Games of Yore: Civilization

Sometimes I indulge in a few reminiscences of the games we old geezers played way back in the last millennium. This time it is: Civilization!

Probably the most famous and one of the longest-running and successful games series in the PC world, Civilization “just” released it’s sixt part, the most successful game of 2016 on the steam platform.
The inspiration for the computer game came from both the board games Empire and the game with the same name Civilization

Leading a small tribe of stone-age know-nothings to be the biggest and greatest nation in the world – that is Civilization. This concept has fascinated millions of players since the start and I am not the only one who recognized “shit, I have to get up early” at around 2 a.m. This is true since the first game of 1991!

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Founding towns, building units and buildings with different bonuses, terrain improvements... weighting which is the most important at that time – that is part of the magic.

The first part already had a lot of features that worked with or against each other. Spread out fast and get attacked by barbarians? Go over the sea but do not deal with the neighbors on your continent? Maybe sign a treaty with them?

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The ultimate goal of the game was to build a space ship to colonize Alpha Centauri, but mostly ended in a conquering spree.

Test of Time

Later parts added concepts like religion or culture which made it easier to do “subversive” attacks. Or win “peacefully” by overwhelming your neighbors with your glory.
While the first 4 games (and spin-offs) used squares for movement, Part V changed that to hexfields, allowing more options of movement but also blocking the building of “stacks of doom”. Over time the system also changed from chance-based one-fight-decides (remember that settler that kills three of your catapults?) to a hitpoint and even unit level system. Some things never changed though, like the specialists in the towns, who would boost a certain production type but no longer could “harvest” map fields around the town.

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Fan Made

If you want the feeling of the old games, I recommend using either Freeciv or Civ evo.
Both are fan-made improvements of Civ 2, the first going as close as possible to Civ 2, while Civ evo has a formidable AI – at least way better then the original game, who always lacked in that department.
http://www.freeciv.org/
http://c-evo.org/

Spin-offs

Civilization also had two remarkable spin-offs: Colonization and Alpha Centauri.
Colonization re-played the colonization (aha!) of the American continent and the war for freedom from the European colonial powers. It was a very production-centered game.
Alpha Centauri is a de-facto continuation of the Civilisation game, depicting the settlers the winning civ shot into space on their new home. It is afaik still the only game where you could (theoretically) terraform the whole planet. And kill towns by lowering the land under the sea level. And kill uber-units with cheap PSI-worms :D
I will talk about them both in a later post.

earlier Games of Yore posts

Liked this post? Nuking Ghandi did!

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This is not my first “Games of Yore” post. You can find earlier ones here:

1. Tetris: https://steemit.com/gaming/@lennstar/games-of-yore-tetris
2. Elite: https://steemit.com/games/@lennstar/games-of-yore-elite-mostly-harmless
3. Wing Commander: https://steemit.com/challenge30/@lennstar/games-of-yore-wing-commander
4. Privateer: https://steemit.com/challenge30/@lennstar/games-of-yore-privateer
5. Strike Commander: https://steemit.com/challenge30/@lennstar/games-of-yore-strike-commander

I also recommend moon32walker who is doing a series of posts on game series, too.