culture / Lazy Sunday / Reblogged

Lazy Sunday CXXIX: Civilization Series

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Yours portly is in the midst of his busy Christmas performance season, and wistfully dreams of blowing hours of his life conquering the world as various historical leaders.  I haven’t had much time for world conquering, but I’ve certainly written about the legendary Civilization games for years now.  Here are my posts about this beloved franchise:

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

7 thoughts on “Lazy Sunday CXXIX: Civilization Series”

  1. We have a few games to look forward to in 2024. A remake of Tomb Raider’s 1-3, Alone in the Dark, Little Nightmares 3 and best of all, the remake of Silent Hill 2. From what I gather, all will be released in the first 3 months of the year.

    As for the highly anticipated GTA6? I’ll wait for the reviews. I have some suspicions about their intent for this game.

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    • I have a real soft spot for Civ III. It’s the one I played most during my late-high-school-through-college years. A buddy of mine would play “hotseat” mode via e-mail: I’d play my turn, attach the file, and send it to him; he’d play his turn, attach the file, and send it to me. We did that for a year with one game. We’d then pick up with the latest save file when we’d get together at home (summers, Christmas, etc.) and play large chunks of the game at once.

      I _still_ remember the epic conclusion to that game. I was playing as the Dutch, and only managed to stay in the game because my friend (the Celts, I believe) had conquered a small island earlier in the game (Arabia was there). During his invasion of the island, he let me settle the western end of it. For context, this was a huge Pangea map, so the existence of this island was a miracle unto itself.

      The Sumerians had conquered massive amounts of the main continent, including my ancestral Dutch homeland. My buddy held most of the rest of the continent, with a few other civilizations maintaining substantial but smaller holdings. Sumeria was on track to win, but we realized my friend could win a diplomatic victory if we played the turns _exactly_ right and worked out certain deals with the other civilizations.

      After several reloads, he pulled it off. Meanwhile, Sumeria was actively bombarding my final island stronghold. As I recall, I was the last democracy in the game; my friend was a fascist government, and I believe Sumeria was, too. I can remember my little Riflemen units bravely holding off assaults from much more technologically advanced and more powerful Sumerian naval and land units. Had the game lasted much longer, I would have been eliminated entirely.

      It’s fun to dominate, but I’ve always loved those games where you’re scrapping by on some rocky no-man’s land, dreaming of a comeback. It wasn’t going to happen in that game, but it was fun roleplaying it. My buddy kept the choicest lands on the little Arabian island, but it was thrilling getting that lonely settler to the island unscathed and building on the ruins of a gutted Arabian town.

      I also remember my friend populating his capital with captured workers from other civilizations, so he had this cool, polyglot, cosmopolitan capital of different ethnic groups. That’s a function I wish Civ would return, as it added an interesting wrinkle to the game, and another bit of cool detail.

      Thanks for reading my wall-of-text. To my original point: I have a soft spot for Civ III!

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  3. Long ago I had a 486 DX 33 MHz white box machine bought circa 1992. It was the first PC I ever owned (although I had been working in computers for Digital/DEC for several years on Vaxen and PDP/11). Many computer games lived on that crude PC machine: Aces of the Pacific, Populous 1&2, XCom, but short XCom, Civilization got the most of the play time. There had been a game called Empire written by Walter Bright (written in Fortran of all things) that was easily available in the Late 70’s on a variety of hardware (VAX, Dec 10 and 20, Data General MV Eagle). It used . for water + for land on the 80×24 terminals of the period with letters (A for army, F for Fighter etc) for the units Uppercase for YOURS lowercase unfriendly. That ate hours of my time the last 2 years of college. When I got the PC I saw Civilization and had to have it. Sid Meier had IMMENSELY refined the explore, expand. exploit and exterminate (4X, why not 4E ?) type of game. Empire in it’s day was amazing. But comparing Empire to Civilization was like comparing a Clovis point to a well made steel spear point. I’ve had a variety of PC as well as game systems since then but had not come back to the Various Civs. I tried Civ VI on XBOX One, but 4X games really need the Keyboard/mouse interface. Recently picked up a new laptop and saw Civ VI on sale. Picked it up and it has taken over my gaming time. Currently duking it out in the classical era with Queen Victoria. My heavens she is a pain in the backside. I suspect I may not survive that. If not start again that is part of the fun/learning in a 4X game.

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    • It’s so cool seeing how these 4X/4E games have expanded (hey-oh!) over the years.

      Oh, dude, those first few matches of any new Civ game are so magical. You’re figuring it all out for the first time, and half of the fun is in making the mistakes.

      England is a pain to go up against. I much prefer playing as Victoria, rather than against her—ha!

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