And so we reach the arguable zenith of the Civilization series, the peak from which there is only a slow decline into senescence and eventual barbarism. Civilization 4 is actually the game that triggered this whole chain of posts, as I was looking for something relatively meaty to play over Christmas that would run on the Macbook I had with me while I was visiting family. It was meant to give me something to do in the evenings in between coding, reading and writing. Instead it ended up sucking me for two games in a row, like it was just released yesterday instead of almost fourteen years ago, and it’s the only one of the series where I barely notice the seams. Civilization 4 may well be ageless — Civilization 5 has aged far worse than 4 has, for god’s sake — and that’s entirely down to Firaxis’s drive to imbue the game with some of the character it had lost in Civilization 3’s relatively sterile treatment of the world, and an absolutely stellar piece of design work on the part of the game designers, especially lead designer Soren Johnson.

Yes, there were others involved in the development of Civilization 4 who probably deserve a lot of credit, but one of the things that’s stuck with me through the almost decade and a half since the game released is the designer notes in the back of the manual, written by Soren Johnson. These notes had been a tradition for Microprose and Firaxis games up until Civilization 4 (I think it was the last game to include them) and they were always a valuable read since they functioned both as a decent insight into why the game had been put together the way it was and as a brief chronology of the development process. However, the Civilization 4 designer notes made a lot of really insightful observations that have stuck with me ever since, and shaped how I think about just about every other 4X released since, because whenever I run into something too micromanagey, too counterintuitive, too unfun, I think back to Civ 4’s designer notes and the guidelines you can find there for avoiding pointless design cruft in strategy games. There’s a ready-made blueprint for doing it right, so I have a lower tolerance for games that do it wrong.

The key design ethos of Civilization 4 is positivity. There’s a good anecdote in the designer notes — actually about the in-development Civilization 3 — where Johnson talks about the Dark Ages that civilizations could experience that would apply penalties to growth and income. The idea was to represent the periods of decline that any civilization goes through over a time, but as far as the game was concerned it felt terrible to be hit with a bunch of arbitrary debuffs through no fault of your own. So they flipped it round: Dark Ages became Golden Ages where you’d experience boosts to your output instead of penalties, and this was a much more pleasant experience for the player¹. For an actual example of the principle being applied to Civilization 4, look no further than corruption. Firaxis had known for years that the entirely negative corruption mechanic was widely hated, but it was seen as a necessary counterbalance to unfettered player growth — until the development of Civilization 4, where they decided to just remove it from the prototype to see how it felt. Unsurprisingly with the corruption gone it was a much smoother experience; more importantly, it opened up design space for the alternate braking force of city maintenance, where founding successive cities incurred geometrically increasing financial upkeep costs. A newly-founded city can eventually pay for itself once it’s been fully developed, but it’s going to require support from the rest of the empire while it gets up and running and spamming too many Settlers will put your empire into the red and cripple you. This remains the most elegant (not to mention logical) method I’ve seen of limiting Infinite City Sprawl, which is why it’s so curious that the series immediately ditched it in favour of the bizarre empire-wide happiness mechanic in Civilization 5.

As a general rule, Civilization 4 tries to couch everything in positive terms. Building a wonder gives you a big advantage that is eventually obsoleted by a technological advance, as in other Civilization games, but the difference in 4 is that the technology that obsoletes the wonder you’ve built is usually one that unlocks a similar bonus to the wonder effect. For example, the Great Lighthouse gives you +2 trade routes in all coastal cities, and will be obsoleted by researching The Corporation, which gives +1 trade route in every city; unless you have an awful lot of coastal cities the Corporation bonus works out as being a bit better than the one granted by the Lighthouse, and so you don’t feel bad about having it be obsoleted. More to the point, you don’t feel bad about being beaten to a wonder either because you know you’ll get that power boost eventually; all the wonders really do is allow you to unlock them earlier than you would from technological research². Speaking of wonders, Civilization 4 is a game that understands there’s a big difference between saying “Construction speed doubled with marble” and “Construction speed halved without marble”. They’re exactly the same effect, but receiving a bonus feels good to the player and experiencing a penalty is not, so Civ 4 tries to communicate all of its gameplay mechanics in the language of the former rather than the latter.

This positive ethos that runs through the core of Civilization 4 guides the rework of some mechanics that, up until now, had been a core part of Civilization. Take building Settlers and Workers, for example. In all previous Civilization games, building a Settler was a) quite expensive in terms of production and b) also cost a unit of population that was subtracted from the city that built it. It feels crap to have a city go backwards in growth to build the most essential units in the game, so Civilization 4 rearranges the process; now, instead of population loss upon Settler completion, the city’s growth is put on pause while the Settler is being constructed and the city’s food harvest is converted into production that boosts the Settler’s build speed. Again, this preserves the idea of some of the city’s population leaving to found a new city while transforming what had previously been a quite unpleasant penalty into something that’s perceived by the player as a bonus, even though the end result is the same; you’re just paying the food/population cost up front now instead of having it deferred until the Settler is built. It also makes building Workers much less painful, as they can now have an appropriately reduced build cost without also applying the sledgehammer blow of a population loss just because you wanted to improve your tiles.

Speaking of tile improvements, guess what? That’s right, tile improvements now provide even more bonuses when combined with the appropriate type of natural resource, which have been greatly expanded for Civilization 4; there are a lot more of them, and all of them bring at least two benefits to your empire. We’d already seen the idea of certain types of unit being dependent on having certain types of strategic resource available in order to build them in Civilization 3, although that first pass on it was incredibly clumsy and narrowed your choices (particularly around the Space Race, which required Aluminium to start at all) instead of expanding them. Civilization 4 switches things around to the model the series has followed ever since³, where strategic resources are required to build powerful variants of attacking units (Axemen, Tanks etc.) but there’s always a less powerful, often defensively-oriented unit on the same tier that can be built with no resource requirements whatever; this means that while resources are still important for aggressive civs to build their units, if they’re aggressive they’ll likely have access to them anyway through conquest, while peaceful civs don’t need to care so much as they can still put up a good fight without them. It’s yet another example of the mechanics being rejigged so that having a resource gives you additional options instead of not having the resource locking you off from that tier of military completely.

