'Civilization' Creator Sid Meier: “I Didn't Really Expect to Be a Game Designer”
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I vividly remember the magnetism of the pyramids depicted on the game's box - it had to be that one. Little did we know that we accidentally purchased what is probably the best game in computer game history.
Fast forward a year (and many hours of Civ) later in history class, when our teacher asked the class (somewhat rhethorically..) whether anyone had an explanation for why the Roman Empire became as successful as it was.
Before he could give us his explanation, I blurted out that it must have been their invention of the aqueduct, which eventually allowed the roman cities to grow as large as they did (which is, of course, the game mechanic of aqueducts in Civ). Regardless of whether that's true or not, let's just say that this wasn't the type of answer our teacher expected from a 6th grader!
As someone else noted in here, it's Paradox Interactive games that have somewhat ruined all advanced Civs for me (the exception being Civ 1!). If you're a grown up gamer looking for something to recreate that ol' Civ feeling, give Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings a try.
If you don't believe me & you need proof (since this is Hacker News) I dare you to play any Civilization game from the series. I suggest Civ 3. Whichever you pick, you will find yourself randomly noticing the people around you are waking up for breakfast & you've been playing all night. You'll be upset with yourself for a minute, but then you'll realize you just need to make a couple more strategic moves to conqueror your neighbor. If you call in sick today, you might be able to take over your entire continent. Then again, now that you've got the hang of it, you could also restart & really perfect your opening moves. Dilemmas..
As time went on, the designers worked harder and harder to block the best strategies in the game rules. They added more and more convoluted systems of upkeep, corruption, etc. in order to slow down a rapid expanding player. This has probably been my biggest beef with the series: redesigning the rules to counteract the player instead of making the AI opponents smarter. I haven't played Civ 6 but Civ 5 just bored me to tears with how much of that nonsense they did. That game felt like you had a million decisions to make and none of them had much consequence.
The main developer, Kael, is now a game designer at Stardock. His latest is Galactic Civilization 3. Have you tried it?
Civ is one of the very rare strategy multiplayer games where AI mode is a lot of fun; different than PvP, but still a challenge and a mostly fresh experience. My main issue with it is the exceedingly annoying political behaviour of the ever-complaining AIs. (You're expanding too much! You're not expanding enough! Your army is too large! Your army is weak! One of your units stared at me wrong!)
The thing that's always been a bummer about Civ's single-player-vs-AI games is that, like most games, the difficulty level simply controlled the amount of handicapping rather than made the AI smarter or more cunning. The difference between hard and easy mode was that they'd just give the player more money, stronger units, better bonuses, etc.
1: I just searched Google for Zerg Rush and holy moly that is awesome. Great job whichever Googler thought of that.
I'm assuming VI will end up similar, and potentially diverge a bit more from V. I'm excited to see what the first, and maybe second, gameplay expansion do to the game, because there are some corner cases (such as the difficulty with tall strategies being discussed). Whenever I recommend V, I say "make sure you have the complete expansions," because it's really a different game. Vanilla VI didn't hook me like expanded V does, but I suspect expanded VI will, and I'm looking forward to that.
This article says it well, too, and also includes a bunch of stuff I hope they consider. The "break-up of nations/empires" point they make about Civ late-game in general is particularly salient. I've always liked the thought of the modern era looking more like the modern era, because late-game does get boring on occasion as everybody rushes toward their victory.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/civilization-vi/civilization-6-expa...
The only problem I have with 6 is a bit of an odd one; I don't really like the nation/leader options. They feel a bit stilted in comparison to 5, though there are a few exceptions.
The music in 6 is fantastic, however, and I love how it changes as your civ progresses.
Part of the issue I'm finding is that real estate ends up being a real problem for buildings and wonders. You can't just indiscriminately rush and stack wonders - you'll simply run out of tiles. So, you're trying to place your cities in such a way to avoid land grabs by other civs, but not so much that they crowd out tiles for your other cities.
The barbarian spawning seems to be very unforgiving in Civ 6 as well.
Goto is hopelessly broken, probably an unfortunate limitation of making a game that can run on 1996-era computers.
City walls are too strong. Catapult, cannon, and artillery should be able to penetrate them. They are always literally the last thing diplomats will sabotage.
The computer gangs up on the player. I guess this makes the game fairer but it also makes diplomacy useless.
The simulation is nukes is hopelessly unrealistic and boring. I wouldn't mind it so much if the pollution system wasn't broken as well. I still got global warming even after making an effort to build solar plants and mass transits in all of my cities because of pollution caused by AI nukes. Rage quitted on that one ;-)
Nuclear non-proliferation in a later Civ was a very good idea IMO.
I think that makes you much better than an 'ok' player!
They also feature some much better (but now largely gimped) late game features. An inheritance war can tear empires apart in CK2, culture and colonies may revolt in EU4, communists will start a revolution if they don't get social reforms in vicky and and soldiers will become more loyal to their general than you in rome.
Paradox games like Crusader Kings II!
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706825-it-s-now-very-common-...
Boo hoo, you're offended by people playing your games. What about us spending money on your game and then hours learning the mechanics only to get beaten by your AI violating the established rules and doing things we cannot.
I don't have have enough time with Civ to have experienced this there, but in Fifa watching defenders with speed and acceleration 10+ points below my strikers outrunning them or that magical switch flipping that says "AI will score now" and watching my own defenders actively run away from the ball or the ball even go right through their legs may not be result of "lazy" design but it's infuriating. Especially when I think of how much money I've laid down to have this experience.
