September 17th, 2008 by Craig (email author)

Description

“High in the Andes, a biting wind howls through the Incas’ ruined strongholds. Half a world away, the Pharaohs’ tombs lie empty. In Italy, the Roman Colosseum decays. Everywhere, you see the remnants of societies that thought they would endure forever. All are dust. Yours can be different. You can be the one person in history that builds an empire that never falls.

That’s the challenge of Civilization, the most enthralling “god game” yet developed. From the creator of Railroad Tycoon – the SPAs 1990 Strategy Game of the Year – Civilization lets you match wits with history’s greatest leaders.

You start at the dawn of recorded history – 4000 B.C. and the founding of the first cities – then nurture your society toward the Space Age. In the beginning, you’ll labor to simply survive while building your settlements, discovering new technologies, and fending off barbarians.

As your empire prospers, you’ll face competing civilizations guided by history’s most legendary figures: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar and more. Now you’ll test your capacity for expansion and domination, your ability to outwit and outmaneuver those cunning and brilliant leaders.

Just look how Civilization lets you build a brave new world.” [box art]

Revisited

I have always loved the Civilization series of games. The original Civilization has the questionable honour of being the first game I was totally engrossed with. I would play games for entire days at a time, and swap tips and strategies with friends whenever I wasn’t huddled around my Amiga.

It was the first turn-based stragegy game I had played which felt like it had proper depth. Once the initial confusion of how to play the game had passed I was totally hooked. Some of the initial appeal came from just trying to work out how to do things, such as learning the strengths and weaknesses of the different units, trying to identify and reach the more powerful units in the tech tree and learning to keep the delicate balance between production, entertainment and science.

Since then, I have followed the Civilization series up through the years. I’ve watched the tech tree become bigger, the rules become more complex and the graphics become more detailed. So I thought it would be interesting to see how the original held up today.

The first obvious difference between the original and more recent versions is the presentation. The map is viewed from a perfect top-down perspective, which allows the user to easily distinguish the difference tiles on the map. Units and citys are displayed as simple squares, decorated with an image of the unit they represent. The simplicity really works well and allows you to get a good overall view of what is going on at all periods of the game. In fact, after a few hours of play I began to appreciate the classic view over the 3D rendered terrain of the latest Civilization games which can overly clutter the map and preventing you from seeing what is going on. It may have just been me, but this simplified view also resulted in faster gameplay.

The basic gameplay of Civilization has remained the same over the years, with just extra features being added for later versions. I did miss some of these, such as the more advanced resource management that the later games have to offer. But this original stripped down version of Civilization does benefit from it’s simplicity resulting in a game that is a lot of fun to play.

The computer A.I. still poses a very good challenge. I will have to admit that I’ve never attempted to play the game on anything but the first three difficulty levels, and the one time I did play it on level 3 I was so far behind in the technology race I soon had a squadron of enemy bombers knocking on the walls of my Phalanx-defended cities. Each civilization also have their own unique personallities, with the Mongols being a particulary bad bunch to be on the wrong side of.

Yet again, I’m very surprised at how much i’ve enjoyed playing a game from my youth. It makes me wonder why I stopped playing them in the first place. I’m going to have to find a really bad one soon to reassure myself that computer games have made at least some progress!

Screenshots

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