Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone | Hacker News Reader

Freeciv – open-source Civilization clone

freeciv.org

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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.

An interesting thing about Open Source game projects is that, if successful, they only ever work on that one game.

Is this in terms of contributors?

To clarify my meaning: a game is never declared "done", with the apparatus of the project moving on to create a new game.

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.

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.

And there are a fair number of open source recreations that keep games alive like OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe) and OpenRCT (Roller Coaster Tycoon)

> 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.

I wish that was the case because then you as the player could be done with paying for the game once. Instead, the current trend is to make games into live services that have continuous development funded with continuous revenue streams. Moch more predictable for the companies to see their revenue slowly go up or down than invest in a completely new game that might be a hit or might flop completely.

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.

A miracle or a curse?

sounds more like a curse.

I beg to differ, the real beauty is how anyone can fork them to follow their own vision e.g. Open TTD has a fork with bundled community patches dating decades that never landed in the main game, or Space Station 13, a game that plays completely different depending on which codebase you play (they don't even have matching licenses anymore, and all of them copyleft).

There's even a nice talk on SS13 specifically since the project is massive and sees changed ever hour (in a single version, let alone all versions or even the multiple remakes currently in development): https://youtu.be/z5sjwqUten0

That is also an interesting attribute, and for similar sociological reasons.

Care to share a link to the OpenTTD fork you mentioned?

Probably https://github.com/JGRennison/OpenTTD-patches

Sure: https://github.com/JGRennison/OpenTTD-patches

The Readme includes the list of applied patches.

Thank you!

I would never guess to search for a GDC talk on Space Station 13. Thank you for this!

For some reason Youtube's offerings for ‘Space Station 13’ look like a supply of memery straight from elementary school, at least going by what I see in the list. I managed to find one vid by ‘MandaloreGaming’, whom I watched one time in the past and pinned as vaguely decent, but even that didn't evade the attention-deficit mode of editing.

Stories of utter ridiculous shenanigans in SS13 from Something Awful's thread on the game are my go-to.

EG https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=28...

It depends on the game/engine. ScummVM plays dozens (hundreds?) of games of course, but even something like OpenRA plays Dune 2000, C&C, and also Red Alert.

Projects dedicated to the preservation and modest enhancement of existing games is even more illustrative of the vague point I'm attempting to gesture towards.

I've recently installed freeciv after struggling in vain to get civ II running on linux. I'll admit I haven't really given it a full chance, but I dearly miss civ II. Apparently one can get it working by installing dosbox, win 3.1 on dosbox, then civ II, but I haven't gotten around to attempting that.

I'm using this setup (win 3.1 on dosbox) to run mordor, an old shareware rpg. It works great I totally recommend giving it a try with civ II!

I have civ ii working on wine without a problem. It's worked with every version of wine I've tried going back to like 2017. I have both the multiplayer gold edition and the original and I'm pretty sure both should work without any fuss.

Last time I tried, I had an easier time getting Civ2 MGE working on wine than freeciv.

You can also use the civ2 ruleset and grab a civ 2 tileset in Freeciv. That way you get the same look and behaviour as you may be missing.

I'm sure someone has probably recreated the campaigns too, though you would be missing the memorable FMV sequences.

If neither Wine nor VMs work for you for some reason, you might actually have an easier time with emulating classic MacOS. There are emulators specifically for it, they have to impersonate just very few models of the hardware, so success is basically guaranteed. The most annoying parts of the experience are if the emulator is too barebones, and that some sites insist on distributing Mac software in ‘StuffIt’ archives, which require a proprietary program in Mac itself, and can't just be uncompressed on the host system.

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/atoidej...

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!

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.

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

Thank you for this.

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.

(Correction: there are more posts if I search for ‘http’ instead of ‘https’.)

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/

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

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

I play it here usually - https://www.freecivweb.org/

Looks like they also have 3D version but I haven't tried it

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

There's some issues with it but I've played multiplayer Quake III Arena here: 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.

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

I'm still amazed when I play quake in a browser. This really shows the conjunction of decades of little things coming together. And it frustrates me a bit more when I see simple things lagging and being slow.

Full blown multiplayer 3d shooter rendered at 120 FPS vs a lagging infinite scroll. Same browser, different tabs.

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.

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

I really enjoyed how you could make so much energy late game that the meter just broke out of its UI box.

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.

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.

http://freecivac.sourceforge.net/

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.

