Civilizations and Trains

Well, that's a serendipitous timing for me. While waiting for a reason to use my newly written train code, My brothers and I decided to revisit an old "Play-By-Cloud" Civ 6 between the Windows, Mac, and Server client. Which always seemed to prevent one (or more) of the players participating in the game until the "next" patch cycle. I put next in quotes because it could take months for the clients to come back into sync so the affected player could take their turn.

Eventually we just gave up on the game entirely, and forgot it was a thing. Recently though, We decided to give "Play-By-Cloud" another go. Mostly because we enjoy playing Civ, but don't have hours to sit down and finish a game. 

This lead to a pleasant(?), and an unpleasant surprise. The pleasant surprise was that the game we had started all those years ago had survived, which surprised us all. We debated just throwing the game away as nobody knew their starting position, and what strategy they were using then. The unpleasant surprise is that around 2020 the steam notification for the play by cloud stuff broke, and Sid Meyer has either hasn't gotten around to fixing it or deem'd not to fix it. Luckily Civ 6 also included a webhook that could be called on turn change, In other words, I can rig my train to alert me when its my turn in the game. 

So I may in the near furture have a train horn play in the background while I'm working to let me know that its my turn to play the game.