Do people still play the original CIV?

Oh me, oh my, oh my!

I thought I was the only one in the whole world still playing Civ. This must be the greatest game ever. I have tried Civ 2 and Civ 3 and did not like it. I did not even bother with the rest. What a pleasant surprize!

Hey Bert, welcome to the civilization forums! The civ1 forums has some great information on playing the game. Feel free to take a look around.

Civ 1 is the greatest game of all time if adjusting for the time when it was shipped..

I do like the later versions more though.. Somethings are not that great.. But some things are critical..

Civ 2 - Hitpoints for units so one unit can't kill 500 others is awesome..
Civ 3 - Culture borders so AI couldn't just plant lots of units in your territory preventing you from using them without it being considered offensive was great..
Civ 5 - The hexes and one unit per tile just makes wonders for combat.

I'm not entirely onboard with the global happiness in Civ 5 yet, but something needed to be done to prevent everything from scaling with number of cities.. One great thing with civ 5 is that rexxing is limited, so you automatically get less cities to manage..

The AI can provide more of a challenge in later releases too.. And multiplayer is also an awesome feature if one still have some nerdy friends..

Bert Pajou said:

Do people still play the original CIV?

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Sure.

Great game Civ1

Yep.

Last played about 2 years ago but since I moved to civ2 in 1997, I stayed there.
Civ 1 started it all and was a terrific game back then, but Civ 2 is the one for me. I tried everything after that but it just doesn't catch up. I suppose I'd have played civ 1 more if there was some reliable means of creating scenarios and editing game parameters like in Civ 2, which is what made me stay with the sequel for all those years.

I actually stumbled on my original Civilization disc the other day and decided to give it a go.

At the time of release up until CivII the game was among the best out there. I don't play the original Civilization now for a number of reasons.

1. The AI likes to fortify units right next to your cities with Militia units and the only way to get rid of them is to declare war, which can be more trouble than it's worth.

2. The game gives you a random question at times claiming someone is saying you're not the rightful king. If you can't answer one of the two questions your soldiers return to their homes and you have to rebuild your army.

3. If units are next to each other on the map like this:

Unit1
Unit2

Neither unit can move east, west, southeast, or southwest. You have to either attack the unit or move north. That combined with the fortification of units right next to your cities makes it very problematic if you want to expand in that particular direction.

Or even if it's a unit and another civilization's city like this:

American Unit
Aztec City

The unit cannot move east, west, southeast, or southwest like in the previous example. In this scenario however, you are completely blocked from exploring Central and South America because the Aztec capitol city has a land tile right next to a water tile to the east and west.

MrRandomGuy said:

2. The game gives you a random question at times claiming someone is saying you're not the rightful king. If you can't answer one of the two questions your soldiers return to their homes and you have to rebuild your army.

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Oh happy days!!! It's a copy protection - those were the glorious days when you could backup your (not so durable) floppy disky as many times as you liked. And all you needed to prove you're the rightful owner of the game was a question you had to look up in your game manual and answer correctly. In Microprose's F117 they actually asked you to recognize aircraft shapes, which - for anyone with a bit of military aviation knowledge - did not even require the manual...

I do! Recently achieved a long (long) time goal of beating the game before 1AD!

MrRandomGuy said:

2. The game gives you a random question at times claiming someone is saying you're not the rightful king. If you can't answer one of the two questions your soldiers return to their homes and you have to rebuild your army.

Click to expand...

This form of copy protection was common at the time. Civilization was unique (or close to it) in that the questions could be answered from knowledge of the game. Most of the time one had to dig out the manual and flip to page X and read word Y. Those could be memorized, too, since there were usually only a handful of questions. Most games booted you for a wrong answer but Civilization allowed the player to continue, albeit in a crippled state. I used to play a challenge mode where I'd lose the questions on purpose.

Star Trek 25th Anniversary had an interesting copy protection feature. At the center of the manual was a star map that matched what was in game. However, only the manual had labels. Going to the incorrect star resulted in a challenging battle, which was actually fun to do. The map was difficult to photocopy, at least with the generally available technology of the time, due to the amount of black on the page. It was difficult to describe which star was the correct one due to the random sizes and placement. For me, at least, memorizing the star map was much more difficult than memorizing the text answers in other games.

