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Civ II game a decade old

471 points by jchrisa 14y ago

jcurbo 14y ago
To be clear, this is a guy that has been playing a single game of Civ II for 10 years. When I first saw this I thought, isn't Civ II older than 10 years? (came out in 1996) I love Civ and still go back and play Civ II at times. I spent a lot of time with Civ III and IV as well (and a little with V), but it's nice to go back to my first experience with the genre (Civ 1 was before my time, sadly).
- sageikosa 14y ago
  Thanks, I sometimes only read the comments on HN. My first thought was: Civ III is over 10 years old.
Tichy 14y ago
Is it possible to run a completely automated Civ game (all players computer players)? Should be a quicker way to simulate the future. Perhaps the AI could learn "War Games" style that nuclear war is not the way to go... Or maybe it would be a depressing result if the AIs would not nuke around without a human in the mix?
- martey 14y ago
  I remember trying this when I was younger (with the Cheat menu). The primary issue is that while it is quicker, it is difficult to figure out the details of what is happening in the game when there is no pause at the beginning of your turn. Since the AI "personalities" of the different computer players cause some of them to be more aggressive than others, all of the games I tried to simulate in this way ended up with one military aggressive AI player dominating enough of the world that they did not need nuclear weapons. There was a significant amount of variance among AI personalities and winning strategies in the various versions of Civilization I played, so I suspect that your success would vary depending on which version you were using. For example, if you were using CivNet, the multiplayer version of the original game, the anemic AI in that game might very well lock into some sort of peaceful stalemate, but the contentious resource model in Civilization III would probably produce different results.
- kzrdude 14y ago
  You can do this easily with Freeciv (Civ2-ish clone), unfortunately the AI is not as interesting (what I've seen).
- pwaring 14y ago
  You could do it with Alpha Centauri - I seem to remember an article by Firaxis where they explained putting in this feature so they could tweak a parameter, set the AI off and see what effect it had.
- impendia 14y ago
  I did this, more or less, in the original Civ. I was a player in my own game, I built a city in the Arctic, built a military unit in it, then disbanded the rest of my civilzation. The AI doesn't ever go there.
- CoreDumpling 14y ago
  <shameless plug> I wrote a utility a while ago to manipulate human/AI control of civs in Civ III (conquests expansion pack), as a bit of a reverse engineering exercise: https://github.com/CoreDumpling/c3me https://github.com/CoreDumpling/c3me </shameless plug> It's possible to set every player to AI and then just let the game run to observe the results. (You'll still have to dismiss pop-ups about civs getting eliminated or wonders being built, though.) I've done it on several occasions, mostly to test out mods to check if they are properly balanced. In general, I've noticed that AI's that nuke aggressively do tend to win in the long run, but if nukes are disabled or otherwise restricted, huge stalemates can result.
CharlieA 14y ago
The 3-way division of the world into "super-continents" and the constant war keeping the populace in a perpetual state of starvation and poverty, with the entire world in disrepair is so incredibly reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 it's scary. If you haven't read 1984, it's a startlingly bleak view of a potential future (from a historical perspective, but still applicable today, I think) particularly through technology and a loss of privacy. It's the origin of terms like "big brother" and "doublethink" -- worth a read. One of the most interesting excerpts from this piece IMO: "I wanted to stay a democracy, but the Senate would always over-rule me when I wanted to declare war... ...Anyway, I was forced to do away with democracy roughly a thousand years ago because it was endangering my empire." Although I don't necessarily think it will be because of war, I can see a potential future where people/persons decide democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process -- democratic process being (more or less) committee-based decision making, which proxies votes through individuals based on what is essentially a popularity contest. That's particularly true here in Australia at the moment (amidst a minority government with a lot of political sniping on both sides and seemingly very little real progress) despite the fact that we have a comparatively strong economy, low inflation, low unemployment and generally nothing really significant (again, comparatively) to complain about.
- joshcrews 14y ago
  I too noticed the 1984 similarities. One difference is that the world of this Civ II game is the utopia state for the inner party of 1984-- perpetual war that only happens at the borders and doesn't really risk the existence of the 3 superpowers. Such a war keeps the people from acquiring wealth and leisure and justifies a totalitarian government.
- nathan_long 14y ago
