I started playing civilization when I was 12 or 13 (Civilization 1), and still, to this day, the closest thing I have to meditation is playing Civ V.
I travel a decent amount, and one of my great joys is being on a plane without wifi but with inseat power (Civ V on the mac is a ridiculous power hog), and knowing that I've got X hours of civilization to play with no one to bother me.
My strategy isn't great, I have everything set to Random, and I just drop into whatever situation and work it. At the end of a flight, I close that scenario, and rarely pick it back up - I start a new one. And I feel relaxed and my mind is clear. It's amazing.
I really do not understand the appeal of 5, though clearly it has appeal as it has tons of players active on Steam. 4 was the pinnacle for me - exploring and finding "that amazing city site". 5 for me... all cities are 'balanced' to be identical, and don't even vary that much if you turn them off. Every game kinda plays out the same. I have to uninstall 4 because I see the dawn light appearing through the window. 5 just bores me.
I'm also not usually one to complain about DLC, but 5 also seems particularly grubby in that regard.
Indeed, I feel like a combination of the "amazing city sites" being already occupied by city-states as well as how terrain bonuses seemed weaker, especially production bonus terrain, made exploration in 5 less exciting.
The one unit per stack thing really shows it's flaws when you have lots of large civs fighting across a landmass though. The land can become 'clogged' with units to the point where it can be hard to move around properly.
Couple that with Civ V having possibly the worst AI of any Civ game to date and it's a recipe for frustration in many cases. The AI civs would never use naval units properly and it made a large portion of the game easily expoitable.
Civ 4 was the other extreme, where with many large civs you would end up with the 'stacks of doom' on a single tile containing dozens of units. Obviously this wasn't ideal either.
Some sort of unit stacking limit would have worked I think. Some mods exist that allow you to stack between 2-5 units on a single tile in Civ 5 but I'm not sure how well they work or how the paltry AI copes with the change.
Still, I always felt like stacking by combined arms would have been better, like a stack of 5 units limited to 2 inantry units, a cavalry or vehicle unit, a ranged unit and a siege weapon.
I always found it amusing that in 5, archers ('missile') had a longer range than any gunpowder longarm ('infantry'), from muskets to modern rifles. I understand the gameplay concept, but it's just stupid when some ye olde archers can hit your riflemen and they can't hit back. I actually think that the transposition of unit tactics onto the world map doesn't make good sense at all; it's an ersatz experience.
not sure if it's just because I'm older and less into gaming, but civ5 seems markedly less fun as a game than civ1 and civ2 were. I just couldn't get into it, and I used to spend entire nights on the older games.
It's not your age; tons of people don't like Civ V. The game has a serious problem when it comes to the marginal utility of individual moves. There's way, way more things to do in the game but most of those are obvious moves in the execution of your larger strategy. This is not a good recipe for fun!
Alpha Centauri was always my favourite game in the series but these days I find myself playing a lot of Master of Magic, a game with way more tactical and strategic variety than any of the Civ games.
Civ V completely redid movement. The prior games would allow you to stack units, so you'd end up with a 1-tile "stack of doom"; later-game fights would be reduced to these stacks of doom wearing each other out instead of tactical play. Additionally, making a unified front was difficult because of square tiles (a unit could move in 8 directions).
Civ V changed it so that only a single unit of a given type (military vs utility) could occupy a tile, and switched from a square grid to a hex grid. Individual moves may matter less, but the combat game benefitted greatly.
Yeah, I was really excited about the changes to movement and combat back when Civ V was first announced. After playing the game, my enthusiasm disappeared completely. The AI completely sucks at positioning its units correctly. The widespread simplifications to the economic model (global happiness) dumb down the city building to a large degree. The vast majority of the decisions you make in the game have now become dull, trite, obvious.
I feel the same way, and have been playing Civ since about 92.
One of the reasons (I think) that Civ 5 is not quite as much fun is the fact that the City no longer really has that sense of individuality.
In previous versions, the City was IT. Each one had its own production, trade, corruption, waste, polution, etc. It had personality! If a particular city had trouble, it could shut down or become extremely inefficient at production. The new game doesn't have this, only the aggregate of anything matters.
For me the game lost a bit of its personality, and that's why I like the older ones better.
I've played Civilization 1 and 2 and Alpha Centauri when I was a kid, kind of liked 3 and 4 even more, but they were not such a big deal for me anymore. Had a long pause I didn't play at all, and then picked up the fifth installment with the Brave New World DLC. And oh my, how good that is... I really recommend to get the game with that DLC, it adds very important aspects to the game, like religion, tourism, trade routes and the world congress. For the first time ever the cultural victory is super fun to play, no need to fight wars if you don't want to.
Now I have the Beyond Earth with Rising Tide waiting for me, but that game doesn't scale that nicely to my television... And oh, btw, Civilization 5 played with the Steam Controller comfortably from the sofa is a very nice experience.
