I hate Civilization

Railroad Tycoon Deluxe >>> Civilization

http://www.alterentertainment.com/Images/mainheretics.gif

this thread belongs on ILE y/n

Most of the elements of Civ are probably handled better in other games, but what makes it great is the complete package. That said I don't play it so much lately, but what would you suggest as a better turn-based strategy game on a similar scale of geography and history?

in civ 4, they made all the religions mechanics fucking identical. every improvement is like lol gives more fucking bread for every sea tile.

Why can't my civilizations discover transfat and cocaine? The "great people" system is so limited! i hate this shit

I AM GOING TO BUILD A FORGE MY PRODUCTION IS BETTER YAY

I agree with all those things being shit but I still love the game, I don't know why. It's more epic than other games or something.

its a fun idea but civ4 is too big to justify it

I like how there are about 2 skill levels where it's easy to win and 6 or 7 where the computer is an absolute bastard.

I can win up to like the middle.

War is so tedious that it isn't even worth it.

Until a couple of nations that have been getting steadily more and more pissed off at you for not handing out free technology advances turn up on your border with gigantic armies.

I like that war is expensive and difficult to sustain, that seems fair enough, but they've erred too far in that direction and the lack of good diplomatic options makes it more or less inevitable at some point in a game. I moaned about this on the Civ 4 thread I think, I'd love to see a game with really deep diplomatic/political options.

I hate the fact that certain Civs(i.e. Spain) are complete warmongering bitches, who fuck up my attempts to race up the technology tree.

Jon do you like Alpha Centauri y/n

I'd never played Civ, and I thought I should, so I bought a cheap game-plus-expansions package a few months ago. Except I got confused about the numbering, and bought Civ 3 thinking that was the newest one. Got home, installed, realised my mistake. And thought hey, I should give it a go anyway. Then (for some reason...I don't normally do this) I started reading the manual, and got hugely bored within about 3 pages, so uninstalled it without even getting as far as the "start new game" button.

I never played AC

Also the combat system sucks

AC is great.

Also, never read the manuals.

Where the hell can I buy Civilization II? I've been wanting to play that game, literally, for years to see what all the fuss is about.

Amazon?

jon otm

this took over my life ages 15-20 but it doesn't make a lick of sense

europa universalis is better

civ2 and master of orion ii basically defined my early teen ears (esp. the music)

i have never met a cilivization game I thought was awesome
shit is pretty terrible guys

one time, years ago, my baby sister wanted to just play with me
but I was way deep in civ2 and I was like "sorry dude, I've gotta crush the sumerians"
she just cried and cried

yeah fuck a sumerian

Europe Universalis isn't turn-based tho is it? I am old and easily flustered by shit happening in real time.

Europe = Europa

it's technically rts but it goes at a snail's pace and you can pause it

ships/armies move at variable rates, which is the only 'rts'-y thing in the whole game really

Okay I will *coughcough*acquire*cough* a copy.

Fucking torrent stalled at 97.5 percent.

guys civ pwns wtf

the harder it gets, the more you have to micro-manage every little thing, the less fun it gets.

I like how they remove more fiddly shit with each game, but then they add in more, like religions and culture wars. Keep It Simple Stupid.

with III i just cannot beat it past the "monarch" difficulty setting. the top 3 hardest levels are just impossible.

I wish there were fewer city improvements but each of them was richer

i wish everything increased exponentially (economies, populations, movement, military effectiveness etc) as in history, not arithmetically. new york having 50k more people than babylon and armor working to beat phalanxes is some bullshit

i'd rather be playing galactic civilizations ii, or even football manager, to get my turn based strategy fixxx.

or jagged alliance.

I finally gave in and downloaded Civ IV last night (of steam). Started the tutorial and that thing just seemed to go on forever. I don't know how I'm ever going to be able to wrap my head around all that fiddly information. I got kind of fed up (cause it just kept going on and on and was boring as hell) and turned it off before even getting close to finishing the tutorial, and now the problem is - if I even want to finish that, it seems like I have to redo the whole thing again.

Buyer's remorse...

i knew this would be a tombot thread

???

What makes the clown smile? Schlitz.

I finally gave in and downloaded Civ IV last night (of steam). Started the tutorial and that thing just seemed to go on forever.

I borrowed it off a friend last week and had the same experience. For some reason I got hung up trying to build a road between my two cities and couldn't figure out what to do next, got bored. I'd rather play Carcassonne.

I may give it another shot.

someday

Surely they could come up with a fun way to teach you how to play the game - not a boring endless tutorial (unless playing the actual game is just more of that, which it may be)? I also found the computer animated Sid Meier head annoying and a little scary

Civ rools. it's compulsive like few other games once you get immersed. it would be weird to just start from scratch at this point though, without having played through the evolution of game concepts from Civ I, or Civ II at least, so i can maybe understand why it'd be difficult to get into as a first exposure. maybe worth actually going back to Civ II first.

