The latest release had a bug with Tribal War not letting you easily go on after selecting regions.  Seems to have been expecting one more region than what it was fessing up to.

Patch is here - simply unzip and replace the .exe.  This will only work if you have downloaded PocketCiv since 1AM EST last night.  :-)

Otherwise, the installers on the links to the right will lead you to all the goodness of the current version.

 

After about a week and a half of virtual silence, I have another release of PocketCiv ready for consumption.  This one is a slight version change because I moved the maps and save games to subfolders on the install.  If you have existing games, you can move them there.  All maps and save files you may have created already will work in this release.

The fixes are:

0.4.2.0
    - Fixed Astronomy again.
    - Fixed unhandled part of Diplomacy event involving trade with an
      established partner.
    - Fixed unhandled part of Bandit event where the selected region
      drawn does not border a desert.  Narrative now appears explaining
      this.
    - Added option to see tips or not in menu.
    - Added further history.
    - Added menu option to see history from main screen.
    - Added folders for save files, maps and logs in main application directory.
    - Fixed error where sea-bordering regions were not checking as thoroughly
      as they should have been.
    - Added bigger and better God screen so I can debug better.
    - Fixed bug where negative numbers weren't saving correctly.  This affected
      game saves.
    - Fixed bug where Trading Partners were saved, but not loaded.
    - Fixed Mining dialog verbage.
    - Fixed bug where you could acquire an advance from the same city more than
      once in a round.
    - Fixed bug where if you had a free city AV, the game would still make you
      pick a region.

 There are still some known issues, but this should knock out a couple rather nasty bugs that snuck in when I was moving a lot of the stuff out of dialogs.  Still investigating.

If you have a bug or issue, please email me or post to this blog or at Board Game Geek.  

 

Thanks!

 

J.

Busy removing wizards in PocketCiv.  Looking good, but I need more focus on what exactly is going on. Basically, the wizard approach does such a great job of wrenching your attention and working you through what needs done, it's harder to draw attention to the main board when you take 'em out.  

Five more events remain to be converted over.

Release this week at some point, probably Wednesday but maybe later.

I got bit by a stray backslash today that got caught by the community. Download via the side link.  Windows should work fine - Linux via Mono andmaybe via Mono might work - give her a try and let me know.

Here's the latest group of changes since the last blog entry:

0.4.0.5
      - Forced directory character selection by reading platform.  Bug in PathSeparator character in .Mono doesn't read it right away.
      - Fixed so it would run in Linux with Mono again.
      - Added scenarios 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 13 and 15.
     
0.4.0.4
      - Further fixes/enhancements on main board city advancement.
      - Added scenarios 6 and 8.
      - Fixed Roadbuilding to exclude frontiers and sea from second city calculations.
      - Added support to maps for additional borders for regions if Roadbuilding/Equestrian is obtained.  (Required for some scenarios).
      - Added support to specify the minimum AV for a city.  (Required for some scenarios).
      - Added support for multiple goals to complete a scenario.  (Again, required for some scenarios).
     
0.4.0.3
      - Fixed bug in Epidemics where attacking force would get wiped out just for moving to another region.
      - Fixed bug where actions in Advancement phase that would reduce your empire's tribes to zero were allowed. 
        (Note:  The upkeep round does not have this restriction in the rules).
      - Indicated tribe placement a little better.
      - Moved basic city advancement out of dialog onto main screen.  (Note:  Capitol advancement has not been ported yet.)
      - Tinkered with region selection for attacks on Visitations and Bandits.

Another patch of changes is up for 0.4.0.2.  Basically, to place tribes on the board, I've removed the one wizard and thrown it directly on the board.  It still needs cleaned up, but it's more intuitive.

 Next dilemma I'd like to hit is to make city advancement on the board as well.  Not sure how I want to do this because the mechanics for doing this are pretty involved in terms of sequences of events and how to break the code out from how it is now.  I need to sleep on it.  I'm sure something will come of it.

For the adventurous at heart, the latest source and install of PocketCiv is available for Windows.  Mono in theory works, but I've done no testing whatsoever.

