
Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions - blammail
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/18/civilization-25-years-66-versions-33m-copies-sold-1-billion-hours-played/
======
mattzito
I started playing civilization when I was 12 or 13 (Civilization 1), and
still, to this day, the closest thing I have to meditation is playing Civ V.

I travel a decent amount, and one of my great joys is being on a plane
_without_ wifi but _with_ inseat power (Civ V on the mac is a ridiculous power
hog), and knowing that I've got X hours of civilization to play with no one to
bother me.

My strategy isn't great, I have everything set to Random, and I just drop into
whatever situation and work it. At the end of a flight, I close that scenario,
and rarely pick it back up - I start a new one. And I feel relaxed and my mind
is clear. It's amazing.

~~~
zem
not sure if it's just because I'm older and less into gaming, but civ5 seems
markedly less fun as a game than civ1 and civ2 were. I just couldn't get into
it, and I used to spend entire nights on the older games.

~~~
lackbeard
Did you ever play 4? Was the best one, IMO.

~~~
ionised
Agreed. Civ 4 with Beyond the Sword was the pinnacle of the series I think.

Thousands of hours I lost in that game.

~~~
baldfat
I prefer Alpha Centauri and Civ 3.

MOO2 was much more to my liking. (I still play it)

Civ end game are just ___brutally boring_ __and just never really wanted to
finish them. The start and middle were the best parts.

------
kinghajj
Nobody else has mentioned this, but something Civ has taught me is how to
appreciate realpolitik. Nothing makes it more clear than when you catch
yourself having thoughts like:

\- "Washington spawned too close for comfort; they're a threat to my peoples'
long term security. Annihilate them first."

\- "Hmm, the Mayans have some strategically valuable territory..."

\- "Hey, the Persians are way back in the Renaissance, while I'm in the modern
era, and they have luxuries I need. Let's send a few battleships over there."

~~~
jhanschoo
If you're interested in realpolitik in games, I'd like to recommend the
excellent Crusader Kings II game and its DLC. You play as a feudal ruler, and
find your character plotting murders, marrying off daughters, and conspiring
for claims to titles.

~~~
elthran
Then you'll end up trading those normal realpolitik thoughts for "I'll marry
my heir off to my sister because she's a genius", "I'll just have these 5
children assassinated for their father's land". Choose your own poison.

~~~
creshal
Ideally you choose their poison, not your own.

Unless you want to commit suicide to be able to bring your strong, genius heir
to power.

~~~
eropple
Gotta get the Depressed trait first for that.

------
ekianjo
I highly prefer Colonization to all the Civilization episodes I have played.
Colonization feels more focused, more tangible, and yet still manages to be a
great management game with credible threats with multiple parties: natives
trying to fight back for their land, other European powers trying to establish
successful colonies on their own, and ultimately the royal power you will
fight against to secure your Freedom. The tension gets really high, really
quick. And there is no "shortcut" you can take to have a technological advance
versus your enemies.

~~~
douche
Too bad they kind of missed the mark with the Civ 4-engined reboot.

The only really unbalanced part of the original was if you happened to land in
a temperate area with lots of beavers, friendly Indians with the Fur Trapper
training, and managed to roll Henry Hudson for the first Continental Congress
member. Very quickly you could start churning out full stacks of furs and
basically printing money that would allow you to buy specialists, cannon,
ships and supplies.

~~~
ekianjo
Yeah the Civ4-reboot was awful. Or at least, it was just a recreation of the
original without any addition while it could have been a great opportunity to
build on it.

> The only really unbalanced part of the original was if you happened to land
> in a temperate area with lots of beavers

Sure - there are actually many ways to make money fast, but they also have a
system that rebalances prices back in Europe when you sell too much of the
same thing (price fall) - this forces you to diversify your production.

------
ra1n85
Amazing series.

I still recall being able to recount all of the 7 wonders, all of the large
Greek city states, and all that other countless historical context that the
developers packed into the game that gave me a slight leg up in middle school
history class.