NV is spot on about the difficulty levels on Civ IV, though, which are a charade. there doesn't seem to be a gradual increase in difficulty, just a switch from easy to pointlessly hard.

I haven't played a Civ since Alpha Centauri. That said, what are you crazy, it's one of the best games ever made!?? Then again I can sorta see how it would be overwhelming now to start it now, since they've just added more and more to every sequel, and it seems like diplomatic options haven't much improved since AC.

For all its flaws it's still a game like no other, and so much more addictive than any of the other build-a-civilization games I've tried. Maybe it's a case of you love the first one in this genre that you learn to play and can't be bothered to learn a different kind of game after that. I put Civ 2 in my top 5 on the ILX poll. There's a beautiful completeness to the way the Civ games' arc plays out that keeps me persevering even when the AI is a dick.

Civ IV has much more fogiving AI if you keep them sweet. No more arbitrary "I declare war on you because there are <100 turns left". Stay friendly with Civs more powerful than you, and piss on the weaker ones. Providing the stronger Civs don't have strong alliances/defensive pacts with your punching bags, they'll leave you well alone.

I've been playing a boatload of LAN games with a friend over the last couple of months. Much fun to be had in multiplayer, even if you keep the peace.

Doesn't staying friendly with more powerful civs often just mean dishing out free tech and money whenever they demand it tho?

sounds like ILX

on the tougher levels, if you're the top civ, or even top 3 on bigger games, the cpu will fuck you over with as much spite and ruthlessness as it ever did, so i don't know that i agree with g-kit entirely. but you definitely will get a more consistent, reasonable relationship with them if you're lower down the food chain, more so than with previous versions of the game.

I played tons of Civ 1 and 2, and loved getting lost for a weekend in them, probably still would. 3 had all this stuff that was in principle cool, like territory lines and requiring natural resources like oil to be within yours to build certain units. In principle that was cool, but in practice it just meant getting stalled out trying to acquire oil even though you're waaaaaaaay bigger/more advanced than the others. Maybe that's "realistic" but as a game it was boring. So I lost my Civ thing, and haven't bothered with 4 as it seems to have been more of the same. I'm excited about the upcoming console version, Civilization Revolution: I hope it will be dumber and less twiddly about production, unrest, etc: and just let me get tech advances and build big cities and crush the Aztecs.

requiring natural resources like oil

ruined the game :( but 4 is free of this sort of thing

I think instead of trying to slog my way thru the whole tutorial I'm going to see if I can convince my brother to come over for a few hours one of these weekends and teach me how to play. I know he has put a fair amount of time into the game. I definitely want to learn how to play one of these big type games and see how it goes.

ha

Where the hell can I buy Civilization II? I've been wanting to play that game, literally, for years to see what all the fuss is about.

-- Mr. Snrub, Tuesday, January 8, 2008 5:28 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Link

Amazon?

-- The Yellow Kid, Tuesday, January 8, 2008 6:31 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Link

Ha!

I liked natural resources because often times I would go to war to stop the enemy from even producing unit X by taking his city that had access to it.

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS is amazing. Everything from Civ I-III in one sub-$30 package. BUY THIS

and by I-III i mean I-IV. :O :O :O

I want a strategy/war game like this

A NEW ONE I MEAN

anyone?

rome total war!

The broad strategy part of R:TW isn't that great, I don't think, but the battles are a hell of a lot better so it's swings and roundabouts.

i actually dig the strategy game in RTW, ESPECIALLY the dynastic approach w/ randomly generated awesome/shitty leaders. REALLY REALLY COOL.

It sucks when you end up with a crew of in-bred mentalists who can't be trusted to govern a town tho, and it isn't even your fault.

^Story of my life

lol u just described ilx2
metazing on everybody so clever I hurt myself

I'll lob them up, you smash them back over the net eh?

I prefer Pirates

noodle vague you have to go make them get in wars and deal with scary cities and hang out with less sketchy leaders and shit, that way they get toughned up for reals! if they just sit around your capital and stagnate that is when they turn into fat lazy pedophiles with a penchant or asking their horses to shit on them at every given opportunity (or whatever brand of crazy they end up having).

Is xbox pirates fun

YES

xbox pirates is great, imo

Wow, $25! Question, is it better to buy that or to buy Civ IV for $15? I can't imagine acquiring a connoisseurship in all the different ones, so I guess what it comes down to is, is Civ IV the best Civ or do I want II or III?

lol paying for PC games

Civ IV is the purtiest.

But II or III have the most balanced gameplay.

I tried both Rome total war and Pirates and couldn't get through more than a half hour of either one. What kind of freaks have attention spans like this? I don't even have a long enough attention span for Sim City, though, so...

uhm, what version of Pirates? because the one I played was very simple

mongols just sacked my capitol

Not really feeling the DS version.

Jon was right, resources in 3 was great and added lots of strategic malice and hilarity.