Civ 4’s big innovation with the resources, though, is to promote all of them to the same level as the strategic ones. Previously there were a lot of different resources in Civilization that just gave a passive boost to tile yields and had no special function past that. Here, though, all of the non-strategic resources have been split into two additional types: Luxury resources provide a civilization-wide happiness bonus, while Food resources provide a health bonus. Happiness works much as it always has, counteracting unhappiness from city size and recent events, while health is a new concept for Civ 4 that effectively replaces the ultra-negative pollution mechanic. The larger a city grows and the more negative environmental factors there are surrounding it (flood plains, factories, coal plants etc.), the more unhealthy it becomes, and unhealthiness is subtracted from your food harvests. Unhealthiness can substantially slow a city’s growth, and too much of it can even tip the city into starvation, so it’s a good idea to counteract it by giving your citizens access to healthy foods like Bananas and Rice. In practice you’ll rarely encounter starvation in Civ 4 unless some prick of a spy poisons the water supply, which fits with with the idea that penalties should be minimised as much as possible, but sooner or later your city growth will peter out and you really want that to come later instead of sooner by grabbing as many different types of Food resources as possible.

This means that every resource must now have the appropriate improvement built on them (which must be unlocked by researching the relevant technology, lending yet another dimension to the decision-making as you clamber up the tech tree) and be connected up to your road network, not just the strategic ones. This incidentally gives Workers much more to do than building endless roads and railways — especially since the ludicrous commerce and production bonuses awarded by roads and railways have been removed from the game entirely. Yes, this is a rare case where Civ 4 actually rows back on a bonus, but it’s for a good cause: covering every square inch of your empire with a spaghetti network of railways was always deeply tedious, and so they’ve removed the primary driving force behind having to do that. Instead, for most of the game road networks grow out somewhat organically, connecting together resources as as they are claimed and cities as they are founded, and the road-spam is staved off until the very end of the game when all possible tiles have been improved and you have a lot of idle workers sitting around. Until then there’s always stuff to be doing in a Civilization 4 turn, and not the tedious make-work of the later games where you have to individually move twenty different units to get your war on. No, the orders you give in Civilization 4 are never less than engrossing because, thanks to that ethos of positivity that wraps almost everything in it, you know that each one is going to result in an incremental boost to your civilization’s power. It never feels like you’re wasting your time in Civ 4, and that’s something I haven’t felt in a Civilization game in almost a decade.

Positivity isn’t the only driving force behind Civilization 4, mind. There’s a secondary strand of thought to its design: that everything should be much more transparent and legible to the player. Combat has been greatly overhauled, with the old attack/defence values being thrown out of the window in favour of a single numerical strength value on each unit that can be modified by a whole host of external factors such as terrain type and fortifications, as well as special attributes of the unit itself — for example, spear units get bonuses against cavalry and archer units get one or two free hits at the start of each combat to reflect their ranged capability. This could all be quite fearsomely complex, except all of these factors are broken down, listed and precalculated by the game and then presented to you as an overall percentage chance of that unit winning a given combat before you commit to it. This makes combat much more understandable — and interesting, as you can start to manipulate it in ways that simply weren’t possible before this information was made available to the player. The same goes for diplomatic interactions with the AI, as all of the positive and negative factors that make up its opinion of you are listed for you with the push of a button; as a result, Civilization 4’s diplomatic AI is still the gold standard for the series as it was predictable. I don’t mean that in a bad way because it’s still a very tough opponent on the higher difficulty settings, but rather that it’s never a surprise when Montuzema declares war on you because you can see exactly why he’s upset (spoiler: it’s because he’s Montuzema.) and will hopefully have made the appropriate preparations beforehand.

Before I get too effusive with my praise, it should also be remembered that Civilization 4 wasn’t quite a perfect game on release. It introduced religion but, aside from it being an additional driver of diplomatic opinion, failed to do anything really interesting with it. It brought back the Social Engineering government interface from Alpha Centauri, but forgot to make half of the options viable and so you end up taking the same route through it every time: beeline to Slavery for the production, and then tech up to a facsimile of Democracy or Communism according to taste. I was also never convinced by the built-in counter to the infamous Stack Of Doom tactic, where you’d suicide siege units into a stack so that they could damage multiple units at once; it’s an unusually clumsy piece of design in a game that otherwise feels extremely logical and intuitive. The expansions failed to do much to rectify these issues, instead choosing to lather on more and more half-baked mechanics such as colonies, corporations and espionage, and if it wasn’t for the additional units that bulk out gaps in the tech tree (AT Infantry in particular is a core unit that makes sure you’re never caught short by not having Oil resources) I’d almost prefer to play without them. With the exception of espionage, though, all of these subpar elements are almost totally ignorable, which is a far cry from Civ VI’s attitude that you’ll fucking shut up and send hordes of missionaries to die in the Religion Wars every few turns, or else risk the AI winning a Religious Victory out of nowhere

The last thing I want to mention is Civilization 4’s sense of your civilization being thrust into a living world, and its obvious reverence for humanity’s accomplishments to date⁴. It is the first game in the series to go full 3D, and (staggeringly) it was built on top of the same 3D engine that drove the godawful strategic battles in Pirates! Given that, it has absolutely no right to look as good as it does, even fourteen years on. Everything on the map has a charming little animation. Trees sway in the wind. Elephants trumpet as they march around their tile. Minecarts rumble in and out of mines. Look at a Civilization 4 map, even in the early game, and you’ll see a lot of movement, a lot of things going on. It was also the first game in the series to start reflecting city improvements on the world map — build an aqueduct and it’ll pop up on the map connecting that city to the nearest water source, and certain wonders such as the Great Wall have a very tangible presence there too. The look of tile improvements updates as you advance your civilization through successive eras, too, with Cottages upgrading from medieval towns to modern suburbs. The Beyond The Sword expansion added culture-specific models for various units, so a Modern Armor unit built by the USA would look like an Abrams while one built by Russia or China would look like a T-80, which is a really nice, flavourful touch that I’ve missed in subsequent games⁵.

