Sid Meier’s Civilization

Description of Sid Meier’s Civilization

Sid Meier’s Civilization was a watershed for the 4x genre before the genre even had its present name. While there had been earlier games that 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 that gave it a staying power as one of the most dominant and recognizable PC franchises in history. The premise is simple but has become timeworn: you take a faction from Stone Age primitivism to either global conquest or interplanetary colonization. You research technologies, which allow you to build better units and new city improvements. You’re presented with opportunities for peace and trade or war and conquest. Advances are less linear than RTS games and improvements are permanent [unlike, say, Age of Empires, where you play multiple scenarios with your civilization and start essentially from scratch each time]. This gives you a bit of flexibility in your strategy, though there’s only a limited amount of optimization—it’s not rock-paper-scissors; units progress with each era in a straight-forward manner—it’s more about when you get one of one type over one of the other. The biggest strategic factor is Civilization’s signature “Wonders of the World” improvement; these unique city projects are as numerous as they are expensive, so building them all yourself is next to impossible on any reasonable challenge difficulty. One of the notable aspects of Civilization was the rather motley and incongruous crew of historical figures used to represent each faction. Choices of leaders are less puzzling here than in later installments, perhaps, but it must have been a programmer’s sick joke to make Mahatma Gandhi a bullying warmonger. Civilization has some interesting world creation settings, which I strongly suggest you use, because the Earth map for it 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 is a fairly casual play compared to later installments. One can easily get an entire game in over the course of one late night or a lazy weekend.

Review By P. Alexander

External links

• Mod DB

• PCGamingWiki

• WSGF