Noodle is that after playing Civ Rev on another platform, or is this your first take on this? I have it on 360 and have ended up playing it a ton, and picked it up for DS too but haven't yet tried it out.

i liked the ds version a lot but it feels incomplete. kind of challop-y but III is my fav version. the only real flaw w/ it is the AI is completely broken and v. single-minded.

Only played it on DS. Don't know what I don't quite dig about it, something about the smallness of the screen and a lack of nerdiness maybe, it doesn't feel deep enough.

xpost yeah I think I might've liked 3 the most, I should get it again.

yeah I kinda dig the lack of depth, b/c it frees me up (psychologically) to take chances and go aggro rather than bunkering down as is my wont when I know the game is going to take 2 weeks to finish.

otoh just picked up Medieval War 2 Gold so I guess a new kind of depth awaits me

i'm playing II again now simply because i'm traveling and only have a laptop and its just too easy to game. despite my having just lost Washington i'm way ahead of almost everybody and i control all the wonders but two @ 1300 bc.

shit meant Medieval 2 Total War, you all know what I meant.

i need to get empire total war at some point. the other part of the reason that i'm playing civ II is that i'm jonesing for some tactical battle attack fun

of course i start playing civ and devolve into the same micro-mgmt trade and expansion style that i no works and have almost no units at all

has civ 2 been eroded from its position as 'the one classic example of this type of thing' yet? are the later versions generally rated above it?

i played civ 2 what seems like a 'lot' in high school but it seems like it takes some seriously epic playtimes to even think about developing a 'style', like multiple hundreds of hours

today i kind of wish it was a bit more guns-germs-and-steel-ish

like, you don't even HEAR about spain until your 352nd turn. and by your 354th you have been wiped out.

I like Civ Rev b/c it's so fast and so you can try out styles w/o a long grind.

Alpha Centauri 4 LIFE

YES, just reinstalled AC a few days ago

played civ 2 what seems like a 'lot' in high school but it seems like it takes some seriously epic playtimes to even think about developing a 'style', like multiple hundreds of hours

really? i would think it would take like a half dozen games above warlord @ most and you'd have at least a vague conception of what works for u what type of civ u like to create. i mean III asks u to do that b4 u have even started ~??~ '_'

i no wut u mean re: guns, germs & steel and i think that III and IV tried to do this, a little, both w/resources and map generation. like in III its relatively true that the stile of play u adopt should be dictated by the terrain your civ starts w/ what types of resources u have but i think most players will still lean towards certain methods. also the connection btw civ personality and starting location wasnt that strong (it was there but weaker than say diff lvl) so

I bought Galactic Civilisations II: Ultimate Edition last week, which is the shit if you are at all into 4X games. Civ II was my Civ-era, but the AI always sucked so bad. AI in GalCiv is great and the game is way more customisable if you want to simplify/streamline the gameplay. I bought Civ Rev a month or so ago for the DS but I haven't touched it yet.

I love Civilization and always have and always will!

As you should!

today i feel like finding a copy of civ ii and playing for hours and paying a bare minimum of attention to the outside world :|

Played it off and on for my entire 16 hour shift!

ok i want your job

ayo thomp ill play u a net game of civ II today if u want

i think real life is too much in the way today : / another time mb

today i bought civ iii on steam though

i noticed insofar as i have a 'style' it has changed: when i played civ ii a lot in hs i basically never, never attacked the other civs and tried to grab all the wonders and did caravan rushes to ensure that (which doesn't seem to be in iii?) - anyway today i kind of went 'ok i want all the sumerian cities, also all the russians'

after spending pretty much the entirety of the middle ages at war i own a whole continent and suddenly have 90% corruption rates under pretty much any govt. style

h8 u civ 3

civ 3 is like a broken civ 4 - i actually really like the corruption in 4, the way your over-expanded empire becomes a technological backwater feels historically right somehow.

in civ3 if you have more than 30 or so cities corruption will skyrocket. yes, this sucks.

civ 3 is the best imo ~ civ 4 isnt a v. deep game just a complex one and most of the best features of the game get sacrificed to a bunch of sliding scales ~~ theres a point where attempting to make a game "real" makes it less fun a game u no?

civ 2 strategies dont work v. well in civ 3 altho there are times and places. also i think u REALLY have to no what ure doing in order to play a democratic ostrich stlye game but i like that ur generally forced to become involved w/the world and typically its not wholly on your terms to easy to dictate even on the highest lvls in civ 2.

the ai in civ 3 is hella broken tho~ that more than anything breaks the game and limits potential strategies~ if only they couldve written a smart rather than just cheating ai then any trade/diplo start wouldnt completely fall apart above prince :/

oh and ilx user thomp basically up for any iteration of civ net battle ill even dosbox civ.net if u want altho i can break that game waaaaay too easy ^_^ just pm me ~ def be into it

I agree about what's being said about Civ 3. And it sucks because if you settle for a 30 city empire, then it's critical that your empire have all the resources you need, or else you won't be able to build tanks at the relevant time and then you're going down, despite your tech edge. If you lack that resource then you have to go war with shitty units, which is a tedious grind. Plus, if you have 30 cities only, the enemies will too, and so your end game will basically be grind war with all the other empires while you pull out one of the non-violent victories.