I also don't really like 5 and I think 2 was by far the most balanced one and fun to play. SMAC had an amazing story and varied factions but the replayability just wasn't there for me.
Recently I've found Endless legend and that is a bit of cross between SMAC and Civ 5. Very pretty but a lot of depth too, different strategies possible, varied factions, you HAVE to make custom units (there are only 5 by default, each has ~6 slots for one of 20 pieces of equipment). The combat is completely fucked up though.
EDIT: oh yeah and another thing I kinda like about it is how there is no civilopedia or good tutorial so you have to figure stuff out
You know what I miss? Civilization: Call to Power. Its balance was always a little wobbly, but I liked dragging my civilization into the Diamond Age, building cities in space, bombarding the enemy from orbit and taking out their capitol with nanites.
I never was a Civ player, but through involvement in a different gaming community (Descent) I ended up as friends with the guy (Bob "Sirian" Thomas) who led the Civ IV alpha-testing effort. He noticed that they didn't have any inexperienced testers to look for the sorts of things that would make the game hard to understand for new players, so he asked me if I'd be willing to get involved.
In the middle of all of the balance tweaks the expert players were calling for, the devs took the time to listen to my newbie feedback along the lines of "every so often this chart showing political alliances pops up, but I have no idea how to trigger it intentionally" and they added easy-access buttons to the HUD for me. At one point I counted something like a dozen minor UI improvements that had come out of me saying "I don't understand what I'm doing". They, of course, didn't make any game-balance tweaks for me because I had no business even attempting to comment on game balance.
The fact that they knew not merely to listen, but what types of feedback to listen to from which testers, really made the game shine. They listened to experts when it came to strategy, and noobs when it came to discoverability, and all sorts of players when it came to general aesthetics and coolness. IMO a lot of game-design efforts could learn from that.
4 was by far the best 'classic' Civ experience. That being said, I think the one unit per tile change in Civ5 was needed and added a lot of strategy to actually fighting. My hope in Civ6 is that tiles are smaller and that cities and other features can take up multiple tiles.
I tried playing V. Probably spent 15 hours on it to make sure it was the game and not me. Finally decided that V and I just would never get along, and I went back to IV. Best of the series, imho.
I agree. I like 5, in all the ways that it's different- but I always feel like 5 has a long expanse of seemingly meaningless turns until all of a sudden things get good. Then it will have another long lull between interesting events.
Maybe in a way, the team finally got their model of Civilization true to real life? :)
The Brave New World expansion really fixed this. With the world congress, trading and collecting art, there are no more meaningless turns in the game. Definitely try it out.
I bought all the expansions in a Steam sale (I think it was like $5 or $15 for all of them, couldn't press buy fast enough). You're definitely right about BNW having a lot more to do between turns. I kind of forgot that World Congress was part of the expansion- I can't remember playing Civ 5 without it. It's one of my favorite parts of the game, though I do wish it was a little easier or possible to get other civs to form a voting bloc.
It's not that difficult. You just need to have something another civ wants, and trade them for their vote on an issue. Also, you can form your own voting bloc by allying city-states.
4 removed it's anchor to the real world. I wasn't playing on earth anymore, along the tapestry of human history and invention, against the great leaders of every epoch.
It's just some fantasy land composed of abstract references to the real world, and I find it hard to care.
That was my first impression, but I've actually found that I enjoy Civ 5 more. It's more dynamic and polished, and they've removed exactly these aspects of the game that I used to find annoying.
I felt that way before the Civ5 expansions. Bounced right off of it. With the expansions, though, I enjoy Civ5 quite a lot. It is emphatically not the same game as Civ4BTS, which I still play pretty regularly too, but it's a pretty decent spin on the formula as far as I'm concerned.
there's a lot of streamlining that happened, so it depends on why you played civ
If you played the older civs for the micromanagement aspects, then civ5 probably disappoints. I play Civ for the "macro" (I really enjoy watching my civ grow, and don't really do much in terms of strategising), and I enjoy Civ 5 a lot.
Are you my twin? Playing my pirated copy of Civ 1 in the basement at 12 or so most have occupied hundreds of hours of my childhood. These days Civ 5 on the Mac almost brings me back.
I still play Civ 1 every now and then. I just love the aesthetic of it. It doesn't feel dated to me gameplay wise at all. I attribute much of my knowledge of history as a kid from reading the Civilopedia.
From my perspective Civ III was the best of the series however. I always loved building massive empires and Civ III was great for that.
Special mention to Civ: Call To Power where you could build underwater and space cities in the super advanced age. That was fun! I wish there was more of that.
I wanted to see if anyone mentioned Call To Power. That Civ had great concepts, I liked the soft revolutions you could cause with lawyers and religion. Might have to fire it up again.
Fall from heaven mod was also an all time favorite. So much stuff.
