[HN Gopher] Freeciv - open-source Civilization clone
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Freeciv - open-source Civilization clone
Author : modinfo
Score : 440 points
Date : 2022-08-10 05:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.freeciv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.freeciv.org)
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I would have loved to enhance some open code of Sid Meyer's Alpha
| Centauri...
| totetsu wrote:
| I really enjoyed how you could make so much energy late game
| that the meter just broke out of its UI box.
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| http://freecivac.sourceforge.net/
| upupandup wrote:
| I am still waiting for an open source version of Total War, or a
| least the top down map strategy portion of it.
| [deleted]
| bondant wrote:
| 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...
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| For some reason, the "Death - Sound of perseverance" album works
| great with Freeciv.
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Link https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
| oynqr wrote:
| It's also very actively developed and contributions are always
| welcome. As far as I looked at it, the codebase is rather
| approachable.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
| roschdal wrote:
| The 3D version is playable online here: https://www.fciv.net
| KryDos wrote:
| I play it here usually - https://www.freecivweb.org/
|
| Looks like they also have 3D version but I haven't tried it
| oblak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| oblak wrote:
| 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
| ta988 wrote:
| 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.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Full blown multiplayer 3d shooter rendered at 120 FPS vs
| a lagging infinite scroll. Same browser, different tabs.
| samwestdev wrote:
| How's the codebase? Clean? Worth a study?
| zulban wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Also check out FreeCol, the open-source clone of Colonization:
| https://www.freecol.org/
| User23 wrote:
| 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
| blippage wrote:
| 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.
| dhx wrote:
| 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
| rrreese wrote:
| 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.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| 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.
| suby wrote:
| 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.
| antifa wrote:
| Last time I tried, I had an easier time getting Civ2 MGE
| working on wine than freeciv.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| 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.
| spapas82 wrote:
| 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!
| aasasd wrote:
| 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.
| catach wrote:
| An interesting thing about Open Source game projects is that,
| if successful, they only ever work on that one game.
| DaedPsyker wrote:
| Is this in terms of contributors?
| catach wrote:
| To clarify my meaning: a game is never declared "done",
| with the apparatus of the project moving on to create a new
| game.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| AaronM wrote:
| And there are a fair number of open source recreations
| that keep games alive like OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon
| Deluxe) and OpenRCT (Roller Coaster Tycoon)
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| catach wrote:
| 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.
| keyle wrote:
| A miracle or a curse?
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| sounds more like a curse.
| Hamcha wrote:
| 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
| catach wrote:
| That is also an interesting attribute, and for similar
| sociological reasons.
| kubafu wrote:
| Care to share a link to the OpenTTD fork you mentioned?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Probably https://github.com/JGRennison/OpenTTD-patches
| Hamcha wrote:
| Sure: https://github.com/JGRennison/OpenTTD-patches
|
| The Readme includes the list of applied patches.
| kubafu wrote:
| Thank you!
| Kinrany wrote:
| I would never guess to search for a GDC talk on Space
| Station 13. Thank you for this!
| aasasd wrote:
| 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.
| Arrath wrote:
| 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?threa
| did=28...
| aasasd wrote:
| And other open-source clones of various games:
| https://osgameclones.com
| Alan_Dillman wrote:
| Thank you for this.
| aasasd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| harvie wrote:
| Never really understood how to play that. It is too hardcore :-D
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| 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.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| You are talking as if open source was a single entity. This
| doesn't make any sense.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| Well, some say that proprietary code is limiting because it
| doesn't allow for modifications and yet it creates almost all
| the innovation.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| - Apache
|
| - GCC/Clang
|
| - Nginx
|
| - Virt Manager
|
| - OpenBSD at firewalls
|
| - OpenSSH
|
| Should I go on?
| jtode wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| 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.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| 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).
| SanderNL wrote:
| 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).
| nkozyra wrote:
| 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.
| jrm4 wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| People say lots of things, but without metrics they are
| just making things up.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| deepdriver wrote:
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| 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...
| the_only_law wrote:
| This does kinda annoy me. I'm sick of seeing updates on stream
| games and getting excited only to find "launcher update".
| zenlot wrote:
| I play Civ 6 on PS5 and haven't had a single issue with launch
| or gameplay.
| nkozyra wrote:
| 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.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Had noticed some weird slowness creeping in
| over time with the startup, random hangs but no crashes.
| oefrha wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| smallstepforman wrote:
| 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.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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.
| indigochill wrote:
| > 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.
| Spellman wrote:
| FFH2 even has it's own rebalance mod, Erebus in the Balance
| levesque wrote:
| 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.
| antifa wrote:
| > One unit per tile games are not Civ games.
|
| Hex tiles with one unit per tile is the only improvement Civ5
| has over Civ4.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| nmarinov wrote:
| > 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...
| nkozyra wrote:
| 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.
| oblak wrote:
| 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.
| deepdriver wrote:
| The ads are only in the launcher, but the addition of the
| launcher has caused major crashing and stability problems
| with the base game.
| messe wrote:
| > 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_.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > 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?
| oblak wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| the_only_law wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| spacehunt wrote:
| Their more recent titles (Crusader Kings 3, Stellaris) are
| actually quite approachable, and the upcoming Victoria 3 is
| looking pretty good too.
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| Spellman wrote:
| Vox Populi has added SO MUCH, especially in the AI
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| You can likely use Proton to run Civ 5.
| [deleted]
| distances wrote:
| Likely, I'll have to search a bit if someone already took
| a stab at getting the mod work too.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It should not be a problem. Proton runs unmodified
| Windows software.
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| 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.
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| Spellman wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| Spellman wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| 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.
| GameOfFrowns wrote:
| >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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| bitexploder wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| GameOfFrowns wrote:
| 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?
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| C-evo is a better Civ 2 clone:
|
| http://c-evo.org/
| JoeyBananas wrote:
| freeciv is a noble effort but lacks features players want. For
| one, the AI is not on par with Civ 3.
| cmarschner wrote:
| Well you could change that
| chongli wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| synu wrote:
| 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.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I actually disable all victory conditions when I play
| civ5.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| That's " _ruthless, psychopathic, cyborg Gandhi clones_ " if
| you've been playing Civ long enough.
| chongli wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mcv wrote:
| 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.
| pyrale wrote:
| 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.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Kudos to you for playing that high difficulty, are there
| videos to watch... Going to search now.
| mcv wrote:
| 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).
| space_debris wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I just want strategy games where higher level AIs aren't just
| cheaters.
| buildbot wrote:
| Supreme commander has cheating AIs that will waffle stomp
| you seconds after the no-rush timer if that is what you are
| looking for.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Whoops meant "aren't"
| buildbot wrote:
| 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.
| TobTobXX wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1Y0SCEgooQ
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