Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 50 posts

Re: Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends

#21

Post by dwd »

busterarm wrote: post #5

This style of play is really underrated. I used to play a half-dozen or so games of Diplomacy at time with daily turns for years. There are still modern games that take advantage of this idea (my friends have been playing Old World like this recently) but I'd like to see it more.

Used to play a multi-player Lords of Midnight (the Spectrum/C64 game) where each player (up to 8) made their moves in turn. The original used a day/night turn-based system, so using that for 2-8 humans made sense.

It actually improved on the original by introducing new maps, which probably helped players unfamiliar with the original game who could probably draw the map from memory.

Games could often stall where a real-life didn't allow a player time to make their moves.

Re: Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends

#22

Post by mmcclure » 

    generate_gazette.sh Calls OpenAI to generate "The Civ Chronicle" — an era-appropriate, unreliable wartime newspaper article for each turn.
For a long-running game like this, that's a pretty clever little twist to keep the group engaged. I have extremely low confidence I could convince enough friends to do it with me for long enough to get through a game, but this seems like such a fun idea.

Re: Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends

#27

Post by u3125 »

This reminds me of Neptune’s Pride, a turn based strategy game where time in-game is real-world time. Turns take a very long time.

My friends and I played for a while. The first week was a blast, the second week was fun, but week three felt like a chore and we all lost interest.

Re: Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends

#28

Post by verelo »

mmcclure wrote: post #22

generate_gazette.sh Calls OpenAI to generate "The Civ Chronicle" — an era-appropriate, unreliable wartime newspaper article for each turn. For a long-running game like this, that's a pretty clever little twist to keep the group engaged. I have extremely low confidence I could convince enough friends to do it with me for long enough to get through a game, but this seems like such a fun idea.

This was a friends suggestion after I initially proposed something that exposed a bit too much detail. I wanted to show the diplomacy states and unit/city additions per player as a highlight on the home page, but we instead kept the raw files that generated those UI elements and fed them into OpenAI with the prompt and the Gazette was born.

It's a bit verbose honestly (see https://freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info), I welcome pull requests with improved prompting!

Re: Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends

#29

Post by Gagarin1917 »

mmcclure wrote: post #22

generate_gazette.sh Calls OpenAI to generate "The Civ Chronicle" — an era-appropriate, unreliable wartime newspaper article for each turn. For a long-running game like this, that's a pretty clever little twist to keep the group engaged. I have extremely low confidence I could convince enough friends to do it with me for long enough to get through a game, but this seems like such a fun idea.

That’s so awesome, I had the exact same idea since LLMs came out because I’m a regular Civ player.

I thought about trying some kind of mod for Civ IV but never got around to it. FreeCiv does make more sense.

Very cool stuff.

Re: Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends

#30

Post by verelo »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #29
mmcclure wrote: post #22

generate_gazette.sh Calls OpenAI to generate "The Civ Chronicle" — an era-appropriate, unreliable wartime newspaper article for each turn. For a long-running game like this, that's a pretty clever little twist to keep the group engaged. I have extremely low confidence I could convince enough friends to do it with me for long enough to get through a game, but this seems like such a fun idea.

That’s so awesome, I had the exact same idea since LLMs came out because I’m a regular Civ player. I thought about trying some kind of mod for Civ IV but never got around to it. FreeCiv does make more sense. Very cool stuff.

You can read the code, but my suggestion on how to do this is to just ingest the save game files. They're super easy to work with, especially now we have the magic of LLMs.

In my case i'm creating various json files that describe game state, players, diplomacy, attendance, etc. Then i just throw that at the LLM and give it the goal of writing a newspaper article about where the game is at. The json files are incremental, so i'm not reading all the past versions on every turn. At the end of the current turn it just appends the current turn data to the json file, and then does the generation. These files are also what power the frontend UI, so it's all super lightweight and fast.

To make the graphs, you need to know state at the end of the current turn as the save files don't retain any history. So i store the most recent save file from each turn in order to achieve this.

It's been a journey of reverse engineering this game, but that's kind of the joy of it all.

Post reply on HN