Another nice thing in CtP was the videos you got of each tech when you finished researching it. Felt like a bigger accomplishment than today where you just get a historical quote.
I didn't have a computer that could play civ 1, so I had to go to a friendly family's house who kindly allowed me to come over and play because the dad was equally addicted to Civilization. Whole saturday afternoons would pass this way.
In the exact same boat, or plane I suppose. Every time a trans-oceanic trip is in order this is my go to time killer. I started playing Civ 1 back in the Amiga days and when I was young it took me a while to sort out what the game was all about - I'm glad I stuck with it thought, as over the years it has been an absolute joy to experience the new versions. I have to say, that on the Amiga the games did seem to take a lot longer, I suppose it is because once the game got sufficiently complex the time for the computer turns ended up ever longer - not so much an issue on modern laptops.
I still haven't really been able to make the jump from Civ 5 to Civ:BE. BE's civ and tech choices somehow manage to feel painfully samey and confusingly unorganized all at the same time.
I was super excited for it, but I couldn't get into the future tech tree.
It was hard to determine what tech to reasearch and if I needed "whatever" what tech to research, since I didn't have any historical reference to draw from.
Also one of the new victory conditions was difficult to keep track of and kept sneaking up on me multiple times.
Nobody else has mentioned this, but something Civ has taught me is how to appreciate realpolitik. Nothing makes it more clear than when you catch yourself having thoughts like:
- "Washington spawned too close for comfort; they're a threat to my peoples' long term security. Annihilate them first."
- "Hmm, the Mayans have some strategically valuable territory..."
- "Hey, the Persians are way back in the Renaissance, while I'm in the modern era, and they have luxuries I need. Let's send a few battleships over there."
If you're interested in realpolitik in games, I'd like to recommend the excellent Crusader Kings II game and its DLC. You play as a feudal ruler, and find your character plotting murders, marrying off daughters, and conspiring for claims to titles.
Then you'll end up trading those normal realpolitik thoughts for "I'll marry my heir off to my sister because she's a genius", "I'll just have these 5 children assassinated for their father's land". Choose your own poison.
More specifically, that means that you have other rulers under you who may be providing the bulk of your armies... rulers who may have designs on your throne, and their own allies. And even if they're theoretically loyal to you, your son may be at risk of being stabbed by a brother-in-law with designs on your kingdom - leaving your daughter in a very delicate situation only a few steps away from Game Over. Perhaps that will mean it's time to replace your wife and try for a new heir (good luck with the papal divorce politics, better have some poison ready in case that doesn't work).
My views about the Princes in the Tower[0] changed drastically after playing this game. Pretenders to the throne are a danger to the realm, even the very little ones.
I love Victoria 2, but it does feel a little more on rails than either CK2 or EU4. There tends to be a lot less really interesting ahistorical results than in the other two - invariably you end up with the USA, UK, Germany, France, Russia, and Japan, or possibly China if it managed to industrialize, as the superpowers.
It is remarkable how the win-or-lose outcome of the game changes the player's mindset. In the normal course of real events, I probably would never kill billions of people, but if I have 60% of the world population and I need 64% to win the game, it actually makes perfect sense to just nuke everybody, to bring down the denominator.
Better hope that if / when general intelligence AI arrives that there are isn't anything which optimizes for "bringing down the denominator" of the human population.
I'm confident that there will be plenty of AIs built which would like to optimize for that. (Why you would imagine them to be attached to systems capable of doing anything about it is another matter, though...)
You should totally try Europa Universalis IV for some realPolitik. "The Spanish empire's colonies are profiting from my policing in the caribbean sea, let's make a trade embargo to make them pay."
CKII is really good as well, both are different dishes. I've dumped at least 500 h on each.
And you can buy a converter DLC that takes a CKII save file that's reached the end of the timeline and convert it to a EU IV save file at the beginning of the timeline.
Civilization taught me (or tried to teach me) that there is no corruption whatsoever in Democracy... Stalin and Mao were the greatest leaders of their respective civilizations... United Nations is one of the world wonders... creating United Nations requires Communism... : )
I would love to see some of the realpolitik games mentioned here get tablet/mobile versions that keep the complexity that makes those games fun. Sadly, there's not much available if you want to go down that path (the 2012 XCOM and Civ Rev 2 are about it).
I highly prefer Colonization to all the Civilization episodes I have played. Colonization feels more focused, more tangible, and yet still manages to be a great management game with credible threats with multiple parties: natives trying to fight back for their land, other European powers trying to establish successful colonies on their own, and ultimately the royal power you will fight against to secure your Freedom. The tension gets really high, really quick. And there is no "shortcut" you can take to have a technological advance versus your enemies.
Completely agree. There is something massively satisfying about surrounding your colony with ploughed fields and roads into the mountains, maximising the resource gain. And finally recruiting a proper blacksmith to make tools, as opposed to the Firebrand Preacher I've had temping for him for ages.
