Alternating moves! See http://bugs.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=576.
In Freeciv 2.1 an alternating movement server option (simultaneousphases) is available, in which only one player can move their units at a time.
In a later version this option is renamed to phasemode, and it takes the following values:
- 0: concurrent movement, classic Freeciv behavior, where all players move units at any time
- 1: players alternate, only one player can move units at any time
- 2: teams alternate, all players on a particular team can move units
This page is for discussion of how alternating movement should work.
Traditional Freeciv uses simultaneous movement; everyone moves at the same time. This is slighly changed for AI players but their moves still may intersperse with human players (so even in single-player, sometimes the human or the AI gets to go twice in a row). This movement can also be called asynchronous movement. It makes for faster (but less fair) multi-player games.
In alternating moves (aka synchronous movement), each turn consists of multiple phases. In each phase, one player or group of players (team/alliance) may move while the others cannot move their units. Most actions (like city editing) may be done when it's not your phase, but unit movement in particular may only be done on your phase. This makes single player more consistent (no double-moves) and multi-player more fair. However it will also make multi-player games slower, so it doesn't scale well as the number of players increases.