What Sid Meier’s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About ‘Civilization’

even if there aren't hard coded dark ages on the game, you can absolutely get into a bad state where you stop really progressing for centuries at a time, because of war, or running out of resources, or barbarians, etc.

Eh, the fact that historians have revised downwards how nasty the early middle ages were as they've learnt more about it does not mean the label "dark ages" has lost its utility. For one it does somewhat convey the decline in trade and population in a way "early middle ages" does not, which is useful when exemplifying periods of decay in history for a popular audience.

Effectively, everybody in a Civ game is a slave. All of your units do exactly what you tell them to do, all the time. All of your workers in your cities work exactly where you tell them to, and build exactly what you want. It's a Soviet central planner's wet dream.

Colonization also had some mechanics that were sort of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge towards slavery. There was a convict class of settlers, and there were also "converted" natives that you could acquire. If you had missionaries in their settlements, once in a while some religious converts would come over freely. Or you could attack their settlements, which generated lots of "converts"

> Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series.

Not quite accurate. Civilization 4 has a Slavery civic, which allows you to work your own population to death for faster production.

"Dark Age" certainly doesn't mean the whole Middle Ages -- Petrarch was (a) an ass and (b) writing in what was still the Middle Ages -- but I think that modern historians try to minimize how much really was lost in late antiquity and the "Viking Age" after Charlemagne. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization discusses the first of these periods; A History of Private Life has some interesting discussion of the second, and there was a memorable discussion of the Viking Age in the Archdruid Report blog not long ago. The Archdruid Report's author put it this way, more or less: "a dark age is a time in which the memory of what was lost, is lost."

As for slavery, I object to how Civ makes it almost inevitable; at least back in Civ 4, you underperform for the whole game if you don't work your people to death in the Classical period. Disease definitely needs a larger part in the game as well...

I'd also argue for food insecurity and Malthusian limits (as in reaching the carrying capacity of an ecosystem -- or surpassing that carrying capacity, damaging the whole thing, and producing great mobs of the starving and desperate who'll eagerly listen to anyone who tells them who to kill to fix their problems) being conspicuous by their absence. Population growth wasn't all upside in the long ages that had neither the Haber process nor Norman Borlaug's hybrids...

But then, I've heard that an early version of Civ 1 tried to depict the rise and fall of civilizations, but players hated the fall part, so they just made it rise and rise. The mass market doesn't pay to feel uncomfortable...

The term Dark Age is still legitimately applied to the 1200 BC ish Eastern Mediterranean cultural collapse though, is it not?

You can argue slavery is going on the whole time in civilization. It's not like your workers or armies can decide to stop working for you on their own.

Yes, the changes were more or less cosmetic. Funny thing is that latest, more pronounced changes came from Endless Legend (multi tile cities are the most visible to me)

I wish they would get off their asses in the AI department. It is pretty lacking and playing with humans is obviously a massive drag (difference of skill levels, sheer amount of time for a single game)

I play on prince and usually steamroll everything. When I try king the AI cheats so hard at the start it's just a massive turnoff for me...

Pssh, the best Civ is still Alpha Centauri. Nerve stapling your populace was also a bit more extreme than mere slavery.

Agreed; the point of the game is to make you feel like a God.

Sid Meier gave a talk at the GDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU

In it he explained how Civilization tested random negative events that could shape your world. He mentioned how this had a negative effect on the player experience and many times people would just grab a past save to avoid them IIRC.

I agree. I tell people about some of the things I've had to do in Crusader Kings 2 and they are horrified. Civilization 6 is a history themed 4x strategy game, not some hyper realistic history simulator.

The Civ intros are an impressive display of the game's whole aesthetic. Beyond Earth disappointed me in a lot of ways, but starting it up and feeling like it was a 'next step' from the history of Civ was beautiful.

The voiced quotes for each tech in Civ V were downright haunting for me, and I'm pleased to see the game kept so bright. Even the military quotes strayed to optimism like "Happy are those whose walls already rise."

But I think he had the right problem solving approach, and that led him to make the right questions and get the information he needed. That was the key.

From his website

> He studied at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa with BAs in History and Literature, and at Columbia, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies.

You assume New Zealand wants to be seen.

Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Hispaniola, too. And the Canadian Arctic Archipelago became completely non-archipelagic.

Considering the resolution they were dealing with, I'd say they did a pretty decent job with that map.

Does New Zealand actually exist?

https://www.facebook.com/DoesNewZealandExist/

Civ2's world map has New Zealand. And Hawaii, for that matter. Playing the world map is pretty boring anyway, the AI civs are fairly clueless on it when compared to how they play on randomly generated worlds.

Slavery is in Civ 4.

There were slaves in civ 4.

Civ doesn't really have people, so I'm not sure why it needs slaves anyway.

Slavery isn't absent in civ 5, its just abstracted away.

If you miss games like civ you need to start looking at indie games.

There were games like Master of Magic (iirc) which in practice have a lot of the same ingredients, so to say that there wasn't precedent is not really correct. Civ is a better game, but to say that there was no precedents is simply wrong.

Civ is really a turn-based grand-strategy combined with rpg-esque Skinner-box elements. I enjoy it when I play, but I don't pretend it's deep. Games like that are all about "yay, I unlocked a new goodie!" and "numbers must go up so I can make more numbers go up" more than deep planning.

C:S doesn't really deepen over Simcity, that was more a case of EA flying Simcity into the ground with a whole set of unpopular design decisions.

I think both depth and verisimilitude are limited by the desire to make it possible to complete the sweep of history in a reasonable amount of time while still having the player micromanage most things.

I loved the first Civs and then Alpha Centauri, but since Civ 4 I haven't been a fan.

I feel as if they've tried too hard to incorporate RTS elements, ie. you need X units at this point, or else the enemies will attack you. Now you need to research X/min, or else you'll fall behind, etc. It became too rigid.

I think they lost something from Alpha Centauri, where victory could be had with a large range of playstyles. If you held back you didn't automatically get attacked. You could overwhelm with units, small units, or go for odd strategies like adding water survivability, then nuke everyone to raise the water level. You could affect the weather, make super cities with tons of crawlers, or place a regular close grid of a ton of cities.

Apart from that the game had a lot of atmosphere, unlike for example Beyond Earth.

Freeciv seems pretty easy to patch. So, if you wanted to "disrupt" Civ, you wouldn't necessarily need to write much code.

I definitely feel like the author was trying to write a very different article.

An article about the way that Meier's western-centric view of history caused the system he implemented to have interesting systematic biases that limit the set of behaviors that can be simulated in interesting and unexpected ways, Zizek-style, would have been interesting. But this isn't that article; mentioning the lack of dark ages and the enlightenment grand-narrative view of progress as a game mechanic doesn't deliver, since it's crit 101 stuff that anybody would immediately notice.

The author should have probably recognized that the article wasn't the one she intended to write, & eliminated the points that didn't add to its organic form, rather than trying to force it into the intended form. But, its flaws don't detract enough to justify not posting it or reading it.

Python was Civ 4. Civ 5 and 6 seem to both primarily use Lua for scripting.

I know you're being glib, but no, it's the opposite. Without it we'd still be in continuous war and likely a bit backward, comparatively. Not that we have forsaken war, but we more or less need it to keep the barbarians at bay and spread your vision of not-war.