generate_gazette.sh Calls OpenAI to generate "The Civ Chronicle" — an era-appropriate, unreliable wartime newspaper article for each turn.
For a long-running game like this, that's a pretty clever little twist to keep the group engaged. I have extremely low confidence I could convince enough friends to do it with me for long enough to get through a game, but this seems like such a fun idea.
It’s my first time playing any Civ game ever. I’m currently at the top of the scoreboard for reasons entirely unbeknownst to me. My advice for anyone else considering playing their own game: form an alliance with the server admin.
I've never run Unciv! First i'm hearing of it honestly. I'll have to check it out.
I can say from this experience, the first 24-72 hours of the game was people just complaining in our group chat that the FreeCiv client sucks (it really does). I'm very tempted to jump in and make a few improvements, there's a really awful bug that impacts the ability to move stacked units - and if the diplomacy state changes while units are in the territory of a previous ally, they are unable to move whereas in Civ2 (legit Civ) they just get auto-pushed back to the borders immediately.
> whereas in Civ2 (legit Civ) they just get auto-pushed back to the borders immediatly.
Maybe you're thinking Civ 3? Civ 2 doesn't have borders. If you have units close to other civ's city, they will demand you to withdraw. If you agree, they're teleported to your nearest city.
ah yes you're right! Regardless, i don't think they're mean to get stuck haha. The more offensive element of this issue to me is that the UX gives no feedback, it just doesn't work and gives an audible buzz.
You may know this already, but the different FreeCiv clients are pretty different from each other. It's been a couple of years since I've played FreeCiv, but IIRC the QT client was the nicest at that time.
Yeah, so that's another lesson I learnt during the early phases. I've been using the gtk4 client personally, but someone else suggested the QT client. I do think the QT client is a bit better, but it is broken in different ways too.
It's really confusing to me why there's so many frontends for this one app. I'm tempted to switch to the web interface next time, but figured for now figuring out how to mange the server was enough of a problem without taking on the responsibility for the client people were using at the same time.
Great question, it's not a typo. Making it 23 hours, it means the 'turn end' is constantly moving and never the same time of day.
The logic here is that we have players that are in Toronto Canada, Portland (Oregon) USA, Newcastle Australia and Berlin Germany. If we put the time at 24 hours, it would mean the turns are scheduled to end approximately the same time every day which introduces potential advantages / disadvantages to certain players.
haha, we're at turn 9, but if you want to join the next game let me know. Happy to add others! There's a chance there might be appetite to start a simultaneous game if a few people get knocked out early.
LongTurn (~24 hour) format has been something I've been interested in for a while. It means people can casually commit, without it taking over their life.
An interesting observation another friend made the other day was that this adds oxygen to the room. We have a WhatsApp channel with all the players in it, and at this point most of the 'action' is the conversation in WhatsApp. It's a pretty diverse array of people in there too, many who know me, but do not know each other.
Used to play a multi-player Lords of Midnight (the Spectrum/C64 game) where each player (up to 8) made their moves in turn. The original used a day/night turn-based system, so using that for 2-8 humans made sense.
It actually improved on the original by introducing new maps, which probably helped players unfamiliar with the original game who could probably draw the map from memory.
Games could often stall where a real-life didn't allow a player time to make their moves.
Yeah! I cannot for the life of me remember the game but I used to play this space nation builder type game around 2004-2007...i was so invested. Then i found out the game resets every ~year. Wow that was a sad morning when i woke up to find out I came 50,000th or something haha.
counterpoint: this assumes everyone has the same constraints. not always true
It’s my first time playing any Civ game ever. I’m currently at the top of the scoreboard for reasons entirely unbeknownst to me. My advice for anyone else considering playing their own game: form an alliance with the server admin.
Haha, you’re just a natural.
This sounds amazing. Hard to wrangle friends together to play a game, so giving a full day is great.
Ignoring Civ 2 vs Civ 5 differences, any experiancing hosting Unciv vs Freeciv?
https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv
https://github.com/yairm210/unciv
I've never run Unciv! First i'm hearing of it honestly. I'll have to check it out.
I can say from this experience, the first 24-72 hours of the game was people just complaining in our group chat that the FreeCiv client sucks (it really does). I'm very tempted to jump in and make a few improvements, there's a really awful bug that impacts the ability to move stacked units - and if the diplomacy state changes while units are in the territory of a previous ally, they are unable to move whereas in Civ2 (legit Civ) they just get auto-pushed back to the borders immediately.
> whereas in Civ2 (legit Civ) they just get auto-pushed back to the borders immediatly.
Maybe you're thinking Civ 3? Civ 2 doesn't have borders. If you have units close to other civ's city, they will demand you to withdraw. If you agree, they're teleported to your nearest city.
ah yes you're right! Regardless, i don't think they're mean to get stuck haha. The more offensive element of this issue to me is that the UX gives no feedback, it just doesn't work and gives an audible buzz.
You may know this already, but the different FreeCiv clients are pretty different from each other. It's been a couple of years since I've played FreeCiv, but IIRC the QT client was the nicest at that time.
Yeah, so that's another lesson I learnt during the early phases. I've been using the gtk4 client personally, but someone else suggested the QT client. I do think the QT client is a bit better, but it is broken in different ways too.
It's really confusing to me why there's so many frontends for this one app. I'm tempted to switch to the web interface next time, but figured for now figuring out how to mange the server was enough of a problem without taking on the responsibility for the client people were using at the same time.
Link to the live demo site where you can see what this code does (aside from running the actual server): https://freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info
> for longturn games (23-hour turns)
Why 23 hours? Is this a typo?
Great question, it's not a typo. Making it 23 hours, it means the 'turn end' is constantly moving and never the same time of day.
The logic here is that we have players that are in Toronto Canada, Portland (Oregon) USA, Newcastle Australia and Berlin Germany. If we put the time at 24 hours, it would mean the turns are scheduled to end approximately the same time every day which introduces potential advantages / disadvantages to certain players.
Very smooth looking, I attempted to sign up!
haha, we're at turn 9, but if you want to join the next game let me know. Happy to add others! There's a chance there might be appetite to start a simultaneous game if a few people get knocked out early.
Any reason for such a long turn timeout?
LongTurn (~24 hour) format has been something I've been interested in for a while. It means people can casually commit, without it taking over their life.
An interesting observation another friend made the other day was that this adds oxygen to the room. We have a WhatsApp channel with all the players in it, and at this point most of the 'action' is the conversation in WhatsApp. It's a pretty diverse array of people in there too, many who know me, but do not know each other.
It's a weird little community, just for fun.
You know people used to play games of chess sending their moves via postcard, right?
Like it was popular.
They do. But they used to too.
This style of play is really underrated.
I used to play a half-dozen or so games of Diplomacy at time with daily turns for years.
There are still modern games that take advantage of this idea (my friends have been playing Old World like this recently) but I'd like to see it more.
Used to play a multi-player Lords of Midnight (the Spectrum/C64 game) where each player (up to 8) made their moves in turn. The original used a day/night turn-based system, so using that for 2-8 humans made sense.
It actually improved on the original by introducing new maps, which probably helped players unfamiliar with the original game who could probably draw the map from memory.
Games could often stall where a real-life didn't allow a player time to make their moves.
Yeah! I cannot for the life of me remember the game but I used to play this space nation builder type game around 2004-2007...i was so invested. Then i found out the game resets every ~year. Wow that was a sad morning when i woke up to find out I came 50,000th or something haha.