We were a bunch of CS students who used to hang out in the labs playing a number of multiplayer X11 games - some SGI racing game, Doom 1 and XPilot.
Now as most CS students, we were all Civ fans, so one day we found and installed the Python based Openciv project. However Openciv was rather broken - I think it used 100% CPU power. We then decided to write our own version.
In the end only Allan, Claus and I were willing to devote some time to the project and we split the work between us.
Allan did the graphics. Whatever people think about the original graphics I think it was quite an accomplishment, as Allan had absolutely no training. We partly praised and laughed at his work. He really produced a number of both ugly and nice looking tiles.
Claus wrote the Civ part of the backend. Implementing the logic, rules and game-engine is his work. He got some help with the formulas from a Civ book. He was clearly the one of us who knew most about Civilization.
As for myself I did the client/server architecture and wrote the X11 client. Learning to program X11 was a big motivation - not that I ever used that skill later on.
Funny thing is, that as the game became playable we started losing interest as we were increasingly drawn back to XPilot playing.
I remember later on when we were playing XPilot in the lab, we could hear the younger students were playing Freeciv. I always thought that was nice.
Allan, Claus and I still meet once in a while and occasionally track the progress of Freeciv.
Best of luck with the further development.
- - Peter