31 ms·

Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone

481 points by modinfo 4y ago

29athrowaway 4y ago
For some reason, the "Death - Sound of perseverance" album works great with Freeciv.
JoeyBananas 4y ago
freeciv is a noble effort but lacks features players want. For one, the AI is not on par with Civ 3.
- cmarschner 4y ago
  Well you could change that
- chongli 4y ago
  AI for these types of games is really hard to balance. A lot of players have complained about the weakness of AI in all of the Civ games as far back as I can remember. The problem is that people don’t really want an AI that plays to win. For one thing, it means the AI leaders will be extremely tight and shrewd traders that you can never take advantage of in negotiations. It also means AIs will sign deals with you to size up your military situation and then just wipe you out in a surprise attack as soon as possible. It means the computer players will no longer role play as historical leaders but instead behave like a bunch of ruthless, psychopathic, cyborg Hitler clones. Most of the historically-informed trade and diplomacy options will be useless because the AIs will just betray you at the worst moment. In essence, they’ll play like human players and honestly, Civ games are just not designed for that. There are much better games out there (mainly board games but also RTSes) for playing against humans who play to win.
  - gibolt 4y ago
    AI doesn't have to only try to win to be good. It has to give the perception of competition. Perhaps just scaling behind the scenes based on how the player is progressing
    - wyattpeak 4y ago
      I get frustrated with games that scale things with me. I want to be able to feel myself getting better, having my enemies scale with me on any axis really takes away from that feeling that I'm progressing. I say this not because I think it's an especially noteworthy or important objection, but to echo GP's point, that it's very hard to find AI that suits everyone, and it's not just a matter of difficulty.
      - mcv 4y ago
        Exactly. I do want AI to scale with me, but by me selecting better AI when I get better. That's how I measure my progress: by having to select better AI. That makes my progress transparent. And by having different AI at different difficulty levels, I think you actually can have AI that suits everyone. But I don't think most game companies like developing several separate versions of AI. They just want one that's superficially "good enough".
      - winwhiz 4y ago
        I recall seeing Sid Meier say in a talk that he liked to scale his AI to give players the sense of being on a knife's edge and then scaling it back near the end of a game to give a feeling of victory over impossible odds.
    - synu 4y ago
      This always encourages a human strategy where the optimal behavior is to sandbag in whatever way the AI is measuring your progress, and then slingshot past them once the opportunity arises. Not to say that can't be fun for some people, but it's definitely not a silver bullet.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    At leadt in Civ 6, at difficulty levels 6 and above, you can actually loose to the AI. I agree so, that in those cases winning means behaving like a cyborg Hitler clone. There are only so many ways you can hit the leading AI player down on culture or science victories.
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      I recall one game, my friend and I were playing the strongest AIs. We were closing in on the end of the game, and one pesky AI was very close to a science victory. My friend and I, both launched a incredible min-max campaign against these guys, using nukes, and whatever fast units we had to conquer and raze cities that had spaceports to stop them. We managed this very quickly, it was like my own desert storm in terms of how quickly and well it went for me. Then some random AI snagged a diplo victory and I was livid. I disable diplo victories when I play now.
      - antifa 4y ago
        I actually disable all victory conditions when I play civ5.
        hef19898 4y ago
        My "current" game is a marathon going for a point victory. It is running for almost a year now, and I still have 30 odd rounds left, sometimes a round, without any real action going on, takes uo to 10 minutes to calculate. So I am in for quite a bit more game time.
  - mcv 4y ago
    I would much prefer all of that over just giving them tons of economic bonuses I can never keep up with. (I'm currently playing Civ 6 on Immortal, where it's simply impossible to keep up at first, and I miss out on all of the wonders, but I still win in the end game simply because the AI is stupid.) I remember Brad Wardell claiming Galactic Civilizations would have the best AI possible, and it was certainly decent, but players still identified plenty of situations where the AI was being stupid. Brad said he did that intentionally because doing otherwise would be too mean. Thing is, hardcore players did use all of those tricks. At the highest difficulty level, the AI should too. Use the reasonable, nice, historical AI for the middle difficulty levels, but allow players to choose AI that is just desperate to win.
    - seb1204 4y ago
      Kudos to you for playing that high difficulty, are there videos to watch... Going to search now.
      - mcv 4y ago
        Watching a video of me playing Civ 6 would be incredibly boring. I take a long time, and most of the game I do nothing but desperately figure out how to keep up, and in the end I win with a boring Diplomatic Victory, unless someone else beats me to the Science Victory (other victories don't seem to be possible; except Domination, I suppose). They're not the most exciting games, but they're hard, mostly because it's impossible to keep up in science and wonders. For my current game, I took a step back to Emperor level, though. I wanted to try an early game Domination Victory, chose Alexander the Great on Pangea and Epic speed, and it's just way too easy (except for holding on to conquered cities during a Dark Age). I think I'm going to try the same thing on Immortal next. Maybe even slower speed so we spend more time in the lower tech levels where all Alexander's advantages are. And I need to start spying earlier; stealing tech boosts helps a lot in keeping up. I'm still not quite decided whether it's better to stick to a regular age all the time or flip between dark age and heroic age; Heroic Age is awesome, but hard to guarantee, and holding on to conquered cities is very hard during a dark age (I just learned that the Bread & Games project exists primarily for that situation; it helps a lot to have an entertainment district near your front lines).
