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Unciv
- 29athrowaway 3y agoIt truly needs a different color palette and font. Forget about high contrast colors. Symbolic icons for a Civ game, maybe are not the best choice. Stable diffusion could help a lot here to generate assets.
- andygeorge 3y agoPRs welcome
- 29athrowaway 3y agoI already own my copies of Civ, sorry. I do not see a reason to contribute to that project.
- andygeorge 3y agoi think you replied to the wrong comment
- duozerk 3y agoAlong 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.
- stavros 3y agohttp://nobsgames.stavros.io/ http://nobsgames.stavros.io/
- duozerk 3y agoThis is great, thank you !
- stavros 3y agoYou're welcome! I'm glad you like it.
- karlgrz 3y agoFantastic, thank you for sharing this!
- stavros 3y agoYou're welcome! Please help by submitting and reporting games.
- shric 3y agoNot 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
- stavros 3y agoHmm, I think leave them, as long as they're not completely unavailable. It does lower the quality of my service a bit, though.
- whizzter 3y agoThank Google for that, they're depleting Play Store to play favourites with bigwig publishers. https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/targe...
- antifa 3y agoI've seen this in the wild, I'm guessing ethical indie devs are less likely to make new builds when new Android versions release.
- subtra3t 3y agoI think this website misclassifies a few games. For example in Bastion (iOS) only the beginning can be paid for free. The rest of the game is unlocked via a one-time payment. However the website says that the one-time purchase removes ads/annoyances.
- benj111 3y ago>paid for free Is that a typo, or an apt description of a lot of 'free to play' games?
- subtra3t 3y agotypo lol, I meant to say played.
- fho 3y agoBastion was a great game ... And mostly for the narrator
- stavros 3y agoI think that's fine, but maybe I will change the description to say "one-time payment unlocks the full game, without annoyances".
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoWow, I really needed that website. I spend a lot of time looking for games of this kind, since like 99% of Android games are, in your (rather precise) terms, bullshit, and after some experiences with those I don't want to pay any more, period.
- stavros 3y agoThanks, I had the same thought!
- cgriswald 3y agoThis is exactly what I’ve wanted. It’s impossible to find games on the app store. Other than a few publishers I trust, I’ve mostly stopped playing. 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.
- stavros 3y agoYeah, unfortunately I haven't added code to persist the filter. I'll fix it, but you can manually add the parameter to the url and it should work.
- polskibus 3y agoseems like last Android game was added in 2022-04
- stavros 3y agoCan't be, I added some today. It might be the cache though.
- chongli 3y agoI love SPD. Evan, the author, is incredible! He puts so much work into that game and is extremely open and detailed about the development process!
- calvinmorrison 3y agoMany years ago I found a pack of card games on f-Droid with a great solitare type game called Golf. I wish I could find it!
- boomboomsubban 3y agoSolitaireCG? I searched fdroid for "card," and it was pretty easy to find.
- NoboruWataya 3y ago"Simple Solitaire Collection" is the best solitaire app that I found on F-Droid. Great selection of games.
- kej 3y agoThat reminds me that Zachtronics Solitaire is available on Android. It's the solitaire minigames from all the Zachtronics games, plus a new tarot-based solitaire just for this collection.
- m3at 3y agoI can recommend mindustry as well: https://mindustrygame.github.io/ https://mindustrygame.github.io/
- mellinoe 3y agoShattered 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.
- katzenversteher 3y agoThe only way to break my addiction was to play through it. Due to skill and luck limitations I only got to somewhere in the last 3rd of the game, so I cloned the repo and modified the code so my characters where basically invincible from the beginning and played though it.
- fho 3y agoLol :-) That sooo goes against the Roguelike ethos :-) ... but definitely solves the addiction problem :-)
- rand0mx1 3y agoYou can try Chip defence https://f-droid.org/packages/de.chadenas.cpudefense/ https://f-droid.org/packages/de.chadenas.cpudefense/
- jack_pp 3y agoI can also recommend https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/mvpc https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/mvpc . It's aesthetically very pleasing, no ads as far as I remember. Idk about spying though.
- a_e_k 3y agoAlphacross [0] is the one I keep coming back to. I don't think it's open source, but otherwise it's a nice simple no-frills crossword app. No ads, minimal permissions, sips battery, downloads puzzles on-demand and then works fine offline, etc. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.akop.crosswords https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.akop.cross...
- wazoox 3y agoI highly recommend Yiotro games: https://yiotro.com/games/ https://yiotro.com/games/ They're open-source, simple, quick games.