  >> democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process... seemingly very little real progress... we have... generally nothing really significant ... to complain about. This mystifies me: people sometimes talk about legislative gridlock as though it's all bad. Do you measure the quality of a development team by the number of lines of code they produce? Of course not. The development team does not exist to produce code; it exists to produce and maintain the best possible codebase. Refraining from writing bad code is just as important as writing good code. You just said your country has very little to complain about. What makes you think that a "productive" legislature would make things better and not worse? I much prefer a system where any law needs broad consensus and relatively few are passed. Dumb as I often think the U.S. government is, at the end of the day, we have police, roads, schools, etc. Not perfect, but good enough that I can live my life in peace. Of course, a dictatorship would be extremely efficient: the leader snaps his/her fingers and things happen. The question is: efficient at what?
deleted 14y ago
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Paul_S 14y ago
If you disable the space race as a winning condition the chance of a nuclear holocaust over time approaches 1. I'm not saying there are any lessons to be had from it. It's only a game.
- mertd 14y ago
  After completing "Future Technology #532", spamming nukes is the only interesting thing left to do in the game.
Tycho 14y ago
I can remember my Civ II campaigns in more detail than I can recall about actual historic events.
radical_cut 14y ago
Well that gave me goosebumps. Bleak future indeed, I immediately thought of the Doomsday Clock. I like the idea of a new subreddit spawned by this: http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar. It could be interresting to see if anybody finds a way to save the world from hell. Maybe it's time to relive good old memories of times spend with old Civ games. :)
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  It would be interesting if he exported the game state, so other people could try resolving the conflict.
  - timwoj 14y ago
    The top post of the top thread in r/theeternalwar say he's working on exporting it for everyone.
  - mynameishere 14y ago
    The game is easy and boring in the end. He's purposely letting it go on and on.
    - zem 14y ago
      read through the thread; it's anything but easy. he's hit the point where the ai civs have decided nuclear war is the way to go, and he's reaping the global penalties for it (radioactive wastelands, global warming) while simultaneously having to divert all his resources to maintaining the red queen race of building tanks and having them destroyed rather than cleaning up his farmlands to grow food.
      - mynameishere 14y ago
        I blew away an unfortunately portion of my youth playing this game. When everyone has all the techs, the human wins, very easily.
danso 14y ago
I love Civ 2, but how is it that the OP can't win against two AIs? They weren't geniuses, AFAIK. And though the AI was vicious early on, it never seemed competent at the end. And even if it were, it's hard to imagine that the AI could adapt to a focused, determined attack by a human player (taking one city at a time).
- lars_francke 14y ago
  If you read the linked thread you'll find out why. First of all the game was technically won thousands of years back but he kept playing. And now they are in a stalemate that no one can break. His thread is basically all about asking for help (and fresh ideas) to end this.
  - dupe123 14y ago
    i think by "win" he means break the stalemate. the ai in that game sucked and only stayed competitive by cheating. he should have been able to wipe out the opposing civs after 10 years of playing. especially since the op said he was only playing at prince/king difficulty.
- damon_c 14y ago
  On the higher levels, specifically Deity, it seems that there are some variables set in the AI's favor that go beyond normal game play manipulations... Or maybe I am just misdiagnosing my own failures :(
  - Quarrelsome 14y ago
    Yes. Civ games have never been known for their stellar AI. The way they keep the AI competitive at higher levels is to brutally cheat by getting free techs and units at the start and a beneficial modifier to their production and research. Considering how quick the AI needs to run (you don't want "end turn" taking forever) and how complex the game is I can appreciate its simplicity, it is disappointing though. I have examined the sources for the Civ IV AI and must say that it isn't very pretty (hardly any comments too!). One thing it doesn't seem to do that often though is cheat by examining what other players are doing (such as not building wonders it wont get) which is something at least. But still.... can anyone point me towards a game where the devs actually spent a significant amount of time (relatively speaking) on the AI? It always seems like such an afterthought. Mods seem to always be a better bet. Although perhaps that's because the most efficient ways to play a game are always developed long after the game is actually released.
Toenex 14y ago
I'm not suggesting that civ is anyway up to the task but in all seriousness does any government systematically simulate policy decisions? I can't even remember a UK policy decision that even acknowledge the possibility it might not be a complete success let alone suggested criteria by which it should be ultimately evaluated.
