Philosophy of Sids 'Civilization'

Blaskowitz01

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I am a bonified Civilaholic.
When I'm playing Civilization V, I am constantly thinking of strategy and admiring the beauty of the game. When I'm not playing the game, I am thinking of the next time I will play the game.

If Civilization V were a woman I'd be married to her.

Joking aside, there is a serious side to this post.
I want to discuss something that I think is profound to the success of Civ yet isn't talked about often, not for any nefarious reason: the philosophy of Civ.

Civilization V is so fun and entertaining to the cerebral gamer that we often forget about the worldview and philosophical underpinnings of the game. To me, Civ is a clear and profound product of Western civilizations view of the world.

I base this point on the major emphasis in the game placed on progress, development, and growth. When you start, you are given a settler with some land and resources: these resources are not required to develop but its implied in the game (if you want to win!) that development of these resources leads to wealth and power.

This is not to say that non Western civilizations are not inclined to development, only that in Civ the path to world dominance appears to mirror the path that countries like Britain, America, and Germany took for the last several centuries.

What do you other Civaholics think out there?
 
I am a bonified Civilaholic.
When I'm playing Civilization V, I am constantly thinking of strategy and admiring the beauty of the game. When I'm not playing the game, I am thinking of the next time I will play the game.

If Civilization V were a woman I'd be married to her.

Joking aside, there is a serious side to this post.
I want to discuss something that I think is profound to the success of Civ yet isn't talked about often, not for any nefarious reason: the philosophy of Civ.

Civilization V is so fun and entertaining to the cerebral gamer that we often forget about the worldview and philosophical underpinnings of the game. To me, Civ is a clear and profound product of Western civilizations view of the world.

I base this point on the major emphasis in the game placed on progress, development, and growth. When you start, you are given a settler with some land and resources: these resources are not required to develop but its implied in the game (if you want to win!) that development of these resources leads to wealth and power.

This is not to say that non Western civilizations are not inclined to development, only that in Civ the path to world dominance appears to mirror the path that countries like Britain, America, and Germany took for the last several centuries.

What do you other Civaholics think out there?

Yes? Is there a real world nation or civilization out there that can be said to be a major power in today's world that didn't go through that process on some level or another?

Jokes similar to "'America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.' - Oscar Wilde," aside, of course.
 
A brute is a brute, even if he wears a tux!

Play the game at your will, we start a new world every time we load the game.

You choose what is proper and what is not, you don't HAVE to plant that settler until turn 73, if you don't want to. But you want to settle on turn 0-2, if you want to play the game.

I never even thought of walking throught the game and not settle, maybe I'll give it a try. I have a warrior to protect the settler and with luck I could discover a whole pangaea without ever plopping a city down.
 
A brute is a brute, even if he wears a tux!

Play the game at your will, we start a new world every time we load the game.

You choose what is proper and what is not, you don't HAVE to plant that settler until turn 73, if you don't want to. But you want to settle on turn 0-2, if you want to play the game.

I never even thought of walking throught the game and not settle, maybe I'll give it a try. I have a warrior to protect the settler and with luck I could discover a whole pangaea without ever plopping a city down.

I played a game like this recently, actually, and it was a lot of fun, on King, Normal speed. I was playing as the Netherlands, and for whatever reason I thought it would be fun to wander around in search of a good spot for polders. By around 2500 BC, I found a spot on floodplains with a couple copper resources with the Iroquois capital just to my West, Siam's second city just to my East, and the Mayans North of them closeby. I slingshotted my way to Guilds, managing to build Petra on the way, but I stayed holed up in my one city for a long time, fending off attacks from Siam (the Iroquois were always hostile but never declared on me). Once I got gatling guns, though, everything changed (around 1700 AD, I believe). My army, well-trained through centuries of defense, was now the most cutting edge in the world, and I took the Iroquois capital, reduced Siam to two meaningless cities, and conquered the Mayan capital as well. I stopped playing after 1903 - just lost interest - but I was poised to conquer the world.
 
The game is called "Civilization". The English word expresses an inherently Western concept of what civilization implies - a settled, urban, developed society. The word itself derives from words for cities and large-scale administration. Beyond which, there's not a lot of point in an empire-builder in which you don't build an empire...