- TobTobXX 3y agoThey're not open source, but they don't have ads and a generous free version. The Pro version is really not needed, except if you really are into the game or if yiu want to support the dev.
- haunter 3y agoSimon Tatham’s Puzzles https://chris.boyle.name/projects/android-puzzles/ https://chris.boyle.name/projects/android-puzzles/
- humpydumpy 3y agofor me, one of the best games is Andor's Trail. Magnificent map making, funny dialogue, tons of content. It is not finished yet, but has been a lot of fun to play for years.
- jrm4 3y agoFWIW, and I'm sure a bunch of people would hate it, seems like a dash of AI art tools could go REAL far here.
- wtallis 3y agoProbably. 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.
- eru 3y agoAI can make pixel art, too.
- wtallis 3y agoPixel art as used today isn't quite the same thing as old-school icon design. Unciv doesn't need to operate with a restricted color palette and even on mobile has quite a few pixels to work with, but has to make UI elements easily recognizable and distinguishable at small physical sizes. I think the design constraints are probably most similar to early iOS and some early OS X icons, rather than the constraints of Win95 and 2d video game consoles (where all art—icons and otherwise—had very limited color and pixel counts).
- oefrha 3y agoUnless 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”.
- wtallis 3y agoI'm not talking about technological restrictions; I'm well aware of the pixel counts and color depth of modern displays. They do not get rid of the design constraints of trying to make a usable interface with very high information density on a small screen. 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.
- Waterluvian 3y agoIs 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.
- AsyncGames 3y agoIf you find one, post it to: https://old.reddit.com/r/AsyncGames/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AsyncGames/
- eru 3y agoThere were quite a few of those browser games around about 20 years ago. 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.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skibz 3y agoCiv 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 https://civ.halfstack.software
- Lazare 3y agoPBEM (Play By Email) was (and maybe still is) a big thing in the wargaming space. Long, long ago I was part of a group on USENET and later IRC that organised games of Stars! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!) with typically a cadence of a few turns per week, or sometimes "blitz" games played onn IRC with several turns per hour. 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.
- ericra 3y agoNeat 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.
- thurn 3y agoSpry Fox v. LolApps (2012) was a case about a similar visual and thematic remake of a game (Triple Town vs Yeti Town). The Yeti Town developer decided to settle when it became clear that they would likely lose, and the remake is no longer available. 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.
- john-radio 3y ago> 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-year-legal-battle-against-google/103008954 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-23/janice-duffy-wins-12-...
- HillRat 3y agoThe Spry Fox fact pattern is distinguishable, I think, given that the defendant had access to privileged IP and had been negotiating to port the app before creating the knockoff after negotiations fell apart.
- wtallis 3y agoFreeciv has been around much longer without being targeted by any legal threats that I'm aware of. There have also been commercial competitors like Activision's Civilization: Call to Power and its sequel that only had to drop "Civilization" from its naming for lack of a trademark license. 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.
- sho_hn 3y agoHow does this compare to Freeciv?
- francoisdevlin 3y agoThe strength of unciv is how close it comes to civ 5, and for that I loved it.
- resolutebat 3y agoFreeciv is a Civ 1/2 clone with a few random extra bells and whistles, but the gameplay is essentially still in the 1990s.
- DavidSJ 3y agoHow has the Civ gameplay changed since the 1990s?
- genocidicbunny 3y agoSignificantly. 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.
- rvnx 3y agoAnd then they decided that Workers should be replaced with Builders, turning Civ into a micro-management game :(
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y agoWhile considered 'experimental' this is state of the art in FreeCiv: https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Multiplayer_II_Dragoon_Summary 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_Page 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.
- huevosabio 3y agoI 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!
- chongli 3y agoThat 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!
- huevosabio 3y agoMy 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!
- sbierwagen 3y ago>spatial component is hard to describe in text Idefics, mingpt4, Next-GPT and LLava are open source multimodal LLMs that can read images.
- crashmat 3y agoYes, but do they get a vague idea of what's onscreen or could they really see what's going on in each tile, keep track of all the stats and use those to inform their decisions?
- iopq 3y ago
- hyperific 3y agoGreat app. I didn't know it was on desktop too. Distills everything from Civ V into a tidy package with minimalist graphics.
- billfruit 3y agoWhile 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.
- 800xl 3y agoI like the earlier Civ games, up to around version 4 for this reason. Less complexity and micromanagement.
