Along with shattered pixel dungeon, this is one of the only worthwile games on Android I've found. They don't call home, they don't push ads, they don't spy on you, they're just good games, well implemented and open source.
Not a complaint, more an FYI. I see a large number of games were added in 2020. I tried 3 randomly and all were either "incompatible with my device" or "made for an older Android version". Should I report them, or is it best to leave them for people with older versions of Android?
Wow, I really needed that website. I spend a lot of time looking for games of this kind, since like 99% of Android games are, in your (rather precise) terms, bullshit, and after some experiences with those I don't want to pay any more, period.
This is exactly what I’ve wanted. It’s impossible to find games on the app store. Other than a few publishers I trust, I’ve mostly stopped playing.
There appears to be a bug on your site. I can’t seem to both filter and sort at the same time on iOS Safari. Both work, but if I filter (I filtered on puzzle and free) it works, but if I then click the sort by “added” button it sorts and my filter is gone. If I sort and then apply the filter it goes back to the default order.
I think this website misclassifies a few games. For example in Bastion (iOS) only the beginning can be paid for free. The rest of the game is unlocked via a one-time payment. However the website says that the one-time purchase removes ads/annoyances.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is incredible, but dangerously addictive. It's the perfect game for a 4-5 hour plane ride -- speaking from experience over the recent holidays.
The only way to break my addiction was to play through it. Due to skill and luck limitations I only got to somewhere in the last 3rd of the game, so I cloned the repo and modified the code so my characters where basically invincible from the beginning and played though it.
They're not open source, but they don't have ads and a generous free version. The Pro version is really not needed, except if you really are into the game or if yiu want to support the dev.
Alphacross [0] is the one I keep coming back to. I don't think it's open source, but otherwise it's a nice simple no-frills crossword app. No ads, minimal permissions, sips battery, downloads puzzles on-demand and then works fine offline, etc.
That reminds me that Zachtronics Solitaire is available on Android. It's the solitaire minigames from all the Zachtronics games, plus a new tarot-based solitaire just for this collection.
for me, one of the best games is Andor's Trail. Magnificent map making, funny dialogue, tons of content. It is not finished yet, but has been a lot of fun to play for years.
> Depends what you're looking for. If you're in the market for high-res graphics, amazing soundtracks, animations etc, I highly recommend Firaxis's Civ-V-like game, "Civilization V".
> If you want a small, fast, moddable, FOSS, in-depth 4X that can still run on a potato, you've come to the right place :)
I installed it on f-droid about a year ago. It's lots of fun, though a (decreasing) number of things still aren't implemented.
After playing more than 20 years of all different kinds of CIV, especially switching back and forth between the versions, it dawned on me that the most important aspect of a game like CIV is the display of information, the UX. It all boils down to how I as player consumes the informations and forms my decisions. The second most important thing of any many hours long game is the number of times I have to click something with the mouse. And there is obvious: the more clicks, the worse, in particular if the click is actually avoidable. The rest is for me secondary. Any kind of graphics will do as long as I can see clearly on first glance what it represents.
It’s sadly missing what, for me, makes Civ V the best Civ: Vox Populi [0] fka. Community Patch fka. Communitas, a very extensive mod that under different leadership has been in development for almost as long as Civ V exists. It overhauls the whole game, fixes bugs, balances things, improves the AI (usual recommendation is to play 2 difficulties lower than vanilla to start) and adds features.
Recently they started doing community councils, introducing a process for proposals and getting them voted on.
Personally, as I don’t care that much about balance, I also play with the 3rd and 4th unique component [1] mod, which is mostly a one-man project and not as balanced, but makes civs even more distinct.
Oh, and of course, VP is open source [2].
edit: In case someone decides to play with it, the current version 4.x has had some extensive clean up and might have some new bugs. Also, many addon mods have not been updated for it, so you might want to use 3.x for now.
I appreciate hearing about the modding scene for Civ V. My experience was growing up with Civ IV and great mods like the Rhyes and Fall mods, and Fall from Heaven, and Planetfall.
I remember eagerly awaiting Civ V, buying it on release day, and then being shocked by how different it was. At the time I had strong opinions on all the things that it did "wrong", but now I've concluded that Civ is one of those games where the first one you play will just always be special. Objectively, lots of people love Civ V and I'm happy for that.
But even though I stopped playing Civ V I kept following along in the civfanatics forums to see what kinds of awesome mods would develop around it.