Too bad they kind of missed the mark with the Civ 4-engined reboot.
The only really unbalanced part of the original was if you happened to land in a temperate area with lots of beavers, friendly Indians with the Fur Trapper training, and managed to roll Henry Hudson for the first Continental Congress member. Very quickly you could start churning out full stacks of furs and basically printing money that would allow you to buy specialists, cannon, ships and supplies.
Yeah the Civ4-reboot was awful. Or at least, it was just a recreation of the original without any addition while it could have been a great opportunity to build on it.
> The only really unbalanced part of the original was if you happened to land in a temperate area with lots of beavers
Sure - there are actually many ways to make money fast, but they also have a system that rebalances prices back in Europe when you sell too much of the same thing (price fall) - this forces you to diversify your production.
A lot of fantastic games from that age have these kinds of problems - the competitive balancing of modern online gaming didnt' exist back then, only the Rule of Cool.
Master of Magic is a similarly awesome oldschool 4X game, and it, too, suffers from boneheaded balance problems.
Yeah, and the manual was GREAT! It included a bunch of historical details about how the actual colonization of North America happened, it was a fascinating read and much more complete than anything I could find in pre-Internet era.
Colonization, as a game, is a lot of fun, has mechanically held up superbly over the last two decades, and is probably my favorite Civ-family game as well, but I have a beef with the way it actually presents itself as a piece of art. Eliding such things as, oh, Europeans enslaved a shit-ton of people and killed a lot of others[1] bothers me as a student of history and as somebody acutely aware of the ongoing consequences, both for Native Americans and African-Americans, that reverberate through American society to this day.
The Rise of Revolution mod for Civ4Col is a little better (it's also just really good in general, aside from being better about its recognition of marginalized people), but...there is a fundamental "ick" to colonizing other people's shit that I don't think this game properly grapples with. Because there's a moral issue to European colonization, and while I can see that being surfaced very well in a hypothetical game (I noodled on one for a while) I don't think either Colonization or Civ4Col even tries. And that's a real shame.
[1] - Yeah, you can go play the Spanish and knock over a bunch of native settlements. But you almost never will after you get to a certain level of play. Instead, you will find yourself near the Arawaks or whatever, who have their AI ramped up to turbo-aggressive, and suddenly you'll just have to roll out your army at them, it's not your fault, it's not your fault, it's not your fault...ew.
Sure, but it's not extremely relevant to the whole era covered by the game. From Wikipedia:
> 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 in Africa.[42] By the 1690s, the English were shipping the most slaves from West Africa.[43] They maintained this position during the 18th century, becoming the biggest shippers of slaves across the Atlantic.[44]
While slave trade started early, it was still minor in the early stage of colonies. But you are right, the game completely ignores slave trade even in the 18th century, while it technically should not be ignored. But it's an American game, and it would never have been published if it "featured" slave trade in its mechanics.
You might have noticed that I never actually said "slave trade". Because that's only a small part of it. Slavery in the America goes considerably beyond the triangle trade, etc., discussed in social studies classes. Consider the enslavement and exploitation of the Taino in Hispaniola in the sixteenth century, for example, or the literal thousands of enslaved Inca and the various tribes often collectively known as the Aztecs. I mean, what do you think "Indian convert" units really are?
I am not unsympathetic to the notion of addressing publishing concerns. I'm fully aware that the designers of the game were aware of this; if you read the (very good!) manual, there are nods there. But enslavement and exploitation of native peoples (as well, of course, as Africans) is literally-literally central to the story of European colonization of the Americas. It is inescapable. I tend to think, despite my nostalgic fondness for Colonization, that if you can't get a game published that's honest about this sort of thing, maybe you shouldn't make it at all. (This is why I abandoned my own attempt at a derivative of Colonization: because I couldn't make the mechanics work and still be honest and respectful towards the subject matter.)
They do sort of cover this in game, with the indentured servant class of colonist, as well as the convicts - which fits for the early stages of North American colonization, particularly the British angle that Colonization is mostly playing to. Not to mention the "converted" natives that you could obtain, for instance, by sacking their villages...
I'm not sure how you would introduce slavery into Colonization without making it a cliche. Slave colonists are twice as skilled at picking cotton, but can never produce liberty bells? That would go over real well.
Actually this has nothing to do with slavery. Indentured servants were a real thing back in the days, with poor people accepting to work for x years to pay for their passage to the New World, and after that they were usually granted their freedom (not 100% always the case, I know). Slaves were, for the most part, never able to gain their Freedom back, and were slaves for generations.
So indentured servants were really under a limited term contract, while slaves were slaves forever.
Oh, I'm well aware - my family tree traces back to an indentured servant that bailed on his master before his term was up and ran away from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to live in the wilds of Vermont.
And some of the first Africans were brought to the colonies under terms of indentured servitude, and became free the same as the poor whites after some years.
