Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war | Hacker News Reader

Player stuck in an eternal Civ II war

kernelmag.dailydot.com

186 pointskeeganjw45 comments

Hacker News discussion from the original reddit post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4100032

It has somewhat died down, but a lot of the strategies people came up with and other information have been collected at https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar

Wtf? I clicked that link expecting some screenshots.

Here's some screenshots from the original reddit thread

http://imgur.com/a/rAnZs

TL;DR

Man plays a single Civ II game, locked in a 3-way stalemate, for 10 years (2000 in-game years).

He asks reddit for advice on ending the stalemate, posting his savegame. Quickly a community forms around it. Fans post not only strategies but also art and fiction.

The game and related discussions have also been added to collections in the Stanford University Libraries.

Thank you for this. The signal-to-noise ratio of the article was dangerously low for my attention span ;)

It's a human interest story, and a very interesting one.

I love how this sim makes you a tyrannic psychopath.

As if one man was the Nation and that people had no rights on their own lives and could not have a free will.

These games are wrong on so many level.

Some RPG can transform your psyche, like the jail experiment in SF has proven. Civlization/colonization have let me with a bitter taste in the mouth as a player once I realized how it was making me think, in the real world.

Since then, I uninstalled all of these games.

I think this article about muv luv is right on spot : http://tay.kinja.com/why-the-muv-luv-saga-is-the-greatest-st...

Have you tried Crusader Kings 2? It's a strategy game which tries to simulate all the people from courtiers to kings all with their own motivations.

And Europa Universalis IV, the sequel in the series, has you leading one of the nations at the dawn of the European Age of Colonization. Colonial genocide, holy wars, force-conversion, and state executions to quell rebellions are all explicit game mechanics.

one of my favorites of all time. Haven't found a bigger time sink.

Last night, I was playing Crusader Kings 2 as the Byzantine Empire. I had just conquered Jerusalem in a holy war (after the Catholics failed to take it in a crusade, ha!) and everything was good. I had tons of money rolling in, I was secure in my realm with a son groomed to inherit, and I was thinking about expanding further south to take Alexandria. I figured it was a good time to call it a night at about 11:30pm.

I was just squashing a peasant uprising before going to bed when suddenly the Shia caliph -- the same guy I just stole Jerusalem from -- declared a jihad for Anatolia! Their armies start moving north into Armenia and Anatolia and while I was trying to get enough of my troops in one place to fend them off, some vassals decided to shift their votes and nominate the Exarch of Greece as heir to the empire instead of my son. Stupid elective succession.

I had to get rid of him, because I was about 45 years old and sick with pneumonia. If I lost the empire then my son would just be a random duke with a few counties. It'd probably be a generation before I could retake the empire. But my council wouldn't let me revoke his title because too many of them owed him favours. I had him excommunicated, but that didn't help, and I couldn't imprison him because I'd almost certainly fail and I couldn't have him rebelling while I'm fighting the Muslims.

So I spied on him until I got a chance to abduct and imprison him. Great, now what do I do to get rid of him without angering all my vassals? Executing him would incur tyranny. Should I blind him? That's a big deal to Greeks; they wouldn't vote for a blind emperor right? Or just throw him in the Oubliette and hope he dies before I do?

Next thing I know it's 1:30am and I have to be up in the morning.

That sounds fun. Can i play it on linux?

Yes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_Kings_II

I'm adding this one to my "Games to Play" list.

You play as a civilization not as a individual human (yes technically you are "Abraham Lincoln" but are you to believe that lives to be 2000 years old?) and when you select democracy as a government type the population will begin to have civil unrest if you go to war to much,

That would be absurd! You live to be 6000 years old.

The leader is periodically re-cloned from his nose.

There are several options to play (and win) peacefully if you so choose, even while other nations battle it out around you.

If anything it teaches temperament, resource management, and how to turn failures into learning experiences - the last of which is considered important for being successful in business.

I once participated in a Civ-style, turn-based, global game for a Political Science class, and, full disclosure, I was easily the most controversial person to have participated up to that point.

The way the professor set up the game it actually had grade-implicating consequences. The class before mine essentially sat down in a giant circle and worked together to solve the 'built in' problems so they could maximize their collective points for the exercise. My class...not so much.

By the end of our game, my country, as ringleader of a small coalition of willing and semi-willing participants were on the verge of total global domination (just needed one more turn). One country had been completely destroyed and all of its students received zero points for the exercise.

