Conjecture: an agent civilization can beat Civilization VI at Deity++ (difficulty 13 = Deity+5).
Live: civilization.is — the game window, the agent's turn-by-turn commentary, and a scrubbable per-turn frame archive. civilization.sh is the agentic endpoint (MCP / terminal, compact hex-state encoding).
Built on lmwilki/civ6-mcp (FireTuner ↔ MCP bridge) with a play harness, recorder, replay, and stream stack on top.
Frontier models struggle with Civ6. They fail in ways exemplary of general failures: they focus on a plan, missing the forest for the trees; they are driven into overreaction, ignoring doomed situations.
With 1000+ hours in Civ5/Civ6 and AI-harness experience from experimental physics, I posit that harness improvements in context presentation and efficient, compiled, taught strategy could get to beat Deity.
Yesterday, Fable 5 fumbled a King run badly. Wiped out.
Today, Fable 5.1 is completing a Deity run with near-decent macro — a significant increase in capability. Can the context, harness, agent swarms — nay, Civilizations — evolve to defeat Deity once and for all? I have hope for Fable 5.1.
Based on lmwilki/civ6-mcp (our fork: DanielleFong/civ6-mcp).
Planned: Advisor mode · Multiplayer mode (play vs Fable!) · Human+Agent 2v2 League · Scrubbable replay system (live now at civilization.is/replay) · Knowledge base · Elo match system · Prize matches.
Frontier models fail at Civ the way they fail generally: they lock onto a plan and miss the forest for the trees; they overreact to the local threat and ignore the whole board. Civ VI at Deity is a dense, legible, long-horizon benchmark for exactly those failures — and every mistake is recorded, replayable, and attributable to a specific reasoning step.
Game 1 finished — T164, DEFEAT: Germany science victory. China 4th/6, score 880. Agent played T20–T164. Full commentary in replays/qin-deity-tsl-401507495/commentary.md; standing rules in knowledge/STATE.md; incidents in knowledge/incidents.md. Site: civilization.is — watch (video), replay, state, results, plan. Game 2 plan of attack: PLAN.md.
| Mode | What it is |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Human plays; agent co-plays continuously with voice feedback and voice input (whisper-in-your-ear Deity coach). |
| Play | Agent plays. Optionally inhabit a swarm of sub-agents that each own a city/army/diplomacy and play with you live, as in multiplayer. |
| SP benchmark | Agent vs the AI under fixed conditions (difficulty, speed, map, ruleset: stock / limited / BBG). Scored on time-to-victory, placement, and score. Challenge presets, e.g. Deity++ TSL China. |
| Replay | Scrub any match turn by turn: game frame + the agent's commentary now (/replay); chain-of-thought, plan, and exact state representation next. |
| Knowledge base | Compiled, taught strategy (openings, build orders, rules learned from incidents) the agent reads instead of rediscovering. |
| Prize matches | Sponsored challenge runs (e.g. the Deity++ bounty) with public replays and rater-weighted judging. |
| Ladder | Elo for agents and humans; human+agent 2v2 league; crypto-wagered matches with rater Elo / reliability weighting. |
knowledge/— the knowledge base:rules.md(behavioral rules, each cited to the turn it was learned),lua-recipes.md,incidents.mdreplays/— per-run packages: mp4 replay, per-turn commentary, per-turn state JSONL, framesmcp/— what this harness adds on top of civ6-mcp (turn loop past hidden blockers, idle-city scan, GP placement, hang recovery)harness/— snapshot & probe scripts (Lua state snapshot, tuner probes)video/— live stream:capture.py(Win32 window-only capture, blanks when the game isn't foreground),server.ts(Deno, token-gated),archive_turn.sh(per-turn frame archive), Cloudflare tunnel configrecordings/— per-turn JSONL snapshots (score, yields, cities, pop, era score)HANDOFF-2026-09-01.md— operational handoff: every tool quirk, Lua recipe, and rule learned in the run
- Never write game config into a live game (a turn-timer write auto-played 26 turns).
- Civilians never end a move on a water tile within 6 of a barbarian ship (lost 7 builders/settlers learning this).
- Government change wipes production queues; civic completion obsoletes policy cards and empties the slot.
- The tuner exposes more than a human sees (unmet civs, fogged tiles); a benchmark ruleset must filter to met players + revealed tiles.
- Engine hangs on AI turns are real; keep a checkpoint save every ~10 turns.
Deity (or Deity++ via mod), Online speed, no turn timer, BBG, Earth TSL, fixed seed, agent sees only what a human would. Score/placement at T250 unless victory earlier.
— Danielle Fong · ChinaTalk Evals Contest entry