20250331-unciv.txt
I was dicking around on my Pinephone and decided to go into the Games
part of the software center. Never mind that I would only use the GUI
software installer in mobile, but I was just curious as to what they
had, trying to make my phone more viable.
I scrolled through the options, none of them super appealing. Then I
saw something called Unciv. What? Well, it's a Civ-like game according
to the description, so I might as well check it out. It can't be that
bad.
It's minimalist Civ 5. Yeah, it's got almost exactly the same
mechanics. The only thing I think is different is that the Quick game
seems slower than the all-expansions Civ 5 i've played. The best part
about it is it is comparatively SUPER LIGHT on CPU usage. That's what
I'm talking about.
It still looks absolutely dreadful on the small Pinephone screen, so I
tried hooking it up to a PC... It crashed. No worries, because there
are ports for PC and Android. Score. This and KOTOR (which may fail to
boot fairly soon for me because Amazon is ditching their app store)
are the only smartphone mobile games I've enjoyed in the past decade
and would put up against "real" games.
I tried the Android version as well as the PC version. They're both
pretty darn good, although my Android phone screen is slightly
cramped. At least it's legible unlike the Pinephone version...
Installation from the archive is very simple: just create a
destination directory, unzip the contents to that destination dir,
then run it.
The current version as of this writing is 4.20.15. It can be
downloaded at
https://yairm210.itch.io/unciv , but it requires JS. Not
sure why, but whatever. I'm willing to overlook that for the fantastic
game that won't be going offline for me anytime soon. I've gone ahead
and added it to a new folder in my gopherhole: game.
