CivClicker FAQ

History

What was the inspiration for CivClicker?: The game was strongly inspired by Cookie Clicker.

Getting Started

How do I get started?: If you want people, you'll need to have enough food to support them, and they will need to have a place to live. Make sure you have enough food and at least a tent or wooden hut to start with.
I made a worker, but they died straight away!: Workers eat food. Do you have enough spare?

Features

How do I get more cats?: It is a mystery.
How do I get more deities?: You'll need to reset your game; you get one deity per playthrough (collect them all!).
But if I reset, don't I lose everything?: You get to keep your achievements (you need to reset to get them all), your old deities and some of their upgrades (the Pantheon Upgrades section lists the permanent ones), your wonders, and your cats.
How do I get gold?: You need to trade for it with the traders who show up randomly.
What are all the achievements? How do I get them?: Finding out is part of the fun! If you really need to know, check the source code or ask around on Reddit.
Can I buy bonuses for old deities?: You can only buy upgrades for your current deity. You'll be able to do more stuff with old deities in the future.
My people hate me! How can I fix this?: For the moment, happiness is boosted by victorious raids, or if you have Aesthetics, by building lots of temples.
I don't seem to be making any progress on my wonder. Am I doing it right?: You need a lot of labourers and a lot of every kind of resource. Really a lot.

The Past

Is the game complete?: David Holley, the original author, has stated that he does not intend to develop it further. However, David—
—Gosh, that's awful. So no new features?: Don't interrupt. As I was saying, David generously released the code under the GPL, which made this continuation of the project possible.
Can I play my v1.0 save games on later versions?: You can play them on v1.1, which I plan to keep available. Later versions will probably have to break savegame compatibility, in order to add new features.

The Present

So who is working on CivClicker now that Dave's retired?

I'm Scott Colcord, the primary maintainer of CivClicker on SourceForge. I'm the one doing most of the coding here at this point, although at some point I hope to grow the team with the addition of artists and translators.

So the game is open source now? Does that mean that I can do whatever I want with it?

Not quite. The GPL is an open-source license, but there are still a few things that it prohibits:

You can't change the copyright license.
You can't remove anyone's name from the AUTHORS file. You can add your own name, if you release your own version.
You can't release the code in an obscured (obfuscated or JSMin-ed) form unless you also publish the unobscured version.
You can't mix the CivClicker code with code under another license unless that license is compatible with the GPL.
You can't try to legally restrict anyone's ability to distribute the program.

That last one can be important, because some places, like the Apple App Store, have DRM restrictions that conflict with it.

Wow, there was a long time between 1.59 and 1.61!

Yep. I got busy, and the game slid onto the back burner. That can happen with these "spare time" sort of projects, but I do apologize for leaving a couple of ugly bugs on the table. My thanks to the devs on forks who hunted the bugs down.

How do you feel about forks?

People are absolutely welcome to fork the game - the GPL ensures that everyone has that right. With regard to merging changes from forks back to this branch, I'll evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

Any other suggestions for forks?

If you're going to make a fork, please use git, and import the entire history into your repository so that you keep an intact history chain going all the way back to v1.0.

If you want your fork to remain compatible with others, please resist the urge to reorganize or reformat the code. I know it's tempting, but if the first thing everyone does is impose their personal style, exchanging code will be nearly impossible.

Also, I intend that this version always remain clean of any sort of tracking code, such as Google Analytics. I know it's fun for a dev to be able to watch as people use your code, but we have little enough privacy left already, so I want to preserve what we've got. Finally, I don't want to bring in any external libraries or frameworks at this time; I'd like to see how far the game can go using pure vanilla JS.

The Future

So...what's the plan from here?: First, I'm going to take some time (okay, quite a lot of time) to learn the code, and refactor it to be more extensible. This will allow bigger and better things in time. However, it means that there will probably only be minor bugfixes for a while.

BUGS

I have a bug.: First, try seeing if a force refresh (Ctrl-F5) fixes things. This sorts 99% of problems.
Okay, I still have a bug.: Sorry about that! Please file a ticket on the project page. Screenshots are helpful, as is an exported save string.