Freeciv players might enjoy http://longturn.org - Freeciv games where one turn takes a day. Games usually last half a year. We've been playing it this way for ten years now, since around 2004.
I started this comment trying to explain how Civ was not like chess at all, but concluded that the two have much in common.
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.
There is a parallel in the end game: Military advancements. Civilization lets you research new technology for significantly more effective military units, to ease the mop-up phase. The equivalent military advancement in chess is queening a pawn.
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.
Interesting story but I'm a bit offended by the description of the board game as "linear". Having played the boardgame extensively and then played the first couple of versions of the computer game to death, the inspiration was pretty obvious (the similarity between cards representing societal achievements and similar mechanics in the game is utterly striking; and the boardgame has a really clever trading game which the computer game in no way equals), and the idea that Meier didn't even play the boardgame until after designing the computer game seems to me to be disingenuous.
Sid Meier's career was built on producing computer-versions of classic boardgames.
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.
After reviewing the list, of which I've played over half, I think the stand-outs are Pirates! and Civilization. In case he reads this: Congratulations on a great career Sid, bringing fun, knowledge and appreciation of history to hundreds of millions of people around the world is a brilliant legacy. Keep up the good work!
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.
Just because you don't remember them doesn't mean that nobody does. The F-15 Strike Eagle series, for instance, was a huge success at the time, as was F-19 Stealth Fighter.
> 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.
Actually, I played F-19 and that's what I remember him most for. It was a lot of fun actually, you had to evade radar but it was a little tricky. I mean come on, how can you not love this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kCvSyJaYbc
If anyone gets the chance - have a go at the board game - it's brilliant! (Also make sure to play it with the Advanced Civilization supplement).
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...
I really enjoyed 4X games back in the genre's heyday. Not only Civilization, but also Colonization, Master of Magic and Master of Orion 1&2.
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.
You and I both. I have never played a Civ game, but have played other 4X games and this game has be absolutely itching to play it. Its been a while since I have anticipated a game release this much. Oct. 24th isn't too awful far though.
I can't recommend Distant Worlds enough, if you are looking for a 'Paradox game' in space (it's not produced by Paradox though). There is also Stardrive which is similar, though also much simpler.
While I absolutely love EU4 (and CK2 by the same dev), it is not a turn-based strategy game and its scale is different from the Civ-likes (not 4X either).
If one is after a modern turn-based game I'd still recommend the new Civ and XCom games by Firaxis.
EUIV is definitely a 4x. There's exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. Almost every game will have the latter three, and depending on which country you play, the first item can be either fundamental or irrelevant.
Colonization beats hand down Civilization for me, anytime. It's more realistic and coherent (the tech trees in civ feel completely artificial) and it's great fun to play as different nations. The manual itself was also a great read, teaching you many thing about how the actual colonization took place. One of the best games by Sid Meier.
There was a new version based on the Civ 4 engine (http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/colonization/) but it wasn't as good as the original. The main problem was that the game ended too soon. You'd only have three cities or so, and suddenly it would be time to hold your revolution. Realistic, perhaps, but frustrating when you want to build up the whole continent.
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.
There was a hysterical review of Civ IV: Colonization by Ben Fritz that was so over the top with political correctness it almost had me rolling on the floor laughing. Seems his blog has gone offline, though. Some excerpts here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/84721-Civilization...
"Political correctness"? Ben Fritz was completely correct to ask why people are celebrating the colonial era with entirely unchallenging entertainment products. Colonization as a historical event was absolutely horrific and to make a game, something just for entertainment, in it without acknowledging this is straight-up wrong. Meier consciously skated away from the fact that colonials enslaved and exterminated other human beings in order to sell a game, and fucking well should be faulted for it. I mean, for god's sake, if you have a mission in a settlement and you start shelling it with artillery the natives will flock to your mission for protection. Do you, like, not see how shitty (not to mention ahistorical) that is? Or is it just that it didn't happen to white people so it doesn't matter?
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.
Never saw the RaR mod, thanks for the tip. I don't remember the mission/artillery thing from the game, either, but why wouldn't it make sense to take cover in a sturdy building when cannonballs are falling on your village?
Because it converts them to be your units. It turns them into "Indian Convert" units that are agricultural producers but useless in manufacturing capacities.
