Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends (github.com)

by verelo 42 comments 88 points
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42 comments

[−] mmcclure 59d ago

    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.
[−] verelo 59d ago
This was a friends suggestion after I initially proposed something that exposed a bit too much detail. I wanted to show the diplomacy states and unit/city additions per player as a highlight on the home page, but we instead kept the raw files that generated those UI elements and fed them into OpenAI with the prompt and the Gazette was born.

It's a bit verbose honestly (see https://freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info), I welcome pull requests with improved prompting!

[−] GNOMES 59d ago
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

[−] peterjmag 59d ago
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.
[−] mister_mort 58d ago
Managing to recreate Pitboss mode is a neat achievement.

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?

[−] stavros 58d ago
I want to do something like this for work, except instead of Civ it's discussing a topic, and instead of Civ it's email. Unfortunately, everyone seems addicted to Slack, as it minimises the time it takes for everyone to misunderstand each other.
[−] busterarm 59d ago
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.

[−] tagami 59d ago
Our goto is Civ VI where we play an age every few days. Start game we can usually get 2 ages in, end game 1/2 age or less. Game time is usually 60-90 min
[−] wieder_fi 58d ago
Is this similar gameplay to longturn.net Freeciv with 25h turns? I would guess guess it is. Longturn has a fork of the Freeciv client, available from Github. There are some improvements to the UI and other things, including rulesets for longturn type of games. Might give some ideas for improving stuff.
[−] u3125 59d ago
This reminds me of Neptune’s Pride, a turn based strategy game where time in-game is real-world time. Turns take a very long time.

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.

[−] verelo 59d ago
Link to the live demo site where you can see what this code does (aside from running the actual server): https://freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info
[−] jonathanlydall 58d ago
Time for all players wasn’t the only issue with multiplayer when I tried a while back with Civ 4 and a couple of my brothers. We never even got to thinking it’s taking too long before a desync error would occur.
[−] tasuki 59d ago
Very smooth looking, I attempted to sign up!
[−] ivanjermakov 59d ago
Any reason for such a long turn timeout?
[−] crimsoneer 58d ago
Reminder that everyone should be playing Solium Infernum with their friends
[−] accesspatchh 59d ago
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[−] xallower74 59d ago
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[−] ttbigroad94 59d ago
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