Please check out the readme.txt for what is included and a quick start on how to set up your own maps and play them.  As a general warning, if you don't like clicking on things, you might find the game painful in its current incarnation.  

You will need Microsoft.NET 2.0 installed, which should be on a recently patched XP machine.  If not, go to Microsoft's site and download it.

Next release will be in two weekends, if not sooner.

The game is admittedly rough and a little ugly (like myself), but functional and you should be able to get through a game without it blowing up.  If it does, contact me or throw a thread down at BGG and I'll address it as quickly as I can.

This game is open source and free of cost - and will always be - so feel free to contribute tips, pdf's, graphics, etc. to the cause.

Good luck!

I have found my extra time spent tinkering with PocketCiv by Scott Slomiany.  It is a game that you can print out and play anywhere after you cut things out.  I used a white board and printed out the rules while I was camping earlier in the month and it worked out pretty good.  The one thing that discouraged me was the fact that it felt like there was a ton of bookkeeping.  Running a civilization can do that to a man I suppose, but nonetheless I was looking for a way to shoehorn the events onto cards.

It then crossed my mind to try and computerize the game.  Since it is a solitaire game, there's no AI (yay!) but on the other side of the coin, the rules for carrying out advances and turn processing are quite intricate (boo!).  All things considered, it would be a fun project to try and turn around.  I gave it a month to get moving on it and get something playable.

Amazingly, I'm nearly there.  The thing is, I tried first going at this project as I did with Abande by having everything on the board at the same time and just trying to manipulate the game in discrete stages.  However, after I got out of the movement phase and tried to apply events, things got complicated quickly.  I found myself fighting the fact that the way I wanted to model this thing was not appropriate.  Sigh...

After a few nights to puzzle, I decided I wanted something playable versus something that was all good looks - not that this game isn't good looking.  It feels dated with the Windows menus and the wizard-style way I decided to do events.  And there are still a few playability issues that I would like to address, but the good news is I've got about 90% of the core done.  All that remains are navigating tribes by sea, end of round scoring, ending the game because no one is left in the land (happens quite a lot, actually).

I intend to beta the game out to everyone out there who wants a crack at it.  The rules are complex enough that I'm sure I missed something, and there might be easier ways to play the game than what I am forcing through the current interface.  However, I'm quite happy with it so far and I'm looking forward to some feedback.

As a side note, I have been playing Scenario #1 from Scott's bundling.  The chatter on BGG was that the scenario typically took a modest 15-30 minutes to play out.  On testing in the computer game, I find it takes a lot less time (even if you are prone to analyze things).  Similar to when I played around with RBPlayer for Rail Baron which shortened the time to play the game by a factor of four.  Amazing.

Abande 0.6 will be released this weekend with a couple other extra features attached to it including some new skins, record keeping and a little code cleanup. 

After Abande, I'm looking to try another board game to model, preferrably an abstract again.  TSR's Chase would be a fun one to try and do.  The strategy in it looks interesting to model and the potential for variants look good.  Diceland, on a smaller scale with slightly different rules, would be nice as well with a light tactical feel to it.  I'm also probably going to do Choice, a simple solitaire dice game which I could probably crank out in a couple of days. 

The object is to not have several orphan projects like I do now.  I've worked on a lot of prototypes, most often of games are not in the public domain or I got in over my head on.  Among them...

• 3M's Mr. President. (mostly done)
  
• Days of Wonder's Pirate's Cove and Ticket to Ride: Card Game.   (mostly done)
• Z-Man's 1960: The Making of a President (graphics done, most mechanics done, bear of a game to reproduce.)
• Mayfair's Sm City: The Card Game (again, mostly done for the basic set, but not compelling to play.)
• Self: Indoor Soccer Simulator - Not a board game at all and mostly done, but again, I moved on.
• Self: Sprawl - A cross between "Big City", except with set building, card management, and two boards next to each other.  (mostly done)

It seems that Abande hit a sweet spot of complexity and also had a good independent sponsor from the man who made the game himself.  It makes it much more fulfilling to share something with the world if at least one other person sees it.  Hopefully, Abande is a good starting point.