  - mikro2nd 4y ago
    That's "ruthless, psychopathic, cyborg Gandhi clones" if you've been playing Civ long enough.
    - chongli 4y ago
      Hahaha. I felt that example was a bit too extreme. Having all the AIs nuke you into oblivion every game would get old pretty fast!
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    Of course, most of that just comes down to the game itself having rules that don't actually line up with the intended (for most people) gameplay experience. Compare to Crusader Kings 3, which is nominally in the same general genre, but has rules that actively push you and the AIs into playing 'in character', because if you just ignore all the secondary stuff your attempts at conquest will almost certainly fall apart.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    > cyborg Hitler clones In this particular case that isn't the concern. Hitler has a single excellent strategic insight at the start of the war (movement wins, "Blitzkrieg"), but one reason the Nazis lose is that his later strategies don't work. Hitler really wanted to do Sealion (German ground invasion of England) after it became apparent Britain under Churchill will not surrender, but it's just not practical and his general staff persuaded him not to smash his face against that particular wall. Sealion would be like a Civ AI repeatedly moving a just barely sufficient army from the French coast towards England, each time losing some to the water because they don't have good enough boats yet and each time discovering they can't be reinforced because that's too much movement - so the defenders have an advantage, and the advances all fail. The opponent is bloodied, but loses no territory while the AI's best troops are destroyed for no gain. A Hitler clone, but perhaps not in the way you meant.
    - chongli 4y ago
      The real Hitler wasn’t a cyborg, to my knowledge. If he were, we’d be speaking German right now. Okay, maybe not, but my point was only to use Hitler as an example that the hypothetical strong AI opponents aren’t to be trusted. The cyborg part is what makes them brilliant strategists, having instant access to computing power to simulate battles.
      - tialaramex 4y ago
        In Freeciv you don't have total information right? With imperfect information luck is a factor. An AI which focuses on luck outcomes might be more interesting to play against actually. Why have 100% chance to take exactly one of five enemy cities when you could have 20% chance for each tried in parallel. Less than 1% of the time you crush the opponent with all five defeats, much more often (but still less than half the time) you get none of them, but it always feels like you're a gambler this way.
- space_debris 4y ago
  I was wondering for a long time: wouldn't it be possible to create an ML-based AI that could parse CIV games and emulate/imitate human-style play? It would have to be broken down to the respective difficulty levels a human is playing and I guess it would require a lot of input metrics. But people are playing CIV anyway all the time, so there is definitely no lack of data. That way, CIV could move away from giving the AI boni that it often doesn't know to exploit properly, and we could potentially finally have an interesting competition with the AI.
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    yes, I would say it's probably possible now but not yet practical. It's really the forefront of AI research and only archivable with a team of top researchers and a lot of computing resources (you need to use a lot of self-play, so AI vs AI). But we still make a lot of progress every year, give it a few years and I would bet that it starts to get practical for game-developers to use machine learning.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      The problem with machine learning for game AI is how expensive it is computationally. Forget about using the GPU for it. Maybe if TPUs became more common. I think it should be possible to make, not a good one, but certainly a much better one, with a combination of various classical game tree search techniques, it's just that AI doesn't seem to have been a huge priority for the developers. There are even mods for Civ 5 that drastically improve the vanilla AI just through tweaking various behaviours.
      - LeanderK 4y ago
        I think those big models all had visual input and therefore understand what they're seeing. You don't really need this for game AIs, it could make those models drastically smaller.
        mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
rrreese 4y ago
What I find fascinating about this project is it’s longevity. It was started in 1995, a year before Civ II came out. I remember playing it in 2000. And here it is still going. Development is pretty active and there is even a 3D mode.
- catach 4y ago
  An interesting thing about Open Source game projects is that, if successful, they only ever work on that one game.
  - DaedPsyker 4y ago
    Is this in terms of contributors?
    - catach 4y ago
      To clarify my meaning: a game is never declared "done", with the apparatus of the project moving on to create a new game.
      - account42 4y ago
        Does that really mean anything? For an open source project the "apparatus" is whatever community forms to maintain that project and yes, the community won't just decide that as a whole they are now going to create a different game. But individual contributors absolutely can and do decide that they are done with the game and move on to something else.