- kijin 14y ago
  I like the idea that a piece of legislation should come with concrete criteria for its own evaluation. That would be like falsifying scientific theories: "This theory will be falsified if such-and-such a phenomenon is observed." "This law will be repealed in X years if it turns out to have such-and-such an effect on the economy." Unfortunately, laws can rarely be evaluated in isolation, but only against a wide range of other laws and actual circumstances that constantly shift. It's hard enough to come up with definite criteria for falsifying an advanced scientific theory. It will be nearly impossible to do that with laws, not to mention it's too easy to dispute whether the criteria have been met.
doktrin 14y ago
This was interesting as a simulation cum case study, but rather miserable as far as gaming goes. There is no way a game of Civ II isn't eminently beatable - militarily or otherwise. For one thing, there's no excuse to not operate as a Fundamentalism (0 population unrest) late game. Virtually all other forms of government, particularly Democracy, are an annoying cavalcade of civil unrest late game. I enjoyed the read. It really brought me back in time to playing this game with fervent addiction in middle school.
- dupe123 14y ago
  i'm glad someone said it. i enjoyed the story but wondered how someone could suck that bad at civ after playing it for 10 years.
- creamyhorror 14y ago
  >>> "There is technically no way to tell. The game officially ended years ago and I've had to transfer the save file from computer to computer over the years. Computers that don't have the original hall of fame to reference. That said, I usually played on Prince or King. As I recall, anything beyond that was virtually unplayable in Civ II." I think he probably kept it going even after achieving victory, as a sort of weird experiment that got weirder the longer he went on with it. I can't really imagine being that singleminded/obsessive with respect to a single savegame, but I applaud him for it. -- edit: confirmation >>> What happened to the space race? Did you ever get that far? >>> "Yes. But I didn't participate. When I play civ I usually go for the Diplomatic victory. I did complete it at some point. Probably before the war. But the game was already officially won."
Andytizer 14y ago
For those who are revisiting Civilization II after so many years (or playing it for the very first time), remember to visit this page of bugs, fixes and workarounds for getting it working on modern operating systems: http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Civilization_II http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Civilization_II - if you discover a new fix, please add it in (no account required).
jonnathanson 14y ago
Fascinating, and wonderful to see others are out there who are weird like me, and who will actually attempt to extend Civilization games over extremely long periods. I have a Civ4 game that I've been playing for about 4 straight years now, and admittedly the file has gotten so big that it periodically taxes my system resources to their limits (Unfortunately, Civ4 suffers from poor memory management and is fairly leaky. Especially w/ mods). The problem with Civ4 is that the AI is so hyper-aggressive that long-term stability is all but impossible, unless I become a dominant superpower and take on the role of "world police," intervening in every war of aggression on the side of the underdog. But after awhile, there's really no fun in that. So I have tried to cultivate a game in which a few superpowers are at least my equals, if not my superiors. Since I'm always going to war to defend whoever's about to get wiped out, unfortunately, I'm switching sides constantly, and diplomacy is basically out of the question. (None of the AI players will even return my calls, so to speak. We've all nuked each other so many times over that we won't even speak to each other now). The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict. No, when it declares war, it won't cease until either it's beaten or it totally annihilates its enemy. It's like a Terminator. It becomes quickly apparent that the Nash Equilibrium in a game of Civ4 is one nation standing, while all others have ceased to exist. The game drives ineluctably toward this conclusion, unless the human player puts aside his own nation's interests in pursuit of global stability and game longevity. (And, ironically, being the sole force for stability renders him a political pariah among all the other nations). It's sort of like trying to play one sport, when all the other players in the game have been programmed to play another. Sometimes I wish the AI were more sophisticated, and/or that it could be incentivized to prefer economic growth and interests over nonstop warmaking. Or that one possible victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind (i.e., "Global Victory," instead of just one nation's domination of all others by X or Y measure, or else its complete extirpation of all other peoples on the planet). I realize that's not the game that 99.99% of Civ players want to play, but it's refreshing to hear that I'm not the only one.
- drzaiusapelord 14y ago