Despite the comparatively primitive textures the overall art direction for Civilization 4 is outstanding, producing a world for you to make your mark on that already feels vibrant and alive, and that’s a feeling that’s amplified a hundred-fold by the audio. The soundtrack has yet to be bettered, in my opinion; the original music in Civ 5 and Civ 6 is no slouch whatsoever but it can’t hold a candle to the classical, baroque and modern music used in 4. Each era is given a distinctive feeling simply by matching it to its appropriate music, and nothing has captured the relentless pace of modern technological development for me quite as much as The People Are The Heroes Now. And then you’ve got the signature feature of Civilization 4 that is probably the first thing anyone who played it will think of when they hear its name mentioned: the tech quotes, and Leonard Nimoy’s narration of them. The quotes themselves are extremely well-selected in how they sum up the thing that you’ve just researched, and. Nimoy was an inspired choice of narrator, as he’s got more than enough gravitas for the job while also being able to inject a hint of wry humour for the more comedic quotes without going full nudge-nudge wink-wink as Civilization 6 does. Basically, the people who made Civilization 4 were smart. They’d read books. They’d done their research. They understood what they were talking about, and they understood how to talk about it, and they generally know a lot about, and have a deep appreciation for, the history of civilization, and so the tech quotes end up having a hell of an effect on the game as they’re an opportunity to take a quick moment to reflect on what you’ve just accomplished instead of it just being another ticked box on your way to world domination.

If it wasn’t already obvious, I think Civilization 4 is a masterpiece of player-positive design. It does as much as it possibly can to eliminate all of the annoyances that had plagued the series up until that point, and in most cases it does it in a startlingly elegant fashion that judo-flips what had previously been a weakness into a big strength. Where it can’t get rid of the micromanagement it at least tries to make it feel worthwhile, and it wraps all of this up in an audiovisual package that’s yet to be bettered; when I replayed it at Christmas I was really struck by the fact that the UI was the only thing that looked a little long in the tooth, and even though it’s comparatively ugly I’d still take the Civ 4 UI in a heartbeat over the disasterpieces in Civ 5 and Civ 6 since it actually tells me useful things without having to dig through a billion misleading sub-menus. And as far as how it felt to play, well, Civilization 4 hasn’t aged a day. I think that’s partly down to the two sequels dropping the ball in a quite astonishing fashion, but I’ve also played other 4Xes that have been more successful in how they innovate (mostly made by Amplitude) and Civilization 4 compares very favourably to those as well; it might have its own idiosyncrasies and flaws but it also hangs together far better as a coherent, unified design than any Civilization game has before or since. Given how the subsequent Civilization games turned out, I think that’s a doubly impressive accomplishment; I strongly suspect we’ll not see Civilization 4’s like again.

The post Civilization Through The Ages: Civilization 4 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Civilization 3 was the first Civilization I actually bought with money. It was released in 2001, and by that point I wasn’t having to rely on bootleg copies or swiping my brother’s Civilization 2 CD when he wasn’t looking; I was still in sixth form¹ but had a small amount of disposable income thanks to a rather unpleasant summer job, and so I wandered down to Dixons² the lunchtime of release day and bought what might actually have been my very last big-box³ PC game ever.

It was a big disappointment.

Civilization 3 has two major problems, both of which were readily apparent to me at the time, but which are drawn into even sharper relief by an additional 18 years of playing 4X games. The first is that even in 2001 I thought it was a startlingly ugly game. The colour palette that’s been chosen is far too light and makes the entire game look like it’s take place on a sun-drenched Pacific island, the tile art is crude and indistinct and features the brownest mountains in  videogames, and the isometric perspective that seemed so fitting in Civilization 2 just looks incredibly flat here. In fact it’s interesting to note a couple of other games that ran into this problem: Call To Power and its sequel are both highly unattractive games that resemble nothing quite so much as a tabletop stuffed full of incoherent junk thanks to the isometric perspective. Alpha Centauri on the other hand has aged a little better; it’s handicapped a great deal by how brown the thing is, but it uses voxels to implement the concept of tiles having variable heights and this pseudo-3D nature is easier to parse two decades on and prevents the game from collapsing into a bland mass of nothing.

Now, Civilization 3 did have something of a surprise for me here. When I initially booted Civilization 3 for a replay last week — only the second time I’d done so since Civilization 4 came out in 2005 — it was set to the 1024×768 resolution that was standard at the time and looked just as bad as it did when it first came out (and believe me, the intervening eighteen years haven’t helped it at all). However, these days there’s widescreen patches and/or hacks for just about every older strategy game out there, so I went looking for a way to upscale Civilization 3 to 1080p. It turns out this is quite easy to do by editing an .ini file, and so I discovered that some of Civilization 3’s rough edges disappear entirely at 1920×1080. Many of the UI components lose their jaggedness and the advisor portraits actually look pretty damn good, and while the actual map is still a goddamn mess and isn’t dramatically improved by being able to see more of it at once, the military units scattered across it are at least a little more attractive for having been made smaller and sharper. Civilization 3 is almost on the cusp of being acceptable-looking at 1080p, and it’s just a shame it came out a decade too early for that resolution to be an option.

Civilization 3’s other problem is that it’s the first game in the series to make major changes to the classic Civilization formula. Given the almost-godlike status Civilization 2 had during the latter half of the 1990s this was something that I saw as sacreligious at the time. I was expecting something that was to Civilization 2 what Civ 2 was to the original Civilization: something evolutionary rather than revolutionary, something that was very recognisably the same game with some tweaks, additions and updated graphics.Instead I got a game where the visuals were arguably worse than in Civ 2 and Firaxis had taken a sledgehammer to the mechanics, smashing them into tiny pieces and reassembling them into something that, at best, only half-resembled what I recognised as being Civilization. I didn’t exactly hate the resulting game, but I definitely enjoyed it far less than Civilization 2 and didn’t really understand why they’d decided to mess with one of the best games of all time.