We never saw the same kind of total conversion mods that were possible in Civ IV, I think because of modding limitations. But I either missed or disregarded Vox Populi and now I'm excited to read into its history!
A difference is that it's absolutely not a total conversion. Afaik there are 2 or 3 of those, but VP is purely "Civ V, but better". Everything stays roughly the same, just fixed and expanded. It's a bit as if the devs never stopped working on the game.
FWIW, I started with Civ II (still have the thick manual), but prefer V ;)
On their release date, the best games in the franchise would be between Civ 3 and Civ 4.
Civ 5 and 6 are so different that it is difficult to call them successor games anymore. It's Civ meets Settlers of Catan or something, no longer a true Civ game.
The movement limitations in Civ 5 and 6 don't make sense. The biggest battles in history have been what Civ 5+ players dismiss as "death stacks".
Think of the Battle of Trafalgar, Battle of Stalingrad, Siege of Baghdad (1258), Fall of Tenochtitlan... all concentrations of multiple units on one area.
I mean, historical accuracy is not exactly a Civ feature. For that I’d recommend Paradox games. And game play wise, I find death stacks simply lame, so I’m happy they aren’t there. There are tons of things that don’t make sense for IV either, but I still don’t call it Uno.
Civ is heavily rooted in a certain "classical" view of history, in which generals' tactical brilliance is what determines history.
So I understand why they wanted to make room for actual tactics.
If that comes at the cost of archers being able to shoot a bunch of gatling gunners across the English channel without them having the reach to shoot back, then so be it.
Gatlings are just a borked unit. A simple upgrade completely changing the unit-type raison d'etre is simply a Bad Idea, I honestly don't understand why they did it like that.
IIRC this is because the SDK was only ever released for windows by Firaxis (and not at all for VI), and mods of this size would slow down far too much if they were pure LUA.
While it is an amazing project, I can't wonder about the appeal of civ games themselves. To me they are a mess, the mid to late game itself is chaotic chore of micromanaging large number of units.
To me, the earlier games come with less complexity but with more micromanagement. I played SMAC again some time ago, and it's fun early to mid game, but towards the late game the sheer number of cities and units is just overwhelming. I think Civ 2 was in many respects similar although it's been a long time since I played that.
The greater relative cost and lower number of both cities and units means that to me there seem to be a smaller number of things to micromanage in Civ 5. Units embarking themselves means you don't have to herd them into transports.
The lack of unit stacking and the inability to move any units together automatically (even the ones that do stack) does cause quite a bit of micromanagement, though, so that's true.
I read the "legality" section of your README, and I hope that someone can provide some advice. It would be nice to know where the lines are so you didn't have to constantly be concerned about 2K/Firaxis legal department coming for you.
Just commenting here for visibility in hopes someone more qualified can provide some help.
Freeciv has been around much longer without being targeted by any legal threats that I'm aware of. There have also been commercial competitors like Activision's Civilization: Call to Power and its sequel that only had to drop "Civilization" from its naming for lack of a trademark license.
I'm not sure any of those aimed to be as direct a clone of a specific mainline Civ's rules and mechanics, but rules and mechanics are the aspects of the game that are most clearly free to copy.
Spry Fox v. LolApps (2012) was a case about a similar visual and thematic remake of a game (Triple Town vs Yeti Town). The Yeti Town developer decided to settle when it became clear that they would likely lose, and the remake is no longer available.
Realistically, of course, it probably doesn't matter since I assume the author doesn't have the resources to fight Firaxis in court over this anyway.
> I assume the author doesn't have the resources to fight Firaxis in court over this anyway.
Bigger corporations than Firaxis have made that same assumption and lost. There was a great story recently about an Adelaide woman who represented herself in a suit against Google for years and finally won: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-23/janice-duffy-wins-12-...
The Spry Fox fact pattern is distinguishable, I think, given that the defendant had access to privileged IP and had been negotiating to port the app before creating the knockoff after negotiations fell apart.
I think it's one of those cases where the lines are unclear because this kind of IP issue has never been fully litigated. IP owners like to take an expansive view of IP rights, but they are likely to loose on some issues in court.
TLDR is that it’s really easy to get a larger hosting platform such as Steam, the App Store, etc to take down a game just by issuing a DMCA. But suing to take down something on a self hosted website is much, much harder
If they needed to find safer legal ground they could reimplement the community balance patch, which overhauls basically every game system, and is a much better game tbh.
Is there a genre of online grand strategy games that are designed from the ground up to be played asynchronously?
