SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION

Game Description

Sid Meier’s Civilization was a watershed moment for the 4x genre before it even had a name. While earlier games incorporated many of the features, such as conquest, tech trees, and city management, Sid Meier’s landmark game brought them all together and with the necessary oomph and flair to appeal to a large demographic beyond just wargamers, giving it a lasting power as one of the most dominant and recognizable PC franchises in history.

The premise is simple but tired: you take a faction from Stone Age primitivism to global conquest or interplanetary colonization. You conduct technological research in order to build better units and make new city improvements. You are given the option of choosing between peace and trade or war and conquest.

Advances are less linear than in RTS games, and improvements are permanent [unlike, say, Age of Empires, in which you play multiple scenarios with your civilization and start from scratch each time]. This gives you some flexibility in your strategy, though there is only a limited amount of optimization—not it’s rock-paper-scissors; units progress in a straightforward manner with each era—more it’s about when you get one of one type over one of the other. The most important strategic factor is Civilization’s signature “Wonders of the World” improvement; these one-of-a-kind city projects are as numerous as they are expensive, making it nearly impossible to build them all yourself on any reasonable challenge difficulty.

The rather motley and incongruous crew of historical figures used to represent each faction was one of Civilization’s most notable features. Perhaps the choices of leaders are less perplexing here than in later installments, but making Mahatma Gandhi a bullying warmonger must have been a sick joke on the part of the programmer.

Civilization has some interesting world creation options, which I strongly recommend you use because the Earth map is absolutely terrible (crowded, poorly scaled, and god help you if you picked the English, who are stuck on an island).

Civilization is bright and colorful, and it’s a more laid-back game than later installments. An entire game can easily be completed in a single late-night or lazy weekend.

How to play [title]

• Patch 474.03 (01.04.1992): several errors are fixed, the balance has been corrected, the ability to rename cities, etc. has been added
• Patch 474.04 (21.07.1992) : install after patch 3.0
• Patch 474.05 (13.10.1992): fix bug when hovering advisors. Beta version of the patch, the final version did not work

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