> They do sort of cover this in game, with the indentured servant class of colonist, as well as the convicts - which fits for the early stages of North American colonization, particularly the British angle that Colonization is mostly playing to.
For the British, sure. But the Spanish practiced human slavery pretty much from the jump. The Taino of Hispaniola, the various Mesoamerican tribes--this was a thing, and eliding it is, in my view, at best unethical. I fully understand why it would be done from a commercial standpoint, and I am not unsympathetic to the problems that involves. But sympathy for a game developer must be placed on the scales against empathy for the people that the game erases from its presentation of history.
> I'm not sure how you would introduce slavery into Colonization without making it a cliche.
Neither am I, as it happens. Religion and Revolution treats both African and native slaves similar to petty criminal units, which is unsatisfying too--but at least it acknowledges that they exist.
Don't get me wrong--Colonization is in my top ten games of all time. I've bought the game at least five times, for myself and other people, and Civ4Col was a day-one purchase for me (which was a mistake, at least until TAC and RoR came out). I wouldn't give them money if I thought this was an insurmountable ethical problem. But it is problematic (turns out that it's possible to really like a work and still feel this way!), and I think it's also important to acknowledge that and figure out how to be better.
And there's a core ethical question here: if something so fundamental to the problem cannot be fairly addressed because of the perception of market realities, is it better to make something that casts the marginalized people of history in not just a bad light but one that attests that they don't exist at all, than to not make it? Reasonable people can argue both sides of that dilemma; I'm honestly not sure where I stand. But it is always and emphatically worth thinking about how one treats people worse off than you.
I still recall being able to recount all of the 7 wonders, all of the large Greek city states, and all that other countless historical context that the developers packed into the game that gave me a slight leg up in middle school history class.
And of course I'll encourage my children to play someday. No childhood is complete without having to fight back Gandhi's unrelenting hordes of musketmen with stealth bombers.
It would be remiss to mention Civilization and Gandhi on a tech site without discussing why he was such a crazy warmonger.
In the original Civilization, Gandhi's "aggression" rating was set to 1 to make him a pacifist. Except that when a civilization adopted the Democracy form of government, this reduced the leader's aggression rating by 2. The ratings were unsigned, so this wrapped around and gave Gandhi an "aggression" rating of 255 once he adopted Democracy. Oopsie.
It's also worth pointing out that apparently in some later editions of the game they have reimplemented this bug as a joke. (Not a very good joke, IMO.)
I came perilously close to failing several university assignments thanks to an unhealthy obsession with original Civ. And I loved every minute of it.
I still play the newer versions now and then, but the original stands out as a paragon of game design. It was grid based, so unit movement was easy with keystrokes. That along with hot keys for everything meant that you could play a complete game without a mouse. This was particularly useful at keeping the endgame speedy. Something that I think is missing in later versions.
1B hours played. Think about your experience with a couple hundred hours, and then multiply that by a few million similar instances - how much productivity has been lost? Or how much history has been learned, friendships built, and strategy developed? Similarly, how many billions of hours have been spent browsing Facebook, for better or worse?
I think one of the most important ethical questions we can ask ourselves is how can we write great gaming, working, and social networking software that has a net positive effect on the world through the hours that are spent in it.
You have a fair point in regards to responsibility. I'm guessing that I think similiarly to you that these experiences are subjective?
One person's addiction with a 4x strategy game is another's gateway into a lifelong fascination with building complex information systems. One person's compulsive Facebook checking leading to depression is another's connection with family members when they're working overseas.
There is an ethical responsibility in creating technology, but there are many shades of grey in how people use it.
Think of this as many hours spent NOT learning homework doing rote memorization (or literally anything else unproductive), and I think you'll find it more palatable. Game playing, especially of the Civ variety, builds problem solving skills.
I know it isn't exactly the same - to be fair it's quite simplistic in many ways - but the fast-paced maps of Populous 2 (amiga) hit me in a very similar way. With 1,000 possible levels it's almost a form of mental solitaire. With all the clicking you can't exactly zone out completely (this is where Civ's keyboard driven model is quite nice). But since the maps only take around 10 minutes to play on average, there is this addicting sensation to play "just one more" to get to the next level and see what the new puzzle will be. Then you realize an hour has gone by. Then another.
My favorite thing about Civ is that its creator has kept control over it, and continues to evolve it. We'll probably be enjoying a new Civ in 2026. The charm is that it's the same game in many respects — parts evolve, but the core remains.
This seems unusual; I can point to several popular 90's games that peaked there and never recovered (Roller Coaster Tycoon, Age of Empires II, and arguably SimCity 4 if you include the early naughts). I wonder why; as a player, the Civ model seems preferable (you always have modern versions and new, but not heretical, variety).
Age of Empires 2 is actually alive (again). A modernised HD edition, a new add-on for it, and also a new add-on for Age of Mythology have been released on Steam in the last years.