Civ:Rev, on the other hand, cuts out all the bullshit (and some of the good things too) and is totally fun for it.

nerd

lol

Last night I played Alpha Centauri, which I hadn't looked at since I was... 15? I was playing on Talent (the Prince equivalent). I remembered there was no corruption system, so I just built 324325 cities, squashed the nearest civ, looked at the score chart, and there was kind of no reason to play after that. It was just really striking how simple the algorithm was?

Anyway, it made me elevate Civ 4 even higher in my pantheon. It's the best game ever? Not my favourite or anything, but probably the best.

but... mind worms automatically puts AC above all the others!

i'm kidding, sorta - i think they should try the whole creating an original world/story/universe thing again... i never even bothered to pick up civ 3 or 4, it felt like the games were getting more and more needlessly complicated...

Yeah I mean, AC has a really delightful personality and later Civs have basically none - I'm not saying which I'd *rather* play? Just which is more of an achievement, I guess.

Also I think Civ 4 did something pretty unprecedented w/r/t difficulty - I dunno if deliberately or not? The difficulties in previous civs were a sliding scale, they allowed you to keep up the challenge/achievement ratio as you got better. #4 is much more like Nethack, Prince is the right level to play it on. Everything above is "now I will ascend with an unarmed human wanderer", everything below is the training game. I think the massive gap between warlord and prince really underlines that - if it's deliberate it's v brave.

played for the first time since Civ II tonight, set it way too easy (second or third difficulty level) and cruised, but it still took me 4.5 hours to win. I should have gone to war earlier, but I'm used to getting my ass kicked in strategy games when I decide to fight

The announcement of Civ 5 has got me thinking how I love Civ and have played every Civ so far and I've still never been any damn good at the thing (like, have never won on higher than second difficulty level bad) so maybe I should get off the Civ train this time round

that and because Civ 4 just didn't get the play the previous games had, being a grown-up with a 9-5 job is apparently not so compatible with staying up till 5am staring at a screen

is the iPhone version of Civ Rev any good?

I hate it. I have it and have spent like 5 minutes on it. I dont really know why I got it in the first place tho so Im biased.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/debut-trailer-civilization-v/62387

new teaser trailer. Features Keith David and a buncha new voices.

hexes! cool

http://gaygamer.net/2010/02/you_put_a_hex_on_me_civilizati.html
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/02/18/hex-sells-civilization-v/

i'll probably never play this tho

every iteration forces me to get a new computer :/ :/ :/

hexes are cool but tbh the cheapo early 90s tile units looken better than the shit in those scrn grabs

i cd go on and on abt this game. sadly.

it's an amazing game but the problems are so severe. esp if you know anything about history at all, every other thing is like yeah but, yeah but, no, uh ok. it's a very History Channel version of everything. the new details about hexes and indirect fire just make me think; ok how big is a damn hex? what's the scale here people? everything is a problem of scale -- ancient athens had about as many people in it as the office bulding i'm sittin in rite now. civ doesn't model historical change very well at all, it turns out.

but then, i've tried to play much more hard core crunchy sims like europa universalis and those are incomprehensible and fuckin hard too.

i remember when civ was virtually the only turn based strategy game that used octagons. i guess the virtual death of the genre and the success of catan makes them seem fresh again.

(octagonal movement, not octagons)

i haven't played a civ game with any real conviction since 3, but are you seriously salty about how it glosses over the historical procession of events? We're talking about the game where you can have Ghandhi command an imperialist army and eventually colonize space, right?

yes i am seriously salty about it!

tbh I never found the game's historical accuracy ever to be a problem considering the game lets you run a 5000 year empire with an immortal Gandhi as the leader. It's abstracted enough to be a fun game. The problem with Civ, to me, is that the end game always becomes a drag as you have manage dozens of cities and units and skirmishes, and the game progressively become less fun the further you get in until you're either racing for tech or trying to stomp out the last few holdout cities. But this might just be a problem inherent in the strategy and 4X genre, the climb is always more fun than the end.

I mean even one of my favorite games of all time, X-Com, has this problem with the last third of the game.

The problem I have with this game is the one everyone has had since the beginning-- level 2 is too easy and level 3 is too hard for a light game. Or is it 3 and 4?

re: scale, the more i think about it, a civ game should feel like katamari as history moves along

4 sum reason it always really bothered me that an ideal empire would only have one city every few thousand miles or w/e and nothing around it wld have more 9,999 ppl. didnt feel like a very good model for population distribution.

otoh its a p rad strategy game not a fukken science project so

I'm slightly addicted to the iphone version at the moment, except slightly addicted means "I've been playing 20 minutes a day on the train for the last 5 weeks and I'm just about halfway through my second game". ie it's not really a good fit for the platform, yet it's still compelling, somehow.