The professor and I met a few times in private and he was absolutely stunned at the divisive difference between the results. The 'cooperation' class taught him nothing, and the global warfare class was a ton of work (both calculating results and managing the social dynamics of college kids/semi-adults).

What we discussed at the end was how the flaw in the game seemed to be the 'ideological survey' initially used by him to group the teams together. I landed in the most "passive" group based on the survey results, but ended up being a much more hands-on, active leader and joined up with an "aggressive" collaborator. We agreed the passiveness meant that my team essentially didn't put up any resistance to me taking power, setting the scene, and letting them know they'd get the grade points just don't make waves.

Come to think of it, I still have the whole saga in mind as a long-form write-up so maybe I'll get around to that haha. As Megadeth pointed out, "Peace sells, but who's buying?"

Should you ever write about that experience, I'd be very interested to read it. That sounds awesome!

Looking back it's absolutely thrilling and I can't believe things worked out the way they did. I was a Uni Senior at the time wrapping up my 'electives' so taking intro courses was my plan to pad up the GPA a little (another example: Intro to Piano simply to re-learn to read sheet music). Almost all the other classmates were Freshman level or close to it, being an intro course, which I think went in my favor. There were a lot of personalities and some fair doses of immaturity (I'm a former hardcore Half-Life DM multiplayer gamer) but the professor did an admirable job of keeping it working for the full semester.

I think I need to map out ways to tell the story, rather than just blurt it all out kind of like the above. I've been working a lot on Medium so stay tuned I guess haha

Edit: I've reached out to the professor from the course to see if he'd be interested in reading/critiquing my write-up, should I put one together. We'll see!

Actually sounds like a problem with the class scoring system.

Rational actors will maximize their returns, and in a game that has a set number of rounds, the equilibrium won't be met unless there are returns and costs associated to each round.

Your professor should have graded on a running score, per turn, so that there would have been a reason (other than reputation cost with class peers) for the teams to collude up until the end. It would have also been more realistic for the course, since a decade of continued existence is considered more of a win for a political nation than some final tally at year 2050.

The odd thing is that from what I remember of International Relations classes, the core debate in that subfield is whether states avoid cooperating to achieve absolute gains if there's any risk of compromising their relative strength (and whether game theory is the right analytical framework to use, and whether models of iterative games which penalise defectors are the best explanation for why international cooperation is possible). So I'd have thought a PolSci professor would be far more likely than most people to have designed a game to penalise somebody trying to enrich themselves at the expense of much of the rest class. (if it had been an economics professor, they'd have designed the game so that somebody trying to enrich themselves and their allies at the expense of the rest of the class nevertheless made everybody score higher...)

That's the problem with game theory in politics - unlike hypothetical scenarios, the game never really ends in the real world. There are typically unseen (or ignored) consequences to actions made during engagements, that come back years later. When I said rational actors, I was referring to the students themselves and the scoring system put in front of them.

But you're right - it seems odd that a poli sci professor would give a team zero points if they were wiped out. What if they had previously used trade of luxury goods to maintain peace on a continent for centuries?

I'm really quite excited to write out the experience, though I have to admit over 10 years have passed so I've got to focus to dredge back up the memories.

The 'wiped out, zero points' actually makes the most sense from a pragmatic standpoint. Figuratively speaking, you get zero points when your culture/society/etc is annihilated, wiped out. So there was an incentive to behave in a way to avoid being destroyed.

Just to sum things up, during the conflict & negotiation stage with the "victim" country, the coalition had them surrounded in one tiny town, otherwise taking over the rest of the country. When negotiations failed, the last holdouts were destroyed. It didn't have to end that way - the coalition was okay with letting them have a little compound and stay out of the way...but they didn't like that, made all sorts of demands and noise, and were eliminated out of convenience (my convenience, not necessarily the entire world's).

Right, but rewarding continued existence is already incentivization to not being destroyed.

If the class is graded on a curve, then by making annihilation equal an instant 0 points, you've incentivized the teams to wipe each other out.

My high school world history teacher ran a game like this for the class. He booked a whole week for it. After two days we had destroyed the world in a nuclear war. He made us sit quietly in class for the rest of the week as punishment! What a great lesson though in how terrible people can be.

I upvoted you, but really it's meant for your teacher. It takes guts to follow through on stuff like that.

That reminded of a network security class I took. The goal was to hack the protocol of a game server and win points (we could run a packet sniffer or something like that). Instead I hacked the game server itself, got root on it, and injected a hack in the game server source to give our an advantage. Some people were upset, however we still won. I argued, that is how real security works. It is some seemingly unrelated backdoor or weakness that lets the attacker in.

