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Comment by MrUssek | Hacker News Reader

I think that Errant Signal's video on Civilization offers a really interesting counterpoint to this view. When you think about it, despite it's cheap cosmopolitanism, it has an extremely narrow contemporary liberal view of civilization, government, technology and "progress". I think it's worth looking into.

https://youtu.be/xBlEscMLjy0

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Some of the older Civilization games (Civ 2?) gave points in the final score for happy and content citizens, but not for unhappy ones. While that's a minor detail (you usually don't win the game by score anyway), I think that was a nice touch, and made it feel like something else also mattered beside just the attainment of power.

On a similar vein, I think in Alpha Centauri you could enable a rule that allowed a group of allied factions to win together.

I've occasionally lamented that Civ 5 feels like nothing but a power game where it's difficult to even justify the AI being "friendly" for the sake of being friendly and not just as a strategic, transaction-based move. The game may not be zero-sum, but it does feel like that sometimes. I don't know if my thinking has changed or if the later games just feel different somehow, but I didn't feel quite that way about some of the older Civ games.

The social policy advancement system in Civ 5 also feels a bit too "gamey" to me. What that guy on the video briefly mentioned about each social policy advancement being just another power bonus rather than having to make direct choices about tradeoffs (as you would in the previous games) struck a chord.

Some of the criticism in the video seems a bit nitpicky -- some historical inaccuracies such as lumping all of the ancient Hellenic areas together into a single unified Greek civilization are pretty much inevitable when your scale is the entire world and 6000 years -- but some of the points actually sounded like something I've kind of felt too, I just haven't been able to put them into words.

I don't know. This feels pretty similar to criticizing Call of Duty for not exploring peaceful resolution of conflict enough. Civilization is just a skin on a resource management game; popular history is the theme. Criticizing it for not adequately exploring the intricacies and assumptions of western history is missing the point.

If you can, as TFA, plumb it for deeper political meaning, you can also, like Errant Signal, criticize it for that political meaning being a glorification of a rather weird, authoritarian-nationalist (nearly fascist, with the game's single-minded obsession in directing all resources, human or otherwise towards the service of a single-purpose state) world view, that does not even make any sense in 95% of the time periods that the game covers.

Your argument can certainly be made, but it can also be turned against the article this thread is about, with similar levels of success.

Errant Signal is not saying that the game is bad. It is saying that the political picture its mechanics paint isn't one with any depth to it.

> it has an extremely narrow contemporary liberal view of civilization, government, technology and "progress"

Indeed - you can't even marry your own daughter!

This comment was made by CK3 gang.

I love the Civ games but I definitely agree with that criticism. Civ is to politics or culture what the world music genre was to music. Even the styles of the civ cutscenes, the character design, or the dialogue screnes aesthetically seem to resemble sort of 90s world music album covers.

This is why Alpha Centauri is by far my favourite Civ game, it's free from having to deal with a lot of historical accuracy and just has a very strong narrative and great worldbuilding.

Agree. Alpha Centauri is still the peak of the genre for me, two decades later. It's just a shame there's no active open source effort, because the technical implementation has aged poorly.

I was looking into AC again today and noticed that there are some unofficial patches, one of which allows you to freely configure the resolution. I'm sitting here playing Alpha Centauri at 1080p and I couldn't be happier.

Yitzi patch: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;cat=2 (you'll need to download 3.5 and 3.5d, then overwrite the terranx.exe in 3.5 with the newer one from 3.5d)

Graphics patch: https://github.com/DrazharLn/pracx

Requires Alpha Centauri with the latest official patch (GOG version comes already updated).

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