“Mac will try hard not to let you run this; it will tell you the app is damaged and can’t be opened and helpfully offer to trash it for you. From a terminal you can xattr -cr /path/to/OpenCiv3.app to enable running it.”
How far OSX has come since the days of the “cancel or allow” parody advert.
The lockdown has been slow and steady. Slow enough that at every juncture, apologists point out that it is still possible to run software you choose. I think we enjoy freedom that people do not appreciate because they never had to earn it. Gaining it back will require extraordinary effort.
Apple has been slowly tightening the screws on app notarization (code signing) requirements for running apps on macOS. To do it properly you need to be a registered developer ($100/year), and they're certainly not making it easy if you don't have access to a Mac.
> On devices with macOS 10.15, all apps distributed outside the App Store must be signed by the developer using an Apple-issued Developer ID certificate (combined with a private key) and notarized by Apple to run under the default Gatekeeper settings.
Have you actually tried it? Because I did some months ago to setup an AppleTV and it just does not work. It just hangs at the last step without telling you anything. If you inspect the server response it just says "Your account cannot be created at this time.".
What ultimately helped after weeks of trying and tinkering was installing VMware Workstation, patching it to enable macOS support, create a VM with the specific hardware configuration of an older MacBook, install an old version of macOS and do the 2FA from in there.
It’s probably the easiest way of setting up a Mac VM if you have unraid. I know there are similar options for qemu and kvm based hypervisors. If you have an amd gpu you should be able to pass it through.
Has this ever happened? Not revoking certificates, which they've certainly done for malware or e.g. iOS "signing services", but because a developer used non-Apple hardware.
I am the dev of Pocket Squadron (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bombsight....) and a few years ago I tried to make a build for iOS due to many player requests. I did not have a mac so I setup a mac VM and a dev account to start making builds and see how big of a lift it would be. My account was banned unfortunately. Still no iOS build to this day, I'm probably missing out on a good bit of money.
I don’t know the answer to that but a quick search shows lots of examples of people complaining that their developer certificate has been revoked, demonstrating a willingness by Apple to revoke certificates if they believe the developer violated their terms of service. I doubt Apple would go out of their way to include language in the agreement that binds developers to their own sanctioned platform if they didn’t intend to enforce it.
I agree, but I think a better wager (and what GP probably meant) would be that all of these developers had their certificates revoked because Apple thought they were distributing malware. That's what the system is for.
Rather than making people run commands in Terminal, it would be more ideal to just tell people to try to run the app, then go to System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> scroll down until they see the Open Anyway button.
It'll be a skill they can use for any unsigned app and you can have cute screenshots. The Terminal command, on the other hand, is a huge barrier to entry.
This error exists because Apple has effectively made app notarization mandatory, otherwise, users see this warning. In theory, notarization is straightforward: upload your DMG via their API, and within minutes you get a notarized/stamped app back.
…until you hit the infamous "Team is not yet configured for notarization" error.
Once that happens, you can be completely blocked from notarizing your app for months. Apple has confirmed via email that this is a bug on their end. It affects many developers, has been known for years, and Apple still hasn't fixed it. It completely elimiates any chances of you being able to notarize your app, thus, getting rid of this error/warning.
Yikes. Why anyone would willingly develop for Apple platforms is beyond me. But then I also don't understand why some some people like using the crap^WmacOS. To each their own I guess. Hardware does look nice though, too bad about their software.
Well, mainly because it's a better unix than Linux for the desktop, and I'd rather pull my eyes out of their sockets with a rusty screwdriver than use Windows.
Other than developing my own (without using any other OS...) which is a ... significant ... task, there's not much other option. YMMV.
It was a better linux for the desktop back during the snow leopard day but it's slowly gotten worse at the same time that linux became better.
Now the only advantages they have is the hardware. The os is buggy doesn't respect apple's own human interface guidelines and is increasingly locked down. Gone are the days of simbl extensions, customizability and a clean nice coherent stable os with few bugs.
MacOS is a better desktop in the sense that the desktop is locked down. GNOME trie to be the same as MacOS but being the default desktop for nerds and build for people who lives the Apple way makes it a bit schizofrenic.
As a Linux lifer I agree that the hard diamond surface of the Mac desktop has a solid feeling to it. The Linux way is harder and also more brittle. Windows and Linux are both better than MacOS even as a desktop as long as you do not look at the in the wrong way. The thing is I have only minor problems doing that on either Linux or Windows, but the walled garden of the Mac, Android and iOS is a joke.
MacOS is designed to be a somewhat stable desktop, that is good. It is not a better Unix, it is a political stance that means hacking will forever die.
I don’t know anything about “hard/brittle” analogies for operating systems. What I do know is that Linux distributions don’t seem to have a coherent strategy for building an operating system with sensible defaults and a consistent design that makes it easy to use for non-technical users.
Linux developers seem to almost-universally believe that if the user doesn’t like it or it doesn’t make sense then the user will fix it themselves either via configuration files or patching the source code. That model works fine for users with a lot of knowledge and time on their hands. In other words, it’s an operating system for hobbyists.
MacOS, for all its faults, is still pretty easy to use (though not even close to the ease of use of Classic Mac OS 9 and earlier).
Apple developers seem to almost-universally believe that if the user doesn’t like it or it doesn’t make sense then the user will... just have to learn to live with it.
I never said the Mac was perfect. Far from it. But it has sensible defaults which the vast majority of users find acceptable and easy enough to use.
Linux users, on the other hand, seem to spend more time customizing their operating system and sharing screenshots of it than actually getting work done.
You are encouraged to play with footguns on Linux, I do not do it and none of my family do it works fine for us. On "Linux desktop" one of the things you are not encouraged to play with is installation of programs. The Linux way is preferable that is why Apple and all the other are walking down the same path.
Not being able to install things sucks, but when you do you will easily destroy your nice shiny brittle desktop. The pebkac is strong here, but making the users enemies is a bad solution, this is why Google, Apple and MS are all bad desktops.
As I said I have been a Linux user my whole life. I know it works as a desktop but it works best with either people who do not care about instaling stuff, or thise who care enough to get it working.
It might be "better unix" (whatever that means), but it sure as hell is not better. Locked down, buggy, and difficult / impossible to navigate by keyboard. And I need to install (and trust) a 3rd party app to get a multi value clipboard? Yeah right, better. I'd prefer Windows, and I'm not fan of the ad-OS either.
The advantage is you can just develop it once and publish, rather than pushing things through multiple different packaging processes, and a MacOS person might be more likely to spend money.
> It affects many developers, has been known for years, and Apple still hasn't fixed it.
Not a feature they care about. Same for deleting apps not released yet. Haven't looked in a while but for over a decade it has been impossible to delete ios apps submitted and not released. So either you have to release the app, make it "apple approved" and then immediately kill it or have an app always present (I think you can hide it but I've not checked that in quite a while.
Yeah but this command sucks because AFAIK then it doesn’t even verify notarized apps anymore (for example if the certificate is invalid, if it was revoked, etc.)
