Civilization 1, 4x made it big | Hacker News Reader

Civilization 1, 4x made it big

abortretry.fail

20 pointsBirAdam19 comments

When I played Civ1 first I was disappointed that it was all about war and conquest and not the peaceful progress of humanity. In fact I was disappointed with computer games being mostly about war and domination, about killing, but only very rarely about building and growing and progress.

I still played it, but it was only Civilization by name, it was the opposite of civilization - uncivilized conquest.

It was the 90s and we had a positive outlook on the future, cold war just ended, the world got more peaceful and y2000 was around the corner, a glorious dawn. And then... Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld stomped on that dream of peace and prosperity with 9/11, just like they're trying with this Ukraine BS, Kosovo, Israel and Taiwan, different perps same shit.

But the best was Civ II because you could create long (north to south) thin (west to east) worlds that made for a really competitive solo game vs multiple computer opponents. Those were the days. Later versions removed this, the series best feature.

So, I do plan to cover later versions as well :-)

The best was Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (SMAC). That game shed the constraints of historical figures and created an incredible sandbox for exploring the many philosophies of government and society. It wrapped all of it in a rich and complex world with rival factions based on founder ideologies. It tied everything together with a wealth of quotes from real historical figures and fictitious quotes from the faction leaders serving as a commentary on historical thought.

The last one is especially important. Philosophy isn’t just a bunch of stuff written by long dead thinkers, it’s an ongoing conversation. SMAC takes this conversation and continues it, extrapolating into the future with fictional technologies, and turns it into a cohesive narrative about the future of humanity and what a trans-human society might even look like. It’s such a fantastic game!

I still break this out for nerve stapling every now and again ;-)

You son of a! I really like how there are so many viable strategies in the game. I personally love rushing to jets/coptors, or sometimes I'll just build defenses against water before I start nuking everyone.

Another favourite is doing Gaia with max capturing, those native lifeforms can be deadly.

My strategy in the originals were to create an ever expanding ring of units, with no gaps anywhere, but of course that no longer worked in the later versions.

Civ 2 is one of my all time favourites and I still play it every once in a while. The most recent interesting way to play it was to go for only coastal cities, get republic as soon as possible and go for maximizing science, money and population at the cost of production. Just buy all the improvements and military you need.

Never thought of this long/thin variation, care to elaborate a bit?

Right, I should said more, so now I have, as a reply to my comment. Thanks.

I should have said more - by making a very tall, thin cylinder world you have to fight your way past some civilizations before you get to those furthest from you, and they'll have developed quite a bit before you conront them, or even find out much about them. So there's a lot more suspense. The drawback to CIV back then seemed to me that often you could tell far too early that you were going to win (or lose) for sure; not much suspense. The early game of quick primitive development yielded to a middle game; but often the game was obviously over, for all practical purposes. Not so with a tall thin world. Lots of good wars at the end with modern armies and units. Great fun.

Wow, I just received a copy of Civilization for the Amiga in the post yesterday. I haven't played it since the early 1990s, I am looking forward to firing it up on the Amiga 1000 this weekend.

My favorite was Civ Net, because you could play multiplayer without hotseat. We used to play large games in one of the University library computer labs. Good times.

What does it mean to be 4x?

Game genre: “4X (abbreviation of Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate)”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X

4x games are empire building games, the four Xs are eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.

They're more complicated than other strategy games and have multiple win conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X

4X:

eXplore an unknown world map, typically procedurally generated, and look for good places to settle new cities.

eXpand your civilization by settling cities and building new public works to grow your economy.

eXploit your rival civilizations through shrewd diplomacy and trade.

eXterminate anyone who refuses to bend the knee, taking their cities for your own and capturing their technology and public works to improve your civilization even further.

Some more info about the awe-inspiring box art: https://ask.metafilter.com/347272/Who-did-the-box-art-for-Si...

Just a nerdy blog post about a childhood introduction to a video game.

“ Just a nerdy blog post”

Welcome to HN, you will find a lot of that here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com