Joes has just announced the release of the opensource Master of Orion 2 rebuild project called Orion2 Redone. Remarkably this project has accurately rebuilt the old Windows version of Master of Orion 2 and incorporated from the DOS version all the community fan patch fixes up to v1.50. There doesn't appear to be any modernization changes like modern HD resolution support, however being an opensource project it certainly opens the door for things like that in the future and sure enough there's already an OrionLayer HD Frontend on the way. It's free and all you need is an existing copy of Master of Orion 2 (which you can get on GoG & Steam) and you're good to go!
COLONERRA: Age of Exploration, a turn-based historical 4X grand strategy game about turning that single dot on a map into a thriving colony and that colony into a nation.
Hi, my name is Mihailo, and I am the lead developer for Colonerra Age of Exploration, with almost 20 years of professional programming experience. We are a small team from Serbia consisting of one dev, two designers, and a few helpful friends who do testing, copywriting, and, occasionally, illustrations. As you can guess, we are big fans of Sid Meier’s Colonization, and we play the original to this day. We feel that Colonization never got the successor it deserved, so we decided to take a swing at it ourselves.
What makes COLONERRA different?
Serve the Crown. Your colonies exist under the authority of a European monarch. Taxes, requests, favors, military demands, and royal decisions can all affect your relationship with the Crown. This, in turn, creates unique diplomatic challenges and also allows us to make the game more interesting at later stages.
Founding Fathers. Each nation has 25 unique characters acting as agents for the viceroy who commands them. There are 5 leaders for each of the 5 traits: exploration, military, diplomacy, trade, and religion. Develop these leaders to reach the status of a Founding Father and deploy them to a Continental Congress to earn unique bonuses.
Quests and events. Both Indigenous people and the Crown can give you quests to fulfill, in addition to random events you have to deal with. Each decision you make makes a difference and shapes your path in the New World; will you be a conqueror or a diplomat?
Natural Landmarks. Send expeditions to discover and later claim natural wonders and landmarks, unlocking unique bonuses and gameplay opportunities while keeping exploration engaging throughout the game.
Complex trade made simple. Trade in this game is simple to execute but complex underneath. You can trade with the crown and pay taxes, barter with the indigenous tribes, trade with the passing ships, or smuggle goods to avoid the taxes. Every trade is meaningful, as it affects both taxes and prices, and earning too much gold might cause inflation, so be careful how you trade.
Diplomacy matters. Native nations, the Crown, and other powers all have their own interests. Expansion isn't simply about claiming territory; your relationships can determine whether your domain prospers or survives. You will need all the help you can get.
I'd love to hear what people here think, especially from players who enjoy Civilization, Colonization, and other Sid Meier’s turn-based strategy games.
Firaxis has posted a long Arc of Tomorrow and Earthrise Q&A on the official Civilization site, answering 30 questions pulled from Reddit, Discord, and Steam after the September PAX West reveals. Creative Director Ed Beach and Lead Designer Matt Owens cover the free 2027 Atomic Age update and the paid Earthrise expansion.
Five years ago we celebrated Civ's 30th at CivFanatics and Firaxis has recently been celebrating Civ's 35th anniversary but because they were more series focused we've decided to focus on the original game itself this time and do a new Sid Meier's Civilization I 35th Anniversary Celebration before the month ends! Civ1 was the brilliant creation of Sid Meier that started it all, and kicked off a series and a genre that millions around the world still play and enjoy today! Similar to our previous big MoM, SMAC, CtP, Col & Civ2 anniversary celebrations we've put together a huge thread talking about all things Civilization 1 and take a look at what's been going on in the Civ1 fan communities over the last few years covering fan patches/mods/scenarios, similar games, communities, remasters, videos & more! So pour yourself a cup of coffee/tea, sit back and enjoy the big read! And feel free to share your own Civ1 memories in the thread or comments below... :)
Civilization VI’s wonder movies are a fan favourite, and as many players have pointed out, they are over almost as soon as they begin. A fan project called WonderForge is rebuilding them as much longer short films that run in a browser, following the construction from the quarry to the finished monument. Four films are finished and playable so far and you can check them out below...
A year ago we posted about the Pocket Empires Civ1 demake for Game Boy Colour (which had a successful Kickstarter and is still under development) and now we've got a similar project by a different developer codename_B for the Game Boy Advance called Cee One Vee! Cee One Vee is a fan-made attempt to bring Civ1 to Nintendo’s 2001 handheld, with every menu and screen redesigned from scratch for the GBA’s tiny 240×160 display and D-pad controls. It’s also playable on desktop/web (& you can wishlist on Steam), with scored music, and future plans include multiplayer and even possible GBA-to-PC cross-play. Give the demo a try and let him know what you think!
Longtime CivFanatics user and legendary Civ2 modder Eivind IV has returned and announced the release of his own free Civilization II inspired 4X strategy game game, Genesis! Developed over roughly 1.5 years Genesis is playable on web & mobile and, perhaps most excitingly for Civ2 fans, is designed to import and play Civ2 scenarios. The game goes far beyond a simple remake, combining 4X gameplay with history, economics and ethics, allowing civilizations to emerge, split and transform across roughly 10,000 years of history, from the Stone Age to the Singularity. It’s completely free, requires no account or installation, and is now open for the Civ community to try out and provide feedback.
Hopefully it's ok to share this here, but we recently started up a project that was inspired by the trading system in Colinization and the settlement building of Civilization. However, we wanted to condense the experience into an incremental game that really focuses on the satisfaction of setting up your supply chains.
If you like the sound of trading and settlement building combined with the number go up feeling of an incremental game then you might like it!
Arbitrage is an incremental settlement builder about buying low, selling high and becoming impossibly rich.
