When comparing Nethack vs Freeciv, the Slant community recommends Freeciv for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source games?” Freeciv is ranked 28th while Nethack is ranked 29th. The most important reason people chose Freeciv is:
In Freeciv you have to take into consideration terrain, resources, cities, economy, units, combat, diplomacy, governments, technology, wonders and many other things both for your and all competing civilizations.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Potential for enormous skill growth
Nethack is a game that you can play for hundreds of hours and still not master. But you'll have tons of fun attempting to master it.
Pro Depth
The gameplay is very deep due to the amount of skills and systems present in the game.
Pro Over two decades of constant development
Nethack was first released in 1987. The latest version, 3.6.0, came out in December 2015.
Pro ASCII and tiles available
Nethack is able to run on simple ASCII graphics or use graphic tiles instead.
Pro Excellent depth
In Freeciv you have to take into consideration terrain, resources, cities, economy, units, combat, diplomacy, governments, technology, wonders and many other things both for your and all competing civilizations.
Pro Intelligent AI
Even on lowest difficulty, Artificial Intelligence of Freeciv will give you a run for your money.
Cons
Con Burden of knowledge
There's simply too much information that the game expects you to know before you can properly take advantage of the systems in the game.
Con Feature creep
NetHack has an overwhelming amount of features mostly because the development team found them cool at the time, but with little thought of their greater impact. For example, a Nethack staple is Sokoban as a built-in minigame, which feels out of place in a dungeon crawler.
The extremely large amount of items and abilities break the game's balance and coherence.
Con Outdated controls
You need to study a wiki just to learn the most basic controls. The game is broken in this regard.
Con ASCII Art
Con Run of the mill story
The story of the game is pretty generic fantasy fare. It features orcs, elves, and trolls in an effort for the hero to save the world. While it does not detract from the gameplay, it does seem very familiar to those interested in the genre.
Con Modeled after aging game
Freeciv is designed as an open source version of Civ 2, which is quite an old game at this point. This means that many of the mechanics now found in the more modern Civ releases are not to be found here. It also means the graphics are quite dated looking.