As far as I can tell, your 'observation' stems from confusing the term "civilization" - which is a descriptive of complex, developed societies of the sort Civilization focuses on - with "societies", or the social perceptions of the superiority/inferiority of different forms of societies. A civilization is a civilization and a tribe is a tribe, regardless of Western perceptions of the relative value of each (in the same way that concepts like 'democracy' and 'communism' mean the same to people who favour them as to people to don't).

Having said that, Civ has always been patterned on European development specifically - the vast majority of non-unique units and buildings, and the approximate progression of the tech tree, are all essentially European (China never had Great War Infantry, for example, and landships were a very short-lived early tank design essentially confined to European nations).
 
I think the real thing is that Civ has a science focus. Everyone must develop science or be left far behind. Such thinking has only been around for the past few centuries, and it is more or less a western invention. That, I think, is the philosophy of Civ.
 
I played a game like this recently, actually, and it was a lot of fun, on King, Normal speed. I was playing as the Netherlands, and for whatever reason I thought it would be fun to wander around in search of a good spot for polders. By around 2500 BC, I found a spot on floodplains with a couple copper resources with the Iroquois capital just to my West, Siam's second city just to my East, and the Mayans North of them closeby. I slingshotted my way to Guilds, managing to build Petra on the way, but I stayed holed up in my one city for a long time, fending off attacks from Siam (the Iroquois were always hostile but never declared on me). Once I got gatling guns, though, everything changed (around 1700 AD, I believe). My army, well-trained through centuries of defense, was now the most cutting edge in the world, and I took the Iroquois capital, reduced Siam to two meaningless cities, and conquered the Mayan capital as well. I stopped playing after 1903 - just lost interest - but I was poised to conquer the world.

Well done! I've never wandered that long, the farthest I got was to turn 20 before founding my city. I do like to wander a bit before settling in. I may have to try this in my next game. Wander until I'm forced to settle and see how well I catch up.
 
i played a game recently as the barbarians, i got to control all the spawning barbarians and the goal was to destroy the established civs before they could wipe out the last spawning ground. wait that was just in my dreams that i played that. someone make a mod.
 
i played a game recently as the barbarians, i got to control all the spawning barbarians and the goal was to destroy the established civs before they could wipe out the last spawning ground. wait that was just in my dreams that i played that. someone make a mod.

That was a Civ4 mod. I think it came with one of the expansion packs.
 
I think the game philosophy has evolved a lot from the first version to the fifth.
In civ I, the idea was that all civs were created equal, and that you could reach greatness through science and trade or warfare.
The next iterations of the game added culture and religion, but these remained secondary. They also allowed diplomatic victories, putting some emphasis on diplomacy and relations between civilizations at the cost of trade (loss of trade caravans, with only the great merchants remaining).

Civ 3 made a conceptual leap by providing unique units to civilizations, meaning they were inherently different. I don't like that philosophy very much as I think it's just racist.
Civ 5 went even farther by adding the concept of city states, which is, in my opinion, the single worst thing in the game from a philosophical point of view. It turned a game where every civ was equal and could win the game with even a single city (OCC dates from the first civ or maybe civ2) to a game where certain civs are actually not civilized and inferior to the rest in their capacities. I hate this with a passion, and Civ 5 is really built around it (diplomatic victory without city states?), and no longer play Civ 5 because of city-states.

Civ I-IV also had a concept of evolution through revolution. You had to time periods of chaos to get breakthroughs, progressing from one government type to the next. The game reflected drastic changes to a society such as the French Revolution, which turned an absolute monarchy into a Republic (although a short-lived one). Civ V decided to throw this concept out the window, which is a shame too. Civ V is built in such a way your civilization evolves smoothly, adding stone after stone to an existing wall. Civ I-IV allowed for revolutions and changes. Another reason why I don't like Civ V.
 
I think the game philosophy has evolved a lot from the first version to the fifth.
In civ I, the idea was that all civs were created equal, and that you could reach greatness through science and trade or warfare.