Not terribly fair. When Windows decided running everything as administrator was bad and to add a visual sudo-like prompt, Apple made fun of them for it, but it was Microsoft reacting to a changing threat landscape then too.
My first thought was "But back then those prompts were constant, making them almost useless", though maybe that did actually help by making software vendors rely less on admin rights?
It was a big mess, because users didn’t expect it, developers wanted users to just have everything run as admin, and the UAC user experience wasn’t polished yet. But that’s what you expect from new security features being introduced.
Additionally, just remembered, recently there is an additional option on Windows 11 that the UAC generates a temporary admin user and then throws the security token away.
I mean it has, but the situation is getting ridiculous, I'm at the point where I'm honestly not sure what special set of magical incantations and rituals I need to do to get this process to work, it seems to change between different bits of software and get more complex with time as if Apple keeps finding proverbial bigger fools who can get through this mess without intending to and so they're solution is to keep making it increasingly more Byzantine
The thing that really irks me is I've got a paid developer account with Apple, I've already done the xcode dance, notarized binaries and all that nonsense, shouldn't this have activated some super special bit on my Apple account that says
“this one needs to do random stuff now and again and after saying, `Hey just checking in, doing this will do X to your computer probably, and maybe set it on fire, but if you say "go for it, I promise I know what I'm doing', I'm gonna trust you champ`, finger guns“
(not sure why in my head the personification of Apple would do "finger guns", but here we are I guess :shrug:)
Hell at this point I'll take a checkbox in my settings that says, ”Some people are into extreme sports, I love to install random binaries, just get out of my way“
It's not an issue of permission, it's an issue of trying to make a computer that's safe for grandma to use. Criminals can and will convince grandma to navigate a byzantine labyrinth of prompts and technical measures in order to drain her bank account. That's the threat model we're dealing with here.
People also forget that it makes it safe for people who aren't grandmas. The reason why you think it's just grandmas is because, for you to get a virus or your computer hacked now, it requires so many user gaffes for something like that to happen. In addition, it almost always involves typing in or telling someone your password when you shouldn’t. In the early 2000s, I still remember there was some ad affiliate for the cyanide and happiness webcomic website that, if you let it's ad load, instantly infected your computer with adware just from visiting the site. That’s unheard of now because of increasingly protective/restrictive policies set by technology companies. It’s one of those situations where if a system is working correctly, you won’t even know it’s working at all.
I helped my mother out with a computer, gave her a mac after she called twic a wee about a windows popup. Eventually she became a grandmother, and later in old age, with dementia she stlll using the mac more or less successfully to google and e-mail.
Intentionality, coordination are important for keeping cognitive faculty.
It all sounds so easy, but letting her send e-mail through voice could create confusing situations.
…you don’t, just like you don’t need the bank’s permission to withdraw funds… but they will still try and stop you pulling out $10,000 so you can buy iTunes gift cards to pay off your taxes.
IIRC everything you compile on macOS yourself, possibly only when using Apple’s llvm toolchain, already gets the proper bits set to execute just fine. This also seems to work for rust and go binaries. I’m not sure whether that is because they replicated the macOS llvm toolchain behaviour for the flag or whether another mechanism is at play.
The command line incantation is just a convenience. You can unblock the app that you just tried to run by going to Privacy and Security in system settings and clicking around a bit.
This is the reason I dropped macOS as a platform target. Apple will make users think you're a hacker trying to trick them, because macOS acts as if your app is radioactive if you don't pay the Apple tax, and refuses to let users run the apps they want.
Maybe 1 out of 1,000 users will know the magic ritual required to run what they want on their machine, and for every one of those, 10,000 are gaslit into thinking you were trying to harm them by macOS' scary warnings and refusal to do what they want.
Taking a legitimate concern (which of course does factor into the overall trade-offs) but exaggerating it into a tirade is uninteresting. Trade-offs are complex. There is more than one sensible mix depending on one’s values and position.
Only seeing the worst potential explanations of other parties whom make different trade-offs than you is uncharitable. It can also look like what I would call
counterfactual hypocrisy, by which I mean, if you were in those shoes, would you actually behave differently?
E.g.: If you were in Apple’s shoes (think about what this entails), what actions would be compatible with a business’s MO from that point of view? From various ethical points of view?
If you say you would’ve behaved differently, is it even possible that you would’ve ended up in their shoes in the first place?
A common response here is early mistakes compound. Or actors have poor character which leads to an inevitable fall. That’s the stuff of Greek tragedies. I’m more of a system thinker. If you look at the patterns, it is pretty easy to see that the leverage points are human systems rather than human nature itself.
If you don’t like the environmental conditions that led to the decision space, then think about changing the system rather than blaming parts of it.
Casting blame on individual parts of the system arguably plays into maintaining the status quo. The most effective changemakers understand how things work and how they got that way without alluding to convenient oversimplifications. Rant now concluded.
> Apple will make users think you're a hacker trying to trick them
Apple will make users know that there are loads of hackers trying to trick them. The threat is extremely real.
> 10,000 are gaslit into thinking you were trying to harm them
Gaslit? Again, many are absolutely trying to harm users. Pretending this is some fake threat is perverse.
As much as people like to complain about downloaded software having restrictions, or encouraging the developer to be verified by Apple, we had already entered a world where users were told to never, ever run any software not by one of the bigs. I mean, I've told relatives that, for good reason after they installed malware and other nonsense repeatedly. It sucks having to get an Apple account and sign your executable, but for any normal user outside of the foolish, that was the only way they were ever going to run your app.
And honestly, for the case given this should be a web app. People shouldn't be trusting some random executable by some random group.
It doesn't ensure anything. But it does force an identity trail (you have to prove your identity), and more importantly allows Apple to have a rapid kill switch: If a developer uses their account to distribute malware, Apple revokes the cert and those apps will no longer run on user devices (as soon as the revocation hits).
Should it be $100 per year? No, that is ridiculous and usurious.
Users shouldn't need permission from trillion dollar corporations looking for a source of recurring revenue to be able to run the software they want.
It isn't 2001 anymore, systems are designed to be secure, and the outdated security model of trusting gatekeepers to keep you safe has been shown to be a farce, as billions of dollars are siphoned each year from innocent users who are just listening to good-intentioned people like yourself and trusting the App Store or Play Store. But they still get scammed anyway. The gatekeepers do not give a shit and approve of malware everyday. Hell, if you structure your scam right, you'll make those gatekeepers very rich until they reluctantly remove you. That or they leave the app because it's a "game" or "service".
How many users are being scammed by "legitimate" apps that charge subscription fees for features already on their devices, or god forbid, apps/games that are just illegal and unregulated casinos? Absolutely tons. I regularly find my older relatives being scammed by the App Store with a dozen different recurring subscriptions they didn't know they signed up for and certainly don't use. And those are the apps/services deemed "legitimate" by gatekeepers, because they're profitable even if they're taking advantage of users.
Sorry, I don't trust gatekeepers who run unregulated casinos and are the largest distributors of malware in the world to keep anyone safe. Design systems to be secure and you don't have to trust corrupt gatekeepers' blessings.
