Earlier this year, there was a giant, 42-player, AI-only game of Civilization V going down. Wonder why we never heard anything more about it? Because it died. But that’s OK. Now the same guy is going to run a game with over 60 players.


TPangolin, the organiser of the original Battle Royale, thinks he’s fixed the issues plaguing the original game (“A cocktail of inherent game flaws and some bugs in the mods used”). He’s found more stable mods, reduced the number of units which will be created and got hold of a new .DLL file for Civ V that’s letting him run a lot more factions.

Perhaps most importantly, he’s going to set the game to run and then keep running until it’s done; part of the problem last time was that the game would hang or crash upon loading from a save.


With 61 Civilizations taking part, there’ll be a mix of official factions from the base game and user-created ones, so alongside stalwarts like Elizabeth and Genghis Khan there’ll be modded leaders like Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Hannibal and King David.

The battle has already begun. There are no reports as of yet (TPangolin rounds up major events and chronicles them in handy galleries, like this one), but those should be coming soon; you can keep up to date on the Battle Royale subreddit.

Note: it isn’t called Battle Royale for fun. The only possible victory option is Domination (ie, military), so there’ll be no time for science or diplomacy here. Just centuries of blood.