And of course I'll encourage my children to play someday. No childhood is
complete without having to fight back Gandhi's unrelenting hordes of musketmen
with stealth bombers.

~~~
mikeash
It would be remiss to mention Civilization and Gandhi on a tech site without
discussing _why_ he was such a crazy warmonger.

In the original Civilization, Gandhi's "aggression" rating was set to 1 to
make him a pacifist. Except that when a civilization adopted the Democracy
form of government, this reduced the leader's aggression rating by 2. The
ratings were unsigned, so this wrapped around and gave Gandhi an "aggression"
rating of 255 once he adopted Democracy. Oopsie.

~~~
deciplex
It's also worth pointing out that apparently in some later editions of the
game they have reimplemented this bug as a joke. (Not a very good joke, IMO.)

------
dcw303
I came perilously close to failing several university assignments thanks to an
unhealthy obsession with original Civ. And I loved every minute of it.

I still play the newer versions now and then, but the original stands out as a
paragon of game design. It was grid based, so unit movement was easy with
keystrokes. That along with hot keys for everything meant that you could play
a complete game without a mouse. This was particularly useful at keeping the
endgame speedy. Something that I think is missing in later versions.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
1B hours played. Think about your experience with a couple hundred hours, and
then multiply that by a few million similar instances - how much productivity
has been lost? Or how much history has been learned, friendships built, and
strategy developed? Similarly, how many billions of hours have been spent
browsing Facebook, for better or worse?

I think one of the most important ethical questions we can ask ourselves is
how can we write great gaming, working, and social networking software that
has a net positive effect on the world through the hours that are spent in it.

~~~
dcw303
You have a fair point in regards to responsibility. I'm guessing that I think
similiarly to you that these experiences are subjective?

One person's addiction with a 4x strategy game is another's gateway into a
lifelong fascination with building complex information systems. One person's
compulsive Facebook checking leading to depression is another's connection
with family members when they're working overseas.

There is an ethical responsibility in creating technology, but there are many
shades of grey in how people use it.

------
phillco
My favorite thing about Civ is that its creator has kept control over it, and
continues to evolve it. We'll probably be enjoying a new Civ in 2026. The
charm is that it's the same game in many respects — parts evolve, but the core
remains.

This seems unusual; I can point to several popular 90's games that peaked
there and never recovered (Roller Coaster Tycoon, Age of Empires II, and
arguably SimCity 4 if you include the early naughts). I wonder why; as a
player, the Civ model seems preferable (you always have modern versions and
new, but not heretical, variety).

~~~
yen223
Strategy games in general seem to have hit a slump for some reason.

~~~
frik
Yeah sadly. More game developers changed to "console first" or "mobile first".
Streamlined casual gameplay pay to win / free to play and the lack of a
precise input device (mouse) on consoles almost killed the former very popular
PC strategy games segment.

Civ, SC and Anno barely survived that trend in some streamlined form or
another. I am still playing old perls from Age of Empires, Roller Coaster
Tycoon, SimCity, Command & Conquer, Empire Earth, Settler, Industry Giant, etc
series. The PC strategy game era I am familar with was between 1990 and 2005.
The good thing all software still works and 2D graphics of some titles is good
enough and aged better than early 3D graphics. And C&C Generals, Roller
Coaster Tycoon 3, Age of Mythology and Age of Empires 3 still look very good,
12-15 years later.

<rant>It's like Crysis 1 from 2007 and GTA 4 from 2008 are still top notch,
and can be compared with the best titles in 2015 like GTA 5 PC and AC Unity.
No wonder with all the stagnation that highend GPU on 2k is running on just
25% load these days.</rant>

~~~
ascagnel_
There are hopeful signs that this is starting to change. The 2012 XCOM title
has a more console-friendly interface (it plays better with a controller) and
has a great mobile port (the iOS version is mechanically identical to the PC
game, and is only missing a few maps and graphical flair). Yes, that title is
streamlined, but that streamlining sanded off the rougher edges of the 1990s
games (especially in the tactical mode, where managing time units was a
constant pain).

~~~
frik
Sorry, but you wrote 180 degree opposite response to what I actually wrote.

The problem I see is a lack of strategy games, especiall real time strategy
games that are not trying to clone Star Craft 2 (like 10 SciFi clones,
boring!). And the casualization and streamlining of gameplay makes it
pointless for real core PC game players. PC games of the 1990s and 2000s had a
great PC UI, I don't want dumbed down UIs and gameplay of bad console ports. I
want micro management and real time gameplay like in the games mentioned in my
previous comment. (The same goes for console players who don't want to do
micro management of single small units with a controller, that's why console
strategy games aren't very popular and have different gameplay.)

