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

“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.

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.

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

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.

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 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)

Really wish someone would do this for Alpha Centauri, my favorite game of all time

This feels like the perfect game to add (screen reader) accessibility to.

Sadly, I don't think it can be done by us screen reader users, as the Godot editor UI is not really accessible (though they're apparently changing that in the latest version).

I encourage people to try Unciv. It is the best open-source Civ clone for desktop/mobile.

https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv

I'm one of the weird ones that really wants an open source Civ:CTP. Especially if you can still edit the .ini file to have 255 civilizations on the map.

This looks great! Shout out to FreeCol, a reimagined Colonization, that has the same isometric look and is a lot of fun.

ive never played before. i moved my guys around the map for 6 turns then they just disappeared. also cant figure out how to increase the scaling of the screen

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.

FreeCol / Colonization team FTW

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!

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.

Freeciv was what brought me too the civ world, I'm sure this project will be the same for many children of this generation.

Another awesome game - Civ II inspired.

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

I'm old enough to have played Civ I when I was a child, but have not played since then. So, why didn't this project choose to create a Civ 7 or Civ 6 play-alike, nor a Civ 1 play-alike, but rather Civ 3? What's special about it?

More generally - if someone remind us of the major differences between the different versions of Civilization, in a nutshell, we would be in your debt.

been following OpenCiv3 with interest. curious if you've been using any AI coding assistants to speed things up, or if it's been mostly vanilla dev? the codebase looks pretty clean

wow, look at me stuck in the world of freeciv (civ 2)

Really cool, I want something like that for Railroad Tycoon 2.

UnCiv is the best FOSS clone of Civ I've played

Neat! Civ 3 was always my favorite version.

Any chance the AIs will be easily extensible?

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.

[1]: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/mod-fall-from-heaven-...

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

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.)

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.

uh oh

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