I hate Civilization

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