  >The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict. This is why I don't play civ. Total war AIs are a bizarre choice in a strategy game. I dislike it when games are setup in a way where I'm the only one thinking strategy and the AI opponents are there to give me a sense of action. Total war in the real world is rare. >Or that one possibly victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind When I was a kid I played a strategy game on the original Mac. I think it was called Balance of Power. The game punished you when war broke out. It didn't encourage it. The game ended if you and the Soviets got into a nuclear conflict. Why can't more games have rational goals instead of just being a more advanced form of Pacman?
orbitingpluto 14y ago
This post illustrates why turn based games rule for richness and complexity. There is nothing so satisfying as finding stable points in gameplay. This one Reddit post will probably waste thousands of what could be productive hours... I am sorely tempted to play Civ3 or GalCivII:TotA today.
- shriphani 14y ago
  I have sunk several hours of my life into Civ5 (and played very few multiplayer games). The thing about the series is that I can sit, build a large empire and take my time. In every non-turn based game (AOE) etc, everyone rushkills and shoots for metrics like FC (fastest castle) etc. without building a lasting empire. The civ series allows me to truly enjoy this aspect of the game. OTOH, in Civ5 I have found the battles sorely lacking (the AI is not clever and artillery can do some very solid damage) so I feel cheated a bit. I still haven't found a game that combines the elements of Civ5 I like and also demands a good battle strategy.
renegadedev 14y ago
We look ahead at 3991 AD and find it to be depressing. I've always wondered how past civilizations (Greeks, Egyptians, etc) would find our modern day civilization.
- Retric 14y ago
  I think they would most flip out over the number of fat people walking around. EX: Here is a pile of grain 1/8th as tall as the great pyramid of Giza. http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/09harvest.html http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/09harvest.html
- cpeterso 14y ago
  And looking forward, I wonder what future civilizations think about their future. What kind of science fiction do people on Star Trek read? It's a convenient cop-out that everyone on the Enterprise is a fan of mid-20th century pop culture or Shakespeare.
- Andrew_Quentin 14y ago
  Its because we have had peace for so long, we fear we might loose it, so the dominant emotion is not hope of getting better, though that exists, but fear of getting worse. Past civilizations mainly were in war with each other, so their dominant emotion was probably hope that things will get better, thus they dreamed. We dream too, but fear a bit also. ha
sid05 14y ago
I'm not familiar with Civilization resources so how would it be possible to perpetually build Nukes ? Wouldn't there be an energy cap or is there some sort of tech to cotinually generate the needed resources.
- stusmall 14y ago
  In the game each tile gives some type of resource. If I remember right, you had food, shields (productivity) and trade (money). A farm land would produce a lot of food but little trade but a mine would produce lots of gold but no food. You gather this amount of resource each turn but it doesn't tax the land at all. Nukes just cost a certain amount of productivity so as long as you hold land you can keep building them. The game isn't really meant to last much past modern times so the model kind of breaks down in a game like OPs. Its worth noting that in later games special resources were added to help make it a little more realistic. Like you had to have a uranium mind somewhere to produce nukes. It lead to really cool strategies, like wars for oil or iron. The reason why he had world resources dwindling at all is because its possible for global warming to cause sea levels to rise and take away bits of land and in the parts of land that don't sink their type can change (plains can become deserts, jungles to forests).
jacqueschirac 14y ago
i love this game. civ V roooooocks.
rangibaby 14y ago
I really enjoyed Civ2; even once you've figured out how to game the AI (it's predictable hostility and cheating are actually it's biggest weaknesses), there are still challenges, such as limiting yourself to one city (!) or finishing before a certain year. Just one thing set off my pedant alarm: Civ2 didn't come out until 1996. I still remember getting the collector's box with the huge strategy guide ;-)
fts89 14y ago
My plan to defeat the other armies is: 1. Get the game: http://www.amazon.com/Sid-Meiers-Civilization-II-Pc/dp/B00002S8AV/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339556977&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Sid-Meiers-Civilization-II-Pc/dp/B0000... 2. Defeat the other armies
radical_cut 14y ago
In case anybody else is interested, here's a post with link to the save file: http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uyswv/here_it_is/ http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uyswv/here_it... Time to fire up Civ II and try to save the world!
vog 14y ago
I'd love to see a similar report about a long-played FreeCiv game. (http://freeciv.org http://freeciv.org)

