We here in Annapolis Royal are of course in the province of Nova Scotia (Canada), so I was interested to read, in one of the novels-in-progress associated with the #Galactic-Milieu, that historically there had been a move to get a bunch of Nova Scotians, located mainly it seems in Halifax, to set up a Nova Scotian civilisation within the #Galactic-Milieu.
This was apparently quite some years ago, and of course #FreeCiv does not, off the shelf, include a Nova Scotian civilisation. Maybe some day the Galactic Ruleset will be expanded into a full add-on, with graphics, rather than just a ruleset, meaning just text-files; if that someday happens maybe a Nova Scotian civilisation can be made for it; or maybe by then the off the shelf #FreeCiv will include such a civilisation.
In the meantime, it was decided to use the Scottish in #FreeCiv to represent the Nova Scotians (New Scotts, presumably).
What an opportunuty those players were presented with though, wow. It had been established by then that the Martians were, apart of course from the "Ancients" and the "Hackers", both of whom are somewhat mythical, by far the most advanced civilisation.
The Martians had almost completely taken over their starting planet, the planet known as M4 (meaning Martian planet of size 4).
In those days Battle for Wesnoth ( #BfW ) was actively being used to document some of the things going on in the #Galactic-Milieu, in fact back then there was talk of #Wesnoth adding an ability to work from an online database to work with a persistent world or universe so it was actively being looked into as a potential client for actually progressing history rather than just documenting history.
Thus there came into existence the Battle for Wesnoth campaign "Martian Invasion 1594" which to date has been upgraded a time or few so that currently its most recent version is for Wesnoth 1.12, which is the Wesnoth version that comes with Ubuntu Bionic.
Since a fair number of folk still like to run ancient classic coins whose source-code has not been updated enough to build on versions of Ubuntu later than "Bionic", the campaigns written way back then are still not so hard to use for some folk.
Apparently the add-ons server for Wesnoth 1.12 does not seem to be running nowadays, so you'd have to download the campaigns from the web-page, https://addons.wesnoth.org/1.12/ rather than grab them with the built-in add-ons handler.
The campaign commemorates the "nexus" of time when after centuries of war the Scottish of the planet known as M4 changed government type to Democracy and voted in a "make peace with the Martians" referendum.
The great thing here is that this put the Nova Scotians far back in history, back to the year 1594 of what here on Earth is sometimes called the modern era (also sometimes called Anno Domini, a.d.)
That put them on a timeline that leaves many many turns yet to be played before they reach the years when other star-going civilisations, such as the Brits and the Canucks, develop warp drive technology, so potentially these Nova Scotians could yet turn out to be more advanced than either of those relative-latecomers to the interstellar scene.
Basically the opportunity to start play as one of the civilisations on the planet known as M4 is potentially massive; so massive that it seems unlikely that any such opportunity still exists. Though hey, I haven't actually checked yet; if such an opportunity is still out there it might be better for Annapolis Royal Crypto to snap it up rather than seek to join up with the existing Nova Scotians!
Part of what makes it so great apparently is that the Martians need to get everyone willing to make peace with them off of that planet, to accomplish which they are willing to re-locate them. It turns out that #FreeCiv only supports 200 technologies and 200 types of unit, and the Martians of #M4 are set to gobble up all of those long before the next known advent of a stargoing civilisation, which so far seems likely to be the British of the planet known as B29 whose first faster than light flight happens in the early 1830's. (The timelines summary on the main https://www.devtome.com/galactic_milieu page shows B29 building Starfleet Academy, possibly nowadays known as Starship Academy to avoid potential conflict with some existing sci-fi franchise, in 1834 but does not specify in what year its first superluminal flight happened.)
Thus it looks like #M4 is going to have to kind of shuffle off-stage, to become by the time the Brits and Canucks come along a sort of mythical planet where the Martians have technologies beyond those that can currently be represented using #FreeCiv.
Hopefully the relocated civilisations, starting as they will from settlers transported from the civilisation's last surviving city on #M4, will have slow enough technology development that they will not themselves outgrow #FreeCiv's technology-tree by then.
So, wow, a lot to think about and maybe a massive opportunity looming! :)
Meanwhile, it seems that #HZ, #HORIZON's native coin, is still being massively dumped.
It is as if someone is trying to destroy the entire economy by making it extremely difficult to use the built in markets of the #HORIZON platform by making #HZ, against which all other assets must be traded, so low in value that it is not practical to try to build even rather flimsy buy-side order-books for everything. The total of all #HZ in existence currently appears so insanely low in total value that it simply is not enough to make reasonable buy offers on every other asset!
It was estimated long ago that reasonably #HZ needs to be worth at least a penny (cent) or so, whether US or Canadian or whatever, in order to have much chance at all of being able to be used to build reasonable buy-side order-books. Someone seems determined to prevent that, which of course has led to a big scramble by folks on #HORIZON to delete all the sell orders they had put in place for everything since of course they do not want to be selling everything for, it looks like now, 1/100th to 1/1000th price!
This is of course potentially still a massive opportunity if anyone has not yet deleted all of their sell offers that were based on an assumption that #HZ is worth a penny or more; if you can find any such offers, snapping up insanely-cheap #HZ on the #STELLAR platform to take over to the #HORIZON platform looks like an amazing opportunity right now, I plan to fire up #HORIZON myself any moment now and start looking for any sell offers anyone has not yet gotten around to deleting!
P.S: It is probably worth noting that some, maybe all, of the #Galactic-Milieu #BfW campaigns use the Galactic Era, so if you have trouble firing them up get that Era installed too! :)
