
The Wacky Geopolitics of ‘Civilization: Beyond Earth’ - benbreen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/24/the-wacky-geopolitics-of-civilization-beyond-earth/
======
tedks
>I tried to reach the redditor to find out how things are going, but I got no
reply. Maybe they've left that wasteland behind for greener pastures on
another planet. With Beyond Earth.

What horrible reporting. I expect better from someone associated with the
Washington Post.

The save file in question has been uploaded and shared with Reddit, and the
community centered around it is
[https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar](https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar)
.

As it happens, the thousand-year stalemate was the cause of the original
player simply being bad at civ. He kept building tanks and trying to perform
land invasions of his enemies, rather than crossing the oceans and attacking
amphibiously.

By using a landing force comprised primarily of Howitzers, and landing in a
well-developed area, a new player was able to prevent the Vikings from
obliterating his army with nuclear weapons due to his presence deep inside
their homeland. By constantly reinforcing the army across the ocean, you can
defeat the Vikings and move on the the Americans, which have a strong air
force but a weak ground military. Ground forces can eliminate American bases
and cripple their air force.

The writeup is here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uzm4w/took_5...](https://www.reddit.com/r/theeternalwar/comments/uzm4w/took_58_years_ingame_but_i_pulled_it_off/)

This is literally on google, I can't believe the journalist was that lazy.

~~~
goldfeld
Geopolitically, the stalemate's veracity would have to be assessed with either
the same player trying to win with each of the nations, or playing it out with
all computer players. As it stands, pitting a very good Civ player against the
dumb AI determines how good the player is at Civ, not why the stalemate goes
or doesn't go on. So the original player being bad at Civ seems to put him in
the same league as his computer opponents, which is all to say: it makes for a
more dramatic AAR.

------
aaron-lebo
> There's a lot more of the politics we could get into — like how crazy it is
> that China would attack its ally, North Korea, or that India somehow sits
> idly by while the bombs are falling. Also crazy: India and Pakistan put the
> past aside and become allies! But let's move on.

The story line in the game starts in 2064, so 50 years from now. In 1940
France and Germany were bitter enemies, by 1990, they were best buds. Not that
crazy after all, especially when crises change the world order.

The article also goes into discussing the necessity of a world hegemon to keep
trade open. I wonder if this is less necessary in an age where global
economies are much more connected and so many more countries are liberal
democracies.

~~~
smsm42
My personal suspension of disbelief was more strained by the premise that
nuclear war would somehow lead to very significant warming. Shouldn't just the
opposite happen - all the dust and debris causing the infamous nuclear winter?
Looks like the game creators are mixing the popular horrors from the 70s with
the modern ones and just handwaving over the contradictions.

~~~
jerf
The Wikipedia article, which is very interesting in a number of different
ways, even has a section on "Nuclear Summer":
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter)

'A "nuclear summer" is a hypothesized scenario in which, after a nuclear
winter has abated, a greenhouse effect then occurs due to CO2 released by
combustion and methane released from decay of dead organic matter.'

That's all it says about that particular thing, but it's worth a read for
everything else.

------
eastbayjake
Why is this the thing we're discussing about Civ 6? What I want to know is
whether the writing is as good as the original Alpha Centauri. Even 15 years
later I still think about quotes from that game's tech tree -- and I can quote
many of them by heart. Here's one for Brian Fung at WaPo:

 _" I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put my
body in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million
ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you
run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has
spared us this moment." \-- Anonymous, Datalinks_

~~~
patmcguire
"Richard Baxter piloted his recon rover into the fungal vortex and single-
handedly held off six waves of mindworms. We immediately purchased his
identity manifest and repackaged it as the Recon Rover Rick character for a
multi-tier media campaign: movies, touchvids, holos, the works. People need
heroes. They don't need to know that he died clawing his eyes out and
screaming for mercy; the real story would just hurt sales."

------
Apocryphon
I'm sure Firaxis put a lot of effort into their backstory, but I don't see how
the geopolitics for Civ: Beyond Earth is any more plausible and meant to be
take more seriously than any other pop sci-fi work with a dystopian result for
humanity. Nuclear war, environmental collapse, things fall apart- that's the
stuff of speculative fiction for decades. In fact, the original Sid Meier's
Alpha Centauri game had it in the background as well, though less explicitly.

~~~
mxfh
That's why SMAC worked so much better in the far future (22nd century) without
the burden of explicitly extrapolating current geopolitics and going all in on
agenda/ideology driven factions. The current faction/sponsor selection looks
way more nationality based and just seems to cater too much to the respective
major digital game markets of today: US, Western Europe, Brazil, Australia,
Eastern Europe, plus the token African Union, while all of Asia get's lumped
in into one minus the Indian sub-continent. This just all feels like Oprah
Winfrey driven game development («You, get a faction, you get a faction,
everybody gets a faction»). Maybe I just miss those cut scenes and quotes,
they really set the tone in SMAC; Beyond Earth so far, is sadly enough an OK
game, yet forgettable.

~~~
Apocryphon
Well, SMAC happened in the unspecified 21st century as well, but all of the
background pre-Arrival fluff was written very subtly, and all of the factions
were based around fundamental human philosophies/ideologies/motivations. The
national backgrounds of the faction leaders was purely for flavor. All of the
real meat of the story and characters was in the gameplay itself, which all
takes place on Planet. You didn't need to know what exactly happened on Earth,
except that it was bad stuff, and it helped to shape the faction leaders who
are the personifications of those primal ideologies.

------
citizenkeen
Solid read; but fails to acknowledge one of the many reasons certain countries
aren't mentioned - expansions. I'd argue Austria and Spain had _some_
influence on world history, but they don't exist in vanilla Civ.

~~~
gsnedders
Austria is in Civ5, at least (or maybe one of the DLCs?).

~~~
Kudos
They're in a DLC, which is why they said "vanilla".