It's also very actively developed and contributions are always welcome. As far as I looked at it, the codebase is rather approachable.

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.

Link https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv

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

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.

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.

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

Well you could change that

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.

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

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

I actually disable all victory conditions when I play civ5.

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.

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.

Kudos to you for playing that high difficulty, are there videos to watch... Going to search now.

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).

Since we're talking about freeciv, civ2 on deity is pretty easy if you know what you're doing. It's not even a forced way of playing, you can decide to win with just one city, or you can decide to spam cities with less than 3 population to avoid population penalties, and there's many other strategies.

If you don't know the game well enough to win at the highest difficulty, it is not degrading to play at lower difficulties to learn the ropes while still enjoying the game.

That's "ruthless, psychopathic, cyborg Gandhi clones" if you've been playing Civ long enough.

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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe, but you'll still be pretty damn limited in terms of access to the GPU. Games generally tend to push the graphics to the limit. You could make a graphically very simple game and put most of your GPU compute into AI. I'd be interested in seeing a space like that explored for sure.

For graphics intensive games though, you either want something that can get by on the CPU or in future maybe TPUs will become common enough in consumer PCs so you could offload your AI onto that and still keep the GPU for fancy graphics.

I just want strategy games where higher level AIs aren’t just cheaters.

Supreme commander has cheating AIs that will waffle stomp you seconds after the no-rush timer if that is what you are looking for.

Whoops meant “aren’t”

Oh that is much harder then :)

At some point in the future I can imagine being able to plug in a pretrained alpha-go model into any game for fine tuning, that would be sweet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1Y0SCEgooQ

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?

> 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

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

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.

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

Then there's the web version!

https://www.freecivweb.org

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

C-evo is a better Civ 2 clone:

http://c-evo.org/

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_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.

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.

Yeah, see the guide here from the linked thread: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-to-bypass-the-stu...

I had crashes with the launcher, and bypassing it fixed it completely.

> 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=88962...

In theory I can see the mental graph search in play but civilization's AI is too dumb to need that.

It's like playing with the most predictable chess player.

Damn, is that a recent development? Because I can recollect buying the game but don't remember actually playing it. It's very likely that have spent less than 2 hours on it. Would Valve let me return the game? Don't want ads, and additional launchers in my steam games.

I returned Crysis 3 a few years ago (because the Origin client wouldn't work correctly on my Linux machine) and have been steadily avoiding EA ever since.

Thanks for sharing.

The ads are only in the launcher, but the addition of the launcher has caused major crashing and stability problems with the base game.

> It's very likely that have spent less than 2 hours on it. Would Valve let me return the game? Don't want ads, and additional launchers in my steam games.

I'm not 100% certain, but I think you can only return it if it's during the first two weeks after purchase AND you've played under 2 hours.

> I returned Crysis 3 a few years ago (because the Origin client wouldn't work correctly on my Linux machine)

EA market the game as being for Windows only, no?

I am sure the game works just fine, as Crysis 2 works without any issues but it does not require the launcher. So yeah... Their loss, not mine.

Thanks for sharing. Had noticed some weird slowness creeping in over time with the startup, random hangs but no crashes.

I still stick with Civ 5 myself. Never really cared for Civ 6.

Although Civ isn't really my type of strategy game anyway. It's fun, but man the games take forever(and I play classical chess...). And for single player, the AI is so dumb, annoying and belligerent it kinda saps the fun out of it for me. The difficulty levels in Civ 5 are actually all the same dumb AI, just with varying levels of cheats enabled. I believe on Diety it starts with 3 settlers or something bonkers like that, and a huge production multiplier to boot. And yet the AI is still so dumb that a strong human player can win a game against 5 diety AIs on the same team. If Civ 5 had a somewhat passable AI I would play a lot more I think, because then I could actually get practice put of single player mode.

Additionally there's so much busy work(micromanaging tiles/workers can get pretty tedious). I feel like strategically and tactically the game is pretty simple. In games against much more experienced players where I get a lucky start and we're even entering the endgame I tend to win because I'm just a better tactician due to studying chess. But they usually get much better early games because they know all the mechanics more intricately, which is basically rote. I'm kind of more partial to Risk for that reason. The rules are dead simple, yet it is still tactically very complicated.

I wouldn’t mind but diplomacy is broken still. Civs stay mad at you for invading a neighbouring civ for the entirety of the game. Things like denouncement and warmongering issues don’t fade away nearly as fast enough to allow varied gameplay.

