&gt; The irony of it all is that last year when i had a couple of computer science applying for a job, they told me that they had assignments of doing bits and parts of a civilization clone at the university as part of the studies, so i guess that the university got smarter in the meantime.<p>Yes, indeed. The Software Architecture course at Aarhus University (which is where the FreeCiv founders are from) now contains the HotCiv project: &quot;This project develops a framework for defining strategy games similar to the classic computer game, Civilization.&quot; The lecturer, Henrik Bærbak, wrote a textbook for the course: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baerbak.com&#x2F;description.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baerbak.com&#x2F;description.html</a>