      - hombre_fatal 4y ago
        I think that's just the nature of software never being done + the only reason games have been declared "done" in the past is when you had to master a single boxed release.
        catach 4y ago
        I would suggest that the vast majority of commercial games still trend very heavily towards the "done" model. Maybe a few patch releases over a year or two, but nothing like the Open Source model where the energy invested is constant. You allude to the reasons why though, with the box release requirement--though that's a part of the greater economic reasons.
harvie 4y ago
Never really understood how to play that. It is too hardcore :-D
bondant 4y ago
I used to play for several weeks on the same game with people across different countries. Although the game is (was?) missing a way to send a message to notify players it’s time to play their turn, it’s not difficult to write a small python script to parse the log and send an email. https://github.com/dareg/jouer_a_freeciv/blob/master/atoidejouer.py https://github.com/dareg/jouer_a_freeciv/blob/master/atoidej...
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  That's a pity that feature is missing. Might be a fun weekend project to look into someday. Where did you find the players in your group by the way? I always wanted to play long Freeciv games with friends but never found anyone willing to put in the time in my own circles!
  - bondant 4y ago
    I used to play with people I met at university and work. But I have to admit that most of the people I invited to join gave up as soon as they launched their first single game. Most were turned off by the complexity of the game interface or the old school graphics.
deepdriver 4y ago
While it may not have the shine and polish of Sid Meier’s Civilization 6, at least FreeCiv doesn’t force glitchy unwanted advertise-- er, launcher updates that break the game years after release: https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/nkdh4d/follow_up_to_the_2k_launcher_issue_thing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/nkdh4d/follow_up_to_th... Truly can’t describe how aggravating it is to have Civ 6, my after-work happy place, effectively torn from my hands years after purchase by some MBA manager and bargain-bin programmer. Bypassing the launcher only sort-of works on my PC. Can’t roll back to an earlier version because Steam. At least we’ll always have FreeCiv.
- zenlot 4y ago
  I play Civ 6 on PS5 and haven't had a single issue with launch or gameplay.
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    On platforms it launches without issue but if you haven't crashed it once I'm impressed. It crashes on every computer or game system once every 5-6 hours of gameplay for me.
- oefrha 4y ago
  Wait, you can bypass that shitty launcher? Thank goodness. It's been taking forever to start, or flat out refusing to start for me since about a year ago. What a useless piece of garbage.
  - Nition 4y ago
    Yeah, see the guide here from the linked thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-to-bypass-the-stupid-launcher.639325/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-to-bypass-the-stu... I had crashes with the launcher, and bypassing it fixed it completely.
- nmarinov 4y ago
  > Can’t roll back to an earlier version because Steam. I haven't tested it with Civ 6 cause I don't have it, but it works for several other games I've tried: How to Download Older Versions of a Steam Game https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=889624474 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=88962...
roschdal 4y ago
The 3D version is playable online here: https://www.fciv.net https://www.fciv.net
- KryDos 4y ago
  I play it here usually - https://www.freecivweb.org/ https://www.freecivweb.org/ Looks like they also have 3D version but I haven't tried it
  - oblak 4y ago
    Thank god I did a control+F "web" before asking if there's a version one can play in a browser. What a time to be alive. Time for someone to make a proper, no-plugin-required Quake multiplayer game. Quake Live could've been it but the tech wasn't ready. if anyone at id Software is reading this: do it. DO IT
    - nmarinov 4y ago
      There's some issues with it but I've played multiplayer Quake III Arena here: http://www.quakejs.com http://www.quakejs.com There's also several other ports to js. Most of them run amazingly well for being in a browser. At the very least it's nostalgic trying them out.
      - oblak 4y ago
        Thank you. Guess mods (like OSP/CPMA) don't work but still. Quake 3 on the web. Forgive me for asking but judging from your nickname, you're likely from Bulgaria. If that's true, then it's amazing we don't know each other as the Quake community (now long dead) is rather tiny. Edit: Well, it does not work in Firefox but I'll check out later in chromium. CPMA is the default I see. Truly amazing. Edit 2: I am getting rock solid 120 fps on a Ryzen 5800H. On battery. This really made my day
        nmarinov 4y ago
        Glad you like it. No worries about asking, you're correct about the country but I'm just a casual gamer by choice and never put that many hours into Quake. Love the game but my main appreciation of it comes from the id history, Doom and even it's influences on UT.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
Open-source should have speed up the evolution of new ideas and yet more often than not it's just keeping old proprietary software barely alive or duplicating it.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  You are talking as if open source was a single entity. This doesn't make any sense.
  - Silverback_VII 4y ago
    Well, some say that proprietary code is limiting because it doesn't allow for modifications and yet it creates almost all the innovation.