Usually a civ will start expanding into your land, cause a war, then you take them out but of course everyone else is now mad at you and it stays like that for the rest of the game.

With Civ5 you probably want to use Vox Populi. It really improves the game to a completely new level, including the AI. It's not a human opponent but much better than any Civ version ever shipped officially.

Vox Populi is a DLL mod though so Windows only. This mod is basically the only reason I keep Windows around.

Edit: and forgot to say that the development and community is very active, 12 years after the game originally shipped. New versions come out regularly.

You can likely use Proton to run Civ 5.

Likely, I'll have to search a bit if someone already took a stab at getting the mod work too.

It should not be a problem. Proton runs unmodified Windows software.

Running yes but the mod is shipped as a Windows installer package so that needs to be extracted, either by running the installer or by some other means. So needs a bit of effort to figure it out unless someone already posted working instructions.

Proton is basically Wine. Wine creates a "Wineprefix", which is a folder hierarchy similar to that of a Windows installation. You can run the installer within that Wineprefix using wine. That will install the files. Then you can run Civ 5 and everything should be in place.

Vox Populi has added SO MUCH, especially in the AI

>I tend to win because I'm just a better tactician due to studying chess

Can you give an example situation where your chess experience gave you an edge over your opponent?

I'm failing to see how chess tactics would translate to a more complex sim like Civ.

It is an interesting assertion. What we know about learning and chunking in our brains implies that chess knowledge is too specific to be used elsewhere directly. The years of playing chess probably just mean parent is good at analysis and learning things like chess, and is why they were interested in chess to begin with. Maybe some chess concepts work and apply, but chess memory and skill is rather specific.

A lot of it is specific, but it's not like chess and civ are completely disjunct either. There is some significant overlap between some of the thought processes involved. They both have minimax game trees, though civ obviously has a much bigger branching factor so you have to be a lot fuzzier about it. But I'd argue that just having played a lot of chess with a more managable branching factor makes it easier to make the meta decision of how to think about these games.

It's not very tangible like "oh that's just like a skewer tactic in chess!", it's more a general ability to think ahead and enumerate various likely scenarios, and ways of deciding what to do. Chess is not just pure pattern recognition. It's also a game of decisions, understanding what your opponent is trying to do, swallowing your own pride, etc.

You can play chess in an almost poker type way, playing risky lines betting that your opponent won't find a tricky refutation. It seems like the board state(and clock) is all there is, but that is far from the truth. One of the biggest challenges for learning chess players is to learn to consider your opponent's plans and factoring it into your own. This sounds obvious, but from my experience tutoring kids it's very much not the natural state of things. The natural thing is to only consider what you want to do. Which doesn't work if the opponent's plan is quicker. Then you need to find a new idea. Even if you're just a few moves away from completing yours. There's a mental discipline to avoiding the sunk cost fallacy there that can easily be worth a few hundred rating points.

Now, most of the research on transfer of chess skills has focused on things like IQ and working memory, and found no meaningful transfer. But there's a lot more to chess(or any other skill) than that. I'm not convinced this is adequately expored by the field of psychology at all.

I regularly beat people at simpler strategy games even though they're the ones teaching me the rules of the game.

You could argue I'm just naturally good at strategy games, and that's why I play chess. And that must be at least partially the reason. But it's my intuition that some of these more abstract game decision making, opponent modelling, etc skills do transfer(I am biased though, obviously). But that's a lot harder to research than doing an IQ test and a short term recall test.

Thank you very much for the insight and also for providing the example (in the other post).

What is your opinion on the Age of Empires series?

Only happy to provide!

I haven't played AoE since the very early days.

AoE is an RTS game, right? I used to play a fair bit of Starcraft 2 back before the expansions. I'm hilariously bad at it and it's too stressful for me, but I love watching pro players play it, in fact it's become one of my favourite sports to watch. AoE4 multiplayer was a bit of a clusterfuck balance wise, last I heard. I hope they get that sorted so a real pro scene could develop, and I can enjoy watching it :D

I feel like there's very little meaningful transfer between RTS and chess. Much more dependent on fine motor skill, fast thinking, and multitasking, all of which are things I'm not stellar at.