No, conversion happens from establishing a mission and keeping peace with a native power for a long enough period of time. Conversion from attacking them? Let's be real here. It's a stand-in for European abuses from Haiti to Canada and all points between.
And you know it's indefensible, so let's not play dumb.
You're not describing the mechanic well enough to make that clear. You're saying that if you had a mission in an Indian village, and then you shelled the village with artillery, the Indians became converts all of a sudden? Or was it when another power attacked? The way you describe it it actually sounds like a bug or an exploit. If the attack had to come from another civ, maybe it represents "refugees" flocking to your civ?
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.
It could be a bug. Given their shitty treatment of People Who Aren't White in the sequel, too, I am comfortable not giving them the benefit of the doubt.
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.
Conventional history deals with things that are actually true, not with things that fit the narrative you prefer. There was no systematic extermination in American history (at least not until 1974). European settlers in the New World did not invent slavery, instead, they fought a great crusade to end it. There is a great deal to celebrate about the colonization of the new world and the creation of the new nations here. The narrative you are telling about American history was basically invented in the 20th century to fit the Marxist vision of history as perpetual war between oppressor and oppressed. We would not use the term "politically correct" to describe it if it were actually "correct".
Wow. Wow. Wow. Is that really your dodge? "Well, we didn't invent it!"
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.
You've thrown me for a loop here. I thought your complaint was that the game glorified oppression of the Indians, slavery, etc, and that we should all feel guilty for enjoying it. Instead, you seem to be saying that the game omits slavery, and that we should all feel guilty for playing a game that doesn't glorify it.
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.
> Meier consciously skated away from the fact that colonials enslaved and exterminated other human beings in order to sell a game,
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.
The French certainly did, you're right, and Colonization even namedrops the coureurs de bois. But (as far as I can tell) there is not a single use of the word "Africa" in the game. The only mention of "slavery" that I can find in the game--which I have installed, because aside from its super problematic presentation of history it's a really great game--is in the little Colonopedia blurb about Bartolome de las Casas...where they then elide that he advocated enslaving Africans instead. (And, certainly, he later recanted that position. So say that too! But paint the whole picture.)
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?
> But there is not a single use of the word "Africa" in the game.
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.
> 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.
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.
Uh actually if you're going to define it as 'Art' then it's entitled to take a "view point" which you may not thinks is correct, but which is intended to cause a reaction. Which you are having. There is no duty to be truthful - which is why it's "Art" and not a history book.
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".
You are asserting that doing your level best to ignore the worst offenses of American history is somehow valid.
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.
HoMM games are not 4X. They're great[0], but they're not like Civ at all.
[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
i gotta read posts more closely, the Space Empires games are really fun, you gotta play SE5, Malfador (the creator) took it into pretty cool looking 3D and the combat looks greats.
I ended up not like SEV for some reason I can't quite put my thumb on. On the flip side SEIV is a lightweight enough game I have it zipped up and stashed in my dropbox so I can download it on whatever and get to playing. It'll even run on pretty old hardware. I used to play it on my netbook quite happily.
The best 4X game I've ever played is called "business". It's incredibly deep and complex, never ceases to surprise me, has unbelievably versatile multi-player options, and requires constant creativity to come up with winning strategies. One of the great features of this game is that the points earned in-game can be spent in any shop in exchange for goods and services. For example, you could earn £5000 points in-game and, after paying tax (one of the more annoying features - who asked for that?) you can spend that at the Apple Store to buy a spanking new computer. How cool is that?
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.
"£5000 points in-game and, after paying tax (one of the more annoying features - who asked for that?)"
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" :)
In Civ IV though, it's possible to get enough great merchants and then run at 0% tax rate in some kind of scientific utopia, which I presume is where silicon valley libertarians got their ideas from.
Gal Civ (1 and 2) were pretty fun, and the AI is genuinely top notch; way better than typical 4X AI, in that it actually ran the different civilizations as having different interests, rather than all against you. Brad Wardell has garnered a lot of attention (not all of it good), but Stardock's stuff is generally pretty good.
Although it's not new now, you should definitely try the Frog City Imperialism series(they're on GOG). Very taut, economic-oriented 4X games, they're turn based and spiritually precede the Paradox games in how they move away from the wargame unit-movement and city-management trope in favor of mechanics around province boundaries, transit links, and centralized production sliders.
