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Rob Zacny

Episode 175: Gods and Kings

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But then again, Egypt stops being an independent culture and therefore a player in world history shortly after 1000 BC, so it's not a particularly good example there either. China is the closest to the ideal of an eternal and unchanging civilization, but only because its successive governments have been enormously invested in arguing for perfect continuity with the past. No, the entire idea of history-spanning nations is totally bankrupt from an intellectual standpoint, but it feels very authentic even so, so I guess we give it a pass?

Yeah, I think Civilization is better seen as a (very very very rough) simulation of how human society at large progresses, rather than how individual nations and governments progress.

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Going back to Civ 1 or 2 for my story. Was playing on the world map, and had settled Europe and blocked access to Africa with a city in the Sinai. Barbarians would spawn in the North African deserts and home in on my European cities, but couldn't cross the Med. Every so often, I'd send a few troops over to clear out the barbarian leaders (100 gold a piece) from my barbarian factory.

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That's interesting. I wonder if that's actually a reflection of the changing American (as I presume most of the Firaxis developers to be) view of their own country and what it means to be a superpower in the modern world.

It could be a change between what it meant to be a superpower in 1990, in the unipolar world that existed immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, versus the multipolar world that many expect to emerge in the near future. That is certainly an interesting take on it.

To me the recurrent theme of Civs I -IV was the growth of superpower civilisation, and while this still is present in Civ V I feel the picture it paints it is a strangely neutered version of a superpowers.

I think this probably goes to the quick of why some people find Civ 5 so off-putting, but Civ 5's superpowers are only "strangely neutered" vis-a-vis the hyperpowers of previous Civ installments. The kind of global juggernauts that you saw in previous Civ games have no real historical analog (no one has ever actually conquered the world.) Civ 5 superpowers are more like historical superpowers: they can bash heads, threaten people, burn cities, but they don't actually incorporate the entire globe. Again, I prefer the Civ 5 take on it, but I'm a builder and a turtle, so it suits my gameplay.

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Holy crap, some of those lines are so familiar to me they practically triggered sense memories! I had completely forgotten until just now that Civ II had FMV advisors.

Also, Elvis being the cultural advisor is still kinda funny.

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It could be a change between what it meant to be a superpower in 1990, in the unipolar world that existed immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, versus the multipolar world that many expect to emerge in the near future.

The kind of global juggernauts that you saw in previous Civ games have no real historical analog (no one has ever actually conquered the world.) Civ 5 superpowers are more like historical superpowers: they can bash heads, threaten people, burn cities, but they don't actually incorporate the entire globe.

I think you are very very close to hitting the nail on the head here Procyon, but I think the problem is what you are saying is based on world view we have now, but id argue in the unipolar world of the early 1990's the popular consensus would not only have not predicted a return to multi-polar world.

In fact I think they would would have considered that with the Soviet Union gone there was now nothing stopping the American interpretations of democracy and capitalism from going on and effectively “conquering” the world (for their own good of course). The American cultural, military, and in particular economic ascendancy(perhaps even near hegemony) was seen by some as a Fait accompli.

Let me throw out a quote from a book written in 1992 called The End of History and the Last Man

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government

All there was left to do was sit back and reap the benefits, as we in the UK were told in 1997 “things could only get better”.

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Yeah, although to actually get the American experience you'd have to suddenly get a large nation with plentiful resources built for you at the beginning of the industrial era with a little over 200 years left to go. I'm not exactly arguing that you should be forced to play civilisations that actually existed at 4000BC (not least because information on that time is so scarce) and then "evolve" into later ones, or something, but it is interesting how earlier Civ games are so into the modern American concept of superpowers that they retroactively apply them to the span of human civilisation. Are there even any "nations" as we would understand it that have existed unbroken for the last three or four thousand, let alone six thousand, years? China maybe? I'm not even sure about that.

Yes we do play a 6000 year time line in Civ, and yes Civ really does a terrible job of representing the organic way human civilisation really developed in that time. But that’s only a problem if you think that human civilisation is what Civ is really about.

Imagine you take the history of America and its growth towards being the only superpower and stretch it out with all your might so its relatively short development now spans the entirety of human history. In this context how would you capture the beginnings of the American superpower civilisation begin?

Id argue

Earth2_map.jpg

is actually pretty damn close. (although perhaps that should really say Jamestown).