I forgot the example. The one I remember best is this 6FFA where all but me and another much more experienced player(who introduced me to civ in the first place) were irrelevant by the endgame. I was slightly ahead in science and snowballing, and he was playing for culture victory, and succeeding. I could tell that my only option was war. But he has more production. So it had to be nukes, and he had to not know about it, otherwise he could declare war and stop me in time. So I had to make him believe this was not a threat. I did several things like feigning playing for diplo victory(actually to avoid him banning nukes) I got him distracted right there trying to keep me from taking all the cs. By the time I completed the Manhattan Project, his invasion was too late and I was able to nuke his cap and his nr. 2 city. I laid this plan a lot of turns in advance. Afterwards he said he thought the culture win was a sure thing.

The cool thing about Civ is my friends will actually play it. It has the right mix of looking approachable and having depth of mechanics.

Paradox games on the other hand, are too intimidating for most people I know to try.

Yeah... I love history, so I really want to enjoy HOI4, there's just so much fucking busy work to deal with. I think I'm just spoiled by playing chess where there is nothing but the "battle of ideas", as GM Yasser Seirawan likes to put it.

Their more recent titles (Crusader Kings 3, Stellaris) are actually quite approachable, and the upcoming Victoria 3 is looking pretty good too.

If you're interested in F/OSS Civ 5, there's a decent F/OSS mobile-first implementation called Unciv.

https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv

I've played a terrifying number of hours of it in bed on my phone.

edit: on AI, since I'm rate-limited:|

I think it gives higher AI difficulties a massive productivity boost so they just crush you under a flood of units.

Woah, this looks slick! I had no idea this existed.

Now I kinda want to have a poke at this Civ AI business. Or at least look at the code so I can get a better idea of how the AI is implemented and why it's so bad.

Edit: that is, assuming this version has similarly bad AI to the original.

Having played a good number of hours of Unciv myself as well as Civ V, the AI is indeed similarly bad. Their meta-strategies are largely one-trick ponies making them trivial to predict. Harder difficulties just wildly tip the resource scales in the AI's favor without improving their decision making at all.

Mostly because the AI isn't able to really strategically "plan".

Most of the work goes into iterating over all units and giving each an action based on certain metrics. Thus coordinating units and strategy isn't really present.

Now with some work you could add a higher level planner system. Vox Populi, a Civ5 mod, has done some really clever stuff with organizing units into formations for battle.

Makes sense. Only game AI I know intimately is chess AI, so my intuition is to do minimax tree search(like alphabeta). The implementation is tricky though because there's multiple moves. And likely the branching factor is far to high for alphabeta to be helpful.

I think Monte Carlo methods might be more promising. Maybe with some simplified gamestate, allowing you to modify it more cheaply, reducing the overhead per node. "Computing a turn" can take a long time in late game civ5. Probably a lot of probabilistic stuff is needed to get it cheap enough. Like you could have credences based on current information about which win condition is most likely for each civ. Then you could feasibly decide what the long term goal should be.

Kinda feels like a cognitive architecture(like soar) is necessary to get anything even resembling decent play.

It's sort of hard to have an intuition of what kind of heuristic search is feasible without having some idea of the branching factor, though.

Really the simpler answer is have a planning layer that can influence the lower agent decision weights.

Top level AI is going for Domination Victory? Higher weight on making Military Units at your Cities. Pick a target and weight movement of the army towards it. Etc.

Yes, this type of thing is what I was alluding to qt the end of my 2nd paragraph. I was sort of thinking it over as I typed and that's where I sort of ended up. You need some sort of coarse grained planning like that. Or I guess the technical term is hierarchical planning?

Pick a win condition. Science. Ok, what are the subgoals you want for that? You want growth, first and foremost. And you want to get to plastic asap. How do you get growth? Improve food tiles tiles, research civil service and chemistry, spec into tradition, unlock more caravan. Which of those are more worthwhile? Chemistry kinda conflicts with getting to plastics faster, and so on.

Sort of feels like some sort of SAT problem. Which isn't great news, I admit.

I need to read more papers and maybe have a peek in my Russell & Norvig because now I can't stop thinking about this.

I play Civ 6 on PS5 and haven't had a single issue with launch or gameplay.

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.

There is NO successor to Civ4 BTS, the other games with the Civ name are a different more boring game. One unit per tile games are not Civ games.

Having vented, a decade ago I made a hex tile based “we-go” version of Civ (with stacks if units), got bored with the AI and never finished it. Had A* path finding, 3d terrain, economic and production models all working. Maybe in a decade I reignite the passion.

The Normandy landings, Battle of Stalingrad and other major battles in history cannot be recreated in Civ 6 because you cannot stack units. It's an artificial restriction that not only is annoying, it makes things less realistic.