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      You have to take into account that the open source software constitute a very small fraction the overall software both in term of quantity of products and in term of developpers involved. Also there is a lot of innovation in open source software, the thing is those are often not seen nor directed to end users. Because many open source projects are initially started by developers and not by product design and marketing teams, the most successful open source projects that make products that solve developers problems or meet their needs.
      - Silverback_VII 4y ago
        Taking blender as example of a successful open source project, with a strong incentive for developers to create a great tool, you still have the problem that proprietary software is probably better, otherwise major 3d studios would use blender.
        anthk 4y ago
        - Apache - GCC/Clang - Nginx - Virt Manager - OpenBSD at firewalls - OpenSSH Should I go on?
mdp2021 4y ago
I would have loved to enhance some open code of Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri...
- totetsu 4y ago
  I really enjoyed how you could make so much energy late game that the meter just broke out of its UI box.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  So, really, you could just use FreeCiv code similar to Civ2 or Civ3 and change a few things. The setting and interludes were completely different but the gameplay isn’t too different.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Some features might be a little tricky: AC was built around fully customized units. It also supported modifying the terrain in various ways (with the worker-equivalent unit, big enough bombs, or there was an option to vote for global warming I think). You could use it to sink cities or change weather patterns (make your land greener by raising a ridge to block the rain). I think the weather implementation was really basic though, just a uniform prevailing wind you could block, nowadays we could do better... Then there's stuff like the government system which wouldn't be super hard, but would be a whole new screen to add.
- culi 4y ago
  http://freecivac.sourceforge.net/ http://freecivac.sourceforge.net/
qwerty456127 4y ago
I remember the last time I tried (nearly 20 years ago) I couldn't figure out how to play it in single player mode. It was asking for a server or something like that. Can I just click and play some meaningful single-player already?
- jgtrosh 4y ago
  > even for a solo game — one human player and any number of AIs — you need to run both the server and the client programs. https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Introduction_to_Freeciv https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Introduction_to_Freeciv
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
samwestdev 4y ago
How's the codebase? Clean? Worth a study?
- zulban 4y ago
  Good question. However, if you want to learn, the requirement shouldn't be a clean code base. Instead you want to find a working and complex code base. Real projects have warts and history. Whereas you can always find perfect code in tutorial snippets and opinionated blog posts.
notpushkin 4y ago
Also check out FreeCol, the open-source clone of Colonization: https://www.freecol.org/ https://www.freecol.org/
dhx 4y ago
Also see Unciv[1] which is based on Civ5. It works on Android and desktop environments and is very actively maintained and improved. Freeciv is based on Civ1/2. [1] https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
aasasd 4y ago
And other open-source clones of various games: https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com
- Alan_Dillman 4y ago
  Thank you for this.
  - aasasd 4y ago
    I post that each time an open-source clone is on the front page—which is pretty much once a month, sometimes sooner. The site itself was posted on HN three times altogether—one of them in the last hour, again without any traction. This dynamic is kinda funny.
    - aasasd 4y ago
      (Correction: there are more posts if I search for ‘http’ instead of ‘https’.)
- aasasd 4y ago
  BTW, my theoretical favorite of those is the engine clone of Carmageddon, made by one guy in C#—however he's finished everything besides power-ups, and then abandoned the project. http://1amstudios.com/projects/openc1/ http://1amstudios.com/projects/openc1/
blippage 4y ago
I tried playing it a few years ago, along with a similar offering. I couldn't really figure out how to get started, and what buttons to press. So I lost interest quickly.
upupandup 4y ago
I am still waiting for an open source version of Total War, or a least the top down map strategy portion of it.
Pxtl 4y ago
Freeciv is great, but Unciv is the more interesting one to me. Excellent OSS mobile implementation of Civ V. I've burned many evenings away on my phone. The GUI is a bit strange in some spots, but otherwise it's a very nice civ game.
- oynqr 4y ago
  It's also very actively developed and contributions are always welcome. As far as I looked at it, the codebase is rather approachable.
- entropicdrifter 4y ago
  I too prefer Unciv. The mod selection is excellent and includes all of the expansion/DLC content for Civ V, but being able to play it on Android is the real clincher for me.
- Spellman 4y ago
  Link https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
heavyset_go 4y ago
One of my favorite things to do with this game is to set up a huge map and either do one turn a day with friends or against AI.
User23 4y ago
It's a shame there aren't more games with free engines and paid assets. Even Stallman approves of this model[1]: We don't take the position that artistic or entertainment works must be free, but if you want to make one free, we recommend the Free Art License. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#OtherWorks https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#OtherWorks
Der_Einzige 4y ago
C-evo is a better Civ 2 clone: http://c-evo.org/ http://c-evo.org/
SLWW 4y ago
Then there's the web version! https://www.freecivweb.org https://www.freecivweb.org