That's not really the same as releasing proper sequels, but good enough for me :)
I waited for years to get Age of Empires 2 on digital distribution as my computer hasn't had a CD drive since... shoot, 2009? And right after it was released on Steam, my PC broke down and I bought a Mac. And AoE2 doesn't work on a Mac. Boo.
Yeah sadly. More game developers changed to "console first" or "mobile first". Streamlined casual gameplay pay to win / free to play and the lack of a precise input device (mouse) on consoles almost killed the former very popular PC strategy games segment.
Civ, SC and Anno barely survived that trend in some streamlined form or another. I am still playing old perls from Age of Empires, Roller Coaster Tycoon, SimCity, Command & Conquer, Empire Earth, Settler, Industry Giant, etc series. The PC strategy game era I am familar with was between 1990 and 2005. The good thing all software still works and 2D graphics of some titles is good enough and aged better than early 3D graphics. And C&C Generals, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, Age of Mythology and Age of Empires 3 still look very good, 12-15 years later.
<rant>It's like Crysis 1 from 2007 and GTA 4 from 2008 are still top notch, and can be compared with the best titles in 2015 like GTA 5 PC and AC Unity. No wonder with all the stagnation that highend GPU on 2k is running on just 25% load these days.</rant>
There are hopeful signs that this is starting to change. The 2012 XCOM title has a more console-friendly interface (it plays better with a controller) and has a great mobile port (the iOS version is mechanically identical to the PC game, and is only missing a few maps and graphical flair). Yes, that title is streamlined, but that streamlining sanded off the rougher edges of the 1990s games (especially in the tactical mode, where managing time units was a constant pain).
Sorry, but you wrote 180 degree opposite response to what I actually wrote.
The problem I see is a lack of strategy games, especiall real time strategy games that are not trying to clone Star Craft 2 (like 10 SciFi clones, boring!). And the casualization and streamlining of gameplay makes it pointless for real core PC game players. PC games of the 1990s and 2000s had a great PC UI, I don't want dumbed down UIs and gameplay of bad console ports. I want micro management and real time gameplay like in the games mentioned in my previous comment. (The same goes for console players who don't want to do micro management of single small units with a controller, that's why console strategy games aren't very popular and have different gameplay.)
There's a difference between streamlining useless micromanagement and removing gameplay mechanics.
To use XCOM as an example:
The 1994 game featured a time unit stat. You would have to measure out, manually, the number of tiles you would move past, multiply that by four (the amount of TU moving one tile would take), add two if you were kneeling at the start of the turn, subtract two from the available total if you wanted to kneel at the end of the turn, and subtract from the available total the number of TU necessary for the number of shots (or reaction shots) you wanted to take. On top of that, there were three different shot types (an aimed shot that would take up almost all TUs, an auto shot that would take up about half of the available TUs, and a snap shot that'd only take up about a quarter but also maxed out at a 20% chance to hit, making it mostly useless). This process and complexity was not fun, especially since the UI didn't make it easy to count the tiles you'd be moving.
The 2012 removed TU and replaced it with a few systems. For moving, you have a pair of lines that marked a move or a dash. A basic move allows for a shot (either on-command or as a reaction), while the dash would extend range (and could be coupled with a shot based on a class-specific ability). A single character move takes seconds instead of minutes, regardless of the platform. It took an overly-complex mechanic, simplified it, and made it more fun.
Civ 4 vs Civ Revolution. Civ Rev combat is simplified in a bad way -- it's build a giant stack of combined "army" units and whittle away at your opponent, with combat resolved by die rolls and modifiers rather than unit attributes.
It's worth noting that the new XCOM was developed by creating a board game; measuring distance is common in tabletop war games (think Warhammer and its ilk).
In my mind, it's a suitable like-for-like replacement of TUs (you still have to balance movement, exposing the map, etc., with firepower) with an implementation that requires less fiddling with the UI.
Partly because it's difficult to make them work well on console, but mostly it's just down to numbers.
The article mentions that Civ has sold over 30 million copies over the 25yr life of the franchise, whereas some thing like Call of Duty sells 20+ million every year.
When big games publishers look at that they won't even bother commisioning a strategy game. That's why it's only independent companies like Firaxis and Paradox (who are their own publisher) making these games.
Depends. There are some really good STrategy games out there. Endless Space/Endless Legend, the Wargame-Series and the Total War titles. Still waiting for Empire II, though.
I think computing power and graphics simply got to a level where the temptation is strong to invest lots of resources on polish or "scaling up" rather than refining game mechanics.
Many other types of games have suffered similarly when upgrading graphics etc. allowed a lot of apparent quick wins. After all, the graphics and superficial effects are much more immediately visible.