Looking back on it with the benefit of eighteen years and another three games’ worth of hindsight, that reaction is partially on me rather than Civilization 3; the series can’t stay still forever and Civilization 3 had to do something to seriously shake up the game mechanics if it was going to avoid the kind of stagnation that the RTS genre was undergoing at around about the same time. In fact, the first thing that struck me when I went back to it recently with a fresh pair of eyes is how forward-thinking Civilization 3 really is, since most of what it introduced has gone on to form the core building blocks of modern Civilization. Things like tile improvements being split off from Settlers and handed to a dedicated Worker unit. Giving your cities a clearly-defined set of borders around their territory, along with a new Culture resource that drives the expansion of your city borders and which can make neighbouring enemy cities revolt and join your empire. Switching unit maintenance to cost money instead of production. The arrival of the modern diplomatic interface⁴ and the ability to make deals that go beyond technology trading and peace treaties. Strategic resources that allow you to build certain units and improvements. National wonders that can be built by every civilization as long as you fulfil the prerequisite conditions. Bombardment of enemy cities and units to weaken a strong defensive position. Even great leaders, albeit in an extremely prototypical form where they can’t do a whole lot yet. It’s really quite remarkable how much new ground Civilization 3 broke, and how much of it was later polished into excellence by Civilization 4 in particular.

Because I was now coming at it from the world of modern Civ, where all of those mechanics are now commonplace, I initially found myself enjoying my playthrough of Civilization 3 far more than I was expecting to. The biggest issues the new mechanics have during those first few hours stem from the fact that the implementation isn’t quite there yet, and that they have to coexist with an underlying structure that’s still — just about — driven by the same concepts that were at the core of Civilization 2. For example, Civilization 3 makes the conceptual leap of introducing a cheaper Worker unit to handle building tile improvements, but still makes building a Worker cost a unit of city population just like a Settler, which feels totally ridiculous given how valuable the first few units of each city’s population are. It shows you where your civilization borders are for the first time in the series, but the AI is still just as aggressive with its own colonization efforts and seeing it hike across your territory to settle in the single square that wasn’t covered by your borders — even though that square was in the middle of desert — is a thousand times more obnoxious than anything it got up to in Civilization 2. It introduces strategic resources such as coal, rubber and aluminium which are required to build certain units and improvements, but makes the mistake of making that a hard requirement rather than a soft one — so rather than the resource boosting your build speed, or having a less-powerful alternative that’s always available, if you aren’t lucky enough to have one of that resource within your civilization borders (and remember, you can’t see where they’ve spawned until you research the appropriate technology) then you’re screwed unless you declare war on a neighbouring AI that does have it.

This gives Civilization 3 a sort of lumpy, half-baked feel, especially in light of later games which perfected the new mechanics, but for the first few hours it’s not enough to get in the way of the game being fun. Or at least interesting; despite all of this new stuff Civilization 3 is still playing with a paradigm where Libraries increase science by 50%, your choice of government types are split between Monarchy/Republic and Communism/Democracy (albeit with a third alternative of Fascism bolted into the modern era), and military combat is decided by comparing the same attack/defence values that have been in every Civilization to date. The new bits don’t sit with the old all that well, but I can’t deny that watching them attempt to coexist is fascinating, and up until the endgame the friction between the two isn’t yet so great that the whole thing bursts into flames. It’s pleasant to play something that, at times, feels quite like classic Civ with many of the quality-of-life features I found myself missing in Civilization 2, as well as a few ideas that were killed before they could make it into Civilization 4. You can sacrifice Workers to claim resources outside of your territory with Colonies, which would have been very helpful for those silver and fur deposits that crop up in the frozen north without having to build the city from Frostpunk to get at them, and the Civilization 3 spin on the tech tree is pretty novel, with most branches ending in clearly-marked dead ends that nevertheless give you access to powerful Wonders, buildings and units, while the main route up to the top of the tree only gives you the barest minimum to get by. I understand why those ideas weren’t taken forward from here, but they highlight just how experimental Civilization 3 is and, given that the vast majority of it still exists in modern games in some form, how successful that experiment ultimately was.

That payoff was still several years (and another game) distant, though. Even going back to it now, bereft of prejudice, there are too many pain points in Civilization 3 to be properly consumed by it the way I was in the previous two games I replayed, and those pain points become positively agonising once you hit the endgame. The number one culprit is the strategic resource system, which seems designed to force you into wars more than anything else. For example, a key part of Civilization since the very beginning of the series has been beelining for railroads since they boost the yields of the tiles they build them on. Later titles toned the bonus down, or made it selective, but in Civilization 3 railroads are still boosting tile yields by +1 per Irrigation or Mine (and every tile has one of those two improvements on it), so getting access to them is kind of a big deal. It’s the first and most important step your civilization takes along the road from medieval subsistence to modern mastery. Unfortunately Civilization 3 chooses to gate the ability to build railroads behind access to Coal; if you don’t have a Coal resource, you can’t build railroads. Period. You could try and trade for Coal, but this relies upon the AI knowing what Coal is (it’s not visible until you get Steam Power) and having it hooked up to their road network with a mine. If you’re in the situation of having beelined for Railroads you likely have a big tech advantage anyway, so it’s far more practical to declare war and seize a nearby Coal deposit by force before your civilization falls behind again.

It’s at this point that Civilization 3’s second major pain point rears its ugly head: combat between military units has actually regressed from Civilization 2. We’re still fighting out combat over multiple rounds via a comparison of attack/defence values, but in Civilization 2 a more advanced unit had more HP, meaning that even if a spearman was fighting a tank and got a lucky roll it was still likely to lose the overall combat because the tank had so much more HP to wear down. In Civilization 3, though, we’re back to all units having the same amount of HP regardless of era; Green units start with 3 HP, Veterans have 4 HP and Elite units have 5 HP, and that holds true whether the unit in question is high-tech mechanized infantry or a man holding a stick. I appreciate that we’re starting to sketch the outline of a proper unit veterancy system here, but by giving both the spearman and the tank the same base HP we’re back to a world where a spearman can — with the appropriate boosts from fortification, city walls etc — beat a tank. It just happens a bit less because it needs three lucky rolls instead of one.

