Explorminate has published a new videos, about the best 4X games to be expected.
They start with how the 90s with Civ2 and MoO was the golden age of 4X, although 2023 also had a ton of good games, including the expansions for Old World and Humankind, GalCiv4, Spellforce and others. They then follow-up with the 5 most interesting games for 2024, including Paradox’ Millennia (including criticizing the graphics but praising the mechanics), Revival: Recolonization, a post-apocalyptic Civ game, which should get out of early access this year, and Ara: History Untold.
Have a look at the video, and tell us here if you agree with their judgement.
Euronews: “AI models chose violence and escalated to nuclear strikes in simulated wargames”
I do admit, these news are only very tangentially related to Civ6, but nevertheless interesting enough for us here: Nobody probably has not noticed the recent hype about AI, and how people try to use it for everything. Researchers from Cornell university have used different large language models (LLM) as agents in political scenarios and wargames. The models were free to make any decision they liked. It seems though that the Civ-fanatics forum must have ended up in the training material for the AI, as all the LLMs were very likely to initiate nuclear warfare!
An excerpt from the article:
Researchers observed that even in neutral scenarios, there was “a statistically significant initial escalation for all models”.
The two variations of GPT were prone to sudden escalations with instances of rises by more than 50 per cent in a single turn, the study authors observed.
GPT-4-Base executed nuclear strike actions 33 per cent of the time on average.
Overall scenarios, Llama-2- and GPT-3.5 tended to be the most violent while Claude showed fewer sudden changes.
You can read the full article about this research here, titled “AI models chose violence and escalated to nuclear strikes in simulated wargames”.
You can discuss these news with us here.
Play the new Civ6 “Game Of The Month” #178
And for March we get an early GOTM, and you might be eager to test this setup! You play as Mansa Musa of Mali, on a hot and wet standard-sized highlands map on Prince level. You get a disaster intensity of 2, but also a legendary start, and you play with Monopolies and Corporations. You need to win via a science victory, and prevent all other civs from achieving any victory. You have time until April 1 to finish this challenge! For more information please check this thread.
PolyCast 429: The Show Where We Talk About Millenia
The four-hundred-and-twenty-ninth episode of PolyCast, “The Show Where We Talk About Millenia“ is now available for streaming on the PolyCast YouTube Channel. This episode features regular co-hosts CanusAlbinus, Stephanie “Makahlua”, Phil “TheMeInTeam”, and Jason “MegaBearsFan”. Topics for this episode include:
News
– 00h03m42s | Humankind’s Geogre Sand Update Released
– 00h13m33s | Revisiting the Robot Revolution Challenge (Briefly)
– 00h16m01s | Paradox’s Millenia Demo Announcement and video.
– 00h35m32s | Millenia Dev Diary: National Spirits
– 00h47m00s | Millenia Dev Diary – Economy, Part 2
Miscellaneous
– 00h57m44s | A Short Description of Dominions 6
NOTE: This Episode was recorded on February 3, 2024.
PolyCast is a bi-weekly audio production recording live every other Saturday at 12 Noon US Eastern Time throughout the year, in an ongoing effort to give the Civilization community an interactive voice. Streaming is currently disabled due to ongoing technical issues.
Millennia: Release date, and more about ages!
The latest info from Millennia gives us a lot of info about ages, but more importantly also information about the release: Millennia will be released on March 26 2024, and can already be pre-purchased. The standard version will cost 39.99€, and the deluxe version 59.99. The deluxe version will include two skins for early units, as well as two planned further expansions. You can pre-purchase the game here.
As mentioned, the latest update also gives us more insight into the content, as we now get small pieces of insights into each age. The “age of intolerance” for example will be focused on religion and how it shapes diplomacy and unrest in your civ, or the “age of aether” being a kind of steampunk age. For more information about all the ages please check this thread.
New indie game release: Solium Infernum
Prior this game has been described as “Doom meets Civilization”, and today you can see this yourself, as Solium Infernum has been released. The game is set in an underworld hellscape, where you battle turn-based battles with demons. The game also includes 8 single-player campaigns, and also must diplomacy and city-building, but it is right now not clear if this comes close to the extend ot Civ or not.
You can also watch the gameplay video by GamerZakh below:
Buy Solium Infernum on Steam, currently 33.14€, and discuss it with us here.
Civ6 Free to play (Feb 22-26 2024)
The Civ6 Twitter account has announced that Civ6 will be free to play until Monday!
This seems to apply to the Platinum version including all addons, so go and try!
If you get the taste for it, then you can also get it at a discount right now, the base game costing 5.99€, the Platinum version 15.09€ and the Anthology bundle 24.93€.
Play it here on Steam, and discuss it with us here.
New indie game release: Empires Shall Fall
It seems a lot of new games are getting released! This time we’re not looking at grand strategy, but rather at a turn-based tactics game, called “Empires Shall Fall”.
While self-described as being set in a dieselpunk world, the trailer definitely also gives away some X-COM vibes, with various aliens as an enemy to your retro tech army.
You can battle with your units over a square-spaced landscape, giving them faction specific upgrades if they earned enough XP, and the game also seems to include some story as well.
If you are interested, the game is currently also reduced by 10% to 11.51€.
“Empires Shall Fall” is available on Steam, and obviously we have a thread to discuss it here too.