481 points by modinfo 4y ago

29athrowaway 4y ago

For some reason, the "Death - Sound of perseverance" album works great with Freeciv.

JoeyBananas 4y ago

freeciv is a noble effort but lacks features players want. For one, the AI is not on par with Civ 3.

cmarschner 4y ago
Well you could change that
chongli 4y ago
AI for these types of games is really hard to balance. A lot of players have complained about the weakness of AI in all of the Civ games as far back as I can remember. The problem is that people don’t really want an AI that plays to win. For one thing, it means the AI leaders will be extremely tight and shrewd traders that you can never take advantage of in negotiations. It also means AIs will sign deals with you to size up your military situation and then just wipe you out in a surprise attack as soon as possible. It means the computer players will no longer role play as historical leaders but instead behave like a bunch of ruthless, psychopathic, cyborg Hitler clones. Most of the historically-informed trade and diplomacy options will be useless because the AIs will just betray you at the worst moment. In essence, they’ll play like human players and honestly, Civ games are just not designed for that. There are much better games out there (mainly board games but also RTSes) for playing against humans who play to win.
- gibolt 4y ago
  AI doesn't have to only try to win to be good. It has to give the perception of competition. Perhaps just scaling behind the scenes based on how the player is progressing
  - wyattpeak 4y ago
    I get frustrated with games that scale things with me. I want to be able to feel myself getting better, having my enemies scale with me on any axis really takes away from that feeling that I'm progressing. I say this not because I think it's an especially noteworthy or important objection, but to echo GP's point, that it's very hard to find AI that suits everyone, and it's not just a matter of difficulty.
    - mcv 4y ago
      Exactly. I do want AI to scale with me, but by me selecting better AI when I get better. That's how I measure my progress: by having to select better AI. That makes my progress transparent. And by having different AI at different difficulty levels, I think you actually can have AI that suits everyone. But I don't think most game companies like developing several separate versions of AI. They just want one that's superficially "good enough".
    - winwhiz 4y ago
      I recall seeing Sid Meier say in a talk that he liked to scale his AI to give players the sense of being on a knife's edge and then scaling it back near the end of a game to give a feeling of victory over impossible odds.
  - synu 4y ago
    This always encourages a human strategy where the optimal behavior is to sandbag in whatever way the AI is measuring your progress, and then slingshot past them once the opportunity arises. Not to say that can't be fun for some people, but it's definitely not a silver bullet.
- hef19898 4y ago
  At leadt in Civ 6, at difficulty levels 6 and above, you can actually loose to the AI. I agree so, that in those cases winning means behaving like a cyborg Hitler clone. There are only so many ways you can hit the leading AI player down on culture or science victories.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    I recall one game, my friend and I were playing the strongest AIs. We were closing in on the end of the game, and one pesky AI was very close to a science victory. My friend and I, both launched a incredible min-max campaign against these guys, using nukes, and whatever fast units we had to conquer and raze cities that had spaceports to stop them. We managed this very quickly, it was like my own desert storm in terms of how quickly and well it went for me. Then some random AI snagged a diplo victory and I was livid. I disable diplo victories when I play now.
    - antifa 4y ago
      I actually disable all victory conditions when I play civ5.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        My "current" game is a marathon going for a point victory. It is running for almost a year now, and I still have 30 odd rounds left, sometimes a round, without any real action going on, takes uo to 10 minutes to calculate. So I am in for quite a bit more game time.
- mcv 4y ago
  I would much prefer all of that over just giving them tons of economic bonuses I can never keep up with. (I'm currently playing Civ 6 on Immortal, where it's simply impossible to keep up at first, and I miss out on all of the wonders, but I still win in the end game simply because the AI is stupid.) I remember Brad Wardell claiming Galactic Civilizations would have the best AI possible, and it was certainly decent, but players still identified plenty of situations where the AI was being stupid. Brad said he did that intentionally because doing otherwise would be too mean. Thing is, hardcore players did use all of those tricks. At the highest difficulty level, the AI should too. Use the reasonable, nice, historical AI for the middle difficulty levels, but allow players to choose AI that is just desperate to win.
  - seb1204 4y ago
    Kudos to you for playing that high difficulty, are there videos to watch... Going to search now.
    - mcv 4y ago