Isn't the facebook port out soon? More excited about that than I am about civ5.

I couldnt play the iphone version for more than 20 minutes period. Interface was way too clunky.

It's funny that Europa Universalis II is brought up, b/c I just started playing one of its spin-off games, Victoria: Empire Under the Sun, a few weeks ago. Similar game, only far more of an econ sim, and with more particular historical detail added in for flavor. It makes me want to play Victoria II when it comes out later this year.

One of my questions about Civ V is if they'll be able to get the entire presentation down as well as Civ IV did. The opening music, Leonard Nimoy narration, and each historical leader greeting you with a smile and a wave blew me away in terms of how great I enjoyed the production. Something about the great choice of tunes and how each leader was introduced really affected me.

also, firaxis posted this joek:

http://www.firaxis.com/community/bts_af10.php

2K Games Announces New Extreme Diplomacy Mode for Sid Meier's Civilization V

New combat mode enables world leaders to face off in death match

I am stoked for Victoria II.

Who needs noob shit like Civ when you got proper grand strategy games?

I tried Europa Universalis a few years ago. Whilst appreciating the idea of it in theory, in practice it was more like running a historical simulation that you got to contribute to every now and then rather than actual fun game. The incarnations of Civ I have played (Civ II, Civ III, Civ Rev) have always struck a good balance between depth and playability.

fuckin love europa universalis 3. Just started a game of Victoria today, really enjoy the colonisation scheme. Also you can gain prestige (kinda like victory points but also help on the world trade market and with diplomacy i think) from instituting social reforms making peaceful strategies viable (U+K in these kinda games). Game is micro-management hell tho.

euIII is a lot better than civ @ modeling specific historical events & ideas and at having game mechanics that reflect that but it doesnt have anything close 2 civ's scope or replayability. there are a lot (okay mb not that many) of games that do one part of what civ does better - combat, economics, politics, culture - but i cant think of any game that manages to combine so many factors into smthn as playable as any of the civ games.

or i mean yeah the civ model is a lot less robust but its a lot more flexible. i.e. its a better game

pretty much agree with this except endgame of civ is v. v. repetitive and not v. enjoyable as a game and EU3 endgame, fr example, is far more enjoyable.

I sunk billions of hours of my early teenage years into Civ1 and still regard it fondly but would never play it again - - - a couple of years back I dug into Civ2 for a while (feel like it was after talking about it on ILX but I can't find that now)... there are all sorts of fun mechanics to the game, but I just think I am not built for games where it takes hours and hours and you slowly realize you are not going to win but you have to see it out to the end, and then to start over again and try to do things differently and see how it works out...ugh... this is only tolerable in tabletop games with real people, where the social interaction and mind-against-mind stuff is satisfying in itself and success in the game isn't really the driving force.

Still love all the music and stuff though.

pre-load on steam. ayo!

I am so horrendously psyched for this.

I don't get why they decide to release it . . . on a Tuesday! I'm not going to start playing it till the weekend (cos it'll just eat up my time) but it'll be sitting there on my HD for a week looking all neglected and unloved. And I'm not taking a week off work to play a computer game.

manual available for download: http://www.civilization5.com/#/community/feature_manual

Can't play Civ 5 until we get a new puter :(

Can't play Civ 5 until they put out a Mac version :(

^^^ this times infinity

Clearly Sid Meier reads ILG cos it seems the UK release is on the 24th rather than the 21st, so I can;'t unlock it till Friday anyway. Careful what you wish for I guess . ..

Been playing the demo even though my graphics card isn't meant to be able to handle it and it seems ok so far, think I'm going to risk buying it.

can't get the demo to do so much as load, stops working and then that's it, nowt.

Looking at help forums it would seem that it's basically laughing at my clapped out old graphics card.

i ordered i new computer yesterday after trying the demo lol

yknow ending that sentence w/ "lol" really failed to make it any less heartbreaking or terrible

i guess i'm kinda close to upgrading to a civ 5/sc 2 ready machine myself
ugh

so awesome btw

My computer seems barely strong enough to run their website.