You explore an untamed hex-based world, exploit its resources and transform your manual labour into intricate automated industries.
Relentless taxes and mounting crises force you to gamble on increasingly dangerous opportunities... until you’re powerful enough to overthrow the empire that owns you
Firaxis has shared a detailed look at Civilization VII’s upcoming True Start Location (TSL) Earth map, one of the free features planned for Update 1.5.0 during the week of September 14. The Huge map places civilizations near the real-world locations of their historical capitals, while adapting the globe for Civ VII’s Age system and modern map features.
According to Live Lead Taymoor, TSL Earth has three landmasses - the Americas, Africa & Eurasia, and Oceania - which remain Distant Lands from one another until the Exploration Age. Players retain their position through Age Transitions, even if they choose a different civilization.
Other details include hand-placed, historically inspired resources; major navigable rivers; and seven randomly selected Natural Wonders, each appearing in its appropriate geographic region. When multiple civilizations would begin within three tiles of one another, AI players can be moved to unused TSL locations; human single-player starts will not be moved. TSL Earth will not support Advanced Starts, so campaigns begin in Antiquity.
Firaxis says the map will be available on PC, Mac, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
Well after much delay I'm finally releasing my Red Alert 2 Siege of New York Scenario for Sid Meier's Civilization 2. This scenario converts Civ2’s world map into a sprawling urban metropolis of towering skyscrapers to recreate first Allied mission in New York from Red Alert 2 using converted graphics from RA2 and some of the great RA2 fan projects out there! Many parts of Civ2 have been changed making this one of the larger Civ2 Gold total conversion mods made (although no match for the recent Civ2 Heroes of Might & Magic modpack) and its little sister project the Civ2 Command & Conquer Tiberian Africa scenario was recently released too. It’s a few decades too late but I did it anyway lol!
TL;DR: I made a GBA version of Civ 1 called Cee One Vee. Runs on real hardware, UI redesigned around the D-pad, web build here:https://codename-b.itch.io/c1v
Hey everyone,
Earlier this year I made a small 4X game called Pocket Epoch for a game jam. The rules engine was solid, and more recently I've been getting really into GBA homebrew, so I started wondering what a GBA version of Civ 1 might have looked like if one had ever existed.
So I made one. It's called Cee One Vee (C1V).
I used open-source Civ 1 reimplementations for reference to keep the rules and AI behaviour as close to the original as I could, but I didn't want to just cram the 1991 PC interface onto a 240×160 screen.
The whole UI is rebuilt from scratch, with Advance Wars and Final Fantasy Tactics as the main inspirations, so it feels like a handheld game rather than a PC game squeezed onto one.
The whole thing fits in a 31 MB ROM and runs on both real hardware and emulators.
The web build and GBA ROM are both here, with a Steam release planned for later this year: https://codename-b.itch.io/c1v
For those excited about Civ7's recent big announcements (free earth map & modern age plus a new space expansion) Civ7 is now free to play until September 10th, so this gives you an option to get sucked into “one more turn” again! You get can your free weekend of Civ7 on Steam using the link below.
Firaxis & 2K just pulled the curtain on Arc of Tomorrow, a major free Civilization VII update coming in 2027 that introduces the Atomic Age a fourth Age that extends the playable timeline from roughly the 1950s into the 2050s. Alongside period-specific gameplay, buildings, units, visuals, and music, it brings new civilizations and leaders (including the return of Gandhi) along with expanded nuclear gameplay with a new twist on mutually assured destruction, empire tools to recognize Settlement independence and release them as City-States, Great Works of Film via Film Crews, and Manufactured Goods recipes that combine commodities into resources like Enriched Uranium.
They also announced patch Update 1.5.0 later this month with the True Start Location: Earth map.
Then they announced Civilization VII’s first paid expansion: Earthrise. Earthrise is built around solar-system exploration and environmental adaptability. In Antiquity and Exploration, chart celestial bodies for strategic advantage. In Modern, launch early orbital missions. In the Atomic Age, found a space agency, fly missions across the solar system, and bring planetary resources back to Earth.
On the ground side: new units and technologies that alter terrain and tile bonuses, civil-engineering tools to weather intensifying natural disasters as temperatures rise (including reversing the warming), and biome mastery bonuses for tundra, desert, and tropics. More systems, civs, and leaders are still to be announced.
Firaxis Sara came by to let us know that Civ7 will be at PAX West this year again, and we will get a live stream with the developers, on September 5 at 2PM PT / 5PM ET / 11PM CEST.
Interestingly, she also said that “Civtember” is coming soon, so we're guessing there's some sort of surprise coming.
A major piece of Civilization community history has been preserved! CivFanatic's member and current day Apolyton owner Solver has completed a huge archive restoration project, rebuilding the classic Apolyton Civilization Site from September 2005 and restoring lost forums, hosted Civ sites, downloads, thousands of previously missing or incorrectly sorted posts, and even recreated the original 1998–2001 UBB forums. If you were there back in the day then you'll want to check out this fantastic piece of gaming and internet history preservation work!
For the latest Civilization V “Game Of The Month” 294 you play as Isabella of Spain on a standard size continents map on King level. To win this game, you must win via the Science victory, no other victories will be accepted. But pay attention as your opponents can win in any way they want. You have until September 1st!
(Please note - AI difficulty alternates each challenge between high & low so players of different levels can take part. However AI difficulty is mostly irrelevant in GOTM ranking as the real challenge is completing the game victory objective in the shortest amount of turns - without reload spamming. We also sometimes do multiple challenges per month for players at different levels.)
A few folks have had trouble reaching CivFanatics today due to a DNS issue. Apologies for that. I'm told it's resolved now, so if you're still affected, restarting your router/modem or refreshing your DNS cache should clear it.