I got a Mac only because of the excellent battery life. But I dread Os X. Not only it is dumbed down and it is harder to accomplish what is trivial in other operating system, but I have to actively fight against it if I want to run software that is not downloaded from the app store or I want to open files with apps I downloaded from elsewhere. And the UI is broken.
And yet people still support it by finding ways around it instead if just leaving mac in the dust, simply not supporting it. Worked for Internet Explorer, will work the same dor mac
"cancel or allow" (which Microsoft still does) makes no sense, it just trains user to click "allow" every time. Users don't know what they should allow or not.
It makes a bit more sense on accounts that have a password set, as it requires you to confirm identity when introducing significant changes to the system (and this is something that Apple also does).
Gatekeeper is a different thing, it basically makes sure that the software you're trying to run has been pre-scanned for malware by a trusted party, similar to Windows's "smart screen" and Defender or APt's GPG keyring integration. It's a mechanism that is completely invisible to 99+% of users. If you see a Gatekeeper pop-up and the app in question is not mlaware, the developer is doing something very wrong.
Civ III is still my go-to activity for long flights with no internet - I've yet to find a better way to instantly time-travel forward 12 hours.
I haven't tried OpenCiv3, but I'm glad it exists - getting vanilla Civ III running on MacOS is a hassle and still has issues with e.g. audio and cutscenes. I also hope it leads to a way to improve worker automation. Managing your workers well is important, doing it manually is tedious, and the built-in Automate feature is really bad.
Slightly tangential but recently I've gotten into the Ilwinter Game Design games Dominions 6 and Conquest of Elysium 5. I was surprised how similar but how different they are to Europa Universalis and Civilization respectively. Very interesting studies in horizontal game design where every faction has dramatically different gameplay strategies.
It used to be Factorio for me (I live in Australia, so long flights happen a lot). The problem with Factorio the flight isn't long enough! and the game bleeds into 100+ hours post-flight.
DF gets all the news (rightfully so, it's an epic game that I've dumped a ton of hours into) but if you haven't already, consider checking out Songs of Syx. It's like DF but multiplied by 100. You can have tens of thousands of citizens, doing most of the things they do in Dwarf Fortress, and a lot more, including waging huge wars against the neighbors. The limits of DF kinda made me sad, actually, that you are limited to so few Dwarves (and don't say it's because you want to know the story of all of them, because after 30 or so you lose track of who is who anyways, so might as well up the limit from 100 to 50K, or more? ;) Songs of Syx has also routinely been getting massive updates since 2020 and I have a feeling the code is a bit cleaner so the solo dev can add features faster (unlike DF's code base which is, according to one of the new devs a nightmare to work with). It's a game that is never talked about but deserves a whole lot more love from gamers.
I don't mean to cast shade on DF, I really do love it, and am happy for its existence, I just think that DF fans should also look into Songs of Syx.
The defining difference for me are the generated stories in DF, which often are a lot of random trash but still give a feeling of a deeper meaning.
13" Macbook Air, I rarely use a mouse to begin with. Trans-Pacific flights usually have a few extra inches of legroom compared to domestic flights, so it's not that cramped even in economy (and obviously a non-issue in premium economy or business).
> I've yet to find a better way to instantly time-travel forward 12 hours
I find it very hard to use a computer in the cramped tables of the plane. And the person in front always ends up aggressively reclining only when I have a laptop out. Plus I feel bad that maybe my bright light is disturbing the people sleeping next to me.
Qantas offer premium economy, about 39” leg room and a few extra inches of width.
If I travel long haul personally I will always go business, booked wel in advance. It’s rare enough that the extra cost is worthwhile. Others spend the money on fancy cars instead.
When I fly transatlantic I don't mind paying to get an exit row or bulkhead seat, but even just premium economy is a much more significant increase in cost over economy, at least flying from Canada.
I remember being a high paid techie getting 19 hours of paid work done between Melbourne and New York, on a laptop in economy (and a long layover in LAX due to a storm). It was fricking glorious, most productive day of my life.
Business class flights from Sydney to San Francisco cost A$6k, 6-10x as much as economy. Flights from Sydney to Europe are more like 3-4x (A$7k vs A$2k) but still ludicrously expensive. Good luck convincing your company to expense that for work trips, and most of us don't have SV salaries. Honestly, I still manage to get some work done on long flights, the more annoying thing is flights which don't have power outlets or WiFi.
If you are a point hacker you could spend the points on upgrades (which tend to give you better rates than buying base tickets) but then you're paying for a minor comfort improvement that you wouldn't pay for normally -- which is a textbook example of induced consumption and is playing into exactly how airlines want you to use points.
The total war games are like civilization but with actually good combat. Especially if you get mods like DEI for Rome 2, RTR for Rome 1 remastered, etc. It's regrettable that we let the grimdark warhammer crowd define the series.
The paradox grand strategy games are like civilization but with real agency and at times straight up historical accuracy.
Meanwhile I have to deal with Ghandi actually nuking everyone (the bug is ACTUALLY REAL IN CIV 5, the best modern civ game!). Not sure why Indians aren't mad as hell at the whole series.
I've put a lot of time into the Total War series. My favourite is probably Shogun 2. I will say that the combat is quite fun at first but once you learn ranged combat, artillery, and the "sweet spot" it falls apart.
Gets to the point where only defensive battles are any fun at all. Attacking just means you sweet spot your way to a flawless victory.
This exploit seems to be present in every TW game I've played, including Rome 2. It's totally ruined the series for me.
I have found paradox games to have uneven game mechanics; some run miles wide, some of them run deep, and many others are just very superficial, and there is no reliable indication which will be which when you are playing fresh.
Any interesting insights about using Godot with C#? I love C# and I'm happy using it in Godot even though it's not as seamless as in Unity: in Godot 4 we still can't export to Web if the project is C#, and there's the whole conversion between C# types and Godot types that adds inefficiencies and extra allocations, etc.; it feels like it's a second-class language in Godot.
I'm always interested in seeing what people find when developing larger projects in C#.
The founding developers were all software engineers with .NET experience, so it was the natural choice even though at the time it was Godot 3.x with Mono. I had used Unity before but not Godot. The project is structured as mostly plain C# DLLs with a relatively thin Godot UI layer controlling it, so the Godot type system is fairly encapsulated. We haven't really seen any issues with those decisions beyond just working out the communication between Godot and DLL. But again we were just working from what we knew so I can't really say if this was the best way to go about it.
We were building on C# Godot and I think it is a second class citizen in the sense that 1) you can't export to wasm and 2) they are moving the interface to be handled by gdextension.
That said, I think once you get the gist of it and understand the landmines, it is really nice to use vanilla dotnet rather than unity's fork.
I have this principle of "5% scripting". If the high level scripting on top of C++ consumes about 5% of frame time, then the language of the script does not matter.
Oh my, this brings me back! One of my fondest gaming memories involves a massive Civilization 3 PBEM match between a number of Civilization fan sites, where we all had private forums and ran these virtual nations against each other. This was way back in 2002 or 2003!
I believe Civfanatics was in it (run by “Chieftess” if I recall), Apolyton (which I was a member of — elected in as Minister of Public Works and had to come up with a plan to clear our pesky jungles) and a number of other sites.