There has been an uptick in large scale RTS lately. Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Ashes of the Singularity, Planetary Annihilation, Grey Goo to name a few. They don't gather the big attention like AAA console games but they are still coming out. And of course there are the Pandora Interactive games that are always great.
Check out the podcast "Three Moves Ahead" it focuses 100% on strategy games. I think there are amazing games out there but they are from independent studios. Endless Legend is the big one but I also love Conquest of Elysium 3 (Forgive me a 'Roguelike' 4X game).
Starcraft seems to be going strong, Legacy of the Void sold 1M copies the first day, even though the advertising wasn't particularly noticeable (Fallout 4 launched at the same time).
Yes, but it's only Paradox recently. There used to be dozens of big publishers of Strategy games before (SSI for example) as well as many minor ones. The genre is clearly verging extinction apart from the big ones remaining.
Have you tried it with Wine? Wineskin (http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/) lets you package Wine installs as self-contained Mac apps, which takes most of the hassle out of it.
But didnt that article seem to stop all of a sudden? I checked twice on my phone to see if i missed a more button.
Didnt civ 4 get an award for audio?(and i loved the music on 4, was so disappointed with 5s audio), the article left me with a , meh, what about. . . ! for so many things.
Being only 32 i would imagine a great article to show me things i didnt know.
Sigh. The temptation to play more right now is strong, but i need to get this work done :-)
Yes! And get the Caster of Magic fan-made patch[0]. It fixes a ton of bugs and rebalances the game in some dramatic ways. The author has had to severely tone down the bonuses the AI gets at higher difficulty levels and it still feels way more difficult than the original game! I've got several of my friends hooked on this new version, we just can't seem to get enough!
From the description, it's a pretty severe revamp of the game. Do you think it is justified? Also, I wonder, how did he go about improving the AI: it's a closed source game, after all.
After playing a lot of it, the answer is: totally! The original game has some pretty severe balance problems: tons of spells are so underpowered that you never cast them and generally avoid researching them. Most of the units in the original game have so much resistance that nearly all of the unit curse spells have little or no effect on them. The disparity between the realms of magic was also way too high on the original game.
Also, I wonder, how did he go about improving the AI
With a hex editor. A bunch of the AI code in the original game is decently well written. The problem is that the game has tables of hard-coded priorities for things like spells, units, buffs, etc. that are way out of whack. His detailed changelogs go over the hundreds of adjustments he's made to these priority values.
He also just fixed a whole bunch of straight bugs with the AI. Some examples: it would cast spells without a valid target (wasting mana and spellcasting skill), build and disband units repeatedly, miscalculate combat odds and then carry out an attack that had no chance of succeeding, etc.
Thank you for this! I love MoM but I'm constantly saddened by the crashing bugs, the units with negative hit points, and so on. I'll have to try it out!
Since we're doing alternatives for Civ-lovers, I really, really enjoyed Galactic Civilizations II. It had the right mix of massive scale, diverse strategy, politics, and an interesting combat mechanic with user-designed units. Endgame is sometimes a bit weak, when it's obvious you've won and have to grind through a multi-hour campaign of genocide, but it's the only game that's come close to that feeling of depth and complexity I got as a teenager from the Civ series.
I tried to like Galactic Civilization II, but in the end, I came back to the first MoO. For example, I don't care enough about micro-management to build individual things on my planets. Give me the sliders. Also, MoO's research system is still without equal: each playthrough different technologies are available (for each faction, and thus for the whole galaxy) changing the character of the game.
A couple of years ago I got the Civ bug and couldn't get any of the official versions running reliably under Wine, so I tried playing FreeCiv for a bit.
Man, that AI. In Civ 1, on the lower difficulties I could happily defend myself and expand my borders and explore the world. FreeCiv doesn't exactly have a "difficulty" setting—it's got like twelve pages of buttons and sliders—but on the default difficulty it seemed like I always spawned next to two or three other civs that would near-immediately grind me to paste.
I really, really wanted to like FreeCiv, but I don't think it likes me.
Should be mentioned that FreeCIV is roughly equivalent in rules to Civilization 2. Which is perfectly fine since some afficionados consider that to be the best installment.
But Civilization 5 is an entirely different game with different rules (and hexagon grid).
My father still plays civ 1. His windows 94 broke down a number of years ago. He was so sad about not having civ 1 so I set the game up for him in dosbox.
Yes, but we're talking about Civ 1. Civ 1 is also much simpler than the modern games. Revolutions I thought was a good distilling of the Civ mechanics.
Let me guess, II was the first you played? Everybody has a special attachment to the first one they got addicted too.
In my opinion II was the worst of the five. It was basically the same as the first with more of everything. More techs, more unit types et cetera. Didn't really add anything to the game except make it longer. It meant you couldn't finish a game in a single sitting which really lessened the appeal to me.
Starting with III they started added more dimensions like religion and culture. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't but I appreciated exploring how strategies changed.