~~~
ascagnel_
There's a difference between streamlining useless micromanagement and removing
gameplay mechanics.

To use XCOM as an example:

The 1994 game featured a time unit stat. You would have to measure out,
manually, the number of tiles you would move past, multiply that by four (the
amount of TU moving one tile would take), add two if you were kneeling at the
start of the turn, subtract two from the available total if you wanted to
kneel at the end of the turn, and subtract from the available total the number
of TU necessary for the number of shots (or reaction shots) you wanted to
take. On top of that, there were three different shot types (an aimed shot
that would take up almost all TUs, an auto shot that would take up about half
of the available TUs, and a snap shot that'd only take up about a quarter but
also maxed out at a 20% chance to hit, making it mostly useless). This process
and complexity was not fun, especially since the UI didn't make it easy to
count the tiles you'd be moving.

The 2012 removed TU and replaced it with a few systems. For moving, you have a
pair of lines that marked a move or a dash. A basic move allows for a shot
(either on-command or as a reaction), while the dash would extend range (and
could be coupled with a shot based on a class-specific ability). A single
character move takes seconds instead of minutes, regardless of the platform.
It took an overly-complex mechanic, simplified it, and made it more fun.

Civ 4 vs Civ Revolution. Civ Rev combat is simplified in a bad way -- it's
build a giant stack of combined "army" units and whittle away at your
opponent, with combat resolved by die rolls and modifiers rather than unit
attributes.

It's worth noting that the new XCOM was developed by creating a board game;
measuring distance is common in tabletop war games (think Warhammer and its
ilk).

In my mind, it's a suitable like-for-like replacement of TUs (you still have
to balance movement, exposing the map, etc., with firepower) with an
implementation that requires less fiddling with the UI.

------
brandnewlow
I've played 1-5 extensively and Civ III is the most fun by far.

Anyone know how I can get Civ III on a Mac?

It's been "not available" here forever: [http://www.aspyr.com/games/sid-
meiers-civilization-iii-compl...](http://www.aspyr.com/games/sid-meiers-
civilization-iii-complete)

I've tried playing the Windows version via Parallels but it fails out during
load.

~~~
zyxley
Have you tried it with Wine? Wineskin
([http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/](http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/)) lets
you package Wine installs as self-contained Mac apps, which takes most of the
hassle out of it.

~~~
brandnewlow
I will give it a go!

------
marak830
Gods the amount of time i spent on civ.

But didnt that article seem to stop all of a sudden? I checked twice on my
phone to see if i missed a more button.

Didnt civ 4 get an award for audio?(and i loved the music on 4, was so
disappointed with 5s audio), the article left me with a , meh, what about. . .
! for so many things.

Being only 32 i would imagine a great article to show me things i didnt know.

Sigh. The temptation to play more right now is strong, but i need to get this
work done :-)

~~~
yen223
Baba Yetu, the theme song of Civ 4, was the first video game-related song to
win a Grammy. Rightfully so too, in my opinion.

~~~
marak830
Thats the name of it. I need to listen again soon. So relaxing!

------
pella
free & opensource version: [http://www.freeciv.org/](http://www.freeciv.org/)

web version: [https://play.freeciv.org/](https://play.freeciv.org/)

~~~
eru
You should also check out the first Master of Orion. The origin of the 4X
name, and still one of the best examples of the genre.

(There are fan-made patches available. Make sure to get them.)

~~~
foobarian
Also worth mentioning Master of Magic. It's Civilization I with spells.

~~~
chongli
Yes! And get the Caster of Magic fan-made patch[0]. It fixes a ton of bugs and
rebalances the game in some dramatic ways. The author has had to severely tone
down the bonuses the AI gets at higher difficulty levels and it still feels
way more difficult than the original game! I've got several of my friends
hooked on this new version, we just can't seem to get enough!

[0]
[http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=7751](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=7751)