It was such an awesome time. Real diplomacy and trade negotiations between the fan sites while waiting to play our turns. Man, it was fun.
I was also there at Civfanatics watching from the sidelines. Fond memories indeed, and some of those same people laid the foundations for this project.
I didn’t do that stuff but I remember…was it Kryten? Making a multi unit graphic utility, I used it to make and publish some multi units. Fun times. CivFanatics was great.
Good to see you around here! I remember some of your posts way back in the day. I don't recall, did you hang around the civfanatics IRC much back in the day?
There will certainly at least be (technically already is) a Lua scripting interface for mods. We've hand-waved some talk of a proper C# SDK but have no concrete plans yet.
From what I've seen with projects like this, the successful ones do a good job of 'sticking to the mission' of faithfully recreating the original game in a modern engine (openMW, daggerfall unity, all my points of reference are TES related)
The neat part is that they are open source, so anyone who wants to take it in a different direction can fork it. The multiplayer version openMW being a great example of this.
You are getting downvoted, but this is a cool idea. Diplomacy has historically been a weak part of the series, and being able to shore that up may be a lot of fun to play against.
I would say diplomacy is the most misunderstood feature of the series. Players constantly say they want a stronger AI that's smarter at diplomacy. But whenever they have built an AI like that, their play testers complained that it doesn't behave like a real world leader (too ruthless).
This experience led Soren Johnson (co-designer of Civ III and lead designer of Civ IV) to the realization that Civ AIs are supposed to "play to lose" [1].
That makes sense, but at the end of the day, it may be more fun to play around with opponents that act more relatedly. This could take the form of in-game/session-appropriate diplomatic responses that don't read like pre-canned text, or, having explanatory text for why the AI is acting perhaps in goofy ways (which comes up a lot).
I am so tired of game designers/developers being so pathetically wrong about stuff like this. Modders have to CONSTANTLY fix these boneheaded, user hostile decisions in nearly every game. A lot of game developers are not the people actually loving/playing their games in the same way that the cello maker is usually not the cello player.
Even many popular mods fuck this up! DEI in Total War Rome 2 needs submods to make the AI play by the same rules as the player!!! This is top of the most subscribed list right now FOR A REASON!!! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=36258...
Make the AI play by the exact same rules as the player. Make a scaling AI difficulty slider which goes from "piss easy" to "insane grandmaster" but without cheats. It's not that hard to do this, the chess engine crowd figured it out back in 2001. FEAR figured it out in 2004. Game AI has straight up not improved and at many times gotten worse in the ensuing two decades.
It's not that hard to do this, the chess engine crowd figured it out back in 2001.
They really didn't. No one likes playing against weaker chess engines. They play perfectly like a higher-rated engine and then randomly make an obvious blunder. They don't play naturally like a human player of that rating.
The weaker AIs in Civ games do a far better job at "playing to lose" than low rated chess engines. It's not even close!
Even if you don't want an LLM for the actual functionality of negotiations, LLM-generated text would be neat. As-is, the text becomes irrelevant, "Our words are backed with nuclear weapons" is just "nukes = true" - letting an LLM tell you the AI has nukes seems like harmless fun.
Lifelong Civ player. I have always felt the negotiations part of the game is laughably bad, and a huge missed opportunity. The ability to use language as a tool -- diplomacy, but also rhetoric, veiled threats, etc -- is something I excel at, and I would love the chance to test my mettle against an enemy in an imaginary nuclear war context, because when else do you get to play high stakes games like that with words in real life? Civ is the perfect venue for it, but the game designers are extremely boneheaded about how they executed that particular part of the game.
I love that the community is doing this, though I'm curious why Civ 3 in particular. My understanding was that "classic" (for lack of a better term) Civ fans tend to prefer either 2 or 4, and that 3 was considered to be not as good. But perhaps I was mistaken as to the community's opinions on the games.
I can definitely vouch for the 2 or 4 narrative, those have always been my favorites of the 'Modernish' civ games, but my favorite will always be CivNet (Civ 1 with multiplayer). There is some real simplicity in Civ 1 that makes it much better suited to a multiplayer experience than the later entries. It is a real pain to get any non-hotseat multiplayer working nowawdays, but well-worth it.
Agree, wish there were quality of life improvements to Civ1 that kept the simplicity and aesthetics fully intact, while modernizing some of the tedious mid/late game stuff like managing each city in a large empire based on some straightforward goals like 'more science' or 'fastest path to rocketry' or whatnot.
Freeciv unfortunately has none of the charm of Civ1.
For me the most classic one is Civ III by a mile. 4 was way too modern/ flashy for me and 2 too old school. But maybe I was just born at the right time for 3.
For me it was Civ 4's modability that made it the best for me. Because when I got tired of playing Civ 4's normal game, I could install the Fall From Heaven mod and play a completely different game. Wizards, golems, angels, demons, spells, wild animals instead of barbarians (which could be tamed and turned into your own units if you had units with the right promotions)... it made for a completely different gameplay experience.
If I hadn't quit computer games cold turkey (when I realized I was showing all the signs of addiction) over a decade ago, I would still have Civ IV installed and still be playing it today. It just didn't get old, because of how varied the game could become.
Thank you for the link. It is enlightening for someone who likes to play the game, but is not obsessive about a particular version. (I like the idea of Civilization, and will play it for that reason alone. More often than not, I will choose an older version simply because it is faster to load and play than for the intrinsic merits of the ruleset itself.)
Freeciv's point of interest is that it's not trying to exactly replicate any one of the original Civs: it has its default ruleset plus others that are closer to the original games, but it's very easy to make your own.
The latter has more, like Multiplayer 2.4 Dragoon, and Multiplayer 2.5 Elephant(in development), which weren't available locally when I last looked.
There is also https://github.com/longturn/freeciv21 which has an acceptable local client, and finally does not slow down so much when playing larger maps with many AIs, like both FreeCiv and FreeCivWeb tend to do.
Can I tangent on your question here and ask what others think of Civ 7 now? When I learned about it I thought it was a day 1 game purchase for me for sure, but I held off when I saw a stream of bad reviews. I figured I'd come back when they ironed the problems out (as they've done in every major Civ release to my memory). Haven't taken the plunge yet.
I'd recommend avoiding it for now. It still feels unfinsished and poorly thought out. I have many criticisms of their decisions with regards to game design, but even if you like the direction they went in, the UI is rough, and the actual experience of playing isn't fun.
They're releasing a big update in the spring where they reworked the core gameplay mechanic because so many people disliked it. If nothing else I'd wait until that comes out.
They built it as a railroady board game instead of a sandbox video game. The rumors from their experimental workshop test and latest announcement make me hopeful for a big update in the spring. Until then, it doesn’t feel worth playing it more than a couple times through. Every game feels the same.
Trying to streamline the series into a boardgame seems to be a trend. Even Civ6 felt more like a boardgame for points than a sandbox already, even though it was still rather enjoyable.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Ed Beach has been a board game designer in the past. Which is not to say he's the wrong guy for the job, he has done some great work on Civ5 BNW and Civ6. But perhaps he went overboard on 7.
