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Variant2 can be installed with freeciv modpack installer utility part of freeciv distribution. Variant2 is part of the default modpack list presented to modpack installer users.

About

Variant2 is publicly available ruleset that started as fork of the ruleset we use in our private games, and thus closely resembles it.

We forked our ruleset from classic ruleset soon after rules customization with rulesets was introduced to freeciv, around year 2000. Since then the ruleset has been maintained separately. Not only has it got changes that classic ruleset has not, but also classic ruleset has been changed in ways that didn't make it to our ruleset. Despite this differences between the two are moderate. We have not been adding much new features for the sake of new features, but usually changes have been made only to fix some problem we've experinced in our games, and we do have a somewhat bureacratic process to introduce changes.

Variant2 was forked from that ruleset July -13. It's not subject to same process of introducing changes as the ruleset we use, and I'm likely to some degree use variant2 to test new features of freeciv customizability.

Tileset

There's two tilesets specific to variant2 available via modpack installer. Delta2 is tileset to use when you have hex map (default and recommended), deltasquare is tileset to use otherwise.

Variant2 is also playable with standard tilesetss, but as it has some new units that have no gfx of their own in such tilesets, some units use same gfx, making it impossible to distinguish between them on quick glance (you can check unit information with middle button to see its name, of course)

Marko Lindqvist