The History of Civilization
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
Being that I was in 6th grade when Civ (DOS version) came out, and the rich kid down the street had it, I played for about 6 months before my parents bought me the actual game as a christmas present.
By that time I got a legit copy of the game I was a master of all things Civ... All things except the fact that you could fortify units INSIDE towns. Imagine me, positioning 8 units in an array around a town and having those units disappear every N turns due to getting the copy protection wrong.
Once I got to keep my units and I fortified one inside a town on accident, I turned into a Civ monster. Once CivNet came out I proceeded to crush all comers in my small town.
Good times.
There's an opening, where there are a few tried-and-true, well studied strategies, and the goal is to claim territory.
Then there's a mid-game, where all available land is claimed, and competing players start trying to steal territory from each other, and capturing the others pieces (or cities).
I can't seem to find a parallel in the end game though, it doesn't require nearly as much planning and cunning in Civ to finish of a wounded opponent as it is in chess.
The difference is that chess requires continued tactical execution to get there, while Civilization lets you sit back and get there on a superior economy.
So you are still a noob? :-) :-P
I'd always suspected that was the case. It's nice to hear an acknowledgement, and I'm happy Empire was an inspiration.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/26419/...
Is there anything comparable these days?
Sid Meier's career was built on producing computer-versions of classic boardgames.
What? No it wasn't. It was built on flight simulators and wargames. Look at the list of games he worked on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier#Games
Before 1991 (the year the first Civ came out), it's nearly all flight sims, with some original IP (Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, Covert Action, Sword of the Samurai) near the end of that run, as he began to grow away from his partner Bill Stealey's focus on flight sims into a designer in his own right.
Sword of the Samurai (haven't played it) looks like an adaptation of Samurai an Avalon Hill (actually bought from another game company whose name escapes me) which itself was essentially Kingmaker reskinned for feudal Japan. Civilization was clearly inspired by Civilization. Pirates! was -- as far as I know -- pretty original (and my favorite of the lot). Covert Action looks awful but I've never played it and hadn't heard of it before looking at the wikipedia list.
Don't say so :) . One of early books of Victor Pelevin describes "a problem" one avid player of F-19 had because he played too much.
Some players still remember that F-19 had an interesting "unreal" bug, which allowed to fly without fuel arbitrarily long (and quite slow). Upside down. It was possible to start playing the first mission (say, Russian North) ranking as lieutenant and land the first time in the highest possible rank with all imaginable awards. F-19 was, in a sense, interesting enough to be remembered.
> Sword of the Samurai (haven't played it) looks like an adaptation of Samurai an Avalon Hill
Actually, no; Sword is much more like Pirates!, in that it's essentially a collection of themed minigames, tied together by a strategic overlay. Covert Action has a similar design. The three of them are all variations on a theme, more similar to each other than to any external inspiration.
Sword and Covert Action are both available via GOG these days, should you want to confirm this.
It even had an ILS landing system at the airport!
> Sid Meier's legacy was built on producing computer-versions of classic boardgames
For a game that can take 8 hours, it's surprisingly easy to learn. The way the game is constructed, you can learn it as you play because very few game mechanics are needed at the start. As your civilizations progress, more game mechanics become relevant. I wish I was playing it now...
And you should!
Like me, he just wanted a fun train game, not a ruthless economic simulation and i think Railroads! has filled that niche well.
(It's not quite trains, but if you want a resource management game where you have to be careful, try the city builder Banished, built by a single developer)
The original article is from 2007, so I believe it predates Civ 5.
It's awesome to see such a good writeup.
Even for these so called "stripped down / dumbed down" versions of the games, "one more turn" was very much still in effect!
I'd love to buy Sid a beer some time.
Have there been any new turn-based 4X games in recent times? I remember looking for a 4X flash game in 2010 and coming up empty handed. I don't really have time to play that kind of game anyway, but those were good memories.
Its supposedly spiritual sequel to Alpha Centauri.
Then not turn-based, and not necessarily 4X, but the Paradox games like Crusader Kings 2 or Europa Universalis IV can be fun too.
If one is after a modern turn-based game I'd still recommend the new Civ and XCom games by Firaxis.
It was absolutely terrible, I got it and was crushed by how bad it was. It felt like a Colonization-themed Civ IV (which I guess is what it was), rather than a Colonization remake.
And that isn't to say it's a bad game when divorced from the failure to accept and reasonably present the historical context that Meier wanted to play in. It's a tremendous game. I still think Colonization is a more fun experience than Civ, and the Religion and Revolution mod for Civ4Col is absolutely fantastic. But the game cannot be divorced from the astonishingly shitty historical context. RaR also does a lot (not as much as it could, but a lot more than anything Meier or MicroProse or Firaxis ever did) to make you answer those questions, too, and is a much, much better game for it.
