gamer buddy" as a example since Steam is apparently going to be officially released on Linux within a few months. Of course, time still have to prove whenever it's good or not (GPU drivers is still somewhat problematic for Linux).

But I have to agree that you need to introduce Linux (and OSS) where it makes sense to.

I like Nethack, thank you very much. It's steep learning curve is part of the charm, and the fact that lots of things can kill you. It's not a game for the impatient.

You might want to check out the Diablo series. Blizzard themselves admitted that they were inspired by Nethack (and Angband) when they made Diablo, AFAIK people still play it and is very hyped for Diablo III.

If you want to see popular games with awful UI, you might want to check Dwarf Fortress. Manages to be way worse than Nethack (with even steeper learning curve), but is very popular. Not open source however.

I don't try to claim that the average open source is innovative, rather I was trying to point out a huge exception (innovative dosen't mean it have to be mainstream friendly). I have a feeling it's much easier to get developers together to make a clone of a already loved game (which then can be improved upon), than something new and original.

For innovation, I'd personally rather look amongst what the indie developers offer.

What about Nethack? It's probably still one of the more original Roguelikes out there, with a long legacy. :) I believe some "original commercial" games was actually inspired by Nethack.

I see. But I seem to recall there was (or just has been) a large RAM shortage around the time (1994) Transport Tycoon was released. :)

Indeed. After you been spoiled with various custom trainsets (UKRS, NARS, 2CC, the upcoming PJ1K) industries (FIRS is very promising), aircraft (AV8), ships (FISH) and road vehicles (eGRVTS), it's really hard to go back to the original vehicles. Most of the custom stuff feels more balanced (Aircrafts/trains are somewhat less profitable, road/ships are more profitable) and more interesting (with the default vehicles you always just pick the fastest vehicle for your line...).

The only bad thing with those sets is that they generally make the game a bit harder, so I help newbies to learn with the default stuff.

You have to keep in mind of the system requirements at the time too. Originally Transport Tycoon was coded to run on 486 computers. While they vastly improved the pathfinding of both networks and AI's with A*, I'm not even sure if it would work as well on the old 486 computers the game was originally made for (Amusingly, some of the largest rail networks in openTTD slows even down the fastest computers).

I don't know the computational powers needed for A* (other than it majorily increased openTTD system requirements when it was introduced), or if it could been simplified to run better for the hardware at the time.

Freeciv 1.0 was released 1996, so no this is not the first "open source clone" to reach 1.0.

And then you have games like Nethack that's been worked on since the 80's and is a timeless jewel and that nice turnbased medieval strategy game I forgot the name of. I am a huge gamer and I mostly play commercial games (Team Fortress 2 being my current favorite), but I wouldn't sneeze at the open source games.

Keep in mind that generally, open source projects only reach version 1.0 when a major milestone have been reached. It doesn't mean that 0.x versions are unusable or buggy/unplayable, openTTD have been rock solid throughout it's history as far I know (the only bugs I stumbled upon was in the nightlies... which is to be expected).

This gallery have some examples of TTD AI stupidity.

Have a explanation why the orginal AI is poor, note that the "glitches, cheats and bugs" mentioned in the FAQ have been fixed in openTTD since a long time ago. ;)