We do need a new laptop, but hmmmmm

so awesome btw

how have you found the combat? that's the thing im most interested in seeing full-scale although the strategic possibilities of city-states is p high up there too. also what civ(s) are playing as?

loved civ 2 and civ rev. civ 3 was ok but its flaws became glaring after much play. couldn't get into civ 4 -- too much going on at once, too complicated. would i like this one?

am playing as americans - first alphabetically, just gonna go thru the list and try each civ.
*the organic one-by-one addition of tiles to your cities/area of influence through culture or cash purchase is a great system and much better than how it's been done in the past (american civ bonus is manifest destiny (lol?) which makes tile acquisition cheaper, but obv i haven't tried another civ yet to compare).
*the social policy tree is a cool wrinkle that really gives culture generation a lot of substance.
*strategic resources being finite seems like a great idea, and i'm interested to see more of how the ai manages that (in this game, japs rushed thru the tech tree to get samurai real early but i guess they only had a few iron resources and they lost a couple samurai taking a city state buddy o' mine and when i retaliated i took out a couple other samurai and then they could only send a waves or archers after me as i turned half their empire into a puppet state.)
*speaking of puppet states, that is a also a cool addition.
*speaking of archers, the new ranged combat is great. the whole combat overall is a huge success. just being able to only have one military unit per tile takes the whole thing to the next level. city hitpoints and defence takes it to another level still, and gives a new and v welcome emphasis to siege units.
*i am really enjoying interacting with city states, and it feels like they will make the diplomatic victory option much more substantive. however, they chirp up a lot with requests and some people might get bugged by that maybe. not that much tho.
*since civ 2 they have obv been chopping away at the ease/benefits of city spamming and city conquest. i guess they have got where they want to go with that thru the happiness mechanic, and now they are going at it from the other end and giving positive reasons to choose to keep your empire small, the biggest of which is that the more cities you get, the harder a culture victory is. altho i my personal tendency is usually expansionist, this is another strong development imo.
*happiness is going to be maybe tougher to manage than ever, esp for a larger civ. there are a lot of options for generating it, but it gets swallowed up p quickly.
those are the things that have had the biggest impression on me so far. seriously tho, 10/10. abanana - there is a still a lot going on but the interface is streamlined nicely and all of the empire management stuff doesn't need to be as obtrusive as civ4. i can't imagine anyone who enjoyed civ 2 and civ rev not liking this.

nd now they are going at it from the other end and giving positive reasons to choose to keep your empire small, the biggest of which is that the more cities you get, the harder a culture victory is.

this sounds interesting, because in 4 and Rev my main strategy was usually to build tons and tons of cities to build up culture. how does building more cities make a culture victory more difficult in this version?

I still fuck around with freeciv even though it's so easy and predictable, or perhaps BECAUSE it's so easy and predictable.

in order to achieve a cultural victory you "spend" culture just as you would gold but on social policy 'improvements'. the requirements for achieving a cultural victory are fully exploring/unlocking 5 of the 10 social policy trees (the trees are things like 'liberty', 'piety', and 'commerce'). the social policy system takes the place of religion/governments in civ 5.

so basically if you spend your cities culture on expansion you won't be able to invest in the social policy tree & advance your culture that way.

also it appears as if a bunch of cultural benefits are self-reinforcing so it makes sense to stack multipliers. in some of the test plays one of the developers did really well with just three cities.

I've only played one full game of Civ 4 so far (on the 2nd to easiest level cos I want to "build up") but I though the religion system was pretty nice, since it gave you something to do to conquer the world besides build up tons of units that get obsolete so quickly.

i didnt mind religion but the developers argument (that it robbed diplomacy of much nuance by running everything through a simple binary 'are we the same religion y/n' matrix) is a good one. it really did end up having too much importance esp at the higher difficulty settings.

the culture vs expansion thing is explicit - the cost of unlocking social policies actually increases with every city in your civ. i actually focused pretty hard on culture production but now that i have 5 cities plus 7 puppet cities, i am falling behind a couple of the smaller civs that are also going all-out culture.

Yeah, I can see that---I mostly bunkered down w/ my own civ & didn't do much "evangelism"; but if you spread your religion to other civs I gather that eases diplomacy?

puppet cities sound rad

i actually focused pretty hard on culture production but now that i have 5 cities plus 7 puppet cities, i am falling behind a couple of the smaller civs that are also going all-out culture.

what social policies are you pursuing? really curious about how much these affect gameplay...

puppets cities basically count as a city in your civ except you can't direct what their citizens do or what the city produces. so i conquered cumae and had that as a puppet but it was surrounded by rich farmland and growing like a mofo and i suddenly relalized i was running out of happiness fast (happiness is now figured civ-wide). so i got an army or workers on the job and turned all those farms to trading posts. am bummed that you can only have one worker on one tile, so you can't have a gang of workers ruch build an improvement.

i started with liberty for expansion and piety for happiness/culture. i am now working on patronage as it boost your relationship with city states and i am now going for a dipolmatic victory.

Might have brought my spiffy work laptop home "to finish the information pack for the meeting on Tuesday"

so excited abt new civ. i wish steam would go quicker / my internet was better.

Euler it is somehow startling to me that you haven't played Civ 4!