It is _rough_. People say it has gotten better since release, but if you have not played it before, and were to play it fresh right now, it is not great. The UI is both dense and vapid at the same time, UI glitches/bugs, jarring all-or-nothing lock-step advancement of ages, etc.
I’ve played and loved Civ 1/4/5/6 for hundreds of hours each. They have always been a bit rough around the edges on launch, but 7 is the first time I’ve felt like they a) released a half-finished game, b) reduced the game to something that is just plain unenjoyable, and c) made me feel ripped off. It’s a massive downgrade in so many different ways and I would pick any previous version over 7. I have loved playing Civ for decades but 7 killed my interest in the game completely.
I'm holding off on 7 myself. I think they deviated too hard from the formula such that it doesn't look like it's even still a Civ game. And while I'm open-minded enough to try it, I wasn't going to drop $70 on a game I had reason to suspect I would dislike. I figured I would wait until it was on game pass, or on sale for $5 someday.
More recently I read that they are going to update the game such that you don't have to switch civs. That's a good start (though I still don't think I will like the era system at all), but reading the initial reviews a year ago I found out that the game cuts off abruptly in the mid 20th century, rather than going to the information age like normal. To me, that is blatantly unfinished, so I'm not planning to get the game until they fix that as well.
I was big into Civ4. Put about 100 hours into Civ5 and felt that I'd entirely exhausted its strategic depth. Didn't bother with Civ6. Tom Chick hasn't bothered reviewing Civ7 but doesn't seem to be a fan based on forum comments, so I won't be bothering to play it.
It is a great game, and the Vox Populi mod has given it so much more life.
VP has hands down the best AI that the Civ series has ever seen. My "wow" moment was when the enemy parachuted to my hinterlands to pillage my critical resources. In comparison, the official AI couldn't even pull off an amphibious attack.
I must admit that there is a certain sense of nostalgia I get from playing Civ 3 that I never got from any of the other Civ games, but that's probably just because it was the first Civ game I played and got really hooked on as a young kid.
Well, "capabilities" is carrying a lot of weight there. One of the main objectives is to design it for unrestricted modding to accommodate all of the wishlisted features, but "out of the box" the default game mode will be 1:1 in mechanics with some QoL improvements. The inspiration is mostly for designing systems in a way that can be easily reconfigured or extended to behave in other ways. We hope that by the time we reach feature parity, people will have already built some mods to do things that were impossible with Civ3.
As mentioned above this was started by Civ3 modders, and we all have our passionate reasons for preferring it over other entries, but you're not wrong that doing this with a 3D engine would be a whole `nother ballgame. There are actually Civ4 and Civ5 remakes underway which have both opted for 2D implementations.
3 has a really nice feel when you manage to get the early timing attacks off against the neighbours, but the later half of the game is too solved - the game ends with infantry + artillery stacks being the only units you need, and with the 3x4 city grid bring optimal.
4 in contrast had a bunch of different paths to power, and those worked even on high difficulties. There were also no optimal city grid the same way (though still being denser than civ5).
There's Freeciv [1] for IV, and Unciv [2] for V. I doesn't have many fans, VI is too recent, and VII, well... Let's not talk about VII.
> Civ fans tend to prefer [...]
I'd say, each entry in the series gets love. The saying goes: "Your favorite Civ game is the first one you ever played". In my experience, that's pretty true (Still stuck on V).
Interestingly enough, the Call to Power series was unaffiliated with Sid Meier's Civilization and was developed after Activision licensed the name from the board game Civilization was unauthorizedly based upon. There was a sequel called just "Call to Power II" in case you missed it, which had it's source code released in 2003 in case you're feeling nostalgic.
I think the first Civ I played WAS III (maybe II at a friend's house once before?) and it ain't my fav. It sits below IV and V and even VI and I don't really like VI all that much either...
For those like myself who have wanted this but for Civ1 (all 4 of us), someone on CivFanatics has made incredible progress, and the game is actually playable now: https://github.com/rajko-horvat/OpenCiv1
It's really cool to see projects like this designed for dropping in assets from the proprietary version. The separation in the first place is unfortunate, but at least the capability exists.
Civ III in my opinion had some of the best art of the entire series. The 3D feeling of the successor games are kind of off-putting by comparison.
I once had 10 civil war-tech troops with rifles lined up against a fort with ONE bow and arrow troop. I lost every single one of my troops and that's the last time I've played Civ 3 in my life. Hopefully they addressed this issue...
(PS: once a friend lost a battleship to a stone age militia in the original Civ)
Civ III battles are best thought of as dice rolls like the board game Risk. If you have more modern units you get to roll more dice but there's still a small chance archers defeat musketmen.
Strangely enough I still think Civilization I is best.
Later versions added better graphics, some interesting gameplay choice and elements. But all of them felt much slower gameplay wise compared to Civilization I.
I feel in a similar way with SimCity. I liked the follow-ups and they were a bit better in terms of gameplay compared to later Civilizations, but the first version is still by far the best, even if young people today will find the graphics crap.
There is something about purity, to get the most basic parts out. Games today are more like movies. They may be fun but they feel more like playing a movie than a game. Little Nightmares was interesting, pretty to look at and fun from a game play perspective too, but ultimately I feel that the modern games lost something fundamental that they may never get back (at the least non-indie games; indie games are a bit more varied).
This feels like the perfect game to add (screen reader) accessibility to.
Sadly, I don't think it can be done by us screen reader users, as the Godot editor UI is not really accessible (though they're apparently changing that in the latest version).
I'm one of the weird ones that really wants an open source Civ:CTP. Especially if you can still edit the .ini file to have 255 civilizations on the map.
looks super cool. I'm a lifelong civ player but my first one was civ 4, so this seems like a fun chance to dip into some of the earlier ones. love that they're using Godot for the engine!
ive never played before. i moved my guys around the map for 6 turns then they just disappeared. also cant figure out how to increase the scaling of the screen
Loved this one; from the same guy who wrote Scanner which was nice before WinDirStat and WizTree. You could add AI plugins which could take the role of a player, without cheating.
been following OpenCiv3 with interest. curious if you've been using any AI coding assistants to speed things up, or if it's been mostly vanilla dev? the codebase looks pretty clean
I'm old enough to have played Civ I when I was a child, but have not played since then. So, why didn't this project choose to create a Civ 7 or Civ 6 play-alike, nor a Civ 1 play-alike, but rather Civ 3? What's special about it?
More generally - if someone remind us of the major differences between the different versions of Civilization, in a nutshell, we would be in your debt.
I have a long history with the Civ series. I spent a massive amount of time playing Civ1. My next most played was Civ4 and most of that wasn't the base game. It was a mod that had a very loyal fan base: Fall From Heaven 2 [1]. I have tried a couple of times to get all this to work on a modern PC but I think I'm played out on the game and I never quite get it off the gorund. I have a ton of nostalgia for it though.
Civ5 started the whole hex thing, which I was never excited about. Yes, Civ4 had stacks of doom but Civ5 turned into a puzzle of moving units in order because you could only have one per hex.