One of my favourite things was playing scrabble online where I could just do a move and then move on with my day. It’d take a week to play a game but it was on our terms and that felt so good.
PBEM (Play By Email) was (and maybe still is) a big thing in the wargaming space. Long, long ago I was part of a group on USENET and later IRC that organised games of Stars! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!) with typically a cadence of a few turns per week, or sometimes "blitz" games played onn IRC with several turns per hour.
Quite fun, but needs a community interested in such, and very focused game design. (Specifically, need lots of meaningful decisions to be made each turn, but relatively few turns in a game.)
Stars! was one of many such games back in the day, but I'm pretty sure they're all dead now.
My google-fu is failing me. Is there some sort of community for play-by-email games that explicitly lists games that are still active? All the interesting games I came across look dead.
There were quite a few of those browser games around about 20 years ago.
If you really want to melt your brain, and have a lot of time to burn, you can play (the board game) Diplomacy by email. I used to do that a lot. But at our speeds, games took months or even years, not just a week. (We usually play with one turn every three days or even up to every two weeks.)
If you prefer Civ4 over others, give Old World a try. Many of the same people involved, most notably Soren Johnson is also the lead designer of Old World, and the game brings many new ideas to 4X.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the team members. In our experience, most people who say Civ4 is the best Civ end up really liking Old World. When it comes to Civ5, I personally find myself agreeing with Sullla.
Significantly. Hexes, districts, no unit stacking, resource stockpiles, religion, loyalty. Just some of the new concepts and mechanics in more recent civ games that 1, 2 or 3 didn't have.
Other areas that have changed significantly are e.g. trade, diplomacy and espionage.
Diplomacy in the newer games has a lot more freedom and variety in terms of the deals you can make, what you can trade for what with the AI, etc., but you can't directly exchange technologies any more. (At least not in Civ V.)
In Civ I and II, caravans and diplomats/spies used to be units you moved around the map manually. Then there's the whole city states thing since Civ V (I think), strategic resources that are required for particular units or buildings, significant changes in how happiness/approval is managed, as well as several victory types apart from conquest and space race.
In 90's Civ games (except for SMAC) all the civilizations were also essentially identical in terms of gameplay, except for AI leader parameters and diplomatic stances. Newer games in the series have more differences between civilizations in terms of strategy, at least in theory.
Basically, the core idea is still the same but the details and many individual mechanics have changed a lot.
I just looked at https://www.freecivweb.org/ and one can choose this rule set at the beginning, among some other options. Wasn't the case when I last looked. Play in browser, no setup necessary. WARNING!Timesink!
Civ 2's limited sight distances and "every unit in a stack dies if one unit loses a fight" are pretty good anti-stacking measures until you're well past the inevitable victory watershed line of a game.
I actually like the art a lot. I don’t have any interest in playing the new official Civ games. The fancy graphics don’t do anything at all for me. They consume system resources and just end up being a distraction and a source of slowdown.
I’d much rather have a strategy game with a really nice, clean, polished UI and simple, legible graphics!
I think it's amazing how, despite not using AI for their art, so-called AAA games like Civilisation end up with that pasty cartoony look of a thousand cheap pay to win mobile games. I think the leader and advisor avatars in Civ 6 are ghastly.
Probably. But keeping in mind the mobile focus, a more judicious icon-style art design is important, and I'm not sure how good generative AI is at making stuff that's legible at small sizes. Also, the simplicity of the current art allowing the download to be only 21MB is an accomplishment.
Unless you’re talking about feature phones or Nokias before 2010, mobile games can have graphics just as stunning as AAA games and an effective canvas size of 720p or up — definitely not constrained to “icon-style art design”.
I'm not talking about technological restrictions; I'm well aware of the pixel counts and color depth of modern displays. They do not get rid of the design constraints of trying to make a usable interface with very high information density on a small screen.
A game like Unciv can't take the usual mobile UI cop-out of just hiding all the complexity behind a hamburger menu. It needs a large number of individually recognizable UI elements that are all significantly smaller than a thumbprint, because there are several pieces of information that need to be conveyed about each map tile the user can interact with. So a lot of the UI needs to be composed of icons or graphics designed under similar constraints. (And no, the fundamental design constraints and goals of icons are not the same as the file format limitations of early Windows .ICO files.)
Mobile games like Genshin Impact have comparatively little game state information and fewer discrete indicators that needs to be on-screen, so they can go all-out on the scenery and decorative visual effects. Unciv on a phone at its most zoomed-in has about as much physical screen area per map tile as Civ 5 on a laptop at its most zoomed-out; at normal playable zoom levels their respective UIs are working with very different amounts of screen real estate.