I think this is at a tangent to the original post. From its earliest incarnation the Civ tech tree, Civ units, Civ buildings, selection of civ names and most of the selected Wonders have always had strongly European/Western bias, regardless of developments to the game engine. And as the original poster points out, the game revolves around settlement, expansion, the notions of centralised government (which you laud yourself) and wholly distinct nation-states, and, above all, technological progression.

It is also, as I point out, called Civilization, and by definition a game that uses a concept in the English language as its basis is going to have a "Western bias" to some degree. What we call in English 'civilization' is a Western concept, with Western perceptual baggage (such as the notion that being "civilised" is superior to being "uncivilised", which is deeply ingrained in popular usage, as indeed you demonstrate in your own wording) attached. We apply it to societies elsewhere in the world that meet our English definition, but for all I know the Chinese, Mayan or Malian languages might well have wholly different concepts that they apply where we would use "civilization".

Civ 3 made a conceptual leap by providing unique units to civilizations, meaning they were inherently different. I don't like that philosophy very much as I think it's just racist.

Once again I feel you're missing the point. They're "inherently different" to reflect real-world differences in those particular societies. The purpose is to strengthen the roleplaying element. I've said many times before that Civ is not and has never pretended to be a 'blank slate' empire builder, where civs are interchangeable at will. Even in Civ 1 where there were no functional differences between civs, you could be French (and, naturally, blue) with Paris, Rheims etc. in your city list - and that made the game feel intrinsically different from playing as a made-up race with a name like "Alkari" or whatever. Sure, you could rename every civ you played and city you founded to your heart's content, and that in turn could improve the roleplaying element (to the extent that I still remember in the early '90s renaming my Civ 1 civ the Vikings - who weren't introduced to the series officially until Civ II - and changing all the city names accordingly), although you'd still be up against historical civs as AIs. The historical feel is to a large extent the whole point of Civilization (and, indeed, why would you call your civ the Klingons in a game where you go through an approximation of real-world - and predominantly European - tech progression?).

Adding UUs simply adds to flavour, as well as being a nice nod to players who are from some of the countries represented in the game. In any event, even if you're indifferent to all of the above, it's not at all clear how making civs distinct from one another is "racist". That's like saying that the fact that black people look different from white people is racist, so they should all be the same colour - which is itself patently racist.

Civ 5 went even farther by adding the concept of city states, which is, in my opinion, the single worst thing in the game from a philosophical point of view. It turned a game where every civ was equal and could win the game with even a single city (OCC dates from the first civ or maybe civ2) to a game where certain civs are actually not civilized and inferior to the rest in their capacities.

Whereas in previous games (and indeed Civ V) the barbarians always had a shot at winning the game, I take it? Even the name is prejudiced by your standards - perhaps they should be described as "societally disadvantaged"? City-states are just a friendlier version of the old barbarian cities, albeit with more options and game relevance. And once again - though the names screw up some of them - there's a roleplaying element. Zanzibar and Singapore really are city-states, for instance.

And the above emphasises my above point, the perceptual baggage that being "civilized" implies superiority, which is a reflection of your biases at least as much as the game's.

I think it's misjudged for them to use capitals of non-civ nations as CSes (Mombasa, Lhasa, Rio, Sydney, Johannesburg and the rest), not primarily because it patronises those countries for not being 'significant' enough to be full civs (which it doesn't any more than excluding Kenya, Tibet, Brazil, Australia and South Africa from prior civ games altogether does), but just because it rubs me the wrong way flavourwise (as much as I do like the city-state of Kuala Lumpur in my games). The reason for going this route, however, is the exact opposite of your interpretation - it's a nod to players from countries that have never been included in Civ games (or at least aren't in Civ V - Seoul was at one point a city-state even though Korea was in two previous Civ games), or who want greater representation from (say) sub-Saharan Africa to give them something to play with when the game can't reasonably be expected to include a dozen more civs to make everyone happy.

And although they seem a lot more passive in G&K (I've only had one CS conquer a city in G&K, that was with help, and they razed that), city-states used to expand by conquest all the time. The most successful I've seen were Sydney, which captured Mecca (with help) and another CS (Bucharest, I think) as well as a fourth city which they razed, and Tyre (which did the same to two rival CSes) in the same game.

