About
I used to play a lot of chess, and part of getting better was analyzing your past games. Getting better at Civ6 is hard, in part because games are long, and identifying areas of improvement is not always obvious. For a while, I plateaued at Immortal - I could win all my Immortal games but not a single game at Deity (at least without cheating). I tried to figure out what separates the expert players on YouTube or Reddit from myself, but I couldn't point to a single thing. During my past few Civ games, I took extensive notes on what I did and why, what my opponent was doing at the time, etc. These notes really helped me improve, because I could point to specific mistakes in my gameplay. Helpful, but also tedious.
Civ6 itself records the game, and generates a timeline file for export. You can find it in
C:\Users\.
It works similarly to the PGN file in
online chess - it records all your actions in a text format, so you can analyze the game later.
I wrote a program to visualize these files, so you can see what you did and when, and hopefully that will
help you improve.
Future Work
If the Civ6 community likes this idea, I will add the following features, which I think are useful:
- Annotations Chess players like to add notes to certain moves after their games. This would allow players to add notes to themselves or reviewers about their thoughts directly into the timeline
- Gathering Storm I haven't played Gathering Storm yet so I have no idea if this will work for files generated by that expansion. If you have some timeline files from that game, try the service and share your results with me on Twitter.
Or possibly other features suggested by folks on Reddit, if it's not too difficult and technically possible (the timeline file is missing a lot of info).
Cost
Right now, you can upload game files and share the link with anyone to view someone else's files. I'll keep it running for this demo, but in the long-term that's not free. My own games files are around 1-3MB (uncompressed). While storing all of my own games is well under $1/year, storing a few dozen game files for a few hundred people would mean about 10GB of storage. That's not expensive but it's also not free. I'm happy to run the service if a few folks express an interest in paying some trivial sum to subsidize it (probably $1/person/month would be more than enough).
Limitations
I would love to add this information to the visualization, but it's just not present in the underlying data. This is an incomplete list:
- Battles are not annotated with which civilizations participated in those battles. You can infer it from DOW information sometimes, but not always. Same thing for ships sunk.
- Pantheon Founded - not annotated with name of specific pantheon
- Goody Hut Triggered - not annotated with yields
- City Built on Desert - no city name annotation