Civilization is definitely one of Sid Meier’s masterpieces and surely one of the most famous games of all times. The game is far too complex to be reviewed in its entirety. For further explanations look into the very extensive help files and the Civilopedia which come with the game.
Your goal is to lead your people from Stone Age on through the centuries and become the most powerful civilization of the world. At the start, you only have one settler unit and must find a suitable place for your capital. Suitability depends on the characteristics of the several terrain types which produce different amounts of food, resources and trade. A food surplus increases population growth, resources are needed for producing city improvements and units and trade generates income and research. Terrains can have special resources like gold or deer and can be further improved by irrigation, mines and roads (later railroads). Terrain can also be changed; you can convert wood or swamps into grassland and vice versa.
In the cities, you can build city improvements like city walls, granaries or later on power plants and factories. You can also build various Wonders of the World which bring certain benefits for your people but only if you manage to build them before the other civilizations do. Producing the many different units lets you explore the surroundings, defend your cities and deal with other civilizations. Scattered around the map are native villages; on entering them, a random event occurs. Either you’re attacked by a horde of barbarians, or you find some gold or a new technology or even an advanced tribe which decides to join your empire and becomes one of your cities.
A very interesting and innovative aspect is technology advance. You start off with some random basic techs like pottery or bronze working. Step by step, you discover ever more advanced techs which let you go even further. For example to be able to research Automobile you must have knowledge of Combustion and Steel first. So planning is necessary for an effective research.
When you meet other civilizations, you have various options. You can agree to peaceful relations and trade techs or do it the hard way by demanding gold or techs or declare war. You can also find some allies which might help you in conflicts. 3 to 7 civilizations can participate in a game.
Another very interesting feature is the style of your government. At the beginning, you are a tyrant who reigns by despotism. You have total control over all aspects, but your people are not very effective. So after researching other government styles like monarchy or democracy you can make a revolution and change the government. Democracy is most effective but now you cannot start wars or break treaties whenever you want as your ministers won’t let you do that. So you have to consider what you want to do in the near future and choose your style of government accordingly.
The key to success is finding a good balance between expansion, building units and city improvements and researching the important techs first. There is more than one way to win this game: destroy all other civilizations, be the first to build and successfully launch a spaceship or survive until 2100AD where the game ends (counting the points, you can still continue to play, however). A word of warning: when you have reached the industrialization age, keep an eye on the pollution level. When you allow too much of it, you raise the temperature of the atmosphere which results in grave changes of the environment (more swamps and jungles, higher sea level).
The only little flaw I can find in this game is the combat system. Like in Empire, it’s a one-hit-thing. Losing units are destroyed immediately, there are no hit points or damage levels. This sometimes leads to strange results when your modern battleship is being defeated by an old fashioned sailing frigate.
But apart from that, Civilization is an absolute highlight which brought many innovative elements into the strategy genre. Additionally, the option to create a new map every time you play provides indefinite replayability. A game not to be missed, by no means!
Thoughts by NetDanzr (24 00 2006) – PC (DOS)
Without any doubt, Civilization is the greatest and most addictive game that ever graced a computer screen. Designed by Sid Meier, who at that time was already a household name among gamers, the game introduced the world to a new level of empire management: from settling whole continents, through researching new technologies, to building military units, city improvements and even wonders of the world. The game has spawned several sequels and copies, out of which only a single one (Alpha Centauri) comes close in the terms of gameplay and overall fun. Civilization has never left my hard drive, and probably never will, remaining the main reason why I still keep MS-DOS on a separate partition.
In Civilization, you play as a leader of a nation. At the beginning, after selecting the interface and world properties, you will be able to choose from one of fourteen nations to lead. There is not much difference between the nations, but the computer always selects the same opponents, so after a little practice you will figure out which nations it is easier to play the game with. After selecting one of the five difficulty levels, you will be dropped with a single settler somewhere in the world, and from then on it’s up to you.
Your first task is to establish a city. Each city will take advantage of the eight surrounding squares, and thus the placement is very important. Some terrains, such as mountains or deserts, offer very little in terms of food and production; others, such as grasslands are great for growing crops. Rivers add trade bonuses, as do roads, which you will be able to build later. For now, it is important to have a steady supply of food to see your population increase and a good supply of production (represented by shields for some reason), which will allow you to build city improvements and military units. Later in the game, you will need those production shields to support your units as well.
When you establish your first city, you will be prompted to select a technology to research. The rate at which you research will depend on your income and what a share of it you spend on research. As you discover new technologies, you will be able to build new city improvements and units. The city improvements can be divided into six categories: defense (barracks, city walls), city growth (granary, aquaduct), research (library, university), production (factory, power plant), happiness (temple, cathedral) and trade (marketplace, bank). Each improvement costs a certain amount of money to maintain, so you will need to keep a balanced budget. You will also be able to build unique structures, wonders of the world, which will give you certain advantages.
To make matters even more complicated, your people will be unhappy with some of your decisions, and you will have to keep them at least content. This is being achieved by some of the structures, or spend part of your income on luxuries. As you can see, your tax income will be divided into three categories: income, research and luxuries, and you will have to carefully balance all three.
Over time, you will establish other cities and improve the land around them. Special units will be able to irrigate some terrain squares, build mines on others ands build roads (and later railroads) almost everywhere. Other units, caravans, will be able to increase your income by establishing trade routes between different cities. Then there are the military units, ranging from militia to nuclear missiles. If you feel that playing a cloak-and-dagger game is more your style, you will have diplomats available, who are able to bribe enemy units, destroy city improvements and do other nasty tricks to your opponents.