Civ I-IV also had a concept of evolution through revolution. You had to time periods of chaos to get breakthroughs, progressing from one government type to the next. The game reflected drastic changes to a society such as the French Revolution, which turned an absolute monarchy into a Republic (although a short-lived one). Civ V decided to throw this concept out the window, which is a shame too. Civ V is built in such a way your civilization evolves smoothly, adding stone after stone to an existing wall. Civ I-IV allowed for revolutions and changes. Another reason why I don't like Civ V.

While I agree that the loss of the anarchy mechanic kills some flavour (well, it still exists, there's just no real reason to suffer from it), you're also rather overstating its effects in past games. In Civ IV particularly it was trivial, so much so that the Spiritual trait was considered particularly weak, and civics were loved for the ability to switch them at will with essentially no downside; quite likely it was removed because by the time Civ IV hit anarchy had become mechanically pointless. You don't get transitions like the Reign of Terror or the English Civil War.

And that comes down to an argument about the philosophy of game design - do you keep a bad mechanic for flavour reasons, or remove it to enhance gameplay until or unless you can come up with a better solution than previous games managed? Health and corporations were removed, I suspect, on basically the same grounds.
 
From its earliest incarnation the Civ tech tree, Civ units, Civ buildings, selection of civ names and most of the selected Wonders have always had strongly European/Western bias, regardless of developments to the game engine.
Yes, but to me this is not the philosophy of the game. Starting with civ2, you could mod all that away and the game would still be the same. Mods like Seeds of Greatness for instance respected the civ philosophy but were located in the fertile crescent and didn't have a western bias. It's just that the 'default mod' is targetted at Americans and Europeans, and therefore it tries to give them stuff they are familiar with.

And as the original poster points out, the game revolves around settlement, expansion, the notions of centralised government (which you laud yourself) and wholly distinct nation-states, and, above all, technological progression.
Civilization indeed is about nation states, rather than civilizations. which is why France, England, Germany are included when they are only nations, whereas India is much more of a civilization than any of the aforementioned in my opinion.
As for centralised governments, Call to Power had for instance a 'city-states' government type while still retaining the same philosophy. I'm not sure that civ is really about centralised governments, at least in the early versions, where far-away cities became quite useless.

They're "inherently different" to reflect real-world differences in those particular societies.
The choices of these differences is very arbitrary. Many units are ridiculous. French musketeers? Seriously, that's just because of Alexandre Dumas's novels, they were never meaningful or different from contemporary neighbours. I know this is for flavor, but I would rather have civilizations evolve character based on what they do/where they are instead of what they are. I don't like Mongols with a horse-based UU when there is no horse on their continent for instance. Of course, having civilizations which evolve wouldn't appeal to national pride and would make civilisations more different than what they were in reality if played on non-Earth maps, but I'd rather have it this way. I would have preferred a system that makes England develop the best navy in the worls because it's an island rather than a system that gives them a unit to achieve the same goal. The philosophy is much more static, but if I want to go that way, I'd rather play a historical simulator like Europa Universalis (western bias in the name included ;) ).
My gripe with UUs is that I consider all civs should be equal to begin with and evolve based on how the player performs and on their initial location rather than on predefined traits. Why UUs have been introduced doesn't matter. The thing is, they make civs different, it's funnier, but the underlying philosophy of predetermination is one I dislike.

Whereas in previous games (and indeed Civ V) the barbarians always had a shot at winning the game, I take it?
Actually, there were scenarios for this in Civ IV but you're mostly right. However, barbarians were an option that could be turned off without changing totally the way the game evolved. In Civ V, city-states can be disabled but you suddenly lose a lot of game options. Some civics suddenly no longer make sense. Some civs special abilities just go poof. They are an integral part of the game that disappears. Considering barbarians to be people who are unable to evolve a civilization is indeed present from the first civ, and you're right to correct me on that point. However, you could get rid of barbarians without altering the game (only the early game and even then in Civ 4 you've got animals which could replace them for all the game without changing any game mechanics); you can't get rid of city-states without drastrically changing the game.