Anyway, Civ2 and Civ3 never got as much play from me. I'm a little surprised that people had the same enthusiasm. My memory of these 2 was that they just added a bunch of tedium, like I distinctly remember that tile improvement changed to turning farms into supermarkets. It's been a lot of years so I might be misremembering. Maybe I just dind't give them enough time. Or maybe nothing could capture my initial enthusiasm for the novelty that was Civ1.
Anyway, i'm always happy to see projects like this. Games really do live forever. Like people will invent software for free to keep running them (ie emulators).
The Civ series has kinda defied the usual trend to entshittification. I'm really thinking of SimCity here. It's hard to describe how much EA shit the bed with SimCity %, so much so that it basically launched Cities: Skylines, which itself has had issues with the CS2 launch.
Does Civ3 have a massive fanbase compared to Civ1, Civ2 or Civ4? I really don't know.
I love the hex system - adds a lot of tactical depth. Choice of naval vs air vs land focus often comes down to who you're fighting and where. Then you turn around to fight someone else and realize your 20 veteran frigates are near useless despite your new enemy being coastal because all of their cities are tucked away in bays or behind hills...
Gameplay wise this is a straight remake of Civ3 as a baseline, while allowing much greater customization. Freeciv is definitely an inspiration, but it's kind of its own thing.
Genuine question - would that be amenable to fast AI? It's less of a problem on modern PCs running Civ4, but on contemporary systems late-game large maps with many AI/units could really drag during turn-processing.
You don’t necessarily need it to learn during the game, it would be enough for it to learn between games. If you’ve played the game long enough there are behaviors you can exploit that wouldn’t work against a human player. They iterated on the AI in Beyond the Sword and fixed some of the more abusable mechanics in Civilization V (e.g. by introducing diplomatic penalties when you camp units next to an AI’s borders), but it’s just inevitable that once you’ve played a game long enough you will find these kinds of exploitable patterns.
The customization available in IV makes it basically infinitely replayable, but the AI makes the trajectory of each game too predictable if you understand the mechanics well enough.
Lots of old strategy games have been revived by introducing new factions that change the game’s meta; imagine if this process was automated by training the AI on recorded games from the entire playerbase, or on games recorded locally to adapt to the user’s unique style of play.
I don't know about the dedicated Civilization fans, but 3 was the only version I played.
I didn't play it much, but when I did I'd play for 6+ hours at a time. I'll check this out later tonight, and might see if I can find the old CD and get the original running.
Ooof, good luck. Civ3 copy protection was intense. I had to get out my old Win2k disk and stand up a VM. Attempts to rip an iso will be complicated by the fact that they deliberately wrote bad data to the disk. All of this is surmountable, but unless you enjoy a very particular kind of fun, you may prefer to spend $2 on GoG.
How far OSX has come since the days of the “cancel or allow” parody advert.
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/app-code-signing-pr...
> On devices with macOS 10.15, all apps distributed outside the App Store must be signed by the developer using an Apple-issued Developer ID certificate (combined with a private key) and notarized by Apple to run under the default Gatekeeper settings.
Re: Developer ID Certificates: https://developer.apple.com/help/account/certificates/create...
I suspect the friction that users are facing are due to dodging the above requirements.
What ultimately helped after weeks of trying and tinkering was installing VMware Workstation, patching it to enable macOS support, create a VM with the specific hardware configuration of an older MacBook, install an old version of macOS and do the 2FA from in there.
You can also try macinabox if you have unraid:
https://hub.docker.com/r/spaceinvaderone/macinabox
It’s probably the easiest way of setting up a Mac VM if you have unraid. I know there are similar options for qemu and kvm based hypervisors. If you have an amd gpu you should be able to pass it through.
The only way atm is installing homebrew and using a gnu tool chain if I understand the license of the official sdks correctly?
1: https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu
It'll be a skill they can use for any unsigned app and you can have cute screenshots. The Terminal command, on the other hand, is a huge barrier to entry.
In case you're wondering like me, this is the advert in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CwoluNRSSc&t=0
The application cannot be opened for an unexpected reason, error=Error Domain=RBSRequestErrorDomain Code=5 "Launch failed." UserInfo={NSLocalizedFailureReason=Launch failed., NSUnderlyingError=0xae1038720 {Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=163 "Unknown error: 163" UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Launchd job spawn failed}}}
This error exists because Apple has effectively made app notarization mandatory, otherwise, users see this warning. In theory, notarization is straightforward: upload your DMG via their API, and within minutes you get a notarized/stamped app back.
…until you hit the infamous "Team is not yet configured for notarization" error.
Once that happens, you can be completely blocked from notarizing your app for months. Apple has confirmed via email that this is a bug on their end. It affects many developers, has been known for years, and Apple still hasn't fixed it. It completely elimiates any chances of you being able to notarize your app, thus, getting rid of this error/warning.
Have a loot at how many people are suffering from this for years with no resolution yet: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/118465
Other than developing my own (without using any other OS...) which is a ... significant ... task, there's not much other option. YMMV.
As a Linux lifer I agree that the hard diamond surface of the Mac desktop has a solid feeling to it. The Linux way is harder and also more brittle. Windows and Linux are both better than MacOS even as a desktop as long as you do not look at the in the wrong way. The thing is I have only minor problems doing that on either Linux or Windows, but the walled garden of the Mac, Android and iOS is a joke.
MacOS is designed to be a somewhat stable desktop, that is good. It is not a better Unix, it is a political stance that means hacking will forever die.
Linux developers seem to almost-universally believe that if the user doesn’t like it or it doesn’t make sense then the user will fix it themselves either via configuration files or patching the source code. That model works fine for users with a lot of knowledge and time on their hands. In other words, it’s an operating system for hobbyists.
MacOS, for all its faults, is still pretty easy to use (though not even close to the ease of use of Classic Mac OS 9 and earlier).
Linux users, on the other hand, seem to spend more time customizing their operating system and sharing screenshots of it than actually getting work done.
Not being able to install things sucks, but when you do you will easily destroy your nice shiny brittle desktop. The pebkac is strong here, but making the users enemies is a bad solution, this is why Google, Apple and MS are all bad desktops.
As I said I have been a Linux user my whole life. I know it works as a desktop but it works best with either people who do not care about instaling stuff, or thise who care enough to get it working.
Not a feature they care about. Same for deleting apps not released yet. Haven't looked in a while but for over a decade it has been impossible to delete ios apps submitted and not released. So either you have to release the app, make it "apple approved" and then immediately kill it or have an app always present (I think you can hide it but I've not checked that in quite a while.
However yes, security is much more than an UAC dialog.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2025/05/19/enhanc...