So fighting another civilization in Civilization 3 can be very annoying; you suffer attrition even if you’ve brought a huge technological advantage to the fight, so you also need to go in with overwhelming force to make up for it, which leads to micromanaging dozens of units just to put down a bunch of hicks who are barely out of the stone age. Still, let’s assume you’ve won that war, and you’ve now got your Coal, and are happily building Railroads everywhere. You then get the tech required to build Infantry — a key, key unit that in other Civilization games is the thing you build if you can’t build Tanks yet — only to discover that they require Rubber. Tanks? Those require Oil. Good luck prosecuting a war in the modern era without those two resources. And of course I’ve left the best for last: if you are going for a Spaceship victory you’re likely in for a rude shock when you research Rocketry, because that’s the point when you find out that your empire has no Aluminum, which is — you’ve guessed it — a hard requirement to build the spaceship. (Not that Civilization 3 will surface this; it just won’t display the spaceship options in the build menu, which led to some baffled searching through game options because I thought I’d somehow managed to turn the Spaceship Victory off.) If you don’t have it you need to go and get it, which means that even if you’re going for the non-violent Science Victory you need to fight multiple wars to keep your technological advantage and build the sodding thing.

This is why my dominant memory of Civilization 3 from when I originally played it is of an infinite series of wars, and going back to it with more experienced eyes it’s interesting that a) I had almost exactly the same experience and b) I can finally pinpoint why it annoyed me so much: it’s forcing the player to play in one specific way, when Civilization is supposed to accommodate a range of playstyles. It’s proof that while I might have been a little unfair on the game in the past, most of Civilization 3’s problems are very real and its reputation as The Worst Civilization is entirely deserved. However, it also did a remarkable amount to move the series forward in terms of mechanics; never mind that many of the changes don’t successfully land, it’s enough that Civilization 3 dared to make them in the first place, because it opened up the design space for subsequent games to make them actually good. I’m not going to call Civilization 3 a visionary game, but it was definitely a necessary one since without it I don’t think we’d have any of the modern games, and Civilization 4 especially would have been a profound loss. Given that,  I’ll grudgingly accept the way it turned out, especially now that I never have to play it ever again.

(A quick word about Civilization 3’s soundtrack before we wrap up, because I do like talking about soundtracks: it’s a little surprising how underwhelming Civ 3’s base soundtrack is considering the lead designer was Jeff Briggs, who composed the music for the first two Civilization games. The Ancient age themes are okay, if a little percussion-heavy, but it’s somewhat fitting that the Medieval and Industrial themes are basically depression in musical form. It isn’t until you hit the Modern age until you get some properly lively tunes going on, and your enjoyment of them will be gated by how much you like Simcity-style artificial guitar tracks. Still, the Conquests expansion did some work to redress the balance, adding some much better themes for the Ancient and Medieval ages and a truly stellar menu theme, which is still great to zone out to sixteen years on.)

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The post Civilization Through The Ages: Civilization 3 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

To me, Civilization 2 has for many years been the Bigfoot of the Civilization series. You can find the original Civilization on abandonware sites quite easily, and once you’ve got it you can run it via DOSBox with zero fuss. You can buy Civilizations 3 and 4 on Steam, and they both still work fine apart from the missing Gamespy functionality and the occasional crash to desktop. But Civilization 2? It’s not available on GOG, but acquiring a copy of Civilization 2 via alternative methods is just as easy as Civilization (so long as you’re happy with losing the music, the wonder videos and the advisors, anyway); however, it was a Windows-native game released in 1996 — in other words, that awkward period where Microsoft were still sorting themselves out in terms of drivers and APIs for Windows-native games. Consequently it doesn’t play nicely at all with modern versions of Windows, and since it doesn’t have a commercial release on a digital distribution platform it’s entirely reliant on dedicated fans to drag it into a state of semi-compatibility. Getting it to work on Windows 7 was a bit tricky, but doable. Getting it to work on Windows 10 was nigh-impossible until a new fan patch was released towards the end of 2017 that specifically addressed Windows 10 compatibility; up until I found out about it I was seriously considering installing Windows XP on a virtual machine just so that I could play Civilization 2 again.

Fortunately, unlike all of the other fan patches I tried the new one works quite well, and so I get to enjoy classic Civilization 2 upscaled to a resolution that would have made my eyeballs drop out of their sockets had I experienced it in 1996. It scales nicely, too, since it went for some quite chunky unit sprites and terrain tiles that retain all of their character (as well as their readability) when displayed at 1920×1080 instead of 800×600. Because it runs as a windowed app and uses, well, Windows windows for its interface panels (another reason why backwards compatibility for it is a pain) there’s some weirdness around trying to access things while e.g. the City Interface panel is open — Windows 10 flat out won’t let you — but otherwise it’s aged remarkably well, far better than the original Civilization and it also arguably looks better than either Civilization 3 or Alpha Centauri.

Design-wise Civilization 2 is rather interesting, because of all the Civilization sequels it’s the only one that was a direct evolution from its predecessor. There’s no major new mechanics introduced in Civilization 2; it’s still very recognisably the same game with an SVGA facelift and the rough edges sanded off. It makes changes, sure, but the changes it makes are more the sort of thing I’d expect an expansion pack to do in this day and age: bulking out the tech tree, adding more units and improvements for a smoother flow through the medieval and industrial ages, and tweaking wonder effects. This is the main reason why playing the original Civilization is a little redundant unless you’re feeling particularly nostalgic for it, since Civilization 2 is quite literally everything that Civilization was — and more.

Civilization 2 does set out to tackle some of the most egregious mechanical flaws that cropped up in Civilization, mind. First, the Pyramids -> Democracy loophole has been closed off, as Pyramids now gives you a free Granary in every city (still really good) and the ability to switch to any government has been moved to the much later Statue of Liberty wonder. The government system and corruption all work the same way, so brute-forcing Democracy onto your empire is still a very good strategy, but it’s nowhere near as easy to pull off as it was in Civilization. Then there’s the combat system, which has been made far less random. It still works on attack/defence value totals (e.g. if a unit with attack value 6 attacks a unit with defence value 3, it has a two in three chance to win a round of combat as the total of both values is 9 and 6 is two-thirds of 9) but is now fought over several rounds. To accommodate this all units now have an HP bar that gets depleted when they lose a round of combat rather than the unit being instantly destroyed. Not only does spreading the combat rolls out over several rounds mean that the effect of the odd statistical anomaly is greatly lessened, but unit HP increases with the technology era of the unit, increasing the number of successful rolls that an obsolete unit will require to win. I’m sure there’s still a mathematical possibility for spearmen to beat tanks in Civilization 2, but I’ve never seen it happen and I doubt you will either.