471 points by jchrisa 14y ago

To be clear, this is a guy that has been playing a single game of Civ II for 10 years. When I first saw this I thought, isn't Civ II older than 10 years? (came out in 1996) I love Civ and still go back and play Civ II at times. I spent a lot of time with Civ III and IV as well (and a little with V), but it's nice to go back to my first experience with the genre (Civ 1 was before my time, sadly).

sageikosa 14y ago
Thanks, I sometimes only read the comments on HN. My first thought was: Civ III is over 10 years old.

Tichy 14y ago

Is it possible to run a completely automated Civ game (all players computer players)? Should be a quicker way to simulate the future. Perhaps the AI could learn "War Games" style that nuclear war is not the way to go... Or maybe it would be a depressing result if the AIs would not nuke around without a human in the mix?

martey 14y ago
I remember trying this when I was younger (with the Cheat menu). The primary issue is that while it is quicker, it is difficult to figure out the details of what is happening in the game when there is no pause at the beginning of your turn. Since the AI "personalities" of the different computer players cause some of them to be more aggressive than others, all of the games I tried to simulate in this way ended up with one military aggressive AI player dominating enough of the world that they did not need nuclear weapons. There was a significant amount of variance among AI personalities and winning strategies in the various versions of Civilization I played, so I suspect that your success would vary depending on which version you were using. For example, if you were using CivNet, the multiplayer version of the original game, the anemic AI in that game might very well lock into some sort of peaceful stalemate, but the contentious resource model in Civilization III would probably produce different results.
kzrdude 14y ago
You can do this easily with Freeciv (Civ2-ish clone), unfortunately the AI is not as interesting (what I've seen).
pwaring 14y ago
You could do it with Alpha Centauri - I seem to remember an article by Firaxis where they explained putting in this feature so they could tweak a parameter, set the AI off and see what effect it had.
impendia 14y ago
I did this, more or less, in the original Civ. I was a player in my own game, I built a city in the Arctic, built a military unit in it, then disbanded the rest of my civilzation. The AI doesn't ever go there.
CoreDumpling 14y ago
<shameless plug> I wrote a utility a while ago to manipulate human/AI control of civs in Civ III (conquests expansion pack), as a bit of a reverse engineering exercise: https://github.com/CoreDumpling/c3me https://github.com/CoreDumpling/c3me </shameless plug> It's possible to set every player to AI and then just let the game run to observe the results. (You'll still have to dismiss pop-ups about civs getting eliminated or wonders being built, though.) I've done it on several occasions, mostly to test out mods to check if they are properly balanced. In general, I've noticed that AI's that nuke aggressively do tend to win in the long run, but if nukes are disabled or otherwise restricted, huge stalemates can result.

CharlieA 14y ago

The 3-way division of the world into "super-continents" and the constant war keeping the populace in a perpetual state of starvation and poverty, with the entire world in disrepair is so incredibly reminiscent of Orwell's 1984 it's scary. If you haven't read 1984, it's a startlingly bleak view of a potential future (from a historical perspective, but still applicable today, I think) particularly through technology and a loss of privacy. It's the origin of terms like "big brother" and "doublethink" -- worth a read. One of the most interesting excerpts from this piece IMO: "I wanted to stay a democracy, but the Senate would always over-rule me when I wanted to declare war... ...Anyway, I was forced to do away with democracy roughly a thousand years ago because it was endangering my empire." Although I don't necessarily think it will be because of war, I can see a potential future where people/persons decide democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process -- democratic process being (more or less) committee-based decision making, which proxies votes through individuals based on what is essentially a popularity contest. That's particularly true here in Australia at the moment (amidst a minority government with a lot of political sniping on both sides and seemingly very little real progress) despite the fact that we have a comparatively strong economy, low inflation, low unemployment and generally nothing really significant (again, comparatively) to complain about.