> There is NO successor to Civ4 BTS, the other games with the Civ name are a different more boring game. One unit per tile games are not Civ games.

I share this sentiment, but mostly because of the incredible total conversion mods. "Fall From Heaven 2" is still my favorite fantasy strategy game, even compared to other strong contenders like Endless Legend.

FFH2 even has it's own rebalance mod, Erebus in the Balance

I've grown quite fond of the one-unit-per-tile paradigm. It brings a strategic element of a different nature to besieging a city, I don't mind it.

For better or for worse, Civ games are now one unit per tile. You might think they are more boring but IMO they bring interesting new challenges to gameplay. Such as the challenge of moving a large army through an area with difficult terrain, or of not letting your city be completely surrounded.

> One unit per tile games are not Civ games.

Hex tiles with one unit per tile is the only improvement Civ5 has over Civ4.

My issue with Civ 6 was the AI..

It would sort of “rage quit”, declare war and just do nothing (not build any units, not move units) so often that I realized I could play for hours only to discover that one or more of the AI was effectively not playing at all.

This does kinda annoy me. I’m sick of seeing updates on stream games and getting excited only to find “launcher update”.

There is actually a way to roll back steam versions. I had to do it for Skyrim. Not sure if that works for Civ ofcourse.

You have to access the depot. Here is a little thread for Skyrim : https://steamcommunity.com/app/489830/discussions/0/32475650...

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

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

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.

You are talking as if open source was a single entity. This doesn't make any sense.

Well, some say that proprietary code is limiting because it doesn't allow for modifications and yet it creates almost all the innovation.

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.

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.

- Apache

- GCC/Clang

- Nginx

- Virt Manager

- OpenBSD at firewalls

- OpenSSH

Should I go on?

What about OpenSubDiv by pixar? https://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/overview.html

What are better proprietary alternatives to Kubernetes, Nomad, Docker, Podman? Aren't the most widely adopted web servers and frameworks open source? I am only naming a few areas.

One could argue that since these projects are often developed by contributors who have proprietary software in mind, it is in fact proprietary code wich creates the collaborative open-source effort in the background.

Money may make the motivation much of the time, but that doesn't mean that OSS isn't where much of the innovation happens.

The same is true of games. Counter Strike started out as a free Half-Life mod. DOTA started as a Warcraft 3 mod. Both spawned entire subsections of e-sports that are still wildly popular today (tactical FPS arena and MOBA respectively).

Often big companies pay for proprietary stuff because you get support.

Lots of smaller studios use Blender, it's pretty well stress tested by now.

Proprietary software is software that keeps the lights on for the people that work on it.

Sun Tzu has figured out a while ago that it's a bad idea to back your enemies into a corner. Like it or not, fighting with your back against a wall makes you lethal.

Now, I'm not saying open source is unable to match this. They can and have. I'm just saying that most proprietary software has that advantage naturally (in a capitalist society).

I worked at Tangent Animation, now defunct - we used Blender as our primary render software, and produced several feature projects, two of them still running on Netflix last I checked. We were not major, but it has been done.

The reasoning was that we had paid a very large sum to use Maya on our first project, and had received basically no support whatsoever for that money, aside from the software itself. So we worked with the Blender Foundation instead, and got much better support, collaboration on new features, etc.

I don't have any personal exposure to any of Blender's commercial competitors, but I learned to make cartoons as a side effect of working there, and Blender basically fills me with awe at what they have accomplished. Perhaps Maya is even better than that, but that's for people with the money to pay for it to decide, I suppose. From what I heard while working in the industry, Autodesk is a husk of a company with no interest in anything but swallowing smaller companies and increasing profits with as minimal investment as possible in new features.

Meanwhile, the whole world has access to Blender, and it works just fine, if you want to make cartoons and have ideas and ability but no money. "Better" is extremely subjective here.

People say lots of things, but without metrics they are just making things up.

Proprietary code appears to create all of the innovation because you have to market and sell it. I don't think you can meaningfully say "which creates more innovation" in either direction, though if pressed I'd say, "open source in the long run" -- e.g. Linux runs a much greater variety of things than Windows.

In general, I don't think this is true at all and much of the most innovative, boundary-pushing software is open source.

It might be more true for open source games specifically, due to the economics of creating games. But as someone who is a casual/nostalgic gamer at most, that's absolutely fine by me.

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