Unciv(github.com) |
Pixel 7 Pro / Android 14
There appears to be a bug on your site. I can’t seem to both filter and sort at the same time on iOS Safari. Both work, but if I filter (I filtered on puzzle and free) it works, but if I then click the sort by “added” button it sorts and my filter is gone. If I sort and then apply the filter it goes back to the default order.
They're open-source, simple, quick games.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.akop.cross...
> Depends what you're looking for. If you're in the market for high-res graphics, amazing soundtracks, animations etc, I highly recommend Firaxis's Civ-V-like game, "Civilization V".
> If you want a small, fast, moddable, FOSS, in-depth 4X that can still run on a potato, you've come to the right place :)
I installed it on f-droid about a year ago. It's lots of fun, though a (decreasing) number of things still aren't implemented.
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...
The greater relative cost and lower number of both cities and units means that to me there seem to be a smaller number of things to micromanage in Civ 5. Units embarking themselves means you don't have to herd them into transports.
The lack of unit stacking and the inability to move any units together automatically (even the ones that do stack) does cause quite a bit of micromanagement, though, so that's true.
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.
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.
Quite fun, but needs a community interested in such, and very focused game design. (Specifically, need lots of meaningful decisions to be made each turn, but relatively few turns in a game.)
Stars! was one of many such games back in the day, but I'm pretty sure they're all dead now.
If you really want to melt your brain, and have a lot of time to burn, you can play (the board game) Diplomacy by email. I used to do that a lot. But at our speeds, games took months or even years, not just a week. (We usually play with one turn every three days or even up to every two weeks.)
Disclaimer: I'm one of the team members. In our experience, most people who say Civ4 is the best Civ end up really liking Old World. When it comes to Civ5, I personally find myself agreeing with Sullla.
I’d much rather have a strategy game with a really nice, clean, polished UI and simple, legible graphics!
This is just a variation on "Why TF did it take so long to get dark mode on phones?"
Which is -- why not swappable assets, like in a lot of simpler games?
I think the biggest cause of jank from the look of that project is also more due to UI stuff. Font choices, color pallettes, "1px solid white" borders. Maybe generative tools could provide a good way to investigate a better looking set of things though!
Hope someone is gracious enough to contribute a video overview / tutorial.
I looked at freeciv and the code was unwieldly. Maybe unciv is easier to tamper with!
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!
Anyway, it's a pretty reasonable requirement for a game to not look horrific and off-putting, regardless of whether it is free.
What would be the point though? If whoever is making this can't tell it looks terrible, they will probably be like you and take any suggestion that it isn't perfect as a threat.
Symbolic icons for a Civ game, maybe are not the best choice.
Stable diffusion could help a lot here to generate assets.
I do not see a reason to contribute to that project.
I remember eagerly awaiting Civ V, buying it on release day, and then being shocked by how different it was. At the time I had strong opinions on all the things that it did "wrong", but now I've concluded that Civ is one of those games where the first one you play will just always be special. Objectively, lots of people love Civ V and I'm happy for that.
But even though I stopped playing Civ V I kept following along in the civfanatics forums to see what kinds of awesome mods would develop around it.
We never saw the same kind of total conversion mods that were possible in Civ IV, I think because of modding limitations. But I either missed or disregarded Vox Populi and now I'm excited to read into its history!
FWIW, I started with Civ II (still have the thick manual), but prefer V ;)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=20591...
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 Trafalgar, Battle of Stalingrad, Siege of Baghdad (1258), Fall of Tenochtitlan... all concentrations of multiple units on one area.
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.
I'm not sure any of those aimed to be as direct a clone of a specific mainline Civ's rules and mechanics, but rules and mechanics are the aspects of the game that are most clearly free to copy.
Realistically, of course, it probably doesn't matter since I assume the author doesn't have the resources to fight Firaxis in court over this anyway.
Bigger corporations than Firaxis have made that same assumption and lost. There was a great story recently about an Adelaide woman who represented herself in a suit against Google for years and finally won: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-23/janice-duffy-wins-12-...
Firaxis could certainly send a cease & desist.
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
https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...
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.
... but definitely solves the addiction problem :-)
Humans are decent at Civ exactly because we play in a naturally heuristic fashion and don’t try to do any tree search. To get an AI to cope with the this vast amount of information, available and hidden, and make sensible decisions without tree search, is a huge challenge. On top of that, it needs to deal with up to a dozen opponents, multiple of which may be human, and avoid getting ruthlessly exploited in trade deals and diplomacy and all the rest.
Here is one basic decision among dozens made every turn: do I accept an open borders treaty with Bob of the Carthaginians or not? I can’t see any armies he may or may not have (fog of war) and he’s never betrayed me before so I guess he’s trustworthy… oops! He used the open borders to move a vast army into my territory and right up to all my cities in a single turn and then declared war!
That’s one decision, among dozens made every turn, that led to total defeat.
Is that a typo, or an apt description of a lot of 'free to play' games?
No need to add the board game style limitations.
Crypto solve this!
\s
Diplomacy in the newer games has a lot more freedom and variety in terms of the deals you can make, what you can trade for what with the AI, etc., but you can't directly exchange technologies any more. (At least not in Civ V.)
In Civ I and II, caravans and diplomats/spies used to be units you moved around the map manually. Then there's the whole city states thing since Civ V (I think), strategic resources that are required for particular units or buildings, significant changes in how happiness/approval is managed, as well as several victory types apart from conquest and space race.
In 90's Civ games (except for SMAC) all the civilizations were also essentially identical in terms of gameplay, except for AI leader parameters and diplomatic stances. Newer games in the series have more differences between civilizations in terms of strategy, at least in theory.
Basically, the core idea is still the same but the details and many individual mechanics have changed a lot.
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.
Idefics, mingpt4, Next-GPT and LLava are open source multimodal LLMs that can read images.