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In fact I think they would would have considered that with the Soviet Union gone there was now nothing stopping the American interpretations of democracy and capitalism from going on and effectively “conquering” the world (for their own good of course). The American cultural, military, and in particular economic ascendancy(perhaps even near hegemony) was seen by some as a Fait accompli.

Eschatological ideation, in the form of the "end" of history, is a cool subject in general. Reading for my doctoral exams, it's particularly amazing how many authors writing in the twelfth century intended to include the apocalypse in their work, since it was sure to be forthcoming in their own lifetime. Otto of Freising, uncle of German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, refers to himself constantly as "one who writes at the end of time".

There just must be something coded into the Western psyche that processes the prospect of a universal empire, whether the Holy Roman Empire or United States of America, as the end of human history, perhaps even the end of humanity itself. In the twelfth century, the actual upshot was the popularization and intensification of the crusade, which was largely responsible for the idea of "Europe" as its own civilization. I don't think we've seen the full scope of consequences in the twenty-first, myself.

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Yes we do play a 6000 year time line in Civ, and yes Civ really does a terrible job of representing the organic way human civilisation really developed in that time. But that’s only a problem if you think that human civilisation is what Civ is really about.

Imagine you take the history of America and its growth towards being the only superpower and stretch it out with all your might so its relatively short development now spans the entirety of human history. In this context how would you capture the beginnings of the American superpower civilisation begin?

Id argue

Earth2_map.jpg

is actually pretty damn close. (although perhaps that should really say Jamestown).

Oh man, that image just brought back a flood of memories.

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You know, Sid Meier actually did make a game "Colonization" where you take on the role of a colony that has to build up strength until it can break away from the mother country.

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I know Routine, i might even prefer it to Civ. I find that concept of war within a greater empire is a fascinating one, which never fails to feel really dramatic (the Rome Total War civil war is a example I really enjoyed).

But I do feel Civ's early game (& maybe the whole 4x genre) owe something to the whole mythology of manifest destiny.

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My Civ anecdote is that I lost a city to the AI in every game I played of CIV IV. I've yet to lose a city to the AI in CIV V. The stack of doom may have been a crude hammer, but damn if Monty didn't know how to swing that hammer. Granted, it was rare to lose a second city (unless I was playing at some exotic difficulty level, or doing one of the oddball Realms Beyond challenges) because the AI couldn't make a great next decision, but there it is.

I love exploring the idea that CIV V is expressing a shift in opinion about the nature of world hegemony, but I suspect it's merely a reaction to the gameplay problems introduced by the snowball effects so often lamented in 4X games. The best treatment of that problem is in the boardgame History of the World, and I'd love to see a Civ mod that takes advantage of the inheritance of past glory mechanic used in HotW. Yes, I know, Rhys, but the balancing features like the plague, and the mission-oriented victory conditions failed to float my boat.

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You guys really need to get subsidized by Firaxis and Paradox. I was going to hold off for a sale on this one; another $30 down the drain. Every show I listen to seems to have an adverse affect on my wallet. Also, the Civ II lines above were great and several of them I don't remember hearing despite plenty of time with the game. I must have ignored my poor advisors too much.

p.s. I just had to look up why spellcheck didn't like "advisor". I'll stick with the 'o' thank you very much.

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I love exploring the idea that CIV V is expressing a shift in opinion about the nature of world hegemony, but I suspect it's merely a reaction to the gameplay problems introduced by the snowball effects so often lamented in 4X games.

You are probably right on the money.

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I love exploring the idea that CIV V is expressing a shift in opinion about the nature of world hegemony, but I suspect it's merely a reaction to the gameplay problems introduced by the snowball effects so often lamented in 4X games.

It's one of the things I most hate & love about video gaming. The industry seem so hesitant to let us see what's behind, the curtain that so often the conversation around the game often goes off in wild directions. From a academic viewpoint that's probably a terrible thing to be happening,but as someone just on the edge reading and listening to the discussion sometimes a idea that i know in my heart may be wrong is just as fascinating as the more prosaic likely explanation.

I'm sure in this case it's probably 6 of one & half a dozen of another,and in the end the only person who really know is Sid Meier & he's keeping quiet :D

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It's one of the things I most hate & love about video gaming. The industry seem so hesitant to let us see what's behind, the curtain that so often the conversation around the game often goes off in wild directions. From a academic viewpoint that's probably a terrible thing to be happening,but as someone just on the edge reading and listening to the discussion sometimes a idea that i know in my heart may be wrong is just as fascinating as the more prosaic likely explanation.

