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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
“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.
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.
"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.
lol, I just assumed this was a reference to the old workflow for bypassing code-signing on OS X, which was you had to click 'Cancel' in the popup then right-click and select "open" (no indication in the UI that this did something different than double-clicking).
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
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.
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)
70 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 76.4 ms ] threadI 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 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.
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.
but seriously yes everything about the game will be designed for customization
yeah, that's dangerous for me, this is the ONE that got me started
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.
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 content is a bit lacking though, would see more diversity in tech tree, and units.
http://www.c-evo.org/
http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/
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.
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.)
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.
- 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"
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-...
How far OSX has come since the days of the “cancel or allow” parody advert.
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.
In case you're wondering like me, this is the advert in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CwoluNRSSc&t=0
Like windows complainers, most of us do not care.
(PS: once a friend lost a battleship to a stone age militia in the original Civ)