      Watching a video of me playing Civ 6 would be incredibly boring. I take a long time, and most of the game I do nothing but desperately figure out how to keep up, and in the end I win with a boring Diplomatic Victory, unless someone else beats me to the Science Victory (other victories don't seem to be possible; except Domination, I suppose). They're not the most exciting games, but they're hard, mostly because it's impossible to keep up in science and wonders. For my current game, I took a step back to Emperor level, though. I wanted to try an early game Domination Victory, chose Alexander the Great on Pangea and Epic speed, and it's just way too easy (except for holding on to conquered cities during a Dark Age). I think I'm going to try the same thing on Immortal next. Maybe even slower speed so we spend more time in the lower tech levels where all Alexander's advantages are. And I need to start spying earlier; stealing tech boosts helps a lot in keeping up. I'm still not quite decided whether it's better to stick to a regular age all the time or flip between dark age and heroic age; Heroic Age is awesome, but hard to guarantee, and holding on to conquered cities is very hard during a dark age (I just learned that the Bread & Games project exists primarily for that situation; it helps a lot to have an entertainment district near your front lines).
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  That's "ruthless, psychopathic, cyborg Gandhi clones" if you've been playing Civ long enough.
  - chongli 4y ago
    Hahaha. I felt that example was a bit too extreme. Having all the AIs nuke you into oblivion every game would get old pretty fast!
- crooked-v 4y ago
  Of course, most of that just comes down to the game itself having rules that don't actually line up with the intended (for most people) gameplay experience. Compare to Crusader Kings 3, which is nominally in the same general genre, but has rules that actively push you and the AIs into playing 'in character', because if you just ignore all the secondary stuff your attempts at conquest will almost certainly fall apart.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  > cyborg Hitler clones In this particular case that isn't the concern. Hitler has a single excellent strategic insight at the start of the war (movement wins, "Blitzkrieg"), but one reason the Nazis lose is that his later strategies don't work. Hitler really wanted to do Sealion (German ground invasion of England) after it became apparent Britain under Churchill will not surrender, but it's just not practical and his general staff persuaded him not to smash his face against that particular wall. Sealion would be like a Civ AI repeatedly moving a just barely sufficient army from the French coast towards England, each time losing some to the water because they don't have good enough boats yet and each time discovering they can't be reinforced because that's too much movement - so the defenders have an advantage, and the advances all fail. The opponent is bloodied, but loses no territory while the AI's best troops are destroyed for no gain. A Hitler clone, but perhaps not in the way you meant.
  - chongli 4y ago
    The real Hitler wasn’t a cyborg, to my knowledge. If he were, we’d be speaking German right now. Okay, maybe not, but my point was only to use Hitler as an example that the hypothetical strong AI opponents aren’t to be trusted. The cyborg part is what makes them brilliant strategists, having instant access to computing power to simulate battles.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      In Freeciv you don't have total information right? With imperfect information luck is a factor. An AI which focuses on luck outcomes might be more interesting to play against actually. Why have 100% chance to take exactly one of five enemy cities when you could have 20% chance for each tried in parallel. Less than 1% of the time you crush the opponent with all five defeats, much more often (but still less than half the time) you get none of them, but it always feels like you're a gambler this way.
space_debris 4y ago
I was wondering for a long time: wouldn't it be possible to create an ML-based AI that could parse CIV games and emulate/imitate human-style play? It would have to be broken down to the respective difficulty levels a human is playing and I guess it would require a lot of input metrics. But people are playing CIV anyway all the time, so there is definitely no lack of data. That way, CIV could move away from giving the AI boni that it often doesn't know to exploit properly, and we could potentially finally have an interesting competition with the AI.
- LeanderK 4y ago
  yes, I would say it's probably possible now but not yet practical. It's really the forefront of AI research and only archivable with a team of top researchers and a lot of computing resources (you need to use a lot of self-play, so AI vs AI). But we still make a lot of progress every year, give it a few years and I would bet that it starts to get practical for game-developers to use machine learning.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    The problem with machine learning for game AI is how expensive it is computationally. Forget about using the GPU for it. Maybe if TPUs became more common. I think it should be possible to make, not a good one, but certainly a much better one, with a combination of various classical game tree search techniques, it's just that AI doesn't seem to have been a huge priority for the developers. There are even mods for Civ 5 that drastically improve the vanilla AI just through tweaking various behaviours.
    - LeanderK 4y ago
      I think those big models all had visual input and therefore understand what they're seeing. You don't really need this for game AIs, it could make those models drastically smaller.
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

