Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–195 of 195 posts

Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions

#191

Post by eru »

scrumper wrote: post #181
eru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Since we're doing alternatives for Civ-lovers, I really, really enjoyed Galactic Civilizations II. It had the right mix of massive scale, diverse strategy, politics, and an interesting combat mechanic with user-designed units. Endgame is sometimes a bit weak, when it's obvious you've won and have to grind through a multi-hour campaign of genocide, but it's the only game that's come close to that feeling of depth and…

I tried to like Galactic Civilization II, but in the end, I came back to the first MoO. For example, I don't care enough about micro-management to build individual things on my planets. Give me the sliders. Also, MoO's research system is still without equal: each playthrough different technologies are available (for each faction, and thus for the whole galaxy) changing the character of the game.

Sirian wrote well about its charms at http://sirian.warpcore.org/moo1/

Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions

#192

Post by eropple »

ekianjo wrote: post #113
eropple wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Colonization, as a game, is a lot of fun, has mechanically held up superbly over the last two decades, and is probably my favorite Civ-family game as well, but I have a beef with the way it actually presents itself as a piece of art. Eliding such things as, oh, Europeans enslaved a shit-ton of people and killed a lot of others[1] bothers me as a student of history and as somebody acutely aware of the ongoing conseque…

> 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…

You might have noticed that I never actually said "slave trade". Because that's only a small part of it. Slavery in the America goes considerably beyond the triangle trade, etc., discussed in social studies classes. Consider the enslavement and exploitation of the Taino in Hispaniola in the sixteenth century, for example, or the literal thousands of enslaved Inca and the various tribes often collectively known as the Aztecs. I mean, what do you think "Indian convert" units really are?

I am not unsympathetic to the notion of addressing publishing concerns. I'm fully aware that the designers of the game were aware of this; if you read the (very good!) manual, there are nods there. But enslavement and exploitation of native peoples (as well, of course, as Africans) is literally-literally central to the story of European colonization of the Americas. It is inescapable. I tend to think, despite my nostalgic fondness for Colonization, that if you can't get a game published that's honest about this sort of thing, maybe you shouldn't make it at all. (This is why I abandoned my own attempt at a derivative of Colonization: because I couldn't make the mechanics work and still be honest and respectful towards the subject matter.)

Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions

#193

Post by eropple »

douche wrote: post #120
ekianjo wrote: post #113

Earlier 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…

> 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.

For the British, sure. But the Spanish practiced human slavery pretty much from the jump. The Taino of Hispaniola, the various Mesoamerican tribes--this was a thing, and eliding it is, in my view, at best unethical. I fully understand why it would be done from a commercial standpoint, and I am not unsympathetic to the problems that involves. But sympathy for a game developer must be placed on the scales against empathy for the people that the game erases from its presentation of history.

> I'm not sure how you would introduce slavery into Colonization without making it a cliche.

Neither am I, as it happens. Religion and Revolution treats both African and native slaves similar to petty criminal units, which is unsatisfying too--but at least it acknowledges that they exist.

Don't get me wrong--Colonization is in my top ten games of all time. I've bought the game at least five times, for myself and other people, and Civ4Col was a day-one purchase for me (which was a mistake, at least until TAC and RoR came out). I wouldn't give them money if I thought this was an insurmountable ethical problem. But it is problematic (turns out that it's possible to really like a work and still feel this way!), and I think it's also important to acknowledge that and figure out how to be better.

And there's a core ethical question here: if something so fundamental to the problem cannot be fairly addressed because of the perception of market realities, is it better to make something that casts the marginalized people of history in not just a bad light but one that attests that they don't exist at all, than to not make it? Reasonable people can argue both sides of that dilemma; I'm honestly not sure where I stand. But it is always and emphatically worth thinking about how one treats people worse off than you.

Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions

#194

Post by scrumper »

eru wrote: post #191
scrumper wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're doing alternatives for Civ-lovers, I really, really enjoyed Galactic Civilizations II. It had the right mix of massive scale, diverse strategy, politics, and an interesting combat mechanic with user-designed units. Endgame is sometimes a bit weak, when it's obvious you've won and have to grind through a multi-hour campaign of genocide, but it's the only game that's come close to that feeling of depth and…

I tried to like Galactic Civilization II, but in the end, I came back to the first MoO. For example, I don't care enough about micro-management to build individual things on my planets. Give me the sliders. Also, MoO's research system is still without equal: each playthrough different technologies are available (for each faction, and thus for the whole galaxy) changing the character of the game. Sirian wrote well abo…

I never played MoO so I had no basis for comparison. I should probably rectify that :)

Re: Civilization: 25 years, 33M copies sold, 1B hours played, and 66 versions

#195

Post by technofiend »

mserdarsanli wrote: post #131
technofiend wrote: post #123

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 creati…

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

Sarcasm doesn't become you. :-)
Post reply on HN