joshcrews 14y ago
I too noticed the 1984 similarities. One difference is that the world of this Civ II game is the utopia state for the inner party of 1984-- perpetual war that only happens at the borders and doesn't really risk the existence of the 3 superpowers. Such a war keeps the people from acquiring wealth and leisure and justifies a totalitarian government.
nathan_long 14y ago
>> democracy is a less effective system because it's holding back the decision making process... seemingly very little real progress... we have... generally nothing really significant ... to complain about. This mystifies me: people sometimes talk about legislative gridlock as though it's all bad. Do you measure the quality of a development team by the number of lines of code they produce? Of course not. The development team does not exist to produce code; it exists to produce and maintain the best possible codebase. Refraining from writing bad code is just as important as writing good code. You just said your country has very little to complain about. What makes you think that a "productive" legislature would make things better and not worse? I much prefer a system where any law needs broad consensus and relatively few are passed. Dumb as I often think the U.S. government is, at the end of the day, we have police, roads, schools, etc. Not perfect, but good enough that I can live my life in peace. Of course, a dictatorship would be extremely efficient: the leader snaps his/her fingers and things happen. The question is: efficient at what?

deleted 14y ago

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Paul_S 14y ago

If you disable the space race as a winning condition the chance of a nuclear holocaust over time approaches 1. I'm not saying there are any lessons to be had from it. It's only a game.

mertd 14y ago
After completing "Future Technology #532", spamming nukes is the only interesting thing left to do in the game.

Tycho 14y ago

I can remember my Civ II campaigns in more detail than I can recall about actual historic events.

radical_cut 14y ago

Well that gave me goosebumps. Bleak future indeed, I immediately thought of the Doomsday Clock. I like the idea of a new subreddit spawned by this: http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar. It could be interresting to see if anybody finds a way to save the world from hell. Maybe it's time to relive good old memories of times spend with old Civ games. :)

pavel_lishin 14y ago
It would be interesting if he exported the game state, so other people could try resolving the conflict.
- timwoj 14y ago
  The top post of the top thread in r/theeternalwar say he's working on exporting it for everyone.
- mynameishere 14y ago
  The game is easy and boring in the end. He's purposely letting it go on and on.
  - zem 14y ago
    read through the thread; it's anything but easy. he's hit the point where the ai civs have decided nuclear war is the way to go, and he's reaping the global penalties for it (radioactive wastelands, global warming) while simultaneously having to divert all his resources to maintaining the red queen race of building tanks and having them destroyed rather than cleaning up his farmlands to grow food.
    - mynameishere 14y ago
      I blew away an unfortunately portion of my youth playing this game. When everyone has all the techs, the human wins, very easily.

danso 14y ago

I love Civ 2, but how is it that the OP can't win against two AIs? They weren't geniuses, AFAIK. And though the AI was vicious early on, it never seemed competent at the end. And even if it were, it's hard to imagine that the AI could adapt to a focused, determined attack by a human player (taking one city at a time).

lars_francke 14y ago
If you read the linked thread you'll find out why. First of all the game was technically won thousands of years back but he kept playing. And now they are in a stalemate that no one can break. His thread is basically all about asking for help (and fresh ideas) to end this.
- dupe123 14y ago
  i think by "win" he means break the stalemate. the ai in that game sucked and only stayed competitive by cheating. he should have been able to wipe out the opposing civs after 10 years of playing. especially since the op said he was only playing at prince/king difficulty.
damon_c 14y ago
On the higher levels, specifically Deity, it seems that there are some variables set in the AI's favor that go beyond normal game play manipulations... Or maybe I am just misdiagnosing my own failures :(
- Quarrelsome 14y ago
  Yes. Civ games have never been known for their stellar AI. The way they keep the AI competitive at higher levels is to brutally cheat by getting free techs and units at the start and a beneficial modifier to their production and research. Considering how quick the AI needs to run (you don't want "end turn" taking forever) and how complex the game is I can appreciate its simplicity, it is disappointing though. I have examined the sources for the Civ IV AI and must say that it isn't very pretty (hardly any comments too!). One thing it doesn't seem to do that often though is cheat by examining what other players are doing (such as not building wonders it wont get) which is something at least. But still.... can anyone point me towards a game where the devs actually spent a significant amount of time (relatively speaking) on the AI? It always seems like such an afterthought. Mods seem to always be a better bet. Although perhaps that's because the most efficient ways to play a game are always developed long after the game is actually released.

