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Nuclear Gandhi, as far as I can tell, was actually about Civ I, not Civ II. Gandhi would get to nukes early because India had a tech boost, and he would threate
by pclmulqdq 2y ago
Nuclear Gandhi, as far as I can tell, was actually about Civ I, not Civ II. Gandhi would get to nukes early because India had a tech boost, and he would threaten the player in every diplomatic interaction that his words were backed with nukes. The AI in the early Civ games is pretty aggressive, too, so I assume that if you rejected him too many times, he absolutely would become a big warmonger.
As to the integer underflow, that appears to either be debunked or to be something that Sid Meyer misremembered (IMO both are possible). I don't think you need an integer underflow for Gandhi to go nuclear in an early Civ game, though.
- eliben 2y agoIt is authoritatively debunked in Sid Meier's (excellent) memoir - there was no such integer underflow bug in Civ I, it was all a rumor that went viral. The franchise did embrace the meme, though.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoI am aware that it's in his memoir, but I am not sure whether he actually went through the code to write it or just went back through his notes/memory. Or whether 2K told him to "debunk" it so he wrote some fiction (also a possibility - see Feynman's memoirs which have quite a bit of fiction in them). It was a long time ago and prior to the memoir, neither he nor any of the other developers on a Civ franchise remembered whether there was an error, and they all said as much on the record. Also, the story of an underflow was about Civ II, not Civ I. I am not necessarily convinced there is no underflow, but I am convinced that there is a plausible alternative theory.