Some of the additions Civilization 2 makes are also worth talking about because I don’t think they showed up again in any subsequent Civilization. Conquering a city will result in several Partisan units immediately spawning nearby to blow up all of the railway lines; this is Civilization 2’s rather crude attempt to discourage warmongering players from conquering the world, but later Civs went for a more nuanced approach via city pops and happiness penalties. You can build Superhighways in your cities to boost trade yields from tiles with roads by 50%, which is stupidly powerful since railroads boost tile yields on their own so you’re already building roads in every single city tile. Once Refrigeration is researched you can upgrade irrigated tiles into farm tiles, which yield one additional food so long as the city working the tile has a Supermarket improvement. This, again, is stupidly powerful. Your Settlers get upgraded to Engineers when you research Explosives, and Engineers can terraform undesirable tiles such as desert and mountains into plains and grassland, although it’ll take them a long time. Once you hit the modern era in Civilization 2 there’s a real sense of being able to use all of that shiny technology you’ve been researching to bend the world to your will. This isn’t really surprising since the lead designer was Brian Reynolds and his next game was Alpha Centauri, a game all about using technology to shatter every single one of the barriers constraining your expansion into tiny pieces, but it does make Civilization 2’s later stages feel very different from the later games, which rowed back on that idea considerably

For example, I don’t think any of them feature terraforming beyond chopping down/planting forests, likely in an attempt to combat Infinite City Sprawl. There’s no such thing as a bad city site in Civilization 2, because any bad city site can at some point be turned into a good city site. Even if you settle on a one-tile island it can eventually be made worthwhile with the Harbor and Offshore Platform improvements, which add food and production to sea tiles. Consequently ICS is an absolutely obnoxious problem in Civilization 2, especially given that the AI is just as flagrant with its territorial violations as in the original and is also very capable of using ships to transport Settlers in the ancient age; the AI in more recent Civs would wait until much later to do that, if it did it at all. You feel like you have to settle on any scrap of land that’s unused, even if you’re not going to get that much out of it right now, because if you don’t the AI eventually will. When you uncover the map by discovering Satellites (another new innovation, as Civilization only gave you city locations) it’s shocking to see just how densely packed it is with cities. And more cities means more to micromanage, as production queues aren’t introduced until Civilization 3.

As a consequence it can be a bit wearing to play Civilization 2 into the late game. Because I hadn’t played it in so long I’d built it up in my head to be rather more than it was, and it was a little disappointing to discover that it didn’t quite live up to the memories of my after-school play sessions. I said earlier that it had aged well, and it has, but Civilization 2 instead comes across as being rather dated. Being dated is a rather more ambiguous quality than being aged — Back To The Future and The Terminator are very conspicuously dated, but that doesn’t stop them from being classics — and quite aside from some of the more tired gameplay aspects Civilization 2 definitely feels like a game released into the Windows 95 era. There’s that use of native Windows functionality and fonts, for a start, followed by the totally unnecessary yet not wholly-unwelcome full motion video that you could find jammed into just about every game from this period, because computer games were still much smaller than the total amount of storage available on a CD and developers had to do something with all of that space.

Civilization 2 was the first game in the series to feature wonder videos, which put together archive video and/or panning shots over historical images of the thing you just built with a very cheesy midi track. Today they look a bit high school history project-y, but you can see how we got from there to the excellent Secret Project videos in Alpha Centauri, and even though they’re cheap by modern standards they still have an atmosphere of respect for — and wonder at — the thing you’ve just built. Every time your council meets you get these incredibly cheesy videos of LARPers in tacky period-appropriate costumes spouting advice about what to do next, which other people are quite fond of but which I am not and always turn off at the first opportunity. And then, finally, you’ve got the music. The base game shipped with some basic midi tracks, but the Test Of Time expansion added a bunch of custom scenarios with dedicated music which is probably still the best soundtrack in a series replete with excellent soundtracks; it’s a set of weirdly off-kilter themes that are supposed to represent fantasy and sci-fi worlds which are somehow incredibly appropriate for charting the march of your civilization from the ancient age to the modern one.

Many of these features that were all the rage at the time come off as rather gimmicky today, of course, but they do serve to give Civilization 2 the most character of the first three Civilization titles. Because it’s mostly choosing to refine an already-successful formula instead of breaking new ground it’s also the most well-rounded of the three, and is the one which is easiest to slip back into today. It feels like Civilization as it was originally envisaged, before subsequent designers began moving it further and further away from its starting point, and aside from missing quality-of-life features (like production queues) that elegance of design presents remarkably few friction points for players revisiting it twenty-three years later. Civilization 4 eventually dragged the series into the modern age, and Civilization 5 was patched to the point where it could more-or-less sit next to 4 without instantly withering away like a Nazi drinking from the wrong Grail, and I think both of them are better games — but they also both feel like bigger commitments than Civilization 2, whose comparatively simple mechanics make it easy to pick up and complete multiple games in a single afternoon. That, along with its very different character, ensures that even now, after almost a quarter of a century, Civilization 2 can still hold its own against the latest and greatest the 4X genre has to offer.

The post Civilization Through The Ages: Civilization 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Over the Christmas break I found myself playing through Civilization 4 for the first time in about ten years. It did a lot of neat stuff that I’d just plain forgotten about, so I decided to play through all of the Civilization games to see how well they held up today and how the series had evolved from one iteration to the next, and then write something summing up that experience so that I’ll have something to refer back to when I inevitably forget again.

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Civilization has the distinction of being the very first game I played on a proper IBM PC. This was way back in my school computer room in 1995, which was an environment that was far too cheap for Windows 95 and the flashy multimedia games that came with it, and so the four year-old Civilization was the best we could manage on the 386s we had available. By this point I’d played newer, better-looking games on the Atari, Archimedes and Megadrive (not to mention Doom and Command & Conquer on some weird PC card hookup jammed into an Acorn RISC PC), and Civilization looked positively primitive by comparison. It didn’t matter. I was instantly hooked.