Toenex 14y ago

I'm not suggesting that civ is anyway up to the task but in all seriousness does any government systematically simulate policy decisions? I can't even remember a UK policy decision that even acknowledge the possibility it might not be a complete success let alone suggested criteria by which it should be ultimately evaluated.

kijin 14y ago
I like the idea that a piece of legislation should come with concrete criteria for its own evaluation. That would be like falsifying scientific theories: "This theory will be falsified if such-and-such a phenomenon is observed." "This law will be repealed in X years if it turns out to have such-and-such an effect on the economy." Unfortunately, laws can rarely be evaluated in isolation, but only against a wide range of other laws and actual circumstances that constantly shift. It's hard enough to come up with definite criteria for falsifying an advanced scientific theory. It will be nearly impossible to do that with laws, not to mention it's too easy to dispute whether the criteria have been met.

doktrin 14y ago

This was interesting as a simulation cum case study, but rather miserable as far as gaming goes. There is no way a game of Civ II isn't eminently beatable - militarily or otherwise. For one thing, there's no excuse to not operate as a Fundamentalism (0 population unrest) late game. Virtually all other forms of government, particularly Democracy, are an annoying cavalcade of civil unrest late game. I enjoyed the read. It really brought me back in time to playing this game with fervent addiction in middle school.

dupe123 14y ago
i'm glad someone said it. i enjoyed the story but wondered how someone could suck that bad at civ after playing it for 10 years.
creamyhorror 14y ago
>>> "There is technically no way to tell. The game officially ended years ago and I've had to transfer the save file from computer to computer over the years. Computers that don't have the original hall of fame to reference. That said, I usually played on Prince or King. As I recall, anything beyond that was virtually unplayable in Civ II." I think he probably kept it going even after achieving victory, as a sort of weird experiment that got weirder the longer he went on with it. I can't really imagine being that singleminded/obsessive with respect to a single savegame, but I applaud him for it. -- edit: confirmation >>> What happened to the space race? Did you ever get that far? >>> "Yes. But I didn't participate. When I play civ I usually go for the Diplomatic victory. I did complete it at some point. Probably before the war. But the game was already officially won."

Andytizer 14y ago

For those who are revisiting Civilization II after so many years (or playing it for the very first time), remember to visit this page of bugs, fixes and workarounds for getting it working on modern operating systems: http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Civilization_II http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Civilization_II - if you discover a new fix, please add it in (no account required).

jonnathanson 14y ago

Fascinating, and wonderful to see others are out there who are weird like me, and who will actually attempt to extend Civilization games over extremely long periods. I have a Civ4 game that I've been playing for about 4 straight years now, and admittedly the file has gotten so big that it periodically taxes my system resources to their limits (Unfortunately, Civ4 suffers from poor memory management and is fairly leaky. Especially w/ mods). The problem with Civ4 is that the AI is so hyper-aggressive that long-term stability is all but impossible, unless I become a dominant superpower and take on the role of "world police," intervening in every war of aggression on the side of the underdog. But after awhile, there's really no fun in that. So I have tried to cultivate a game in which a few superpowers are at least my equals, if not my superiors. Since I'm always going to war to defend whoever's about to get wiped out, unfortunately, I'm switching sides constantly, and diplomacy is basically out of the question. (None of the AI players will even return my calls, so to speak. We've all nuked each other so many times over that we won't even speak to each other now). The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict. No, when it declares war, it won't cease until either it's beaten or it totally annihilates its enemy. It's like a Terminator. It becomes quickly apparent that the Nash Equilibrium in a game of Civ4 is one nation standing, while all others have ceased to exist. The game drives ineluctably toward this conclusion, unless the human player puts aside his own nation's interests in pursuit of global stability and game longevity. (And, ironically, being the sole force for stability renders him a political pariah among all the other nations). It's sort of like trying to play one sport, when all the other players in the game have been programmed to play another. Sometimes I wish the AI were more sophisticated, and/or that it could be incentivized to prefer economic growth and interests over nonstop warmaking. Or that one possible victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind (i.e., "Global Victory," instead of just one nation's domination of all others by X or Y measure, or else its complete extirpation of all other peoples on the planet). I realize that's not the game that 99.99% of Civ players want to play, but it's refreshing to hear that I'm not the only one.