You don't like a feature - that's totally fine. Talk about your grievances all you like, so we can learn and improve said feature. But don't call the people "lazy" if you don't know what you're talking about.
It was mostly about people being angry about low odds of losing a fight actually prevailing, so the game shows fake probability to the point you'll lose 90%-chance-to-win fights way less than 10% of the time.
But he did tell one thing that really disincentivized him from pursuing a smarter AI: when the AI does something brilliant, people just assume it's cheating.
https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/sid-meier-...
Edit-Airborne ranger was well ahead of its time IMO. Think that was first game I really felt like I was "sneaking".
In fact they have so many good ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MicroProse_games
Falcon 4 is still alive today!
Aaaand now I know what I'm doing with my free time later this week :)
If I can find some again, I do want to get F4 BMS up and running with TrackIr on the 34".
Oddly its perhaps my playing of traditional board games usually with others that kept Civilization from taking over my computer gaming at the time
Only the electronics and breaking in mini-games were really any good, but the game was set up so that you could focus on those and pretty much ignore the others. I loved the whole mystery and trying to untangle the crime aspect with the different actors, as well as how if you took too long or looked in the wrong places you could miss capturing some of the bad guys, or even screw up the whole mission.
Looking at my gaming past, a number of scripted experiences have actually left the most vivid memories, but the sandbox/simulation games are the ones I associate more with friendships, periods in my life, developmental stages, etc.
Nostalgic thoughts are about periods of time, and less about moments. A scripted game, I think, is usually too short to produce nostalgia. The few scripted games that do, like the Myst series, took an unusually long time (for me) to play through, for example.
* VMS Empire: http://www.catb.org/esr/vms-empire/ (apt-get install empire, ascii graphics)
* http://www.classicempire.com
* XConq https://sourceware.org/xconq/
* A relatively more modern commercial variant (including mobile) http://killerbeesoftware.com/kbsgames/ednew/ http://killerbeesoftware.com/kbsgames/edme
(There's also the older Hammurabi game, but that one has no map.)
Instead, a few years back, I took up the occasional Civ1 again, downloaded as abandonware, and running in a DOSBox. A nice thing about Civ1 is that I can usually complete it in a few hours; as I recall, Civ3 could easily take a night to play through. I even played it with my son for a while. I think that he should know the classics.
As for strategy, I play with three civs, I always prioritize research over taxes, and I prioritize expansion over fortification early in the game (I quit when this backfires).
Once I get my civ rolling I have found the best strategy for getting a high score is to track down the other civs as fast as possible and to knock them out, starting at the capital. Once their capital has fallen and a few main cities, they will make peace. Then rest of the cities can be conquered at my leisure or they can be cheaply bought by diplomats and their building sold for scraps, decreasing the price further. An important prerequisite for the aggressive strategy to work is to get to them before they build city walls.
Often, however, I find myself gravitating towards a "tech hub" strategy instead. It rarely leads to scores above 100% on king level but if feels kind of satisfying. The point of this is to appoint some city with potential for trade and growth (ideally all of its accessible squares should be plains or convertible to plains). Then build, as soon as possible, the Colossus (+1 trade per trade square). Then, in some order, a library (+50% science), a granary (faster growth), Copernicus' Observatory (+100% science), university (+50% science), and Shakespeare's Theatre (everyone is happy). Bring in caravans from the rest of the continent to speed up production, and to set up trade routes from the tech hub. Elsewhere, build the Pyramids (switch to democracy) and J.S.Bach's Cathedral (two happy faces per city and only way to keep democracy while dispatching a sail or a frigate with caravans from the tech hub). Research railroad and, once achived, assign all settlers to put railroads on the area surrounding the tech hub, boosting growth (in preparation for railroad, clear any forests and swamps, and build roads and irrigation). Postpone researching electricity since it will cancel the Colossus.
With the tech hub strategy, the science light bulps of the tech hub will often overflow into the next panel on the city details screen and I'll usually have armors and planes and railroads before reaching 0 AD. After that, I guess the correct path is to switch to communism and eradicate all resistance. I tend to do this too late, though.
Totally unlike the real world, where ruling or governing is more about figuring out how to exercise power without getting overthrown.
Such a game would be way more interesting.
No emergent gameplay at all in Civ.
Have you read about the Russian frontier? As soon as it was at least somewhat secure so living on it wasn't a sure-fire way of getting enslaved by Muslim steppe raiders(Tatars), the empty land was filled up by peasants looking for land to farm.
An increase in population led to more slave raids, so Moscow was forced to push the border further south to protect the farmers. In this way the border kept moving south. In 250 years, this mechanism caused the Russian state to expand from Moscow to Crimea.
Paradox is also in the business of making boardgames, albeit with way more elaborate rules.
> your own with a computer, and I think it's worked out really well.
I don't think it has. The AI in Civ series is just bad, and only gets by through rampant cheating. Civ V was out for years, and they haven't managed to do anything decent with the combat AI. Nor prevent the AI from doing stupid things.
Yes, that's pretty much what the game is designed to be; keeping the game what people have enjoyed it for is sensible.
> Totally unlike the real world, where ruling or governing is more about figuring out how to exercise power without getting overthrown.
And, sure, such a simulation would be interesting, but it's not what civilization has ever been, or advertised itself to be. It would certainly be good to have such a game, but why should it be in, or replace, the Civ line?