Edit: did a really poor job of reading your post or else you edited it. Oh well, just pretend my comment stands alone, please.
Yea, Civ1 was the first I played. I like Civ2 for most of the reasons you dislike it -- They took the original, updated the graphics, made some modest improvements/additions, but didn't mess with the fundamentals of the game :)
One of the greatest games of all time for sure. It's a pity that they also dropped the ball on a decent mobile version too - seems like the medium could lend itself well to a well designed turn based strategy.
Civ V with all the DLC is actually quite well rounded in my opinion. If you haven't tried the Complete version, give it a shot. It's not the same for sure, especially the combat. Maybe I'm just used to variation because the first Civ game I really got into was Call to Power, then followed by III and IV.
Lots of similar BBS games, like some versions of Empire for example [1], supported "play by mail" in various forms so they could be played on custom clients offline followed by uploading the moves.
I haven't been able to kick the Civ habit completely, but I indulge much less frequently then I did back in college.
I have told my coworkers though, if I come into work in the morning and look red-eyed and tired, its probably not because I was up late drinking last night. Its because I made the terrible decision to fire up a game of Civ at 9pm.
One of the greatest games of all time - recently added windows 10, bootcamp, virtualbox... just to be able to re-enjoy the original classic version again. Future versions don't do justice to the original.
I think Civ.Net was the first game I played on the internet against someone I didn't already knew. Could have been early 1996.
It wasn't the best gaming experience though. Each turn took like forever (well, minutes), after a few hours we had to pause the game and agree on when to continue the next day.
Still, finding an opponent "on demand" was something that did hint about what was to come later.
(well, there were BBS "door games" earlier, but not really "real time" in the same way)
I like how so many of the posts in this thread are "[this one] was the best!", but I'm pretty sure I've seen all 5 of the main games held up and possibly one about Alpha Centauri too.
I'm sure when Civ 6 comes out we'll have people complaining because it's not like 5 or 4 or whichever one was their favorite, but I like that they change every time. If I wanted to buy a new game every year that was the same as the previous one, I'd be playing Madden.
The Civ series has always been on my radar as they seem to be quite interesting games. I remember going through the tutorials of either 4 or 5 but I never really got hooked. Not for a lack of trying, but I just didn't know what to do in the games. I always felt like I needed more guidance or something. Are there guides out there to help learn how to play these games? I might try 5 again after reading this!
Count me in as another person who was hopelessly addicted as a kid. I remember one summer in middle school I would hit the power button on my PC and play this game until dinner. What's different about this game was that I would play it and not feel bad that I spent so much time doing it. Few games are like that for me today. This has to be one of the best dynamic puzzle or strategy games of all time.
Civ is hella fun but it doesn't scale well - massive games become untenable due to app slowness and memory footprint.
I think this is in part due to Civ's design of each player gets all their moves consecutively, rather than in parallel. Although it would change gameplay Civ could take advantage of multi cpu by either staging decision trees based on likely actions taken by the player and other civilizations or creating multiple rounds of actions in each turn which are executed in parallel.
This would have the added advantage - if "they" chose to code it this way - for hardcore civ players to offload compute to AWS or other services. I would love to crank up a world domination Civ game with 50+ entities that doesn't take minutes per turn.
It's really not the same. Research, city management, and combat are nowhere near the level of complexity a Civ game really needs to shine.
Combat boils down to Civ 4-era "stacks of doom", only after the early game you need to build 3 of every unit to combine them into an army of that unit. From there, it's building the biggest stack of doom and ranking up units the highest.
Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri are still the best balance of simplicity vs fussiness in my opinion. I like Civ 5 quite a lot but there's a lot of fussing about with the resources like horses or oil and there are a lot of edge-case city improvements.
Given the amount of fussing required to get the most of Supply Crawlers in SMAC, I'm surprised to hear that viewpoint.
Nevertheless, the scope of SMAC's vision continues to inspire: https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/ is analysing the canon and implications from the various quotes and project videos.
You're right that the fussiness is there with supply crawlers and some of the terraforming options, but they can be ignored.
Civ 2 is pretty much perfect. Each terraform has 1 or 2 upgrades (road/railroad, irrigation/farmland, etc) and each city improvement serves an exact purpose with no "filler" improvements.
They take some manual intervention, but even at high difficulty level you don't really need to use them.
What made SMAC great was how many different viable strategies there were (not that they were as well balanced as those in later Civ iterations). It was great fun to mess with other factions just by modifying the terrain and sea level.
I travel a decent amount, and one of my great joys is being on a plane without wifi but with inseat power (Civ V on the mac is a ridiculous power hog), and knowing that I've got X hours of civilization to play with no one to bother me.
My strategy isn't great, I have everything set to Random, and I just drop into whatever situation and work it. At the end of a flight, I close that scenario, and rarely pick it back up - I start a new one. And I feel relaxed and my mind is clear. It's amazing.