~~~
listic
From the description, it's a pretty severe revamp of the game. Do you think it
is justified? Also, I wonder, how did he go about improving the AI: it's a
closed source game, after all.

~~~
chongli
_Do you think it is justified?_

After playing a lot of it, the answer is: totally! The original game has some
pretty severe balance problems: tons of spells are so underpowered that you
never cast them and generally avoid researching them. Most of the units in the
original game have so much resistance that nearly all of the unit curse spells
have little or no effect on them. The disparity between the realms of magic
was also way too high on the original game.

 _Also, I wonder, how did he go about improving the AI_

With a hex editor. A bunch of the AI code in the original game is decently
well written. The problem is that the game has tables of hard-coded priorities
for things like spells, units, buffs, etc. that are way out of whack. His
detailed changelogs go over the hundreds of adjustments he's made to these
priority values.

He also just fixed a whole bunch of straight bugs with the AI. Some examples:
it would cast spells without a valid target (wasting mana and spellcasting
skill), build and disband units repeatedly, miscalculate combat odds and then
carry out an attack that had no chance of succeeding, etc.

------
domtron_vox
My father still plays civ 1. His windows 94 broke down a number of years ago.
He was so sad about not having civ 1 so I set the game up for him in dosbox.

~~~
Pxtl
I get the appeal of simplicity,but why not try newer-but-still-simple Civ like
Revolutions or something?

~~~
cmdrfred
Revolutions was too simple for my taste.

~~~
Pxtl
Yes, but we're talking about Civ 1. Civ 1 is also much simpler than the modern
games. Revolutions I thought was a good distilling of the Civ mechanics.

~~~
cmdrfred
Civ 1 still felt deeper to me then rev. It was ok, but I would have preferred
a mobile version of Civ 1 instead.

------
minikites
Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri are still the best balance of simplicity vs fussiness
in my opinion. I like Civ 5 quite a lot but there's a lot of fussing about
with the resources like horses or oil and there are a lot of edge-case city
improvements.

~~~
endgame
Given the amount of fussing required to get the most of Supply Crawlers in
SMAC, I'm surprised to hear that viewpoint.

Nevertheless, the scope of SMAC's vision continues to inspire:
[https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/](https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/) is
analysing the canon and implications from the various quotes and project
videos.

~~~
minikites
You're right that the fussiness is there with supply crawlers and some of the
terraforming options, but they can be ignored.

Civ 2 is pretty much perfect. Each terraform has 1 or 2 upgrades
(road/railroad, irrigation/farmland, etc) and each city improvement serves an
exact purpose with no "filler" improvements.

------
jcadam
Played the original Civilization on an Amiga and have played every release
since (including CivNet).

Civilization II was easily the best game in the series. It's sad that Civ V,
as pretty as it is, is so freaking horrible.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Let me guess, II was the first you played? Everybody has a special attachment
to the first one they got addicted too.

In my opinion II was the worst of the five. It was basically the same as the
first with more of everything. More techs, more unit types et cetera. Didn't
really add anything to the game except make it longer. It meant you couldn't
finish a game in a single sitting which really lessened the appeal to me.

Starting with III they started added more dimensions like religion and
culture. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't but I appreciated exploring
how strategies changed.

Edit: did a really poor job of reading your post or else you edited it. Oh
well, just pretend my comment stands alone, please.

~~~
vacri
In my opinion, each civ built on the last, until 5 plummeted the interest
factor. Played 1 first.

~~~
moomin
Same, I've played a lot of 1,2 and 3, but 4 was ridiculously deep and well
balanced. Never got past Prince.

------
cmdrfred
In my opinion this is the best game humanity ever managed to design. I've
never played anything that I've enjoyed more.

------
locusm
The way Civ let you email a multiplayer round was awesome when connectivity
was an issue.

~~~
vidarh
Lots of similar BBS games, like some versions of Empire for example [1],
supported "play by mail" in various forms so they could be played on custom
clients offline followed by uploading the moves.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Classic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Classic)

------
jack9
After I graduated to dwarf fortress, I never looked back.

------
Smircio-
Im still trying to tell myself that the time played clock is because I left it
open all night on accident... a few times...I didnt.

