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Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

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Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#81

Post by hef19898 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
hef19898 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lower Decks is good, it is done by people that really liked the old ST series. Sometimes, I am not sure if it is mocking some of the ST tropes, like the two-hand punch, space anomalies and so on. Still light years better then Discovery (which is totally not cannon in my mind).

I love Lower Decks. It's definitely mocking and lampshading plenty of Star Trek tropes, but it does that in a playful and positive way. It laughs, but doesn't trivialize - and unlike the other new shows (Discovery, Picard), it doesn't paint the future as grimdark and everyone as untrustworthy and bloodthirsty.

Picard wasn't too bad actually, I think. Maybe a tad to gritty / realistic when compared to TNG. It did offer a plausible universe development so, incl. Picard sacrificing his career for principle.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#82

Post by iSnow »

ant6n wrote: post #53
morsch wrote: post #18

Here's Jimmy Maher's multi part series on Civilization: https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-of-everything-part-1...

Wait so a lot of civilization was ripped off from another game called Empire!? Who`d a thought.

I loved playing Empire on the Amiga back then, but TBH, it was a far cry from Civilization.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#83

Post by Gravityloss »

Gravityloss wrote: post #75
rkagerer wrote: post #74

Absolutely loved this series, but never acclimated to the 3D maps they switched to after Civ 3. You couldn't see as much of the world at once, and units and terrain became more difficult to discern. I wound up playing in the strategic overlay, with mods that relieved some of the claustrophobia, but it never felt as slick as the earlier 2D / isomorphic view. Other classic strategy games from that era followed the tren…

A lot of the game moved to bonus calculation. Playing a spread sheet so to speak. What happened with units and the map was secondary. The Civilization board game was similarly boring. Most of the time there were no wars, and everybody was just trading and dealing with disasters and barbarians.

To add to it, Civ 1 graphics are actually quite beautiful in a pixel art way. With Civ 3, you could use for example a watercolor art pack for the terrain, which was great. And still very legible.

The 3d art just looks like a console game aesthetic - it's extremely kitschy - I guess I'm just not in the target demographic.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#84

Post by hef19898 »

SteveNuts wrote: post #76
rkagerer wrote: post #74

Absolutely loved this series, but never acclimated to the 3D maps they switched to after Civ 3. You couldn't see as much of the world at once, and units and terrain became more difficult to discern. I wound up playing in the strategic overlay, with mods that relieved some of the claustrophobia, but it never felt as slick as the earlier 2D / isomorphic view. Other classic strategy games from that era followed the tren…

"Rome: Total war" is fantastic

As is the the Total War series in general, even if I don't like naval battles that much, but hey that's what superior numbers and auto battles are there for.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#85

Post by Aerroon »

hef19898 wrote: post #84
SteveNuts wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rome: Total war" is fantastic

As is the the Total War series in general, even if I don't like naval battles that much, but hey that's what superior numbers and auto battles are there for.

Total War is a technical miracle. I've yet to see any other games have so many animated units on screen in a battle at once. Other games don't even come close. It creates an amazing atmosphere.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#86

Post by Gravityloss »

dunnevens wrote: post #69
t-writescode wrote: post #43

In an effort to prove that Civ 2 had global warming to respond to some posts in here, I found this thread on Reddit about a civ 2 game going for 10 years. I think y'all might like it: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/uxpil/ive_been_play...

It was also in Civ 1. Industries and nuclear war would create pollution on the map. Would appear as a black cloud over a tile. You could send out a settler unit to clean up the pollution but it was a slow process. If the map accumulated too much pollution, global warming would happen. A random plains tile would be changed to desert. Or a coastal tile would become a swamp. It wasn't too difficult to stay ahead of the…

Global warming was different from pollution. IIRC in Civ 1 global warming turned some coastal tiles into swamp.

Don't remember if there was nuclear winter as well.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#87

Post by UncleMeat »

knighthack wrote: post #78

Why does the author keep referring to the player as 'her'? This neither seems in line with the traditional use of 'he/him' in English texts, or even the neutrality of 'he/him and or she/her'. It reads more like a stunted attempt to virtue signal. I'm quite confident that Civilization games skew to male players, rather than female. What a great way to alienate readers. More so when gender was not a central feature of…

Referring to abstract actors as "she" and "her" only alienates a very specific kind of reader. Consciously using female pronouns in these contexts is a very small way of pushing against the norm of everything being male, which is commendable. You'll see it more and more in CS papers nowadays. I cannot possibly imagine being upset by this.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#88

Post by rufus_foreman »

ACS_Solver wrote: post #48
29athrowaway wrote: post #11

Civ 4 was the last true Civ to have a gameplay similar to the the originals. Civ 5 and 6 introduced unit stacking constraints that completely change the way the game is played. If WW2 happened in Civ 5 or 6, the Normandy landings would not have been possible because you would not be able to stack large number of units in one tile. Those landings were "a death stack". But even if every large battle in history could be…

To anyone who enjoyed Civ4 especially, I would strongly recommend Old World, a classical antiquity period game that in many ways feels like a sequel to Civ4, and does a far better job with 1UPT than Civ5 or Civ6 did. Old World is designed by Soren Johnson, and multiple people on the team are straight from Civ4 days. (Disclaimer: I'm one of the game's developers)

The product page says it is Windows/Mac, is there any way to play it on Linux?

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#89

Post by torstenvl »

UncleMeat wrote: post #87
knighthack wrote: post #78

Why does the author keep referring to the player as 'her'? This neither seems in line with the traditional use of 'he/him' in English texts, or even the neutrality of 'he/him and or she/her'. It reads more like a stunted attempt to virtue signal. I'm quite confident that Civilization games skew to male players, rather than female. What a great way to alienate readers. More so when gender was not a central feature of…

Referring to abstract actors as "she" and "her" only alienates a very specific kind of reader. Consciously using female pronouns in these contexts is a very small way of pushing against the norm of everything being male, which is commendable. You'll see it more and more in CS papers nowadays. I cannot possibly imagine being upset by this.

It alienates everyone who cares about accuracy and everyone who is sick of politics infiltrating every last corner of our lives.

You may not fall into either of those two camps, but let me assure you, it's a lot of people.

For reference, the gender-neutral singular in English is "they/them/their"

they /T͟Hā/ pronoun

2. used to refer to a person of unspecified gender.

Re: Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’

#90

Post by thaumasiotes »

midasuni wrote: post #16
thaumasiotes wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civ III came out in 2001...

Civ 3 caused me to go out and buy a hard drive to put windows on it so I could play it, it was that good. I played the Americans in one game, and as time progressed oil appears. I had a large empire, but no oil. My peaceful neighbouring empire however did, so I had no choice but to invade. 20 years. Great times.

I have Civ III through Good Old Games, but sadly, they only provide it with the expansions included.

They do provide a readme that tells you you can play previous versions of the game by navigating to the install directory and running the particular executable you want, but they only ship the one executable. Not sure why they went to the trouble of removing the other executables.

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