71–80 of 138 posts
It’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 doi…
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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 as…
Idefics, mingpt4, Next-GPT and LLava are open source multimodal LLMs that can read images.
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Probably. But keeping in mind the mobile focus, a more judicious icon-style art design is important, and I'm not sure how good generative AI is at making stuff that's legible at small sizes. Also, the simplicity of the current art allowing the download to be only 21MB is an accomplishment.
Unless you’re talking about feature phones or Nokias before 2010, mobile games can have graphics just as stunning as AAA games and an effective canvas size of 720p or up — definitely not constrained to “icon-style art design”.
A game like Unciv can't take the usual mobile UI cop-out of just hiding all the complexity behind a hamburger menu. It needs a large number of individually recognizable UI elements that are all significantly smaller than a thumbprint, because there are several pieces of information that need to be conveyed about each map tile the user can interact with. So a lot of the UI needs to be composed of icons or graphics designed under similar constraints. (And no, the fundamental design constraints and goals of icons are not the same as the file format limitations of early Windows .ICO files.)
Mobile games like Genshin Impact have comparatively little game state information and fewer discrete indicators that needs to be on-screen, so they can go all-out on the scenery and decorative visual effects. Unciv on a phone at its most zoomed-in has about as much physical screen area per map tile as Civ 5 on a laptop at its most zoomed-out; at normal playable zoom levels their respective UIs are working with very different amounts of screen real estate.
Along 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/
Along 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.
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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.
Along 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.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.akop.cross...
Along 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.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is incredible, but dangerously addictive. It's the perfect game for a 4-5 hour plane ride -- speaking from experience over the recent holidays.
It’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 doi…
On their release date, the best games in the franchise would be between Civ 3 and Civ 4. Civ 5 and 6 are so different that it is difficult to call them successor games anymore. It's Civ meets Settlers of Catan or something, no longer a true Civ game. The movement limitations in Civ 5 and 6 don't make sense. The biggest battles in history have been what Civ 5+ players dismiss as "death stacks". Think of the Battle of…
So I understand why they wanted to make room for actual tactics.
If that comes at the cost of archers being able to shoot a bunch of gatling gunners across the English channel without them having the reach to shoot back, then so be it.
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.
I like the earlier Civ games, up to around version 4 for this reason. Less complexity and micromanagement.