I have played Civ 4! I only bought it earlier this year, though, & only played two games, one on the tutorial which was pretty short & small, & one on the next level up, which took about a week at maybe 2 hours a day. It was fun for a while b/c the techs & wonders were new, but then my empire got pretty big & since I'd decided not to aggro, I ended just tweaking little things & got bored. Then I bought Civ Rev for my iPod & played it a gazillion times & have yet to back to the big momma as it were.

i have played thru a couple games now and can reconfirm that this is really great. but there are a disappointing number of genuine bugs and exploits. nothing really game killing but annoying all the same. only a couple of patches away from a sturdy product tho. par for the course i guess nowadays. and i hope they do keep working on the AI because cpu civs will make some obviously dumb strategic choices with military units that could easily be ironed out. whatever algorithms they use for trading/negotiating with cpu civs is likewise obviously flawed but surely easily fixable. the worst experience so far has been going to the civ forums to check out the bugs i have encountered. like sinking into a swamp of the bored and the mentally deficient. worried about gazing too long into the abyss.

http://marketing.aspyr.com.s3.amazonaws.com/newsletters/Aspyr_November_2010/Thanksgiving_Newsletter_ONLINE.html

u_u

nice knowing you all...

you probably need some monster setup to run this thing, huh? thank heavens

yeah I need m0AR RAM (lol 1997) and get up to snow leopard.

anyone on ilg interested in doing a civfanatics style game of the month civ 1 game?

just reinstalled it on my computer and its p fun tbh

i am interested in doing a civfanatics style game of the month civ 4 game.

yeah i might be into that although civ 4 is kinda the worst

Civ Rev for iPad on sale today for the first time afaik

roughly half price

Not sure - could be persuaded Lamp!

Civ 4 no way, though.

omg u guys are so wrong civ iv is the best (okoksecond best after civ 3). how can u say otherwise???

i was never able to forgive civ 3 for capital distance production penalties.

^^^^ oh man that shit would fuck me up.

the city limit was worse (build more than 30 or so cities and you will start to LOSE production overall)

civ 3 is the best and u must deal

this game is fucking deadly for me because it's the evil intersection of history-nerd and game-nerd. if i take a break from playing and go to a party or something i can't pay attention to anyone because all i'm thinking about is MAYBE A COLONIAL WAR TO SEIZE SPAIN'S URANIUM RESERVES COULD BE WRAPPED UP QUICKLY

anyway i am a 4 person but that's mostly over 2 as i never really played 3.

yeah im pretty bad about fantasizing backstory to my civs as i play, as much is i like the 'natural wonders' or w/e one of the things that i want p badly is the ability to name terrain (sea of otash, an azure seven square expanse btw the bustling trade city of myrrah and the fortified city of dorter, was named after the famed pirate captain otash &c &c)

ummmm

anyway i was thinking civ o.g. would be fun since anyone can run it you can get it for free v v easily it requires no expansions to be playable and its more difficult than civ 2 + easier to play in small increments

i have copies of all of them ~around~ although civ 4 is currently uninstalled so im good for w/e but my vote wld be for the o.g. civ if anyone is interested...

i'm in for whatever, assuming i can get it to run on linux. civ4 does if you perform the dark rituals correctly so the other ones should be fine too.

what's the best way to get civ 1?

is freeciv a close enough clone?

civ v's on sale this weekend on steam, but i'm restraining myself

Link to Civ 1 from and abandonware site:

http://files.abandonia.com/download.php?game=Civilization&secure=d4353e6a45d009305c1ebef166669dc1&td=1311402487

difficult listening hour and Lamp's posts above have to be one of my favorite back-to-back sequences in recent ILX memory, bravo!

so is anyone in for this? i know a week of august has already gone by but we could still do a reasonable august gotm. i will upload a save file with a 4000 b.c. save if any1 is interested

what exactly is a 'civfanatics style game'

Been nerding out of this all day... http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_playing_the_same_game_of_civilization_ii/

Doh! Revived another thread with the same article... And yeah, nerding out on it here too.

Oh oops... I did a search but missed it.

of the three threads revived today for this article, this one has the best title. (i don't agree with it tho. maybe i would if it were on ILE instead of ILG.)

yeah, this is amazing.

Incidentally I had no idea the ice caps could melt in civ ii.

I tend to obsessively play the same scenarios over and over again in freeciv (most similar, probably, to civ 2) even though I know I can win them handily. I like to see just how handily I can win them, but even that is mostly luck by now as I've pretty much perfected my strategy.

my entire game plan relied on building the united nations so that i'd be eligible for secretary-general despite not being one of the two largest civs, because then i could use my painstakingly cultivated excellent diplomatic relations with everybody to turn them against my irl best friend (playing india) and get myself elected king of the world or whatever, but THREE CONSECUTIVE SPIES failed at 80 PERCENT PROBABILITY to sabotage the production of the u.n. in delhi, and then instead of a great engineer i got a great merchant so i couldn't rush my own, and now i'm pretty sure my only chance at victory is to invade delhi and seize the u.n. building (does just holding it make you eligible or do you have to build it? i actually don't know), but everyone's defensive-pacted with everyone else so that would probably cause a global thermonuclear war, which would be the first war in human history. when we fall we fall hard.