------
presty
Sid Meier's Civilization V

You've Played 786 hours

Last Played Today

------
dudul
By far the game I wasted the most time in my life :) Managed to kill my
addiction and stop after Civ 4.

~~~
kjdal2001
I haven't been able to kick the Civ habit completely, but I indulge much less
frequently then I did back in college.

I have told my coworkers though, if I come into work in the morning and look
red-eyed and tired, its probably not because I was up late drinking last
night. Its because I made the terrible decision to fire up a game of Civ at
9pm.

------
phodo
One of the greatest games of all time - recently added windows 10, bootcamp,
virtualbox... just to be able to re-enjoy the original classic version again.
Future versions don't do justice to the original.

------
acheron
I like how so many of the posts in this thread are "[this one] was the best!",
but I'm pretty sure I've seen all 5 of the main games held up and possibly one
about Alpha Centauri too.

I'm sure when Civ 6 comes out we'll have people complaining because it's not
like 5 or 4 or whichever one was their favorite, but I like that they change
every time. If I wanted to buy a new game every year that was the same as the
previous one, I'd be playing Madden.

~~~
tdsamardzhiev
All the Civ games are great on their own right. I know people that still
prefer 1, 2, 3 or 4.

The main reason I currently play only 5/BE is their far superior graphics and
interface. And no stacks of doom.

------
nissehulth
I think Civ.Net was the first game I played on the internet against someone I
didn't already knew. Could have been early 1996.

It wasn't the best gaming experience though. Each turn took like forever
(well, minutes), after a few hours we had to pause the game and agree on when
to continue the next day.

Still, finding an opponent "on demand" was something that did hint about what
was to come later.

(well, there were BBS "door games" earlier, but not really "real time" in the
same way)

------
dinosaurs
The Civ series has always been on my radar as they seem to be quite
interesting games. I remember going through the tutorials of either 4 or 5 but
I never really got hooked. Not for a lack of trying, but I just didn't know
what to do in the games. I always felt like I needed more guidance or
something. Are there guides out there to help learn how to play these games? I
might try 5 again after reading this!

------
Yhippa
Count me in as another person who was hopelessly addicted as a kid. I remember
one summer in middle school I would hit the power button on my PC and play
this game until dinner. What's different about this game was that I would play
it and not feel bad that I spent so much time doing it. Few games are like
that for me today. This has to be one of the best dynamic puzzle or strategy
games of all time.

------
scurvy
My first intro to overrun bugs. I couldn't otherwise have found myself yelling
"effing Ghandi" so often.

------
technofiend
Civ is hella fun but it doesn't scale well - massive games become untenable
due to app slowness and memory footprint.

I think this is in part due to Civ's design of each player gets all their
moves consecutively, rather than in parallel. Although it would change
gameplay Civ could take advantage of multi cpu by either staging decision
trees based on likely actions taken by the player and other civilizations or
creating multiple rounds of actions in each turn which are executed in
parallel.

This would have the added advantage - if "they" chose to code it this way -
for hardcore civ players to offload compute to AWS or other services. I would
love to crank up a world domination Civ game with 50+ entities that doesn't
take minutes per turn.

Wishful thinking for Civ VI but there you go.

~~~
mserdarsanli
Yeah they should also use Node.js to make it more async and MongoDB for
webscale.

~~~
technofiend
Sarcasm doesn't become you. :-)

------
fergie
I hate to think how many of those hours I am responsible for...

------
tamana
All I want is an orthogonal perspective UI with Civ I or Civ II rules, minus
Civ I's bugs. I find the freeciv angled view unusable.

------
megablast
You can see the video here:

[https://youtu.be/SPmKCh5BOjo?t=1991](https://youtu.be/SPmKCh5BOjo?t=1991)

~~~
Narishma
It's private.

------
msh
Does anyone have a good suggestion for the most civilization like game for
iOS?

~~~
cstuder
Well, there is Civilization Revolution 2 for iOS which is a nice squares based
remake of the series.

~~~
ascagnel_
It's really not the same. Research, city management, and combat are nowhere
near the level of complexity a Civ game really needs to shine.

Combat boils down to Civ 4-era "stacks of doom", only after the early game you
need to build 3 of every unit to combine them into an army of that unit. From
there, it's building the biggest stack of doom and ranking up units the
highest.

------
z3t4
Civ I is impressive, even to todays standards (mobile gaming)

------
touristtam
The serie in its latest iteration is hugely underwhelming.

------
talles
I used to play Civilization II... damn I feel old.

------
ausjke
first time heard of this, how does this compare to mindcraft? is this good for
young kids?