It's a bandaid over frigging slavery.
And you know it's indefensible, so let's not play dumb.
You are taking for granted that everyone here prefers the 20th-century Marx-Zinn (yes, politically correct) version of American history, and as a consequence of that, that Meier was deliberately trying to "lie" about that history (which is itself false). If you drop your problematic assumption, there's no way to get to "indefensible" and "play dumb" from this feature/bug you're describing.
As for your second paragraph: "Marx-Zinn" history? Dude! We have the receipts for people that done got bought and sold. Forget your attempts to cast history that happens to not glorify every white person ever in that "politically correct" light, these are primary sources. Are primary sources hissssssss socialist hissssssss too?
There is nothing "politically correct" about "the people you are making a game about systematically enslaved and exterminated people and you have a duty to not look the other way." That's not even "lefty", that's just being a basically functional human being. Does it make you upset that you are not entitled to rework history because it looks bad for Dead White People? That's a shame, but it's minimum viable humanity. I promise you that it's not that hard to meet that low, low bar.
We did it. It is our job to fairly and accurately represent our history. Guess what? The facts are clear as fucking day: We. Imported. Black. People. We. Enslaved. Natives. There is no dodge to that. There is no escaping that. There is only acknowledgement of it. This is not "narrative", we have the receipts.
And omitting it in a "historical" game in favor of heroification is unforgivable.
Look: We did not enslave anyone. Slavery is not among the things that we celebrate about the colonization of the new world. We celebrate the brave explorers who sailed off into the unknown, and the Pilgrims who left the safety of home to build a "city on a hill". We celebrate the poor and outcast who took the risk of building their own businesses and farms so they could pass on a better life to their posterity. We celebrate colonists who found out how to govern themselves as equals, and ultimately charted their own courses as free men. This is what the game was about.
Slave-based agriculture existed at that time, and it spread to the Americas, but it was not the "big idea" of colonization, it was not invented in that era and it was not characteristic of it. It's just a fact of human nature: in every time, in every place, there have always been Democrats.
I don't agree. Colonization as a game clearly shows there were different methods to colonize the new Land based on the nations' strategies. The French, for example, were rarely known to exterminate locals, on the contrary usually forged alliances and friendship with local populations. That's what you see as well in "The Last Mohican": french colons being very close to Indians, and there are many sources to confirm that point. So Colonization was not all done the Spanish way, and most of the deaths the locals endured came from viral infections spreading in non-immunized populations and certainly not slavery or battle. There were reports from Spaniards entering cities in south-America, expecting resistance but instead finding most of the people dying from infections.
So, sure, you're right, #NotAllColonizers--but seriously, do you think that the ability to play in that way obviates the duty to actually present history as it, like, was, and not as will make your purchasers feel comfy?
Art is hard. Come correct or don't come at all.
OK, I'll grant you that, but at the same time, massive slavery scale occurred mainly after 1600-1700 (see Wikipedia reference below) so while slave trade started earlier it was not prominent in the early colony days, and it was first led by Portuguese and Spanish before other nations opted in.
> It is estimated that more than half of the entire slave trade took place during the 18th century, with the British, Portuguese and French being the main carriers of nine out of ten slaves abducted from Africa.[44]
Certainly the game is not perfect on that aspect, but since it's an American game, it would probably be very sensitive to touch upon that subject in the first place. I can't even imagine how that would be sold there if slavery had been integrated.
The game ends in 1850 if you haven't completed the Revolutionary War before then. And Simon Bolivar is available as a "founding father". He was born in 1783. The 18th century is very much in play.
> Certainly the game is not perfect on that aspect, but since it's an American game, it would probably be very sensitive to touch upon that subject in the first place. I can't even imagine how that would be sold there if slavery had been integrated.
You are really underselling it. It's not "not perfect", it's bad. And I am an American, saying this. If honesty won't sell, fine. Don't make it. That's a better alternative than to whitewash history.
And, what do you mean by "correct" anyway. You mean the current view of what you deem to be correct - which may not be others viewpoint, and which probably was not the viewpoint of people in future or the past. And, anyway the only viewpoint that matter is that of the creator of the work.
So no sorry, I think you mean "if I did something about Colonization I would do it differently and the current work does not properly represent my viewpoint".
Not as pithy though.
This isn't merely disagreement on something that's opinion-based. This is ignoring factual things that happened. White guys rewriting history to make then look good is objectively bad. This is simply not that complex.
The last one I played was III, so it's been over 10 years, but they were always fun.