.....

I am playing Civilization 1 since 1992.

For me it is still one of the best games ever.
In CIV 1 and 2 by changing the txt files you can lready change many things.
This is funny for me old cheater.

Best regards,


GoodAdvice

MrRandomGuy said:

1. The AI likes to fortify units right next to your cities with Militia units and the only way to get rid of them is to declare war, which can be more trouble than it's worth.

Click to expand...

MrRandomGuy said:

3. If units are next to each other on the map like this:

Unit1
Unit2

Neither unit can move east, west, southeast, or southwest. You have to either attack the unit or move north. That combined with the fortification of units right next to your cities makes it very problematic if you want to expand in that particular direction.

Or even if it's a unit and another civilization's city like this:

American Unit
Aztec City

The unit cannot move east, west, southeast, or southwest like in the previous example. In this scenario however, you are completely blocked from exploring Central and South America because the Aztec capitol city has a land tile right next to a water tile to the east and west.

Click to expand...

Put a few diplomats (they don't cost upkeep or make people sad) on strategic places beyond your outer cities. Use them together with your cities to stop the other civs military units to advance into "your" part of the world.

When you yourself need to go past other civs units/cities, first send a diplomat to the square, then your military units can follow.

I like Civ 1 better than 3 because there's no catapults or other bombing units. In Civ 3, your goal is basically just to build enough catapults, then you can take any city without losing a single unit. That's pretty boring.

ahman said:

Put a few diplomats (they don't cost upkeep or make people sad) on strategic places beyond your outer cities. Use them together with your cities to stop the other civs military units to advance into "your" part of the world.

When you yourself need to go past other civs units/cities, first send a diplomat to the square, then your military units can follow.

I like Civ 1 better than 3 because there's no catapults or other bombing units. In Civ 3, your goal is basically just to build enough catapults, then you can take any city without losing a single unit. That's pretty boring.

Click to expand...

20 years ago I played Civ1 a lot without really understanding it. We would just build units, oh and if you let settlers do things you have more money. We didn't understand the mechanix.
About 10 years ago I played Civ2 all the time, I played 3 turns of Civ3 but I didn't like it, so I played Civ2. It was civ1 but better and I had more time on my hands back then.
More recently I re-ran into civ3 - bought it cheap and actually loved it. I found it to resemble Civ1 in a lot of ways. Yes - the bombarding thing (and the use of armies) is a big advantage over the AI.
I always thought the cultural borders had to be there - we always planted caravans and diplomats around the cities to prevent enemies from entering the land. Now the borders did that for us.

I played Civ4 for a bit, but found it to restrictive.

I loved colonization a lot too and Sid Meier's Pirates is just a solid adventure game of which not many are in existence.

humbe said:

Civ 2 - Hitpoints for units so one unit can't kill 500 others is awesome..
Civ 3 - Culture borders so AI couldn't just plant lots of units in your territory preventing you from using them without it being considered offensive was great..
Civ 5 - The hexes and one unit per tile just makes wonders for combat.

Click to expand...

Hey, where is Civ 4? Actually it's quite good. And the most challenging at the highest levels.

I think all Civs 1-5 have their interesting features. I very enjoyed them all, except may be Civ 5. But if we take into account the time of creting and the level of games then Civ 1 definetely the best one.

Ive been playing civ1 off and on since the early 90s. tried the other civs but always back to 1

Bert Pajou said:

Oh me, oh my, oh my!

I thought I was the only one in the whole world still playing Civ. This must be the greatest game ever. I have tried Civ 2 and Civ 3 and did not like it. I did not even bother with the rest. What a pleasant surprize!

Click to expand...

Hah, I thought I was the only one too that was silly enough to play such an old game.

I played civ a lot on my very first computer, back in the nineties. Then forgot all about it as I discoved newer, more advanced games.
Recently came across it on an abandonware site and it was instant love again.
Now my 11 year old girl is also playing and loving it

That's cool. There's no reason why the next generation should miss out on the original civ!

Indeed, you are not alone ! Some of us are even mad enough to create entire map editors and modding tools, in 201X, for this 20-year old game: JCivED

Anyhow, I have a strong feeling too about Civ1 play experience, and I believe none of the sequels could fully recapture it...