i wish we were playing rise of nations. when you're losing in that you can just launch a bunch of icbms and cause a nuclear winter out of spite.

sounds like a well balanced game!

yeah i love it when you hit the late game without a clear winner cuz you actually get to use all the fun stuff as it's intended instead of just dully blowing up longbowmen with your helicopter gunships. the corporations in beyond the sword are probably the platonic stop-adding-shit-to-civ addition, but i'm actually really into them; i'd be fucked at the moment if i didn't control SID'S SUSHI CO. one of the common complaints about religion in vanilla civ4 is that they're all identical (although surely you can see why they did this rather than like give islamic civs a military-expansion bonus) and the corporations fix this (even if the ones that generate food are probably unintentionally better than all the others). plus i like that you can aggressively expand them into enemy civs and suck up all the money. (and that, pace friedman, they have no diplomatic effect at all.)

things in civ that make no sense, though: WHY. CAN YOU NOT. SHIP FOOD. FROM ONE CITY TO ANOTHER. been playing a bunch of master of orion 2 lately and specialization in that makes so much more sense: you have agricultural planets and industrial planets, and the former feed the latter.

then when someone blockades an industrial planet it's a huge awesome crisis cuz the workers start starving en masse.

ya... you used to be able to transport food in CIV II or some crazy old version. rip

yes this game makes 0 sense

really nothing moves except armies! populations, commodities, "ideas" etc., all static.

that and the differences between eras are really minimal when they should be gigantic. ancient athens was, what 25k? that's the size of a suburb now, or a favela. the range and killing power of modern machines is many decimal points greater than spearmen.

I COULD GO ON

well money's global (and thus so is research and "espionage points") and resources are available in any city you connect to the trade network. (so you can do cool stuff like destroy the roads leading to a city you're besieging, so that they don't have copper or iron or oil or whatever it is they need to build the kind of units that would offer a defense.) but yeah that's it. the game acts like the population numbers refer to actual population ("the burgeoning greek empire now contains one million souls!") but since yes they clearly make no sense i just ignore them; they're game-numbers not sim-numbers. (you can also decide that at some point they start representing millions rather than thousands, or whatever.) in big macro ways i'm often surprised by how successful the sim is (considering all the micro-level compromises); by the midgame there are always legitimate (and complicated!) geopolitical reasons things are the way they are. considering that it's entirely procedurally-generated (unlike something like europa universalis which has one cribbing eye on real history the whole time) it's neat.

we should have a moo2 thread though. ERADICATE THE CAPTURED POPULATION OF THIS PLANET AT 1 MILLION A TURN? YES/NO

resources are available in any city you connect to the trade network.

sounds cool! i never played past 3 btw

what bugs me about the latest incarnation is that there's no inflation that goes towards trade. 30 turns of a luxury resource gets you $240 whether it's 200 bc or 2000 ad - even tho everything else is much more expensive that much later in the game.

ok, there's that and no science trading. i miss being able to gift gun powder to the tiny civ fighting a geopolitical foe!

Yeah, as I complained on the other thread, they really stripped out a lot that I like about civ with the latest one.

Civ games are fascist

― the people vs peer gynt (goole), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 12:08 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just saw this post in Mario was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me , made me realize this has actually been on my mind a lot lately. like how much i played this game as a kid, and how much I've, unrealizingly, had to un-learn so many of its tropes. many of which are standard-issue grand-narratives stuff (the teleology of technology, history as the history of wars and of material accumulation, eurocentric take on cultural achievements and 'wonders' etc., actually generally assuming that the narrative of europe is fundamentally the narrative of history even if it gets won by the zulus this time out - the zulus will progress from pottery to bach to stealth bombers).... and some of which may be unique to the experience of playing history as a game like this.

so getting back to fascism: the conceit of the game is that you somehow play the continuous leader of a civilization, forever, directing its actions and standing as the sort of personal body of the nation --- or something - and this doesn't change even though the civilization moves from monarchy to "democracy" - "democracy" proves to be a sham, you still make all the decisions exactly as you did before, but some economic and public-satisfaction calculations shift around. your goal is to crush all other nations and have your people love you, at whatever cost. "civilization," folks!

started a civ 2 game

adorable how Deomocracy = zero corruption + 'limits' on war

that'd be *actual* democracy rather than the US military-industrial oligarchy

thank's

#trenchant

President Tracer Hand of the Mixers would like to have a word with you

I'm waiting for Fred to show up

we are holding off on contacting fred until our stealth fighters can subdue his enclaves

i was thinking the other day how fanaticism was civ2's version of fascism -- and how if you are playing a democracy and a war starts, the best strategy is to switch to fanaticism during the war.

I really wanted to get Civ6 but my cruddy old 'HD Ready' TV overscans everything slightly and cuts off the edge of the game and there's no way to switch it off. So instead I got a game called Dawn Of Man where you take a village of prehistoric stone age people up through and into the Iron Age. Not sure what to make of it yet