Well, of course I was. Ever since I played Mega Lo Mania there’s been something particularly intoxicating to me about that image of cavemen versus soldiers on the front cover, and Civilization was an entire game that took that idea and applied it to the real world. It was also the first game I played where military confrontation took a backseat to city logistics and scientific advancement. War is obviously a big part of Civilization — probably bigger than in any of the sequels, just purely as a consequence of there being comparatively fewer other mechanics for it to fall back on — but there’s a non-violent way to win and you can get through an entire game without fighting anyone, if you play it right. This was just as well given the primitive combat mechanics, since you could never quite be sure what was going to happen when you threw your troops at the enemy; the original Civilization is the game that originated the infamous “spearmen beating tanks” phenomenon, after all.

In spite of how undeveloped this and other parts of Civilization are, going back to it I was pleasantly surprised at how well it held up twenty-eight years after it was released . I’m not saying I’d particularly choose to play it over certain later iterations if I didn’t have a nostalgic fondness for the way it does things, but even if I cast the rose-tinted glasses aside I can’t think of any games contemporary to Civilization that have aged anywhere near as well¹. I think part of the reason why this is so is that Civilization itself was inspired by a boardgame and so this first iteration is possibly the most boardgame-y Civillization of them all. Boardgames (or at least good boardgames) have a much longer shelf-life than your average videogame because they focus on clean, transparent mechanics above all else. Civilization follows that line of thinking, preferring a relatively small number of advances and improvements which have sweeping, powerful effects which are nevertheless quite simple and whose value is easily understood by the player.

Take the Library as an example. In modern Civs this improvement does something anaemic like giving you an extra two scientist slots that can be worked by citizens, which creates something like six points of extra science and which is only powerful because of how miserly the later games are with resource gain. On the other hand the original implementation of the Library was that it increased science gain in that city by a whopping 50%; given that base science yields are already quite high (thanks to it being a function of trade value converted to science instead of a dedicated science resource), the effect of building a Library in a single city is immediately noticeable on an empire scale. It feels good to build a Library in Civilization, even 24 years after I first played it. It feels like I’m making big steps towards building up my empire, instead of the infinitesimal power increases of the later games.

Because there’s less to build (but the things you can build do more), the ancient-medieval phase of Civilization ends up feeling quite nippy. Build times are quite long until your cities have a few population units under their belt, but there’s no fancy animations getting the way and it’s much faster at doing the number-crunching that follows every End Turn action, meaning that waiting ten turns for your Temple to finish is actually faster than waiting five turns for something to complete in one of the newer games. There’s also no Worker units to micromanage; at this point we’re using Settlers to build tile improvements, and maintaining Settler units is very expensive in terms of production and food, so early on you’re only going to be able to spare one or two at most. However, because of that limitation tile improvements are much faster to build, with roads being built instantly and irrigation taking 4-5 turns.

Later on the game slows down a bit, both as a natural consequence of having more cities with more to do, and because Civilization is very fond of showing you everything you’ve accomplished on that turn in minute detail. I’ve spoken of my love for Civilization’s City View before, and for good reason: it’s tremendously effective at making those single colour squares that represent your cities on the world map feel like actual places that you’ve built, and you’ll be transported there every time you build a new improvement or wonder, or when the population gets unruly and downs tools because you don’t have enough Elvis impersonators on hand.  Whenever you research a new technology you’re confronted with a full-screen description of the thing you just researched first, and then a summary of what it unlocks, which is a nice way of jamming some edutainment into the game². If you change government you’re informed of the new thematically-appropriate ruling council via a newspaper headline. The game is full of these little visual flourishes, likely in an attempt to compensate for the basic graphics on the world map and the city management screen, which is where you spend 90% of your time.

I was going to say that you’d never get away with this today, and that dragging the player around the game like this is a pretty big UI no-no for all that it adds to Civilization’s atmosphere. That would be a complete lie, however, seeing as how modern Civilizations are, if anything, even more pushy with grabbing the player away from whatever they were concentrating on and e.g. making them manually reroute eight trade routes and place three spies every few turns. So if we’re going to do this, Firaxis, can we at least spend the time looking at something worthwhile instead of a trade route dialogue? The connection with the game world as an actual world is something that recent 4Xes are in danger of losing touch with completely; I’ve spoken of my dislike for Endless Space reducing its colonies to a bunch of numbers, and Civilization has been headed down the same route for a while. It would be nice if Firaxis used their utter disregard for UI norms to build a more robust context around your civilisation and lend it more of a sense of place.

Another thing that struck me about the original Civilization that’s been lost in the more modern iterations: the tech tree is a genuine tech tree instead of a collection of anaemic tech sticks. You can research Explosives without ever having discovered Masonry or Bronze Working. Once you’ve worked your way up to the highest levels of the tree you start building the spaceship, and Civilization’s approach to it is, in my opinion, far superior to any other Civilization game (save 2, whose spaceship is a direct copy of this one). Instead of having ten individual spaceship components with glacial build times resulting in a mind-numbingly repetitious hammering of the “End Turn” button, Civilization has you building up a spaceship out of a set of small parts which are relatively quick to produce, but which you have to build multiple copies of. The full spaceship requires 12 SS Modules, 12 SS Components and 40-odd SS Structures; you can launch with fewer than this if you’re pressed for time and are happy with scoring fewer points at the end of the game, but I prefer building the full thing. The build time for the complete spaceship is approximately the same as in later editions of Civilization, but because it’s parcelled up into smaller chunks like this you feel like you’re making concrete progress towards its completion — more than that, you can see it taking shape in orbit, piece by piece. Again, it’s something that feels far more satisfying to build than the spaceship in Civilization 6, where you don’t get to see the fruits of your actions and the game ends as soon as you hit the “Launch” button so you don’t get to see it fly, either.

In just about every 4X I can think of there’s been a tension between two major strategies: building up a relatively small number of super-cities with high resource outputs, otherwise known as “going tall”, or eschewing city development in favour of cranking out Settler units to expand as fast as possible by founding new cities on every available scrap of land, otherwise known as “going wide”. Ideally you do a bit of both and try to balance the two approaches, but the first Civilization games were infamous for the phenomenon of “infinite city sprawl”, or ICS, which should tell you a little something about how successful the early efforts to discourage going wide were. In fact, until I did this replay of Civilization I thought that was actually intentional, and that it wasn’t until later that designers realised micromanaging an empire of thirty cities could get a bit tedious. However, it turns out it does make an attempt to stop the player from gobbling up virgin territory and AI empires alike via two mechanisms that have been absent from Civilization for at least a decade: government types and their interaction with city corruption.

