[mmcclure]

    generate_gazette.sh Calls OpenAI to generate "The Civ Chronicle" — an era-appropriate, unreliable wartime newspaper article for each turn.

For a long-running game like this, that's a pretty clever little twist to keep the group engaged. I have extremely low confidence I could convince enough friends to do it with me for long enough to get through a game, but this seems like such a fun idea.

[verelo]

This was a friends suggestion after I initially proposed something that exposed a bit too much detail. I wanted to show the diplomacy states and unit/city additions per player as a highlight on the home page, but we instead kept the raw files that generated those UI elements and fed them into OpenAI with the prompt and the Gazette was born.

It's a bit verbose honestly (see https://freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info), I welcome pull requests with improved prompting!

[Gagarin1917]

That’s so awesome, I had the exact same idea since LLMs came out because I’m a regular Civ player.

I thought about trying some kind of mod for Civ IV but never got around to it. FreeCiv does make more sense.

Very cool stuff.

[verelo]

You can read the code, but my suggestion on how to do this is to just ingest the save game files. They're super easy to work with, especially now we have the magic of LLMs.

In my case i'm creating various json files that describe game state, players, diplomacy, attendance, etc. Then i just throw that at the LLM and give it the goal of writing a newspaper article about where the game is at. The json files are incremental, so i'm not reading all the past versions on every turn. At the end of the current turn it just appends the current turn data to the json file, and then does the generation. These files are also what power the frontend UI, so it's all super lightweight and fast.

To make the graphs, you need to know state at the end of the current turn as the save files don't retain any history. So i store the most recent save file from each turn in order to achieve this.

It's been a journey of reverse engineering this game, but that's kind of the joy of it all.