While it is an amazing project, I can't wonder about the appeal of civ games themselves. To me they are a mess, the mid to late game itself is chaotic chore of micromanaging large number of units.
Unciv
41–50 of 138 posts
Re: Unciv
#42Neat project. I love it. I read the "legality" section of your README, and I hope that someone can provide some advice. It would be nice to know where the lines are so you didn't have to constantly be concerned about 2K/Firaxis legal department coming for you. Just commenting here for visibility in hopes someone more qualified can provide some help.
Here’s a really good breakdown from the dev of a Tetris clone: https://blog.osk.sh/post.php?p=643dbb578e1ba3.57021842
TLDR is that it’s really easy to get a larger hosting platform such as Steam, the App Store, etc to take down a game just by issuing a DMCA. But suing to take down something on a self hosted website is much, much harder
Re: Unciv
#43I really want to power civ AIs with LLMs for immersion and better play. I looked at freeciv and the code was unwieldly. Maybe unciv is easier to tamper with!
Funny how often HN comments are like “this would be better if it used AI!”
Re: Unciv
#44It’s sadly missing what, for me, makes Civ V the best Civ: Vox Populi [0] fka. Community Patch fka. Communitas, a very extensive mod that under different leadership has been in development for almost as long as Civ V exists. It overhauls the whole game, fixes bugs, balances things, improves the AI (usual recommendation is to play 2 difficulties lower than vanilla to start) and adds features.
Recently they started doing community councils, introducing a process for proposals and getting them voted on.
Personally, as I don’t care that much about balance, I also play with the 3rd and 4th unique component [1] mod, which is mostly a one-man project and not as balanced, but makes civs even more distinct.
Oh, and of course, VP is open source [2].
edit: In case someone decides to play with it, the current version 4.x has had some extensive clean up and might have some new bugs. Also, many addon mods have not been updated for it, so you might want to use 3.x for now.
[0]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t...
[1]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/more-unique-compone...
Re: Unciv
#45Along with shattered pixel dungeon, this is one of the only worthwile games on Android I've found. They don't call home, they don't push ads, they don't spy on you, they're just good games, well implemented and open source.
http://nobsgames.stavros.io/
Not a complaint, more an FYI. I see a large number of games were added in 2020. I tried 3 randomly and all were either "incompatible with my device" or "made for an older Android version". Should I report them, or is it best to leave them for people with older versions of Android?
Pixel 7 Pro / Android 14
Re: Unciv
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
How has the Civ gameplay changed since the 1990s?
Significantly. Hexes, districts, no unit stacking, resource stockpiles, religion, loyalty. Just some of the new concepts and mechanics in more recent civ games that 1, 2 or 3 didn't have.
And then they decided that Workers should be replaced with Builders, turning Civ into a micro-management game :(
Re: Unciv
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
How has the Civ gameplay changed since the 1990s?
Significantly. Hexes, districts, no unit stacking, resource stockpiles, religion, loyalty. Just some of the new concepts and mechanics in more recent civ games that 1, 2 or 3 didn't have.
While considered 'experimental' this is state of the art in FreeCiv:
https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Multiplayer_II_Dragoon_Summa...
And this giving an overview of the development up to that point:
https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Multiplayer_II_Navigation_Pa...
It's not stuck in 1990. Actually rather fun to play against humans, AI still meh.
Re: Unciv
#48I really want to power civ AIs with LLMs for immersion and better play. I looked at freeciv and the code was unwieldly. Maybe unciv is easier to tamper with!
That would be really interesting. Would the LLMs actually know how to play the game well though? It’s an extremely complicated game with tons of hidden information. It’s way more difficult than chess or poker or diplomacy for that matter!
My guess is, as is, they would be able to play, but not be very good.
The main issue I see is the spatial component is hard to describe in text. The new vision models make it easier, but still I imagine it's not trivial to integrate all the mechanics plus the spatial component on the limited prompt space.
I do think that 1) combining with the hand crafted AI and 2) having an "LLM advisors" system where for a given aspect (eg military) the "advisor" would present the options and tradeoffs to the "Main AI" and the role of the latter is to weigh the tradeoffs between the options presented by the advisors.
And what I do know is that it could be so much more immersive than the current hard coded AI!
Re: Unciv
#49I really want to power civ AIs with LLMs for immersion and better play. I looked at freeciv and the code was unwieldly. Maybe unciv is easier to tamper with!
Funny how often HN comments are like “this would be better if it used AI!”
A lot of fun to be found in the adjacent possible!
Re: Unciv
#50Is there a genre of online grand strategy games that are designed from the ground up to be played asynchronously? One of my favourite things was playing scrabble online where I could just do a move and then move on with my day. It’d take a week to play a game but it was on our terms and that felt so good.
Civ 6 has a multiplayer mode called "Play By Cloud". Here's the best description I could find about how it works: https://civ.halfstack.software