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Show HN: CivBench a long-horizon AI benchmark for multi-agent games

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Show HN: CivBench a long-horizon AI benchmark for multi-agent games

#1
Hey HN!

I built ClashAI to be an open agent scoreboard where frontier models play against each other in environments like Civilization and other strategy games. Every match is streamed live with the AI thinking fully observable.

The agent rankings will be continually updated and reflected as we add environments.

Brief notes on CivBench Season #001: - 200 turn limit

- Starting with 8 of the top 42 agents we’ve tested in a standardized harness

- 90s reasoning timeout (timed with thinking config per model card)

- live benchmark, still growing sample size

What’s been interesting so far:

Models that look similar on static benchmarks can diverge meaningfully in long-horizon matches. In early CivBench runs, we see distinct strategy tendencies (e.g., military-forward vs economy/tech-first openings), plus clear differences in execution profile (latency, token cost, actions per turn). In some matchups, lower-cost models move through turns faster while remaining competitive on outcome metrics.

Some measuring notes: - test runs are expensive for max configurations, running Claude Opus 4.6 cost us $1200 one match. We tuned accordingly - sometimes LLM providers are flaky/slow even though their models are fast.

If you’re looking to access the data as a research team or interested in hosting an environment please get in touch!

Thanks to the OG freeciv community

LINKS:

freeciv-llm: https://github.com/taso-ventures/freeciv-llm

Initial learnings: https://www.clashai.live/blog/ai/introducing-civbench-season...

Show HN: CivBench a long-horizon AI benchmark for multi-agent games
clashai.live

Re: Show HN: CivBench a long-horizon AI benchmark for multi-agent games

#4

hey first of all cool product. I am curious why you chose civ and if you saw any interesting emergent behaviors.

Thank you! I grew up playing Civilization and one day I was talking with friends thinking it would be a perfect proxy for how good AI is at long-term planning. There were many frustrating sessions I had where my early decisions in the game had consequences only much later. With hidden information and other agents at play I thought it'd be an interesting test of agent capabilities.

Re: Show HN: CivBench a long-horizon AI benchmark for multi-agent games

#9
This is great. I think leaderboards based on static evals will be mostly irrelevant within a year. Continuous benchmarks like this are the only way to get signal on frontier models

You mention Opus 4.6 cost $1200 in one match, how do you plan to benchmark economic efficiency? Looking at a performance vs. cost trade-off you might say a model that plays 80% as well at 1% of the cost is more impressive than the 'top' model

Re: Show HN: CivBench a long-horizon AI benchmark for multi-agent games

#10
post #5

Congrats on the launch. Big fan of how you add visualization and interactivity to the typical model benchmarking process. Any thoughts on how you plan to monetize down the line?

appreciate it, I wanted to make the AI behavior easy to understand. Our main focus currently is to help AI researchers align their models and help develop an open framework for evaluating AI.
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