rrreese 4y ago

What I find fascinating about this project is it’s longevity. It was started in 1995, a year before Civ II came out. I remember playing it in 2000. And here it is still going. Development is pretty active and there is even a 3D mode.

catach 4y ago
An interesting thing about Open Source game projects is that, if successful, they only ever work on that one game.
- DaedPsyker 4y ago
  Is this in terms of contributors?
  - catach 4y ago
    To clarify my meaning: a game is never declared "done", with the apparatus of the project moving on to create a new game.
    - account42 4y ago
      Does that really mean anything? For an open source project the "apparatus" is whatever community forms to maintain that project and yes, the community won't just decide that as a whole they are now going to create a different game. But individual contributors absolutely can and do decide that they are done with the game and move on to something else.
    - hombre_fatal 4y ago
      I think that's just the nature of software never being done + the only reason games have been declared "done" in the past is when you had to master a single boxed release.
      - catach 4y ago
        I would suggest that the vast majority of commercial games still trend very heavily towards the "done" model. Maybe a few patch releases over a year or two, but nothing like the Open Source model where the energy invested is constant. You allude to the reasons why though, with the box release requirement--though that's a part of the greater economic reasons.

harvie 4y ago

Never really understood how to play that. It is too hardcore :-D

bondant 4y ago

I used to play for several weeks on the same game with people across different countries. Although the game is (was?) missing a way to send a message to notify players it’s time to play their turn, it’s not difficult to write a small python script to parse the log and send an email. https://github.com/dareg/jouer_a_freeciv/blob/master/atoidejouer.py https://github.com/dareg/jouer_a_freeciv/blob/master/atoidej...

AlecSchueler 4y ago
That's a pity that feature is missing. Might be a fun weekend project to look into someday. Where did you find the players in your group by the way? I always wanted to play long Freeciv games with friends but never found anyone willing to put in the time in my own circles!
- bondant 4y ago
  I used to play with people I met at university and work. But I have to admit that most of the people I invited to join gave up as soon as they launched their first single game. Most were turned off by the complexity of the game interface or the old school graphics.

deepdriver 4y ago

While it may not have the shine and polish of Sid Meier’s Civilization 6, at least FreeCiv doesn’t force glitchy unwanted advertise-- er, launcher updates that break the game years after release: https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/nkdh4d/follow_up_to_the_2k_launcher_issue_thing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/nkdh4d/follow_up_to_th... Truly can’t describe how aggravating it is to have Civ 6, my after-work happy place, effectively torn from my hands years after purchase by some MBA manager and bargain-bin programmer. Bypassing the launcher only sort-of works on my PC. Can’t roll back to an earlier version because Steam. At least we’ll always have FreeCiv.

zenlot 4y ago
I play Civ 6 on PS5 and haven't had a single issue with launch or gameplay.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  On platforms it launches without issue but if you haven't crashed it once I'm impressed. It crashes on every computer or game system once every 5-6 hours of gameplay for me.
oefrha 4y ago
Wait, you can bypass that shitty launcher? Thank goodness. It's been taking forever to start, or flat out refusing to start for me since about a year ago. What a useless piece of garbage.
- Nition 4y ago
  Yeah, see the guide here from the linked thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-to-bypass-the-stupid-launcher.639325/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-to-bypass-the-stu... I had crashes with the launcher, and bypassing it fixed it completely.
nmarinov 4y ago
> Can’t roll back to an earlier version because Steam. I haven't tested it with Civ 6 cause I don't have it, but it works for several other games I've tried: How to Download Older Versions of a Steam Game https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=889624474 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=88962...

roschdal 4y ago

The 3D version is playable online here: https://www.fciv.net https://www.fciv.net

KryDos 4y ago
I play it here usually - https://www.freecivweb.org/ https://www.freecivweb.org/ Looks like they also have 3D version but I haven't tried it
- oblak 4y ago
  Thank god I did a control+F "web" before asking if there's a version one can play in a browser. What a time to be alive. Time for someone to make a proper, no-plugin-required Quake multiplayer game. Quake Live could've been it but the tech wasn't ready. if anyone at id Software is reading this: do it. DO IT
  - nmarinov 4y ago
    There's some issues with it but I've played multiplayer Quake III Arena here: http://www.quakejs.com http://www.quakejs.com There's also several other ports to js. Most of them run amazingly well for being in a browser. At the very least it's nostalgic trying them out.
    - oblak 4y ago
      Thank you. Guess mods (like OSP/CPMA) don't work but still. Quake 3 on the web. Forgive me for asking but judging from your nickname, you're likely from Bulgaria. If that's true, then it's amazing we don't know each other as the Quake community (now long dead) is rather tiny. Edit: Well, it does not work in Firefox but I'll check out later in chromium. CPMA is the default I see. Truly amazing. Edit 2: I am getting rock solid 120 fps on a Ryzen 5800H. On battery. This really made my day
      - nmarinov 4y ago
        Glad you like it. No worries about asking, you're correct about the country but I'm just a casual gamer by choice and never put that many hours into Quake. Love the game but my main appreciation of it comes from the id history, Doom and even it's influences on UT.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

Open-source should have speed up the evolution of new ideas and yet more often than not it's just keeping old proprietary software barely alive or duplicating it.

