I hate 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?

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