Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends

(github.com)

30 points | by verelo 3 hours ago

5 comments

  • GNOMES 1 hour 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

    • verelo 1 hour ago
      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.

      • karmakurtisaani 1 hour ago
        > 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.

        • verelo 1 hour ago
          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.
      • senkora 1 hour ago
        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.
        • verelo 1 hour ago
          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.

  • verelo 1 hour 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
    • algo_trader 49 minutes ago
      > for longturn games (23-hour turns)

      Why 23 hours? Is this a typo?

      • verelo 2 minutes ago
        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.

  • ivanjermakov 2 hours ago
    Any reason for such a long turn timeout?
    • verelo 1 hour ago
      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.

    • busterarm 1 hour ago
      You know people used to play games of chess sending their moves via postcard, right?

      Like it was popular.

  • tasuki 2 hours ago
    Very smooth looking, I attempted to sign up!
    • verelo 2 hours ago
      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.
  • busterarm 1 hour 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.

    • verelo 1 hour ago
      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.