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.
Thanks. Downloaded dosbox and had nostalgia for lunch ;-)
Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
161–170 of 195 posts
Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
#162I 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 w…
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 i…
1 billion hours played sure is a lot, in some ways.
Of course, humanity racks up a billion person-hours now every nine minutes, so in another, probably more meaningful way, it's not much at all.
Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
#163My 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…
Age of Empires 2 is actually alive (again). A modernised HD edition, a new add-on for it, and also a new add-on for Age of Mythology have been released on Steam in the last years. That's not really the same as releasing proper sequels, but good enough for me :)
I waited for years to get Age of Empires 2 on digital distribution as my computer hasn't had a CD drive since... shoot, 2009? And right after it was released on Steam, my PC broke down and I bought a Mac. And AoE2 doesn't work on a Mac. Boo.
Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
#164first time heard of this, how does this compare to mindcraft? is this good for young kids?
Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You know what I miss? Civilization: Call to Power . Its balance was always a little wobbly, but I liked dragging my civilization into the Diamond Age, building cities in space, bombarding the enemy from orbit and taking out their capitol with nanites.
This is still my favorite of all of them.
Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
#166I 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 prev…
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.
Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> slave trade Sure, but it's not extremely relevant to the whole era covered by the game. From Wikipedia: > It is estimated that more than half of the entire slave trade took place during the 18th century, with the British, Portuguese and French being the main carriers of nine out of ten slaves abducted in Africa.[42] By the 1690s, the English were shipping the most slaves from West Africa.[43] They maintained this p…
They do sort of cover this in game, with the indentured servant class of colonist, as well as the convicts - which fits for the early stages of North American colonization, particularly the British angle that Colonization is mostly playing to. Not to mention the "converted" natives that you could obtain, for instance, by sacking their villages... I'm not sure how you would introduce slavery into Colonization without…
> with the indentured servant class of colonist
Actually this has nothing to do with slavery. Indentured servants were a real thing back in the days, with poor people accepting to work for x years to pay for their passage to the New World, and after that they were usually granted their freedom (not 100% always the case, I know). Slaves were, for the most part, never able to gain their Freedom back, and were slaves for generations.
So indentured servants were really under a limited term contract, while slaves were slaves forever.
Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
#168I 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.…
I recommend FreeCol which developed quite nice over the years: http://www.freecol.org/
Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the appeal of simplicity,but why not try newer-but-still-simple Civ like Revolutions or something?
Revolutions was too simple for my taste.
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.
Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions
#170I 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.…
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 yo…
A lot of fantastic games from that age have these kinds of problems - the competitive balancing of modern online gaming didnt' exist back then, only the Rule of Cool.
Master of Magic is a similarly awesome oldschool 4X game, and it, too, suffers from boneheaded balance problems.