And the above emphasises my above point, the perceptual baggage that being "civilized" implies superiority, which is a reflection of your biases at least as much as the game's.
No. The point is that some cultures are integrated in the game but you can't play them and can't win with them. You could win an OCC game with Kuala-Lumpur in Civ 1. In Civ V, you'll have to mod a city state out and mod a nation in in order to try it.

While I agree that the loss of the anarchy mechanic kills some flavour(...)
It's not at all about the anarchy mechanics. It's about the presence of brutal changes. Even with 1 turn of anarchy, going from democracy to theocracy was possible in Civ 2. It is not in Civ V. You have to stay along the road that you paved. Civ V pretends that if you chose options that make your civ a democracy, it can never turn into a totalitary state. None of the previous civ incarnations was that optimistic.

I am not talking about gameplay. I am talking philosophy of the simulated history. Yes, UUs are fun. City-states I feel are far too gamy and badly implemented, because you do diplomacy with them in a way different from other players. Other games with 'minor civs' (f.e. Galactic civilizations) managed to have minor civs interact in-game as major civs did, and I feel that is way better in terms of gameplay.

To go back to the original post, I would say that Japan over the last centuries definitely behaved like Western powers did, and that China or Iran (Persia) in their early history also did. The arabic civilization also did the same when they started spreading their faith and culture up to Spain. So I don't think the game philosophy is Western-centric. The choice of civilizations, wonders, definitely is, but that's a marketing issue, not a philosophical one.
 
How could putting culturally specific units into a civilization's game mechanic be racist. If anything its historically accurate and respectful to the civilization.
For those of us that love history it is offensive for you to suggest that historical accuracy in unit types is prejudiced.
 
The argument that the concept of civilization is an inherently Western one has been brought up a few times left and right on the forums, I believe. I find it quite interesting and I do have some thoughts.

I would like to start by agreeing that a lot of the buildings and technologies have a rather Western feel to them. I feel in the technology side of things this is more obvious in the later stages of the game, the before mentioned Great War Infantry being a good example. Of course in some cases throughout history there has been a rather large 'jump' in technology. A decent example would probably be Japan, which in a relatively short time frame made huge technological advances, 'catching up' with the West in a matter of decades. And China may never have had Great War Infantry, and in this specific case it has a lot to do with location, but a big reason for that would also have been that China was a bit behind in terms of military tech when Great War Infantry are around.

These two examples, of China and Japan, actually illustrate rather well two ways in which the Civilization series is not all that far off the real thing. It's quite possible to fall behind and miss or skip a particular military advancement and it's quite possible (often times necessary) to catch up.

That brings me to another point about technology. While the order and nature of early technologies is largely up for debate, more recent discoveries in the world are reasonable well documented. There is no such thing at the moment as Western technology versus Eastern technology, in the sense that the Eastern people use something other than say, electricity, to power their cities. There is just technology.

But lets go a bit broader and talk about civilization, which the game is all about. It has been mentioned a few times that the concept of civilization is a Western one. I wonder whether that is more a product of language (and even bias) than actual philosophy. What we would call civilizations have developed independently in almost all corners of the world, not coincidentally after agriculture was invented independently in each of these corners. In fact, we seem to base the model of a civilization on examples from the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, none-Western examples. If we say that the very concept of civilization is an inherently Western one, we are no different (and no less mistaken) than the British who tried to 'civilize' the world. Of course, the Brits weren't the only ones to look upon the 'others' of the world as uncivilized. Are there differences between civilizations? Naturally, but they have one thing in common in that they are all civilizations.

Now, in terms of the game itself, it is obvious there is a disproportionate amount of European or Western civ's. This, I imagine, is partly due to marketing, and partly due to bias. But to say the Indians where more of a civilization than the French (which I'll use as an example because it was brought up by a poster before me) is both a kind of meaningless statement (there's no real applicable scale or measurement of civilization-hood) and a biased one. Because modern day India is different from Mughal India and different from the Indus Civilization in a similar way modern France is not the same as the civilization of the Gauls or say, Charlemagne.