The thing that really irks me is I've got a paid developer account with Apple, I've already done the xcode dance, notarized binaries and all that nonsense, shouldn't this have activated some super special bit on my Apple account that says
“this one needs to do random stuff now and again and after saying, `Hey just checking in, doing this will do X to your computer probably, and maybe set it on fire, but if you say "go for it, I promise I know what I'm doing', I'm gonna trust you champ`, finger guns“
(not sure why in my head the personification of Apple would do "finger guns", but here we are I guess :shrug:)
Hell at this point I'll take a checkbox in my settings that says, ”Some people are into extreme sports, I love to install random binaries, just get out of my way“
People also forget that it makes it safe for people who aren't grandmas. The reason why you think it's just grandmas is because, for you to get a virus or your computer hacked now, it requires so many user gaffes for something like that to happen. In addition, it almost always involves typing in or telling someone your password when you shouldn’t. In the early 2000s, I still remember there was some ad affiliate for the cyanide and happiness webcomic website that, if you let it's ad load, instantly infected your computer with adware just from visiting the site. That’s unheard of now because of increasingly protective/restrictive policies set by technology companies. It’s one of those situations where if a system is working correctly, you won’t even know it’s working at all.
Or something like that
(Joke is on you. You thought you'd be given access to app data to back it up? That's against the security model.)
Like windows complainers, most of us do not care.
Maybe 1 out of 1,000 users will know the magic ritual required to run what they want on their machine, and for every one of those, 10,000 are gaslit into thinking you were trying to harm them by macOS' scary warnings and refusal to do what they want.
Only seeing the worst potential explanations of other parties whom make different trade-offs than you is uncharitable. It can also look like what I would call counterfactual hypocrisy, by which I mean, if you were in those shoes, would you actually behave differently?
E.g.: If you were in Apple’s shoes (think about what this entails), what actions would be compatible with a business’s MO from that point of view? From various ethical points of view?
If you say you would’ve behaved differently, is it even possible that you would’ve ended up in their shoes in the first place?
A common response here is early mistakes compound. Or actors have poor character which leads to an inevitable fall. That’s the stuff of Greek tragedies. I’m more of a system thinker. If you look at the patterns, it is pretty easy to see that the leverage points are human systems rather than human nature itself.
If you don’t like the environmental conditions that led to the decision space, then think about changing the system rather than blaming parts of it.
Casting blame on individual parts of the system arguably plays into maintaining the status quo. The most effective changemakers understand how things work and how they got that way without alluding to convenient oversimplifications. Rant now concluded.
Apple will make users know that there are loads of hackers trying to trick them. The threat is extremely real.
> 10,000 are gaslit into thinking you were trying to harm them
Gaslit? Again, many are absolutely trying to harm users. Pretending this is some fake threat is perverse.
As much as people like to complain about downloaded software having restrictions, or encouraging the developer to be verified by Apple, we had already entered a world where users were told to never, ever run any software not by one of the bigs. I mean, I've told relatives that, for good reason after they installed malware and other nonsense repeatedly. It sucks having to get an Apple account and sign your executable, but for any normal user outside of the foolish, that was the only way they were ever going to run your app.
And honestly, for the case given this should be a web app. People shouldn't be trusting some random executable by some random group.
Should it be $100 per year? No, that is ridiculous and usurious.
It isn't 2001 anymore, systems are designed to be secure, and the outdated security model of trusting gatekeepers to keep you safe has been shown to be a farce, as billions of dollars are siphoned each year from innocent users who are just listening to good-intentioned people like yourself and trusting the App Store or Play Store. But they still get scammed anyway. The gatekeepers do not give a shit and approve of malware everyday. Hell, if you structure your scam right, you'll make those gatekeepers very rich until they reluctantly remove you. That or they leave the app because it's a "game" or "service".
How many users are being scammed by "legitimate" apps that charge subscription fees for features already on their devices, or god forbid, apps/games that are just illegal and unregulated casinos? Absolutely tons. I regularly find my older relatives being scammed by the App Store with a dozen different recurring subscriptions they didn't know they signed up for and certainly don't use. And those are the apps/services deemed "legitimate" by gatekeepers, because they're profitable even if they're taking advantage of users.
Sorry, I don't trust gatekeepers who run unregulated casinos and are the largest distributors of malware in the world to keep anyone safe. Design systems to be secure and you don't have to trust corrupt gatekeepers' blessings.
It makes a bit more sense on accounts that have a password set, as it requires you to confirm identity when introducing significant changes to the system (and this is something that Apple also does).
Gatekeeper is a different thing, it basically makes sure that the software you're trying to run has been pre-scanned for malware by a trusted party, similar to Windows's "smart screen" and Defender or APt's GPG keyring integration. It's a mechanism that is completely invisible to 99+% of users. If you see a Gatekeeper pop-up and the app in question is not mlaware, the developer is doing something very wrong.
Refusing to pay $100 for notarization is not "doing something very wrong".
I haven't tried OpenCiv3, but I'm glad it exists - getting vanilla Civ III running on MacOS is a hassle and still has issues with e.g. audio and cutscenes. I also hope it leads to a way to improve worker automation. Managing your workers well is important, doing it manually is tedious, and the built-in Automate feature is really bad.
I don't mean to cast shade on DF, I really do love it, and am happy for its existence, I just think that DF fans should also look into Songs of Syx.
The defining difference for me are the generated stories in DF, which often are a lot of random trash but still give a feeling of a deeper meaning.
I find it very hard to use a computer in the cramped tables of the plane. And the person in front always ends up aggressively reclining only when I have a laptop out. Plus I feel bad that maybe my bright light is disturbing the people sleeping next to me.
That plus flights from Australia are expensive enough in economy, business class is easily 4-10x that cost.
If I travel long haul personally I will always go business, booked wel in advance. It’s rare enough that the extra cost is worthwhile. Others spend the money on fancy cars instead.
Basically closer to "old economy", where you have leg room and real utensils
If you are a point hacker you could spend the points on upgrades (which tend to give you better rates than buying base tickets) but then you're paying for a minor comfort improvement that you wouldn't pay for normally -- which is a textbook example of induced consumption and is playing into exactly how airlines want you to use points.
Or ones which do but the outlets are so loose they are practically useless.
The paradox grand strategy games are like civilization but with real agency and at times straight up historical accuracy.
Meanwhile I have to deal with Ghandi actually nuking everyone (the bug is ACTUALLY REAL IN CIV 5, the best modern civ game!). Not sure why Indians aren't mad as hell at the whole series.
Gets to the point where only defensive battles are any fun at all. Attacking just means you sweet spot your way to a flawless victory.
This exploit seems to be present in every TW game I've played, including Rome 2. It's totally ruined the series for me.
It's like the modern-era Paradox game you wanted but all the mechanics synergize with each other.
Unfortunately it's a bit too complicated as a result.
I'm always interested in seeing what people find when developing larger projects in C#.
That said, I think once you get the gist of it and understand the landmines, it is really nice to use vanilla dotnet rather than unity's fork.
I believe Civfanatics was in it (run by “Chieftess” if I recall), Apolyton (which I was a member of — elected in as Minister of Public Works and had to come up with a plan to clear our pesky jungles) and a number of other sites.
It was such an awesome time. Real diplomacy and trade negotiations between the fan sites while waiting to play our turns. Man, it was fun.
The neat part is that they are open source, so anyone who wants to take it in a different direction can fork it. The multiplayer version openMW being a great example of this.