I'm sure in this case it's probably 6 of one & half a dozen of another,and in the end the only person who really know is Sid Meier & he's keeping quiet :D

If there were one person, it would probably be Jon Shafer, not Sid Meier!

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True but I think Firaxis's lawyers must write NDA's that could tie the devil himself in knots because I don't think I've seen much specifically about the Civ's they worked on from either him or Soren Johnson(after they finished working on them), despite them both being very talented writers as well as designers(alternatively they just don't want to chat about em, who knows).

Think perhaps after what everyone been chatting about I could do with giving Soren's Theme is Not Meaning post a proper re-read and then re-listen to 3MA Ep93 again because that's one of my favourite old episodes.

Anyway I still hope one of these days I'm going to hit play and hear " Good evening you are listening to the Three Moves Ahead, and tonight our guest are Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds, Soren Johnson and John Shafer" because dear god that would be the show to end all shows.

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It's weird how civ is so many different things for so many different people.

it makes me wonder what the designers actually thought they were making

Here's my perspective (I'm kind of an expert in terms of competitive skill, haven't played civ 1 or 2 or smac):

civ 3:

this is the last one that actually functioned as a single player product for me, partly because of the "poor design".

the mechanics weren't totally transparent, and there were a bunch of step functions for everything instead of linear formulas. very crude and inelegant

there were pretty severe limits to excessive expansion. these solved some snowballing, albeit inelegantly

AI behavior was kind of mysterious. playing well usually meant checking/trading every single opponent's "stuff" every single turn. This is "balanced" by how tedious it is to do (so you won't do it often)

All this made it hard to play, which sounds bad. But that also means it's hard to play optimally which is good

i don't know if this was intentional or things came together accidentally, but despite doing so many things to make me rage, the game functioned as a 4X

civ4 singleplayer.

this game is all about tile optimization and order of operations. I can do it easily. firaxis's AI can't.

My power grows exponentially. AI bonuses are linear. There's too narrow a window between "impossible to lose" and "impossible to win"

Successfully targeting that window doesn't depend on strategy, but on the luck of the game. i'm not waiting several hours just to see if the game
might
be playable...

There may be a way for me to play this and actually have fun, but I bet it involves lots of long experimental games and writing a custom AI... sounds tedious

civ4 multiplayer

it's very standard 4X gameplay, but the rest of the genre is so far behind that civ4 doesn't even need to be very good to stand out

For the first 1 or 2 hours it offers pretty good strategy. Choosing between growth / wonders / military / technology isn't completely obvious, but it's still pretty easy.

But there is one huge problem. Player skill (strategy) isn't enough to win the game.

Offense is around 2-3x more expensive than defense. It's really hard for a difference in skill to result in a sufficiently large force.

This makes games drag on really long until that ratio can be upset by late-game units. Thus land quantity and quality plays a bigger role than skill.

Starting resources are hugely important in the early game, and those are based entirely on luck. Land quantity is based largely on starting off well.

Non team-based games are decided by who doesn't get sucked into an early war, which depends on the luck of who your neighbors are.

I think the main reason this stays fun for so long despite the issues is because of the combat randomness. The feeling of suspense when there's a critical battle has not been reproduced by any other game.

The early trade-off between safety and speed is awesome specifically because of the risk-reward equations.

civ 5:

this game had the best design of them all. it combined solid mechanics with choices that were non-obvious and actually meaningful.

in civ4, fast production/growth let you do everything with slightly varying pros and cons depending on the order of operations.

in civ5, the decisions have consequence and how you spend resources is important. it's less about tile luck and optimization, more about strategy

civ5 also balanced exponential growth with social policies. there was now actually a disadvantage for mindlessly expanding.

the person with the best starting position or weakest neighbors wouldn't automatically win

the trade-offs of land vs policies and weak immediate bonuses vs strong delayed bonuses was the core of the game.

this was more strategic than civ4's "pick whatever works best right now" approach

i talk about this in the past tense, because that game no longer exists.

the patches took away a lot of the balance that made these decisions so interesting.

I think the problem was that people couldn't see the real design behind all the distractions (no AI, speed-based multiplayer, city-states, hexes, animated leaders)

Firaxis hastily made huge gameplay decisions based on fan backlash and here we are. still no AI and an even shallower, speed-based multiplayer...