prmoustache 4y ago
You are talking as if open source was a single entity. This doesn't make any sense.
- Silverback_VII 4y ago
  Well, some say that proprietary code is limiting because it doesn't allow for modifications and yet it creates almost all the innovation.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    You have to take into account that the open source software constitute a very small fraction the overall software both in term of quantity of products and in term of developpers involved. Also there is a lot of innovation in open source software, the thing is those are often not seen nor directed to end users. Because many open source projects are initially started by developers and not by product design and marketing teams, the most successful open source projects that make products that solve developers problems or meet their needs.
    - Silverback_VII 4y ago
      Taking blender as example of a successful open source project, with a strong incentive for developers to create a great tool, you still have the problem that proprietary software is probably better, otherwise major 3d studios would use blender.
      - anthk 4y ago
        - Apache - GCC/Clang - Nginx - Virt Manager - OpenBSD at firewalls - OpenSSH Should I go on?

mdp2021 4y ago

I would have loved to enhance some open code of Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri...

totetsu 4y ago
I really enjoyed how you could make so much energy late game that the meter just broke out of its UI box.
BirAdam 4y ago
So, really, you could just use FreeCiv code similar to Civ2 or Civ3 and change a few things. The setting and interludes were completely different but the gameplay isn’t too different.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Some features might be a little tricky: AC was built around fully customized units. It also supported modifying the terrain in various ways (with the worker-equivalent unit, big enough bombs, or there was an option to vote for global warming I think). You could use it to sink cities or change weather patterns (make your land greener by raising a ridge to block the rain). I think the weather implementation was really basic though, just a uniform prevailing wind you could block, nowadays we could do better... Then there's stuff like the government system which wouldn't be super hard, but would be a whole new screen to add.
culi 4y ago
http://freecivac.sourceforge.net/ http://freecivac.sourceforge.net/

qwerty456127 4y ago

I remember the last time I tried (nearly 20 years ago) I couldn't figure out how to play it in single player mode. It was asking for a server or something like that. Can I just click and play some meaningful single-player already?

jgtrosh 4y ago
> even for a solo game — one human player and any number of AIs — you need to run both the server and the client programs. https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Introduction_to_Freeciv https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Introduction_to_Freeciv

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

samwestdev 4y ago

How's the codebase? Clean? Worth a study?

zulban 4y ago
Good question. However, if you want to learn, the requirement shouldn't be a clean code base. Instead you want to find a working and complex code base. Real projects have warts and history. Whereas you can always find perfect code in tutorial snippets and opinionated blog posts.

notpushkin 4y ago

Also check out FreeCol, the open-source clone of Colonization: https://www.freecol.org/ https://www.freecol.org/

dhx 4y ago

Also see Unciv[1] which is based on Civ5. It works on Android and desktop environments and is very actively maintained and improved. Freeciv is based on Civ1/2. [1] https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv

aasasd 4y ago

And other open-source clones of various games: https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com

Alan_Dillman 4y ago
Thank you for this.
- aasasd 4y ago
  I post that each time an open-source clone is on the front page—which is pretty much once a month, sometimes sooner. The site itself was posted on HN three times altogether—one of them in the last hour, again without any traction. This dynamic is kinda funny.
  - aasasd 4y ago
    (Correction: there are more posts if I search for ‘http’ instead of ‘https’.)
aasasd 4y ago
BTW, my theoretical favorite of those is the engine clone of Carmageddon, made by one guy in C#—however he's finished everything besides power-ups, and then abandoned the project. http://1amstudios.com/projects/openc1/ http://1amstudios.com/projects/openc1/

blippage 4y ago

I tried playing it a few years ago, along with a similar offering. I couldn't really figure out how to get started, and what buttons to press. So I lost interest quickly.

upupandup 4y ago

I am still waiting for an open source version of Total War, or a least the top down map strategy portion of it.

Pxtl 4y ago

Freeciv is great, but Unciv is the more interesting one to me. Excellent OSS mobile implementation of Civ V. I've burned many evenings away on my phone. The GUI is a bit strange in some spots, but otherwise it's a very nice civ game.

oynqr 4y ago
It's also very actively developed and contributions are always welcome. As far as I looked at it, the codebase is rather approachable.
entropicdrifter 4y ago
I too prefer Unciv. The mod selection is excellent and includes all of the expansion/DLC content for Civ V, but being able to play it on Android is the real clincher for me.
Spellman 4y ago
Link https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv

heavyset_go 4y ago

One of my favorite things to do with this game is to set up a huge map and either do one turn a day with friends or against AI.

User23 4y ago

It's a shame there aren't more games with free engines and paid assets. Even Stallman approves of this model[1]: We don't take the position that artistic or entertainment works must be free, but if you want to make one free, we recommend the Free Art License. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#OtherWorks https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#OtherWorks

Der_Einzige 4y ago

C-evo is a better Civ 2 clone: http://c-evo.org/ http://c-evo.org/

SLWW 4y ago

Then there's the web version! https://www.freecivweb.org https://www.freecivweb.org