This experience led Soren Johnson (co-designer of Civ III and lead designer of Civ IV) to the realization that Civ AIs are supposed to "play to lose" [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJcuQQ1eWWI
Even many popular mods fuck this up! DEI in Total War Rome 2 needs submods to make the AI play by the same rules as the player!!! This is top of the most subscribed list right now FOR A REASON!!! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=36258...
Make the AI play by the exact same rules as the player. Make a scaling AI difficulty slider which goes from "piss easy" to "insane grandmaster" but without cheats. It's not that hard to do this, the chess engine crowd figured it out back in 2001. FEAR figured it out in 2004. Game AI has straight up not improved and at many times gotten worse in the ensuing two decades.
They really didn't. No one likes playing against weaker chess engines. They play perfectly like a higher-rated engine and then randomly make an obvious blunder. They don't play naturally like a human player of that rating.
The weaker AIs in Civ games do a far better job at "playing to lose" than low rated chess engines. It's not even close!
And it's still a constant complaint that Stockfish suggests moves that no human could really play and follow up correctly.
Freeciv unfortunately has none of the charm of Civ1.
But to each his own. Civ 4 was the first one that really, really hooked me.
If I hadn't quit computer games cold turkey (when I realized I was showing all the signs of addiction) over a decade ago, I would still have Civ IV installed and still be playing it today. It just didn't get old, because of how varied the game could become.
Personally, I didn't play much of 2 or 3, so I don't have strong feelings either way.
https://freecivweb.com/
The latter has more, like Multiplayer 2.4 Dragoon, and Multiplayer 2.5 Elephant(in development), which weren't available locally when I last looked.
There is also https://github.com/longturn/freeciv21 which has an acceptable local client, and finally does not slow down so much when playing larger maps with many AIs, like both FreeCiv and FreeCivWeb tend to do.
https://longturn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
I tried that, recently, and barely espcaped a relapse. (Phew!)
especially since openciv3 aims to fix some of civ 3's shortcomings
Sounds like you've been listening to Civ4 fans. ;) 3 is just as active on steam and has a very active and loyal multiplayer league.
I'm a Civ3 hater, give me 2 or 4 any day. 3 is my least favorite version of the game.
But, OTOH, my wife is ride or die for Civ3.
They're releasing a big update in the spring where they reworked the core gameplay mechanic because so many people disliked it. If nothing else I'd wait until that comes out.
More recently I read that they are going to update the game such that you don't have to switch civs. That's a good start (though I still don't think I will like the era system at all), but reading the initial reviews a year ago I found out that the game cuts off abruptly in the mid 20th century, rather than going to the information age like normal. To me, that is blatantly unfinished, so I'm not planning to get the game until they fix that as well.
VP has hands down the best AI that the Civ series has ever seen. My "wow" moment was when the enemy parachuted to my hinterlands to pillage my critical resources. In comparison, the official AI couldn't even pull off an amphibious attack.
Looks to not be a straight remake. I wonder whether 3 is a preferable target because things like graphical complexity in >= 4 is too much.
As mentioned above this was started by Civ3 modders, and we all have our passionate reasons for preferring it over other entries, but you're not wrong that doing this with a 3D engine would be a whole `nother ballgame. There are actually Civ4 and Civ5 remakes underway which have both opted for 2D implementations.
4 in contrast had a bunch of different paths to power, and those worked even on high difficulties. There were also no optimal city grid the same way (though still being denser than civ5).
> Civ fans tend to prefer [...]
I'd say, each entry in the series gets love. The saying goes: "Your favorite Civ game is the first one you ever played". In my experience, that's pretty true (Still stuck on V).
[1] https://www.freeciv.org/
[2] https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
Alpha Centauri was objectively the best though.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/civilization-ownership-dispute...
3 was a great game for those who prefer building over war, and the first one with a proper non-military victory option.
- OpenCiv1
- FreeCiv (civ 2)
- OpenCiv3
- ???
- UnCiv
I'm curious why civ 4 is the one that got skipped. I feel like it's the one that is most commonly labelled as the "peak"
Civ III in my opinion had some of the best art of the entire series. The 3D feeling of the successor games are kind of off-putting by comparison.
(PS: once a friend lost a battleship to a stone age militia in the original Civ)
Later versions added better graphics, some interesting gameplay choice and elements. But all of them felt much slower gameplay wise compared to Civilization I.
I feel in a similar way with SimCity. I liked the follow-ups and they were a bit better in terms of gameplay compared to later Civilizations, but the first version is still by far the best, even if young people today will find the graphics crap.
There is something about purity, to get the most basic parts out. Games today are more like movies. They may be fun but they feel more like playing a movie than a game. Little Nightmares was interesting, pretty to look at and fun from a game play perspective too, but ultimately I feel that the modern games lost something fundamental that they may never get back (at the least non-indie games; indie games are a bit more varied).
Sadly, I don't think it can be done by us screen reader users, as the Godot editor UI is not really accessible (though they're apparently changing that in the latest version).
https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
The content is a bit lacking though, would see more diversity in tech tree, and units.
I just realised that the actual latest version of Die Ha… Civilization is VII (2025), and for me II remains the gold classic.
Both in Civilisation and in Die Hard.
http://www.c-evo.org/
http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/
but seriously yes everything about the game will be designed for customization
More generally - if someone remind us of the major differences between the different versions of Civilization, in a nutshell, we would be in your debt.
Civ5 started the whole hex thing, which I was never excited about. Yes, Civ4 had stacks of doom but Civ5 turned into a puzzle of moving units in order because you could only have one per hex.
Anyway, Civ2 and Civ3 never got as much play from me. I'm a little surprised that people had the same enthusiasm. My memory of these 2 was that they just added a bunch of tedium, like I distinctly remember that tile improvement changed to turning farms into supermarkets. It's been a lot of years so I might be misremembering. Maybe I just dind't give them enough time. Or maybe nothing could capture my initial enthusiasm for the novelty that was Civ1.
Anyway, i'm always happy to see projects like this. Games really do live forever. Like people will invent software for free to keep running them (ie emulators).
The Civ series has kinda defied the usual trend to entshittification. I'm really thinking of SimCity here. It's hard to describe how much EA shit the bed with SimCity %, so much so that it basically launched Cities: Skylines, which itself has had issues with the CS2 launch.
Does Civ3 have a massive fanbase compared to Civ1, Civ2 or Civ4? I really don't know.
[1]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/mod-fall-from-heaven-...
https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Civ2civ3
I remember losing 6pm to 3am playing civ 4 one time. One more turn...
(But I'm not sure what I need openCiv for... the steam game is good. Maybe its just useful for the long term.)
The customization available in IV makes it basically infinitely replayable, but the AI makes the trajectory of each game too predictable if you understand the mechanics well enough.
Lots of old strategy games have been revived by introducing new factions that change the game’s meta; imagine if this process was automated by training the AI on recorded games from the entire playerbase, or on games recorded locally to adapt to the user’s unique style of play.
I didn't play it much, but when I did I'd play for 6+ hours at a time. I'll check this out later tonight, and might see if I can find the old CD and get the original running.
yeah, that's dangerous for me, this is the ONE that got me started