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'm also not usually one to complain about DLC, but 5 also seems particularly grubby in that regard.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 started with Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, and Civ I, and kept playing them until recently. I love these games.
Civ:BE is an unfocused mess.
Ultimately, the dynamics of playing historical civilizations offers a lot more diversity and interest than a single sci-fi game.
- "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."
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).
CKII is really good as well, both are different dishes. I've dumped at least 500 h on each.
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.
> 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.
Master of Magic is a similarly awesome oldschool 4X game, and it, too, suffers from boneheaded balance problems.
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]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#16th.2C_1...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, humanity racks up a billion person-hours now every nine minutes, so in another, probably more meaningful way, it's not much at all.
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).
That's not really the same as releasing proper sequels, but good enough for me :)
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>
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.
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.
Anyone know how I can get Civ III on a Mac?
It's been "not available" here forever: http://www.aspyr.com/games/sid-meiers-civilization-iii-compl...
I've tried playing the Windows version via Parallels but it fails out during load.
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 :-)
web version: https://play.freeciv.org/
(There are fan-made patches available. Make sure to get them.)
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.
But Civilization 5 is an entirely different game with different rules (and hexagon grid).
Civilization II was easily the best game in the series. It's sad that Civ V, as pretty as it is, is so freaking horrible.
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.
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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.
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'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 main reason I currently play only 5/BE is their far superior graphics and interface. And no stacks of doom.
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.
Wishful thinking for Civ VI but there you go.
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.
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.
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.
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.
