I hate Civilization

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.

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