I think the problem is similar to how Native Americans are generally portrayed as one with nature, or Vikings as a warrior-society. Native Americans and Vikings are/were people too, they would've had s and cowards as well as heroes and leaders. Sneaky schemers as well as honest workers. Putting them all under one stereotype is wrong, even if that stereotype sounds noble to us. It most likely stems from a lack of understanding of the people/civilizations other than our own.

So, for me it's almost the very idea that there is a western bias, which is the western bias.
 
How could putting culturally specific units into a civilization's game mechanic be racist. If anything its historically accurate and respectful to the civilization.
For those of us that love history it is offensive for you to suggest that historical accuracy in unit types is prejudiced.

Historical accuracy is a somewhat loose concept in this case, as has been pointed out in regards to the French Musketeer. Of course it would definitely not be racism, as the civilizations are not all race specific, nor is there any kind of intention to discount or ridicule or harm specific races (or cultures, in fact, in the case of cultures it's almost the opposite). You could, if you wanted to be one of those people that just loves to argue on the internet for the sake of arguing without actually caring about any sort of point, probably make a case for it to be something we could call culturalism or civilizationism.
 
How could putting culturally specific units into a civilization's game mechanic be racist. If anything its historically accurate and respectful to the civilization.
For those of us that love history it is offensive for you to suggest that historical accuracy in unit types is prejudiced.
As I showed, French mousquetaires are not historically meaningful or accurate. They are just showing a stereotype that is associated to a given culture. 'Siberian riches'
was viewed as an insult by some Russians, etc.
I love history too and when I see an 'enkidu warrior', I can't help despairing.

I'll also point out that I'm probably misusing 'racist' here, not being a native-English speaker. Xenophobic might be better in the sense it is discrimination against strangers rather than race, but it's more discrimination than fear I'm talking about here.
 
The Civ series has been as extensively discussed in academia as just about any game and is often labeled as Eurocentric, nationalist, and militarist. On one level this is clearly the case, for the reasons many have pointed out above: you have to "make progress," settle available land and exploit resources, defeat your enemies (other cultures), and keep your citizens "happy" by amusing them with luxuries.

On another level, things may not be so clear. Civ is a game that is played for its immersive aspect as much for hardcore competition, and most of us try out a wide variety of Civs, governments/social policies and playstyles. One game I may posit myself as a hardline warmonger, another as a commercial profiteer, a cultural wonder builder, or a communist leader. This encourages us to playfully identify with various ideologies and identities. The free play of exchanging ideologies and identities in the game allows us to recognize ideology as ideology in the real word, rather than as the inevitable condition of things. This may help in encouraging us to free our minds, and thus reject the hegemonic ideology of capitalist globalization that confronts us today.
 
Yes, but to me this is not the philosophy of the game. Starting with civ2, you could mod all that away and the game would still be the same. Mods like Seeds of Greatness for instance respected the civ philosophy but were located in the fertile crescent and didn't have a western bias. It's just that the 'default mod' is targetted at Americans and Europeans, and therefore it tries to give them stuff they are familiar with.

Even the fertile crescent reflects the Western bias - agriculture arose in China, in New Guinea, and in the Americas, but it's the Mesoptamian origin from which Western civilisation is derived, and consequently with which audiences are familiar.

Civilization indeed is about nation states, rather than civilizations. which is why France, England, Germany are included when they are only nations, whereas India is much more of a civilization than any of the aforementioned in my opinion.

On the other hand, you'd end up with a drastically reduced civ pool if you literally reflected "European civilisation" - with no discrete American civ either.

As for centralised governments, Call to Power had for instance a 'city-states' government type while still retaining the same philosophy. I'm not sure that civ is really about centralised governments, at least in the early versions, where far-away cities became quite useless.

It intrinsically forces a centralised government approach because, after all, there is only one player per faction, and that player's role is basically to do the job of government over the course of their civ's history.

The choices of these differences is very arbitrary. Many units are ridiculous. French musketeers?

