And for March you very definitely also get a Civ5 GOTM! This time you play as Hiawatha on a small boreal map on Immortal level. You need to win via a domination victory, and prevent all other civs from achieving another victory too. You have until April 1 to finish this challenge. For more information please check this thread.
The Millennia demo has been available for quite a while, and many users here at CivFanatics have played it eagerly. Shortcomings have been clear, but it also has found many people who are interested in curious about the full game. The community has given us some short judgements, including (but not limited to) the following:
“A challenger appears!” – MrRadar
“An interesting game, which while it needs work in some areas, has a promising set of core mechanics.” – KayAu
“I will say this though: For all its flaws – I want another chance to play it.. so I look forward to either the release or next demo.” – The MarshmallowBear
For all comments and the whole discussioin please check here.
Also our March GOTM is a themed one: You play as Julius Caesar (obviously) on a standard size toroidial fantasy realm map on Immortal level. You get goody huts and events, and you are free to dominate the world in whatever way you like. This GOTM will run until April 8. For more information please check this thread.
A new post on the Chinese platform bilibili has given us some new screenshots as well as a video of the mobile Civ game, which is in development and might potentially only be available for the Chinese or a wider Asian market. The game was originally announced as “Civilization: Eras & Allies”, and is based on an already existing mobile game. The new screenshots and video strongly indicate that this mobile game will re-use lots of the content from Civ6.
Please have a look at this thread for more information.
The regular Civ streamer JumboPixel now has also published a short tutorial video for Millennia.
This video was done in collaboration with the devs.
The four-hundred-and-thirtieth episode of PolyCast, “Historical Anecdotes“ 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
– 00h04m03s | February Challenge of the Month: The Head of Cyrus
– 00h15m04s | Experiences with Paradox’s Millenia Demo
– 00h40m42s | Alpha Centauri Turns 25
Senate
– 00h54m43s | Where and When to Build the Government Plaza
NOTE: This Episode was recorded on February 17, 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.
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.
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.