QPixel is a nice open source Q&A web application

 Recently I stumbled upon the QPixel software on GitHub. It's a Q&A-based community knowledge-sharing software, that is an open source web application written in Ruby on Rails and that allows users to register, ask questions, answer other questions, edit and comment on content written by others and vote on the content. Content is then shown ordered by score with the highest voted answers and questions on top.

Example view of questions in QPixel

 It's a time proven concept of efficiently creating a knowledge base that will eventually consist of high quality, relevant information. This information is very useful to visitors of these Q&A sites.

 One of the pioneers in this area was Stack Overflow. The combination of bringing askers and experts together and at the same time measure the quality of the content by voting proved to be very fruitful. Millions of visitors have profited from the knowledge stored on the servers of Stack Overflow over the years. The software that powered the platform had a tremendous impact on the success of Stack Overflow as it allowed the collaboration of users from the whole world in such a quality rated Q&A style.

One drawback was that the software powering Stack Overflow is proprietary. Here QPixel comes to the rescue. While being developed actively for 1-2 years now, I'm really impressed by the quality of it. On the outside it looks and feels like a proper Q&A platform with most of the features that a successful Q&A platform needs. Being written in Ruby on Rails it relies on an open source framework that is specialized on efficiently creating web applications. A handful of people only realized a software in the last two years that I would describe as usable. It should be a serious consideration to try QPixel as a free, open source alternative for Q&A at your location.

Indeed there is an instance of QPixel running at Codidact with a few example sites show-casing the features of the software. It seems to run relatively smooth.

I have no idea how convenient it is to setup QPixel but what I really like about it are some features like categories (sub-divisions of single site community) or different post types (Q&A, articles, wiki pages) that can be configured quite freely.

The only other serious open source Q&A software alternative (in my eyes) is Question2Answer and while QPixel feels like an open source replacement for the Stack Overflow platform software, Question2Answer feels more like an open source Quora replacement to me.

Civilization 6 falls quite short of the high expectations of a long term fan of the series

Being a long term fan of the Civilization franchise I yet had to play every part of the series. I played Civilization 1 for countless hours back in the 1990s, and then it went on and on. With much less time and quite late I now gave the latest installment in the series Civilization 6 a try. Testing it 5 years after the initial release and with all available addons/expansions should have advantages though. I expected to see beautiful graphics on a medium powered PC and a polished gameplay with lots of game features. And indeed it looks and sounds gorgeous (at least to me)...

Civilization 6 on difficulty level Immortal a few turns before a science victory without any war at all

I totally buy in the somewhat cartonish, but very polished look of the map. Exploring the map, improving the land, expanding cities with special areas, all that has been fun to me. And I really like the title music. And the terrain generator is really great with so much detail, especially in the naming department.

Nevertheless, I only played it for a couple of weeks, playing maybe three full games and some scenarios and I do not plan to play it any more than that. It's quite a disappointment after all. And here is why:

War is so much Civilization 1-5 (but not 6)

In none of the different attempts at playing the game, war was a big topic! It's just nothing somebody really does except maybe for some fainthearted attempts in early eras and the occasional occupation of a city state. In my last attempt on the second highest difficulty level (implausibly called Immortal) I could achieve a relatively simple science victory without firing a single shoot at anyone and I also think none of the six civilizations did so against each other. This might account to very civilized behavior (by modern standards) but feels so un-Civilization like, it's hard to digest. Actually I felt very bored over the course of the game. It's mostly some linear to exponential growth and the one with the largest growth factor wins in the end, which can quite reliably be predicted once all the areas in the world suitable for settlements are used up. And finally, it might just be me, but military units seem to be too expensive to really wage a war against strongly fortified cities and military areas.

AI opponents are not very smart and quite passive

They don't send much ships around, or settle on a second continent until very late. Or do anything much. They seem to have some agendas and if you fullfill them they're happy. War (if it happens at all) is still not their strong point. But they happily pay lots of gold per turn if you sell them a bit of diplomatic favor or other strategic ressources, even on very high difficulty levels.

Wonders of the World are a dime a dozen

There are really so many of them, in no game all players will build them all. And since they take up space (which I think is the right decision overall) it's often not a bargain to build them, their yield might be much lower than one could obtain from the tile otherwise. Some wonders are really useful and have an effect that scales favorably, but maybe only 10 of them, the remaining ~50 may give you a meagre 4 belief (really not a lot). Often enough a standard building will give a greater benefit.

Horribly, horribly imbalanced scenarios (and not much choice either)

There is a small number of scenarios included (with the base game and the two expansions) and the scenario ideas of some are quite interesting (spreading religion, peaceful expansion, fighting the plague) but the implementation is a big disappointment. Scenario lengths are too short (60 turns) and it's impossible to continue afterwards. For example the religious war scenario could be much longer. And the Plague scenario is a massive hyperbole: everyone died out (me last with about -1000 belief). That felt like an Excel sheet calculation that somehow wasn't tweaked very well.

Summary

Unfortunately, I decided to stop playing Civilization 6. It has too many major flaws to justify spending more time on it. It's surprising that a game that is that old, can appear to be so imbalanced  and unpolished. The multi-player mode (which I didn't test) might still be fun though because between humans many of the critical points listed above might not apply.

Still, it's worthwhile to ask the question: how could Civilization 6 be improved to make it much more playable than now. I think the main points would be:

• Make war more lucrative and make AIs more prone to conduct war.
• AI opponents should stop overpaying for diplomatic influence points or strategic resources.
• Reduce the number of World Wonders massively (like maybe a third of them) and increase their yields (but maybe also their production costs).
• Really polish and balance the scenarios and add more.

Review of Evil Cult

Evil Cult is an open source, turn-based strategy game mainly programmed by Max Kowarski (infidel-). It can be played in the browser, for example at www.in-fi-del.net/static/cult/index.html. The programming language is Haxe and the sources are available on Github, the game is licensed under the GPL-3.0 license. The game is in a mature state and playable, but also still actively developed. One special feature is that this game (or a more enhanced version) is also commercially available on Steam for PC.

Playing Evil Cult in the browser

 I like it a lot and think it is a quite enjoyable strategy gem. The screen output is text-based, with the network of cultists taking up the main part of the screen. Resource and other important information is on the left and menus for managing sects and getting information about cults are on top. The interface is very clean and easy to understand and use, the layout is agreeable. A nice little detail are the hilarious sect names as well as cultist names.

The game mechanics is all about growing the network of follows of your own cult (there are computer controlled opponent cults) with special emphasis on resource generating individuals, defending them by having at least 3 links to each of the resource generators, staying undetected (low awareness of the cult), defending against investigators and finally with the help of advanced cultists and the resource "virgins" performing the Final Ritual before anyone else does. This means that the game poses quite a strategic challenge while also offering an interesting fresh setting.

A single game lasts about 30 minutes (~30 turns) and may depend somewhat on luck, i.e. the availability of resource generators close to the starting position as well as the absence or presence of an investigator in the early turns, however, if one keeps a low public profile (awareness ~5%), expands quickly to gather a lot of "virgin" resources (which can be converted to the other resources at a favorable rate) and focuses to get rid of investigators early on as well as sacrifices sects on level 2 for resources, it can be won on all difficulty levels.

The only thing I miss would be a multiplayer mode. I imagine that playing against other human opponents could increase the appeal of the game even more.

I can strongly recommend it and hope it will be improved even more in the future.