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.
Like it was popular.
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.
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.
It was more of a mechanism to keep connections shorter because most BBSes only had a few phone lines, or even just one, so the number of simultaneous users was extremely limited.
Ignoring Civ 2 vs Civ 5 differences, any experiancing hosting Unciv vs Freeciv?
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.
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.
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.
Why 23 hours? Is this a typo?
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.
generate_gazette.sh Calls OpenAI to generate "The Civ Chronicle" — an era-appropriate, unreliable wartime newspaper article for each turn.
It's a bit verbose honestly (see https://freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info), I welcome pull requests with improved prompting!
I thought about trying some kind of mod for Civ IV but never got around to it. FreeCiv does make more sense.
Very cool stuff.
In my case i'm creating various json files that describe game state, players, diplomacy, attendance, etc. Then i just throw that at the LLM and give it the goal of writing a newspaper article about where the game is at. The json files are incremental, so i'm not reading all the past versions on every turn. At the end of the current turn it just appends the current turn data to the json file, and then does the generation. These files are also what power the frontend UI, so it's all super lightweight and fast.
To make the graphs, you need to know state at the end of the current turn as the save files don't retain any history. So i store the most recent save file from each turn in order to achieve this.
It's been a journey of reverse engineering this game, but that's kind of the joy of it all.
My friends and I played for a while. The first week was a blast, the second week was fun, but week three felt like a chore and we all lost interest.
How do you handle the turn time creep problem? If people complete their turns and the game moves to the next 24 hour bloc after the last player submits, the submission window creeps earlier in the day until the deadline until it gets too early for one or more players and they miss a turn. Or do you not immediately process the turns and always stick to the 24H time period even if you have all players?