Interestingly, I’ve just finished a game of Civ2, so I can attest that it’s still enjoyable after all these years.
YES. For me, Alpha Centauri is where the series peaked.
Such a well thought out and designed story arc- gameplay that innovated and added beyond 2 without messing anything up. That’s where they started doing quotes with every tech advance, They had that great multiple choice government system, the manual unit creation was awesome, they started incorporating cities at sea, and use of apace.
Just awesome. If only they could have made the AI capable.
Then of course, the innovations got out of hand.
3 was just broken. Combat was reduced to building stacks of doom and throwing them against one another. Corruption was messed up and failed to work well. Cultural boundaries- a good idea but didn’t really do much. Aircraft were nerfed to the point of uselessness. Strategic resources meant that the map could have screwed you completely and you just didn’t know it yet.
4 was better, but a bit boring. It was obviously so balanced for multiplayer that the single person campaign became stale. The maps suffered from this as well. Combat was better, I likes the promotion trees and so on but the towering stacks of units were still a problem. The thing I really didn’t like was the penalties for having too many cities- no clear gamepley reason for this other than railroading the player into “playing the right way”.
I didn’t even buy 5. Paradox had stolen my loyalty by that point.
5 was interestingly different - as a start, it has hex tiles and doesn’t allow unit stacking (you can have one civilian and one military unit per tile). It makes for a somewhat different and more tactical warfare aspect - and the culture, tourism and religion systems are nice enough. It’s interesting how it differs from EU4 - Civ is better at giving you interesting gameplay choices at reasonable intervals, but EU4 feels more satisfying and … heavy? Deep?
Oh, the Alpha Centauri tech advance quotes. Mixing in so many from
historical figures was ingenious. Half the time I forget which ones were
faction leader quotes, and mistakenly attribute their sayings to “some
philosopher…what was their name?..oh right.”
OTOH, I’d take Commissioner Lal or even CEO Morgan over the vast majority
of real-world human leaders, and I think a Dierdre Skye/Prokhor Zakharov
dyarchy would be awesome.
As an upper limit, maybe .001%, including both Civ1 and Civ2.
I didn’t have a game hour counter, but unless there’s a job offer waiting at the end, I’ll spare you the logic of my estimation process. I will say that it was derived independently of the 10,000 hour rule.
In other words, I could have become an expert in any other damn thing in that time span
I remember playing “just a bit” of Civ one evening many years ago. At around 5am, I very clearly heard a voice in the background music chanting “sleep is for the weak”…
The really hilarious thing about it is that the eternal-war-between-three-great-powers scenario (he published his save game file) can be won in several turns by radically changing strategies from 1984-style “grind out tanks and nuke them.”
They’re not even hacky things, either. It’s stuff like “infiltrate their cities with spies” or “only build enough tanks to defend yourself and pour everything into production repairs”
Back when the only game in town was plain old Civilization running on DOS for cripes sake, I had the habit really really bad.
I dreamed the most incredibly cool Civilization dream:
The “creating the world” step was taking a long time, and eventually timed out. A screen I’d never seen before appeared. Paraphrasing:
“The world does not have enough land mass for a human civilization. Choose between arboreal or amphibian.”
I chose amphibian. My species (who resembled the Swamp Thing and whose initial militia units used quarterstaves with cotton-swab like ends dripping with poison) treated swamps as prime grassland and jungles as forests. It was a hot wet world so there were plenty of them.
And just as I was freaking at how utterly cool and logical this was, the dream ended.