Pixel art as used today isn't quite the same thing as old-school icon design. Unciv doesn't need to operate with a restricted color palette and even on mobile has quite a few pixels to work with, but has to make UI elements easily recognizable and distinguishable at small physical sizes. I think the design constraints are probably most similar to early iOS and some early OS X icons, rather than the constraints of Win95 and 2d video game consoles (where all art—icons and otherwise—had very limited color and pixel counts).
Maybe, but honestly a big issue with a lot of art in projects like this is the lack of a coherent matching style between assets. I think you can get generative tools to get close to that, but at one point you get diminishing returns compared to just opening up Aseprite and doing the thing yourself.
I think the biggest cause of jank from the look of that project is also more due to UI stuff. Font choices, color pallettes, "1px solid white" borders. Maybe generative tools could provide a good way to investigate a better looking set of things though!
That would be really interesting. Would the LLMs actually know how to play the game well though? It’s an extremely complicated game with tons of hidden information. It’s way more difficult than chess or poker or diplomacy for that matter!
They would not have to be able to play the game if the job of the LLM was mostly to handle some diplomacy and communicate with the player. The strategy and tactics could still be handled by good old game AI tricks and tree-searches. Sounds like it could be fun for single-player games in general.
My guess is, as is, they would be able to play, but not be very good.
The main issue I see is the spatial component is hard to describe in text. The new vision models make it easier, but still I imagine it's not trivial to integrate all the mechanics plus the spatial component on the limited prompt space.
I do think that 1) combining with the hand crafted AI and 2) having an "LLM advisors" system where for a given aspect (eg military) the "advisor" would present the options and tradeoffs to the "Main AI" and the role of the latter is to weigh the tradeoffs between the options presented by the advisors.
And what I do know is that it could be so much more immersive than the current hard coded AI!
Yes, but do they get a vague idea of what's onscreen or could they really see what's going on in each tile, keep track of all the stats and use those to inform their decisions?
I don't see how it's a more complicated game than poker, which has a huge tree of possibilities at every potential street of betting. Not just in future streets, but also in the past streets that influence your future decisions.
The game tree of Civ is vastly larger than any board or card game. In a single turn you make dozens of decisions about what to build, where to move units, who to declare war/make peace with, what technology to research… and on top of that, games last for hundreds and hundreds of turns on a map with thousands of tiles which must be explored, resources uncovered, terrain improved.
Humans are decent at Civ exactly because we play in a naturally heuristic fashion and don’t try to do any tree search. To get an AI to cope with the this vast amount of information, available and hidden, and make sensible decisions without tree search, is a huge challenge. On top of that, it needs to deal with up to a dozen opponents, multiple of which may be human, and avoid getting ruthlessly exploited in trade deals and diplomacy and all the rest.
Here is one basic decision among dozens made every turn: do I accept an open borders treaty with Bob of the Carthaginians or not? I can’t see any armies he may or may not have (fog of war) and he’s never betrayed me before so I guess he’s trustworthy… oops! He used the open borders to move a vast army into my territory and right up to all my cities in a single turn and then declared war!
That’s one decision, among dozens made every turn, that led to total defeat.
It's easily more complicated, civ 5 is like poker, except you have to manage the location of each card, an economy, map control, barbarians, nuclear weapons, warmonger penalties, forward settlements, citizen management, wonder rushes, map scripts, restart.
An LLM could at least create a greater variety of dialog, quickly translate, text-to-speech, decorate a base sprite to the style of a specific country with a specific player color. The final build wouldn't benefit much by including an LLM. The LLM would be huge and the existing diplomacy algorithms are not complicated or open-ended enough to need any kind of ML.
I've probably played 1000 hours of Civ games. This looks horrifyingly garish. I can't imagine being able to stare at this. I notice it's a top down view, and I don't see an option for an isometric view. Maybe the AI is smart? The AI in Civ 5 was absolute trash, which is a pretty common theme in Civ games.
Anyway, it's a pretty reasonable requirement for a game to not look horrific and off-putting, regardless of whether it is free.
Will you be making making the game pretty or simply demanding others do that? I see a fantastic effort here to replicate the Civ V mechanics. If people want to improve the graphical assets they're free to do so.
What would be the point though? If whoever is making this can't tell it looks terrible, they will probably be like you and take any suggestion that it isn't perfect as a threat.