Multiplayer (especially the competitive, punishing kind) presents a totally different perspective on the game mechanics.

It's a painful way to play civ, but it's the only way to see the full extent and intricacies of the game's design.

I'll remember civ5 as the great strategy game that lasted only a few weeks (literally, since steam's forced patching will never let us play the original game)

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I'll remember civ5 as the great strategy game that lasted only a few weeks (literally, since steam's forced patching will never let us play the original game)

And yet Civ 5 multiplayer was largely unplayable at launch, I'm a multiplayer only guy, I don't view Civ as a single player game at all, haven't done so since Civ 3 Play the World was released. Civ 5 had so many issues with synch errors in multi crashing game, you also couldn't save a game that was in progress. I'm amazed anyone made it through a game in this state pre-patches. I've enjoyed it thoroughly for good games since then.

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My civ story is multiplaying Civ 4 with my best friend from high school (we were in our late 20s and living on opposite ends of the country at the time.) I was playing the Mongols, had terrible starting land, then had to axerush my way through 2 neighbors to get to some useful real estate. In the process, I completely tanked my economy. Eventually, my buddy found me and gifted me a crapload of tech to save the day, but only after a few very tense turns spent fighting defensive war.

Just in case Rob or Troy are taking a census, mark me down as another 3MA loyalist with absolutely no interest in civ 5. It shipped completely broken and all the pre-expansion patching only managed to upgrade it to "somewhat less broken." I still play 4 and am in disbelief Firaxis charged me 50 whole dollars for 5. It was the first thing I've pre-ordered in about a decade and I sure won't be preordering anything else anytime soon!

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Just in case Rob or Troy are taking a census, mark me down as another 3MA loyalist with absolutely no interest in civ 5. It shipped completely broken and all the pre-expansion patching only managed to upgrade it to "somewhat less broken." I still play 4 and am in disbelief Firaxis charged me 50 whole dollars for 5. It was the first thing I've pre-ordered in about a decade and I sure won't be preordering anything else anytime soon!

Sorry to hear that Civ 5 broke your heart like that. I know a lot of people that share your opinion and keep playing 4. I just can't go back to stacks of doom on tiles, though I really miss the Civ 4 Civic System.

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I'll remember civ5 as the great strategy game that lasted only a few weeks (literally, since steam's forced patching will never let us play the original game)

I wonder if steam could also provide the answer to this problem, if the changes you disliked were mainly balance ones shouldn't it be comparatively easy for someone to create a mod that balances them again and put it on the steam workshop?

Sorry to hear that Civ 5 broke your heart like that. I know a lot of people that share your opinion and keep playing 4. I just can't go back to stacks of doom on tiles, though I really miss the Civ 4 Civic System.

I'm with Troy on this stacks of doom always felt deeply unsatisfying to me.

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I wonder if steam could also provide the answer to this problem, if the changes you disliked were mainly balance ones shouldn't it be comparatively easy for someone to create a mod that balances them again and put it on the steam workshop?

As I've heard from a few people who own Civ V but miss the depth of certain mechanics from Civ IV, the mod Civilization NiGHTS is apparently just what one would crave.

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I don't like Civ. My earliest experience was with Civ 2 and I had already played Master of Magic by that point. I didn't fully understand the game, it was a little complicated for a 7 or 8 year old, but I remember cheating and giving myself some tanks and hot air balloons (planes run out of fuel sadly). I encountered an enemy phalanx unit, which was fortified on a mountain tile. I knew that they had a defensive bonus when fortified but when I attacked with a tank and lost, I was incredulous. I don't care if these are the guys from 300, theres no way they are prying open the hatch and killing the people inside, who are likely armed with assault rifles. They shouldn't even be able to get close enough to put a rock in the barrel Indiana Jones style (which is also ridiculous in retrospect).

I bought Civ 4 on sale for my dad mostly but I played a game and it was okay. I wasn't really drawn in, I didn't feel like I was progressing like in Empire Earth and the decisions I was making weren't too interesting. Civ 5 really helped since the 1UPT made it feel more like a wargame. My main problem with Civ 5 was pacing, I am used to games like Moo2 and Master of Magic where everything is on an assembly line when perfectly tuned. Civ 5 felt like I had to constantly compromise and I could never rush down the tech tree, but maybe I am just too inexperienced.

So in the end, Warlock scratched the itch for me in a way that Civ never could, though i've heard so many great things about Fall from Heaven its kinda tempting to check that out.

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