[0] Though I prefer the King's Bounty remake[1]
[1] Although 1C is excessive in its milking, Armored Princess + Crossworlds had a somewhat better balance and interesting new units wrt The Legend, but Warriors of the North got seriously long in the tooth, felt like "well we'll just reskin a few units and change the magic/rage balance and call it a day
Slow, real-time 4x strategy game with no randomness and lots of fun.
You should probably check out http://www.reddit.com/r/4xgaming
There are all sorts of scenarios available, and depending on your starting resources and chosen strategy the game can provide a vastly different feel. It's really good, I recommend it.
One big downside compared to traditional 4X games, though, is you're never really in control of anything. So if you really crave that sense of control that you get from having a well-organised empire and steamrolling over your opposition in the controlled environment of Civ-like games then you will want to go back to the traditional computer-based versions from time to time.
If you had spent some time playing Civilization, you would know that taxes allow your country to have things like roads, an army, public education, and many other things that put together create the conditions for you to play "business" :)
There are occasionally new 4X games that appear on Steam but I haven't found one I like yet.
Actually, maybe you shouldn't try Imperialism if you don't have a few days free. It is a dangerously addicting game, especially the second one.
I do think they can add more complexity in other areas hough.
It's controversial, but not without its benefits. Really depends on the type of gameplay you're going for, IMO. I enjoy a very diplomatic game of Civ4, for instance, and I try to squeeze every ounce of quasi-emergent diplomacy and even policy gameplay from what little I feel is there. But I realize I'm in the minority on this. Most Civ gamers seem to prefer a purely military game. In fairness to them, that's the clearest objective of the game. But I like that Civ allows you, albeit with a great deal of against-the-tide effort, to play a different type of game.
I never made the leap to Civ5, due to what I perceived as oversimplification, and a trend away from precisely those features I liked (but which everyone else seems to hate). So I can't really comment there.
Again, I'll have to take your word for the annoyance of this element in Civ5. In Civ4, the UN is the closest equivalent. I found it to be somewhat enjoyable, if inconsistent in its decision making. It can throw a real spoilerish element into the gameplay that I like in my games. For instance, if I'm over-relying on my nuclear arsenal as a source of military power, and the UN suddenly bans nukes, the playing field is leveled toward factions with bigger conventional forces and fewer nukes. I have to adjust accordingly, or else pray that the issue comes up again in another UN session and is reversed. I dig that.
It was weird when it came out, that people were lauding a hex map as perfect. In reality it adds very little (given diagonals, it's less freedom of movement). But the strangest thing was... why go for a cell structure at all? In an age where you can calculate real distances, it's a massive throwback. Civ games are about resource management - cell-based maps are not fundamental to this.
Not to mention that they really gouge for the most minor DLC. But llike you, I perceive myself in a minority - Civ 5 is one of the most-played games on Steam.
Would a game of chess be any better if it featured pixel-sized cells and real distances? Some games, especially turn-based, are more fun with a limited number of acceptable actions, because they require you to think in a certain way in order to win. In a game, you may end up weighing complex pros and cons of placing a city between two adjacent cells; that gameplay element would be a lot more hand-wavy with pixel-sized cells.
That said, Rise of Nations might be for you, if that is what you are looking for.
Keep in mind also that chess is an extremely abstract version of combat, whereas Civ is trying to emulate civilisations. Likewise, chess has six different kinds of pieces, all of which play very differently. Civ effectively has three: 'ranged unit', 'melee unit', and 'air unit', without much difference between ranged and melee. There simply isn't the scope for clever arrangement or movement of pieces like in chess - civ combat is more simplistic like checkers... a game which very few people enthuse about.
When we recognize patterns, like, when we throw a ball at a moving target, we don't consciously analyze things, but that doesn't make it "hand-wavy". With a more complex map, it might take longer to develop an "intuition" for it, but that doesn't mean there are not a lot of complex and somewhat precise "calculations" going on, it's just that we're not that aware of all of them.
It has been a joke since the original that dealing with the computer is like trying to barter with a schizophrenic, and sadly newer versions have only gotten a little better. AI's will still go from "I love you and want research agreements and luxury trades" to "I denounce you" and verge on war in the space of a turn.
Notably, the addition of the City-States was a big improvement, as they mostly respond logically, and their trend over time is to stabilize back to zero. They also provide you clearer guides on their emotional state and what actions will +/- it. If the main AI players were closer in the information they provided, and the options you had for interacting with them (ie, you could do things like destroy barbarians near them or gift them back their workers to increase your friendship) then the main AI might actually be reasonable to play with diplomatically.
The subpage with the video (feat. Sid Meier) is offline now, but the video itself isn't.