The famous Stanford Prison experiment has numerous methodological flaws[0] and is most likely hokum, and Phil Zimbardo, the director of this study has exhibited numerous moments of questionable ethics. Including sleeping with and marrying one of his research students.

[0]https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201...

The article you posted seems to be a summary of the findings (as well as a poorly-concealed advert for a book) and doesn't mention any methodological flaws. Am I missing something?

No.

> Including sleeping with and marrying one of his research students.

Right or wrong as a moral or professional practice, this was incredibly common in the 20th Century, and if that implicated bad science, we'd have to discard quite a lot of it.

Also, it's hard to see how sleeping together would cause them to do bad science.

Sounds like you're not able to easily differentiate between games and reality. I believe you made the right decision for you to stop playing.

For the rest, enjoy!

The book "The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks was inspired by the computer game "Sid Meier's Civilization" and it paints a picture of a profoundly dysfunctional empire which is governed by the use of an elaborate game. Mark Zuckerberg recently recommended the book, but it's highly thought of by SF fans generally.

("Civilization" was a development of "Railroad Tycoon", an earlier PC game inspired by the boardgame series 18xx designed by Francis Tresham, starting in the 70s)

Just some context.

Just to correct myself: it's Banks's later book Excession which was directly inspired by Civ. The video game hadn't yet been released when "The Player of Games" was published, and I can't provide evidence that Banks was aware of Railroad Tycoon or its predecessor board games.

"Excession" is a good book as well, and appears to draw on email mailing list culture. http://www.tor.com/2015/03/06/on-iain-m-banks-and-the-video-...

Maybe I was just slow in the uptake, but it took until the end of the book for me to realize the interactions between and lives of the minds were the whole point of the story, not so much the main plot line.

For me Civilization was my introduction to realpolitik. Before playing it I had genuine difficulty understanding why or how wars ever happened. Maybe it is psychopathic - but it's long been observed that the behaviour of corporations would be psychopathic if seen in a human, and the same is true for nations. The best games hold a mirror up to (one aspect of) reality, and Civilization does exactly that. Indeed part of the reason the story in the linked article is so compelling is the fear of something like it happening in the real world.

PS: I have been wondering about playing Muv-Luv for a while. But that article is very badly written. It must have been heartfelt for the writer, but they haven't managed to convey what makes it so special to them.

I was playing Civ 5 a while ago and had good relations with my neighboring civs. I tend to aim for science or cultural victories, so playing nice works well.

Come to find out I had no iron resources. Without iron I could not progress and would be unable to defend myself agains barbarians let alone another civ (like that backstabbing Napoleon!). I could have tried to trade for the resources, but didn't really have much to offer in exchange and would make for a volatile supply.

Meanwhile, my good friend just to the south had loads of iron, but almost no troops... I've never felt more dishonest than when I crushed his civ to take his iron. The military buildup I needed to do so along with the new iron resources ended up essentially forcing me to choose the military domination victory path.

The game forced me to switch from peacenik to expansionist military force crushing all who opposed me.

I don't know if the downvotes are fair here. She's making a point worth discussing even if we disagree. I think that even just since the first civ came out, there has been a little bit of cultural shift where maybe people are seeing national power relations in a different way. Where people are less likely to see acquisition of lands for their nation as being quite such a good thing.

The idea that Civilization makes you, personally, a tyrannical psychopath is not worth discussing. There are vaguely related topics like the one you bring up here that might have some conversational value, but the comment with the downvotes is attributing a positively insane level of mind control to video games.

No, of course, it doesn't.. in fact Civ 5 is my favorite game at the moment, and I hope I'm not a psycho! I interpreted the post to be saying that it makes you play the role of a psychopathic ruler. I mean, I've used nukes on my enemies in Civ. And I guess the other question is, does it pass on the values of.. well I would say imperialism, but it goes back a lot farther than that. The patriarchy, maybe?

In my experience, war is rarely worth pursuing in Civilization. Relentless, manifest-destiny expansion via settlers is the way to go. They've tried to build in some penalties for this kind of expansion in recent titles, but I've still found it the best strategy. I think in either 3 or 4, you could produce so much culture/influence that you could simply take over land and assimilate cities from other civs peacefully.

I do always play marathon games on huge maps, though.

They're just games dude.

Adults are supposed to be able to distinguish fiction and fantasy from reality.

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