OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

217•klaussilveira•2h ago

Comments

bigstrat2003•1h ago

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.

toast0•1h ago

FreeCiv covers civ 1 and 2 more or less.

Personally, I didn't play much of 2 or 3, so I don't have strong feelings either way.

zozbot234•1h ago

Freeciv's point of interest is that it's not trying to exactly replicate any one of the original Civs: it has its default ruleset plus others that are closer to the original games, but it's very easy to make your own.

warmwaffles•1h ago

I actually preferred Civ 3 to 2 and 4. It scratched a certain itch.

data-ottawa•1h ago

3 is still my favourite of the series. 5 was good too, but 3 overall feels complete and had great graphics.

afavour•1h ago

> with capabilities inspired by the best of the 4X genre and lessons learned from modding Civ3. Our vision is to make Civ3 as it could have been

Looks to not be a straight remake. I wonder whether 3 is a preferable target because things like graphical complexity in >= 4 is too much.

JumpCrisscross•1h ago

Is 3 the one with forced retirement?

bigstrat2003•1h ago

Not sure, I only started the series with 4.

TheRealPomax•1h ago

Civ 1 and 2 have already been done, so if you want to play those, hit up freeciv.

bigstrat2003•1h ago

I'm aware. But why rebuild 3 rather than 4, in that case?

packetlost•1h ago

3 is my favorite in the series, but maybe that's not a popular take.

caminanteblanco•55m ago

I can definitely vouch for the 2 or 4 narrative, those have always been my favorites of the 'Modernish' civ games, but my favorite will always be CivNet (Civ 1 with multiplayer). There is some real simplicity in Civ 1 that makes it much better suited to a multiplayer experience than the later entries. It is a real pain to get any non-hoseat multiplayer working nowawdays, but well-worth it.

WildWeazel•53m ago

Because it was born out of the Civ3 modding community which has been wanting a remake for 20+ years.

Sounds like you've been listening to Civ4 fans. ;) 3 is just as active on steam and has a very active and loyal multiplayer league.

stodor89•42m ago

Here's a perspective on "why civ 3" by one of the best civ 3 players: https://youtu.be/IOvWgfZiHGo?si=uvTWTaRQsfxE_ffN

thrance•42m ago

There's Freeciv [1] for IV, and Unciv [2] for V. I doesn't have many fans, VI is too recent, and VII, well... Let's not talk about VII.

> Civ fans tend to prefer [...]

I'd say, each entry in the series gets love. The saying goes: "Your favorite Civ game is the first one you ever played". In my experience, that's pretty true (Still stuck on V).

[1] https://www.freeciv.org/

[2] https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv

acessoproibido•39m ago

For me the most classic one is Civ III by a mile. 4 was way too modern/ flashy for me and 2 too old school. But maybe I was just born at the right time for 3.

TheGRS•32m ago

Can I tangent on your question here and ask what others think of Civ 7 now? When I learned about it I thought it was a day 1 game purchase for me for sure, but I held off when I saw a stream of bad reviews. I figured I'd come back when they ironed the problems out (as they've done in every major Civ release to my memory). Haven't taken the plunge yet.

bigstrat2003•6m ago

I'm holding off on 7 myself. I think they deviated too hard from the formula such that it doesn't look like it's even still a Civ game. And while I'm open-minded enough to try it, I wasn't going to drop $70 on a game I had reason to suspect I would dislike. I figured I would wait until it was on game pass, or on sale for $5 someday.

More recently I read that they are going to update the game such that you don't have to switch civs. That's a good start (though I still don't think I will like the era system at all), but reading the initial reviews a year ago I found out that the game cuts off abruptly in the mid 20th century, rather than going to the information age like normal. To me, that is blatantly unfinished, so I'm not planning to get the game until they fix that as well.

wewtyflakes•3m ago

It is _rough_. People say it has gotten better since release, but if you have not played it before, and were to play it fresh right now, it is not great. The UI is both dense and vapid at the same time, UI glitches/bugs, jarring all-or-nothing lock-step advancement of ages, etc.

tfehring•1h ago

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.

colechristensen•35m ago

The key here is seeing this mentioned and not time traveling forward until 6 AM Saturday morning.

donw•18m ago

Yeah, that's what Factorio is for.

JumpCrisscross•1h ago

Any chance the AIs will be easily extensible?

Joel_Mckay•1h ago

How does this compare with https://freeciv.org for game play =3

dleslie•58m ago

Not sure, when Civ2Civ3 is now the default ruleset in Freeciv.

https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Civ2civ3

WildWeazel•48m ago

Gameplay wise this is a straight remake of Civ3 as a baseline, while allowing much greater customization. Freeciv is definitely an inspiration, but it's kind of its own thing.

jrm4•56m ago

uh oh

yeah, that's dangerous for me, this is the ONE that got me started

reconnecting•47m ago

Interesting choice of version.

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.

WildWeazel•42m ago

Hi all, OpenCiv3 founder here. Thanks for the support! Check us out on Civfanatics or Discord to keep up with the project.

slazaro•34m ago

Any interesting insights about using Godot with C#? I love C# and I'm happy using it in Godot even though it's not as seamless as in Unity: in Godot 4 we still can't export to Web if the project is C#, and there's the whole conversion between C# types and Godot types that adds inefficiencies and extra allocations, etc.; it feels like it's a second-class language in Godot.

I'm always interested in seeing what people find when developing larger projects in C#.

bigcat12345678•41m ago

Yes CIV3 still feels to me the peak Civ experience.

The content is a bit lacking though, would see more diversity in tech tree, and units.

tbmtbmtbmtbmtbm•34m ago

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!

d_silin•24m ago

Another awesome game - Civ II inspired.

http://www.c-evo.org/

jlarocco•4m ago

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.

PlatoIsADisease•1m ago

Wake me up when OpenCiv4, but only when there's an option for smart AI rather than boosted fake AI.

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.)

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OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

Comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

The Waymo World Model

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

Early Christian Writings

Learning from context is harder than we thought

FORTH? Really!?

An Update on Heroku

Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days

The Oklahoma Architect Who Turned Kitsch into Art

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

The Beauty of Slag

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

How to effectively write quality code with AI

Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents

How virtual textures work

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

Masked namespace vulnerability in Temporal

Show HN: Horizons – OSS agent execution engine

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