drzaiusapelord 14y ago
>The other problem is that the AI fights total wars by default. It will never engage in a limited conflict. This is why I don't play civ. Total war AIs are a bizarre choice in a strategy game. I dislike it when games are setup in a way where I'm the only one thinking strategy and the AI opponents are there to give me a sense of action. Total war in the real world is rare. >Or that one possibly victory condition in a game of Civilization would be to maximize a global human development index of some kind When I was a kid I played a strategy game on the original Mac. I think it was called Balance of Power. The game punished you when war broke out. It didn't encourage it. The game ended if you and the Soviets got into a nuclear conflict. Why can't more games have rational goals instead of just being a more advanced form of Pacman?

orbitingpluto 14y ago

This post illustrates why turn based games rule for richness and complexity. There is nothing so satisfying as finding stable points in gameplay. This one Reddit post will probably waste thousands of what could be productive hours... I am sorely tempted to play Civ3 or GalCivII:TotA today.

shriphani 14y ago
I have sunk several hours of my life into Civ5 (and played very few multiplayer games). The thing about the series is that I can sit, build a large empire and take my time. In every non-turn based game (AOE) etc, everyone rushkills and shoots for metrics like FC (fastest castle) etc. without building a lasting empire. The civ series allows me to truly enjoy this aspect of the game. OTOH, in Civ5 I have found the battles sorely lacking (the AI is not clever and artillery can do some very solid damage) so I feel cheated a bit. I still haven't found a game that combines the elements of Civ5 I like and also demands a good battle strategy.

renegadedev 14y ago

We look ahead at 3991 AD and find it to be depressing. I've always wondered how past civilizations (Greeks, Egyptians, etc) would find our modern day civilization.

Retric 14y ago
I think they would most flip out over the number of fat people walking around. EX: Here is a pile of grain 1/8th as tall as the great pyramid of Giza. http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/09harvest.html http://artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/09harvest.html
cpeterso 14y ago
And looking forward, I wonder what future civilizations think about their future. What kind of science fiction do people on Star Trek read? It's a convenient cop-out that everyone on the Enterprise is a fan of mid-20th century pop culture or Shakespeare.
Andrew_Quentin 14y ago
Its because we have had peace for so long, we fear we might loose it, so the dominant emotion is not hope of getting better, though that exists, but fear of getting worse. Past civilizations mainly were in war with each other, so their dominant emotion was probably hope that things will get better, thus they dreamed. We dream too, but fear a bit also. ha

sid05 14y ago

I'm not familiar with Civilization resources so how would it be possible to perpetually build Nukes ? Wouldn't there be an energy cap or is there some sort of tech to cotinually generate the needed resources.

stusmall 14y ago
In the game each tile gives some type of resource. If I remember right, you had food, shields (productivity) and trade (money). A farm land would produce a lot of food but little trade but a mine would produce lots of gold but no food. You gather this amount of resource each turn but it doesn't tax the land at all. Nukes just cost a certain amount of productivity so as long as you hold land you can keep building them. The game isn't really meant to last much past modern times so the model kind of breaks down in a game like OPs. Its worth noting that in later games special resources were added to help make it a little more realistic. Like you had to have a uranium mind somewhere to produce nukes. It lead to really cool strategies, like wars for oil or iron. The reason why he had world resources dwindling at all is because its possible for global warming to cause sea levels to rise and take away bits of land and in the parts of land that don't sink their type can change (plains can become deserts, jungles to forests).

jacqueschirac 14y ago

i love this game. civ V roooooocks.

rangibaby 14y ago

I really enjoyed Civ2; even once you've figured out how to game the AI (it's predictable hostility and cheating are actually it's biggest weaknesses), there are still challenges, such as limiting yourself to one city (!) or finishing before a certain year. Just one thing set off my pedant alarm: Civ2 didn't come out until 1996. I still remember getting the collector's box with the huge strategy guide ;-)

fts89 14y ago

My plan to defeat the other armies is: 1. Get the game: http://www.amazon.com/Sid-Meiers-Civilization-II-Pc/dp/B00002S8AV/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339556977&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Sid-Meiers-Civilization-II-Pc/dp/B0000... 2. Defeat the other armies

radical_cut 14y ago

In case anybody else is interested, here's a post with link to the save file: http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uyswv/here_it_is/ http://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uyswv/here_it... Time to fire up Civ II and try to save the world!

vog 14y ago

I'd love to see a similar report about a long-played FreeCiv game. (http://freeciv.org http://freeciv.org)