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.
same here, i think its probably one of the only franchises where i have played all of the sequels. playing Civ 5 a bit now until beyond earth comes out. Alpha Centauri was really fun and had some really cool features, i hope beyond earth really is a "spiritual successor" as they claim..
When playing the first Civ, my friends and I would start a game on one computer and then share the save file as a way to compete. Outside of MUDs and BBS games, I am trying to think of the first multiplayer game we played on token ring? Probably the Doom mod that let you do multi-player and run your own maps.
As someone who lived through those times as an avid gamer, and spent countless hours suffering from "one more turn" syndrome, I really enjoyed this piece. I wish I could tell clearly when it was written. As for this line: "Meier began coding Civilization on the IBM PC in early 1990, soon after MicroProse killed a sequel to Railroad Tycoon that he and Shelley had been working on," all I can do is /sob.
Sadly, they dumbed it down a lot - as someone who loved 3, Sid Meier's Railroads was a disappointment in that they handicapped the economics an d make route laying a lot "simpler", and not in a good way. I would kill for an updated version of RT 3.
I was in Hamburg earlier this year, visiting among other things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniatur_Wunderland and I thought to myself, wouldn't it fun to play with those train routes again? I bought the "Railroads!" again on Steam, and had a lot of fun for 20-30 hours. Then I read the Railroads! wiki page and found out Sid Meier wrote it exactly because he visited the same Wunderland 7 years before.
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)
Apparently their argument was "It's about the trains!", turning it into a 'model railroad simulator', which I found odd given that the most vocal fans of the series weren't train nerds, but 'resource strategy' fans.
I've never played A Train, a train sim by the Japanese developer Artdink, but it has its fans. I think it's more about the economics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-Train
It is interesting to hear them talk about the game getting complex. I think in the latest version they hit that wall with the world government. It is probably one of the most unfun and distracting features that Civ games have gotten.
I do think they can add more complexity in other areas hough.
"It is probably one of the most unfun and distracting features that Civ games have gotten."
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.
I agree with you in as far as it makes a great multiplayer element. In the vs the computer game it is a bit of a crapshoot though. Working with different world leaders is not something that is possible. You can't sit there and strategize over several votes. Futhermore the later in the game you are the more frequently they meet. By the information era they are meeting every 10 turns.
Agreed. Against my better judgment, though, I still try to hammer out "diplomacy," or some moderate semblance thereof, in my games against the AI. Mods are almost necessary in doing so, as the vanilla AI and rule set are optimized towards conquest. (Some AI personalities are more treacherous or aggressive than others, but virtually all of them will pursue military expansion over real diplomacy, provided the risk/reward calculations favor their odds.)
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.
I have very strong opinions on Civ 4 vs 5. Civ 4 is the kind of game that I'll install, then uninstall a week later after too many 3am or 4am nights. Civ 5 has the same 'just one turn'-ism, but it's not fun, which is weird. Any one city site is much the same as another - that feeling of finding an awsome site in Civ 4 is gone. I also miss the feeling of moving borders from 4 - the first owner of a hex has it permanently. You can have a massive city, but if a tiny village got the hex first... culture means nothing.
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.
> why go for a cell structure at all? In an age where you can calculate real distances, it's a massive throwback.
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.
Well, I already mentioned that the placement of cities is largely meaningless in Civ 5 anyway. Unless you're putting them right next to barren land, they're all pretty similar.
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.
> 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.
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.
I would extend that to say that Diplomacy is still probably one of the weakest features of Civ.
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.
> Meier was also a big fan of an early computer game called Empire, which combined Risk-like world domination with intricate city management. "At one point, [Meier] asked me to make a list of 10 things I would do to Empire to make it a better game," says Shelley. "That was some of his research on Civilization."
I'd always suspected that was the case. It's nice to hear an acknowledgement, and I'm happy Empire was an inspiration.
Speaking of Empire I've always loved this article about someone who was addicted to playing Empire and developed coding skills to process the email reports to win out:
Another interesting thing from Civilization was the copy protection. Every so often it would ask you to guess the correct symbol off page N of the manual. If you got it wrong, rather than end your game, it simply removed all of your military units.
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.
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