All those units will become very important: sooner or later, you will run into other nations, with the same goal that you have: destroy all opponents or be the first to build a spaceship and colonize Alpha Centauri. From the first meeting on, you will be able to build diplomatic ties, declare war on each other, demand tribute, exchange technologies and more. The designers' ingenuity went as far as to allow you to learn much about the other civilization on your meetings: the number of people on the screen indicating the size of the civilization, and their appearance indicating the form of government. That’s right, you will be able to change your government as well. All forms of government have certain advantages and disadvantages, and depending on the stage of the game (and your technology) you will be able to choose which government to use.
All this sounds like a very complicated game, but thanks to the detailed manual (which set a new, unsurpassed standard for manuals) and the relatively slow introduction of more advanced game principles, learning the game is very easy. Mastering it is the hard part.
While the concept of the game is absolutely perfect, the technological aspect is a little weaker. I can say nothing bad about the interface. In current standards, the interface is rather bad, but in 1991, it was very simple, allowing the player to use a drop-down menu when he didn’t remember a certain shortcut. The graphics, too, are simple, but very well visible, allowing absolutely no confusion. In fact, I like them more than the flat and lifeless graphics in Civilization II. However, the game absolutely fails in the area of artificial intelligence. Not only the opponents are dumb and predictable, but higher difficulty levels simply make the game harder for you and not increase the intelligence of the opponents. The stupidity of computer-controlled nations is most apparent in diplomacy: they have no memory, allowing you to sneak-attack them and sign peace over and over again.
Still, despite these shortcomings, Civilization is the one game every self-respecting gamer should play. Even after all those years and several sequels, it remains highly playable, mainly because of the delicate balance that was achieved here, and never repeated again. The game is much more simplistic than its sequels, and it is this simplicity that makes it so easy to learn and so hard to master, and that allowed the designers to tightly control the balance throughout the entire game. The game has justifiably been named the best computer game of all time by many magazines, and fortunately is still sold. So what are you waiting for? Go and get it now.
Thoughts by Mr Creosote (05 00 2020) – Amiga (OCS)
I remember my first time of playing Civilization well. Sitting in front of the A500 hooked up to an already aging CRT TV sporting ten physical buttons to switch channels. Next to me, my best friend. The slow loading times and the virtually unskippable intro didn’t bother us in the slightest. Not being aware of version differences, the Amiga port annoyances typical for Microprose at the time, such as unreliable mouse controls, didn’t even occur to us, either.
We played a random map. Located on what some time later turned out to be a fairly small island, we founded our first city. Another one followed, but that one was unfortunately overrun and conquered by our first unfriendly encounter with another civilization when we were still in the middle of building our road connection from the capital. Swearing vengeance, we changed our capital production to horsemen. Many years and fierce battles later, we actually managed to overcome their defences again… but storming the city, intending to reclaim it, all we had actually conquered was ruins.
Sending our cavalry further, we finally located the enemy capital. Our armies failed to take it. The next centuries passed locked in a stalemate war between the two civilizations with neither able to gain the upper hand. Of course, strategic thinking and operations were limited. Our planning consisted of drafting as many horsemen as possible and as soon as one was ready, send it forth and hope for the best. Technological advances were severely limited due to most resources being pumped into military and subtleties such as the relevance of streets outside of pure transportation bonuses escaped us (obviously not owning a manual and not patient enough to read the excellent in-game Civilopedia)
My friend had to leave at one point. Spellbound, I played on. And then it happened!
So enthralled by this, I called my friend on our dial plate family phone. Meticulously, but probably totally unstructured telling him all that had occured. Starting with the huge event: lying a bit about how I had been this close to finally attain victory, the ships of a third civilization had arrived at our shores. Making short work of both our hardly developed nations. He couldn’t believe it: they had crossed the sea? This technology seemed unthinkable considering what our best scientists had been able to do. We agreed to try again the next day. The rest, as they say, is history.
Thirty years later, it may be hard to understand for those who didn’t experience it themselves, or even for those who don’t remember these emotions equally. Though what Civilization just so intuitively communicated was an unheard of sense of scale. This feeling of being part of a world simulation so wondrous that virtually anything could happen.
Of course, the game looked suspiciously like Railroad Tycoon, a game which we also loved at the time, but it had never sparked this sense of wonder. Mostly playing on the European map, there was hardly any real competition going on in that game, as all four companies could easily co-exist and be profitable. Also, we understood how a model railroad worked (having a large one in our renovated attic we used as a play room), so the rules of the game and its scope were totally transparent to us (even, erm…, without a manual).
Not so with Civilization. The player freedom of how to approach the task at hand was simply unheard of. There had been wargames before. There had been economy simulations before. There had even been the Sim City type building simulations before. Though each imposed a specific operational model to its player whereas Civilization seemed to just do away with it. Said task being none less than the survival and advancement of mankind. It doesn’t get any larger than this!
Nowadays, having methodically analysed all the underlying game mechanics and rules, understood and learned how to exploit them, the fascination is a fundamentally different one. It has turned into more of an admiration of the well-balanced combination of aspects (at least when not taking one of those mentioned exploitation shortcuts, which guarantee victory, but aren’t a lot of fun). Admiration how none of the mini games feels tacked on, how clean the overall design is. Admiration of how in spite of obviously springing from a cold war mindset clearly promoting “western” ideas of society and economy, it managed to keep all governmental models it includes worthwhile for their very own purposes.
Sure, it is easy in retrospect to point out all the things which some sequels did better. Though it is also easy to forget how many others tried and failed by simply destroying the balance, sometimes exhibiting fundamental misunderstandings of what had made the original game so great. Most importantly, though, it is always much easier to take something existing and improve on it. The original Civilization came out of nowhere. It showed us, how large computer games could be. How big developers could think. How the powerful technology of the day could enable such grand visions. All this, Civilization gave us. Something we always have to remember.
