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OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

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Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#121

Post by lurk2 »

Marsymars wrote: post #112
1980phipsi wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see someone use modern machine learning techniques to make a kick ass Civ AI.

Genuine question - would that be amenable to fast AI? It's less of a problem on modern PCs running Civ4, but on contemporary systems late-game large maps with many AI/units could really drag during turn-processing.

You don’t necessarily need it to learn during the game, it would be enough for it to learn between games. If you’ve played the game long enough there are behaviors you can exploit that wouldn’t work against a human player. They iterated on the AI in Beyond the Sword and fixed some of the more abusable mechanics in Civilization V (e.g. by introducing diplomatic penalties when you camp units next to an AI’s borders), but it’s just inevitable that once you’ve played a game long enough you will find these kinds of exploitable patterns.

The customization available in IV makes it basically infinitely replayable, but the AI makes the trajectory of each game too predictable if you understand the mechanics well enough.

Lots of old strategy games have been revived by introducing new factions that change the game’s meta; imagine if this process was automated by training the AI on recorded games from the entire playerbase, or on games recorded locally to adapt to the user’s unique style of play.

Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#122

Post by chongli »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #111
chongli wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say diplomacy is the most misunderstood feature of the series. Players constantly say they want a stronger AI that's smarter at diplomacy. But whenever they have built an AI like that, their play testers complained that it doesn't behave like a real world leader (too ruthless). This experience led Soren Johnson (co-designer of Civ III and lead designer of Civ IV) to the realization that Civ AIs are supposed t…

I am so tired of game designers/developers being so pathetically wrong about stuff like this. Modders have to CONSTANTLY fix these boneheaded, user hostile decisions in nearly every game. A lot of game developers are not the people actually loving/playing their games in the same way that the cello maker is usually not the cello player. Even many popular mods fuck this up! DEI in Total War Rome 2 needs submods to make…

It's not that hard to do this, the chess engine crowd figured it out back in 2001.

They really didn't. No one likes playing against weaker chess engines. They play perfectly like a higher-rated engine and then randomly make an obvious blunder. They don't play naturally like a human player of that rating.

The weaker AIs in Civ games do a far better job at "playing to lose" than low rated chess engines. It's not even close!

Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#123

Post by apothegm »

chongli wrote: post #108
Der_Einzige wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Who's to say the criminals won't use a genAI agent to call grandma and social-engineer her so they can drain her bank account?

They pretty much already are.

Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#124

Post by WildWeazel »

davely wrote: post #102
WildWeazel wrote: post #23

Hi all, OpenCiv3 founder here. Thanks for the support! Check us out on Civfanatics or Discord to keep up with the project.

Oh my, this brings me back! One of my fondest gaming memories involves a massive Civilization 3 PBEM match between a number of Civilization fan sites, where we all had private forums and ran these virtual nations against each other. This was way back in 2002 or 2003! I believe Civfanatics was in it (run by “Chieftess” if I recall), Apolyton (which I was a member of — elected in as Minister of Public Works and had to…

I was also there at Civfanatics watching from the sidelines. Fond memories indeed, and some of those same people laid the foundations for this project.

Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#125

Post by apothegm »

JojoFatsani wrote: post #98
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm holding off on 7 myself. I think they deviated too hard from the formula such that it doesn't look like it's even still a Civ game. And while I'm open-minded enough to try it, I wasn't going to drop $70 on a game I had reason to suspect I would dislike. I figured I would wait until it was on game pass, or on sale for $5 someday. More recently I read that they are going to update the game such that you don't have…

Civ is like TOS Star Trek movies: You can mostly avoid the even numbered ones!

With the exception of Civ2, which was excellent.

Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#126

Post by apothegm »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #14
TheRealPomax wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civ 1 and 2 have already been done, so if you want to play those, hit up freeciv.

I'm aware. But why rebuild 3 rather than 4, in that case?

Because 4 was a travesty unless you’re REALLY into religion.

3 was a great game for those who prefer building over war, and the first one with a proper non-military victory option.

Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#127

Post by skeltoac »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #106
chongli wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an issue of permission, it's an issue of trying to make a computer that's safe for grandma to use. Criminals can and will convince grandma to navigate a byzantine labyrinth of prompts and technical measures in order to drain her bank account. That's the threat model we're dealing with here.

[flagged]

We are all creeping toward old age. Let’s be kind to our future selves.

Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#128

Post by skeltoac »

donw wrote: post #34
colechristensen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key here is seeing this mentioned and not time traveling forward until 6 AM Saturday morning.

Yeah, that's what Factorio is for.

You won’t get me this time.

Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#129

Post by jwilliams »

tfehring wrote: post #7

Civ III is still my go-to activity for long flights with no internet - I've yet to find a better way to instantly time-travel forward 12 hours. I haven't tried OpenCiv3, but I'm glad it exists - getting vanilla Civ III running on MacOS is a hassle and still has issues with e.g. audio and cutscenes. I also hope it leads to a way to improve worker automation. Managing your workers well is important, doing it manually i…

It used to be Factorio for me (I live in Australia, so long flights happen a lot). The problem with Factorio the flight isn't long enough! and the game bleeds into 100+ hours post-flight.

Re: OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

#130

Post by WildWeazel »

slazaro wrote: post #31
WildWeazel wrote: post #23

Hi all, OpenCiv3 founder here. Thanks for the support! Check us out on Civfanatics or Discord to keep up with the project.

Any interesting insights about using Godot with C#? I love C# and I'm happy using it in Godot even though it's not as seamless as in Unity: in Godot 4 we still can't export to Web if the project is C#, and there's the whole conversion between C# types and Godot types that adds inefficiencies and extra allocations, etc.; it feels like it's a second-class language in Godot. I'm always interested in seeing what people f…

The founding developers were all software engineers with .NET experience, so it was the natural choice even though at the time it was Godot 3.x with Mono. I had used Unity before but not Godot. The project is structured as mostly plain C# DLLs with a relatively thin Godot UI layer controlling it, so the Godot type system is fairly encapsulated. We haven't really seen any issues with those decisions beyond just working out the communication between Godot and DLL. But again we were just working from what we knew so I can't really say if this was the best way to go about it.
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