When you start a game of Civilization your empire is ruled by you (obviously) as dictator at the head of a Despotic government. You have to research other government types and the closest alternatives — Monarchy and The Republic — are a few rungs up the tech tree, so in your early expansion phase you’re stuck with Despotism. This isn’t such a bad thing, though, as Despotism offers free unit support costs; in Civilization units are supported with production (and in the case of Settlers food as well) rather than money, and so building up the initial Settlers you need to expand and develop your empire and the military you’ll need to defend yourself from marauding barbarians would be crippling at this early stage if you didn’t have Despotism. Even Despotism comes with a catch, in that each city only gets free support for a number of units that’s equal to that city’s size, and if you build more than that you have to start paying production. Given that production is quite hard to come by in Civilization, this can flatline your cities if you expand too fast and crank out too many units. So even the government type that’s specifically intended to aid early expansion has a natural brake on going too fast: you have to wait until a city reaches size 3 or 4 before it’s properly useful to your empire in terms of building and supporting units.

Corruption on the other hand actively siphons off money and production from your cities. Your capital has zero corruption, but subsequent cities will have increasing levels of corruption the further they are from your capital. Expansion may be comparatively cheap under Despotism, but Despotism experiences rampant corruption and pretty soon any new cities you found will have the majority of their resources consumed by it. This is an incredibly negative mechanic that I instinctively dislike (since it makes founding a new city feel awful when 80% of its resources are sucked away by corruption) and which was removed from the game in Civilization 4 for good reason, but it’s undeniably effective and almost works in Civilization. The idea is that you’re incentivised to upgrade from Despotism to Monarchy/The Republic by two things: first is that Despotism has a cap on the resources that you can gather from city tiles that gets removed when you change to any other government type, and second is that Monarchy and The Republic are both less corrupt forms of government. The flipside is that you’ll have to start paying full support costs for your units (even Monarchy doesn’t give you any free ones) but once your empire has developed to a certain point this will be outweighed by the boost you get from more resources and less corruption. Switching too early, on the other hand, can really throw a spanner in the works as the production costs of supporting units are far higher than the savings you get from the new government type.

This is a very good design idea. Figuring out when exactly you should switch away from Despotism to The Republic, and then from there to Democracy (which has its own drawbacks) is supposed to have balances and tradeoffs and make the player think carefully about when exactly to make the switch. Unfortunately Civilization shoots itself in the foot here thanks to its boardgame nature; it likes these very powerful, simple mechanics but doesn’t fully think through what’ll happen when people play the game for thousands of hours instead of running through it once or twice and then putting it back into the cupboard. The problem has two parts. One is the Democracy government type, which (somewhat naively) completely eliminates corruption and gives a significant trade boost to your empire, in exchange for extreme penalties for doing anything military. You’re supposed to switch to Democracy once your expansion phase is over and you want to start building your cities tall, which is why it’s situated halfway along the tech tree and should in theory take some time to get to, during which you’ll have to labour under one of the lesser forms of government and deal with the resulting corruption, slowing your expansion. By the time you switch to it the AI empires should have built up a decently threatening army and the military penalty Democratic civilizations receive should therefore be somewhat meaningful.

Unfortunately the Pyramids wonder — available after researching Masonry, one of the very first advances available — lets you use any government type even if you’ve not unlocked it yet. This means that you can switch to Democracy around 1500BC if you’re beelining for it, and while you take the intended production hit for unit support it’s massively outweighed by both the turbocharged growth your cities experience as the food restrictions on city tiles are lifted, and the trade boost that lets you simply buy anything you can’t produce, as well as boosting your science well beyond what it should be at this stage of the game. This lets you spam Settlers with wild abandon until you’ve filled every nook and cranny of your continent, at which point you can briefly switch to Communism to beat the shit out of your nearest neighbour with a technologically advanced military and take their space, and then back to Democracy again. There’s no other restrictions or penalties for expansion in Civilization — no spiralling technology costs, no happiness penalties, no maintenance — which is why the very first installment of the series ended up with empires that sprawled across the entire surface of the planet. It’s the optimal way to play.

Still, given that the Civilization series has spent the last twenty-eight years grappling with this problem and still hasn’t come up with an adequate solution, I’m not going to hold Civilization’s failure to do so against it. It’s interesting enough to discover that it was aware of the ICS problem from the outset and took steps to try and govern it, even if those steps were flawed. Anyway, there’s a bunch of other weirdnesses in the game that date it far more thoroughly, from the utter failure of the AI players to respect territory boundaries — they’ll happily park themselves right outside your cities, preventing you from working the tiles, and there’s no option to tell them to sod off — to there being no way to initiate diplomatic contact with other empires; you have to wait for them to come to you. That and the primitive interface make Civilization a bit too painful to play compared to Civilization 2, which is the same game with the rough edges sanded off.

I do think that there’s a lot to learn from the way Civilization handles world-building, though, and its generally positive (if somewhat privileged) attitude towards the that world. It’s a game that celebrates humanity’s achievements and which looks towards the future with an optimistic view that seems very out of place in the cynical landscape of 2019. You can cure cancer in Civilization. You can contact aliens by building the SETI wonder. And yes, you can build a spaceship and colonise other worlds, which is actually shown in the goddamn ending sequence here rather than the game instantly ending when you launch the spaceship. It’s a very outward-looking game, which is refreshing in this era of constant navel-gazing via the internet and social media. Given that this is so remarkable when the Civilization series is still going strong (there’s an expansion pack for Civilization 6 coming out next month, in fact) is a pretty damning indictment of how recent incarnations of Civilization have chosen to portray that broad sweep of human history — but I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, let’s just say that OG Civilization is a product of its time, but that’s precisely why I still find it fascinating almost three decades later; the difference in its approach and outlook is rather stark when compared to almost any modern 4X, and for me that ensures it avoids being reduced to a mere historical curio. Few other games from 1991 can say the same.

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