- vintermann 3y agoAre we talking about the same games, where you had to check every single city for rebellion every turn?
- Delk 3y agoTo me, the earlier games come with less complexity but with more micromanagement. I played SMAC again some time ago, and it's fun early to mid game, but towards the late game the sheer number of cities and units is just overwhelming. I think Civ 2 was in many respects similar although it's been a long time since I played that. 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.
- Semaphor 3y agoIt’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-to-install.528034/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/community-patch-how-t... [1]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/more-unique-components-for-vox-populi.26966/ https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/more-unique-compone... [2]: https://github.com/LoneGazebo/Community-Patch-DLL https://github.com/LoneGazebo/Community-Patch-DLL
- personjerry 3y agoSpent a lot of hours in Civ V and Civ VI, sadly the big Civ V mods don't work on Mac :(
- Semaphor 3y agoIIRC this is because the SDK was only ever released for windows by Firaxis (and not at all for VI), and mods of this size would slow down far too much if they were pure LUA.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoOn 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 Trafalgar, Battle of Stalingrad, Siege of Baghdad (1258), Fall of Tenochtitlan... all concentrations of multiple units on one area.
- linrl3 3y agoI just noticed that the project started from 2017: https://github.com/yairm210?tab=overview&from=2017-12-01&to=2017-12-31 https://github.com/yairm210?tab=overview&from=2017-12-01&to=...
- profsummergig 3y agoTried it out. Would like to play it. Can't figure out what's going on. Hope someone is gracious enough to contribute a video overview / tutorial.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoIt's nearly 1:1 with civ V, just with different graphics and a few missing systems (e.g. forest auto-removal).
- roschdal 3y agoFreeciv3D at https://www.fciv.net https://www.fciv.net
- Y_Y 3y ago> > Is this any good? > 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.
- petesergeant 3y agoI’ve been playing freeciv since forever. Should I upgrade?
- Spellman 3y agoDepends. Do you like Civ2 with it's unit stacks and square grid? Or Civ5 with 1-unit-per-tile hex design?
- ltbarcly3 3y agoI've probably played 1000 hours of Civ games. This looks horrifyingly garish. I can't imagine being able to stare at this. I notice it's a top down view, and I don't see an option for an isometric view. Maybe the AI is smart? The AI in Civ 5 was absolute trash, which is a pretty common theme in Civ games. Anyway, it's a pretty reasonable requirement for a game to not look horrific and off-putting, regardless of whether it is free.
- antifa 3y agoI'm not totally sure what you mean, but it looks better than it did a year ago.
- s_dev 3y agoWill you be making making the game pretty or simply demanding others do that? I see a fantastic effort here to replicate the Civ V mechanics. If people want to improve the graphical assets they're free to do so.
- ltbarcly3 3y agoYes, someone could TRY to do that. 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.
- antifa 3y agoI think that's an unfair assumption, it's possible there is an artist already donating their time or the devs are happily waiting for one to show up.
- Jean-Papoulos 3y agoThank you so much for posting this !
- ralfd 3y agoCiv IV is the best Civ. https://sullla.com/Civ5/bnwreview.html https://sullla.com/Civ5/bnwreview.html
- ACS_Solver 3y agoIf you prefer Civ4 over others, give Old World a try. Many of the same people involved, most notably Soren Johnson is also the lead designer of Old World, and the game brings many new ideas to 4X. 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.
- sinuhe69 3y agoAfter playing more than 20 years of all different kinds of CIV, especially switching back and forth between the versions, it dawned on me that the most important aspect of a game like CIV is the display of information, the UX. It all boils down to how I as player consumes the informations and forms my decisions. The second most important thing of any many hours long game is the number of times I have to click something with the mouse. And there is obvious: the more clicks, the worse, in particular if the click is actually avoidable. The rest is for me secondary. Any kind of graphics will do as long as I can see clearly on first glance what it represents.
- jcadam 3y agoI'd like to see a modern refresh of Civ2, which IMO is still the best in the series. Just update the graphics/sound/UI and leave the rest as-is.
- chrispine 3y agoBut maybe with proper pathfinding and better terrain generation? :)
- jcadam 3y agoI wouldn't mind (optional) bigger maps (particularly Earth), to be honest :)
- Spellman 3y agoWell how about I introduce you to... FreeCiv! https://freeciv.org/ https://freeciv.org/
- jcadam 3y agoFreeCiv is missing the advisor videos :)
- falserum 3y agoWonderful game. Thanks!