Yes, plainly some are better choices than others, and certainly many are chosen for popular appeal (or at least recognition). But that doesn't obviate the point I made, and anything you do to try and add individual flavour to a civ with a history that in most cases dates back centuries, in which it will in reality have been known for many more things than one or two units, is going to force decisions based on some arbitrary standard - popularity is as good as any, probably better than most from a developer's point of view. England has a naval UA and a ship of the line unit (and in Civ IV a Man O'War unit), yet "England" was only a naval power for the less than two-century period between the naval reformations of Henry VIII and the Act of Union that formalised the creation of a unified Britain, and even then only intermittently (the state of the navy being so poor immediately prior to the Glorious Revolution that the Dutch were able to sail unopposed up the Thames, raze part of London and, if memory serves, capture the Royal Navy flagship).

Seriously, that's just because of Alexandre Dumas's novels, they were never meaningful or different from contemporary neighbours. I know this is for flavor, but I would rather have civilizations evolve character based on what they do/where they are instead of what they are.

As I've noted before, then you'd have an empire-building game, but it wouldn't be Civilization. I've trotted out this link several times before:

http://www.playthepast.org/?p=593

Fundamentally the only difference between Civ and its successors and imitators that makes it the classic empire builder is its historical flavour. Take exactly the same game, assign random names and abilities to the civs involved, and it becomes something else (and in my mind something less). This lack of the historical flavour (and indeed the various invented future developments that again, to my mind, detract from the whole point of Civ) is the reason I never became interested in Call to Power.

The philosophy is much more static, but if I want to go that way, I'd rather play a historical simulator like Europa Universalis (western bias in the name included ;) ).

Well, this is the thing: that's what games like Europa Universalis are for. It's not what games like Civilization are for. It's always been more of a sandbox than a simulator - and sometimes it's worth throwing in Attila the Hun just so you can sometimes hear him say "We shouldn't let war define who we are", or Gandhi with his nuke fetish. But that only works if you can identify the protagonists in the game as the Huns, Indians etc. rather than "Generic Island Civ 1", "Horse-riding Steppe Civ 2" or whatever.

My gripe with UUs is that I consider all civs should be equal to begin with and evolve based on how the player performs and on their initial location rather than on predefined traits.

The two aren't in any way mutually exclusive. Civs invariably do evolve based on how the player performs and on their initial location (in the game I just finished, for example, my game evolved very different from a start with a hilly, production capital in plains, and with surrounding city-states that were predominantly cultural, than it does in more usual Siamese starts with gold-laden early jungles and - it seems as often as not - early game mercantiles in abundance, although the Siamese UU, UA and UB are identical whatever the start and player style). They just don't evolve traits or units that way (well, beyond the ones their choice of tech progression and access to strategic resources provides them with). And (unlike the Huns) if the Mongols get no horses, they don't get to use their horse-based UU - the same for any other civ that has a resource-dependent UU. But as well as adding flavour, differences between civs also provide variety between gaming sessions - Civ III was following a long-established herd when it first provided civ-specific trait combinations to its factions, and it's a system most games have adopted for good reason.

The only difference I see with Civ V is that its genuinely unique civ abilities (rather than just unique combinations of shared traits) have prompted the designers to more specifically tailor certain civs to particular strategies and playstyles. My example above was Siam, which happens to be one of the most versatile civs in the game and one which is particularly strongly defined by its environment (since its UA is wholly contingent on what city-states happen to be in the surrounding landscape).

This is in fact why it's my favourite civ, and so in that regard we're probably coming from much the same perspective (although naturally I like the city-states). It probably is the closest Civ V offers to what you're looking for - whether Siam develops as a religious powerhouse, a centre for culture, or a growth economy with a range of options can be determined very much by its early environment. And ironically it's a part of the environment you dislike for flavour reasons that actually provides that mechanical emphasis (and can too for other civs, but to a lesser extent).

Actually, there were scenarios for this in Civ IV but you're mostly right. However, barbarians were an option that could be turned off without changing totally the way the game evolved. In Civ V, city-states can be disabled but you suddenly lose a lot of game options. Some civics suddenly no longer make sense. Some civs special abilities just go poof.

In Civ V disabling barbarians makes Germany's ability just go poof, drastically limits Songhai's, and makes the Honor tree opener useless. It's not as drastic as removing city-states, certainly, but it's there.

No. The point is that some cultures are integrated in the game but you can't play them and can't win with them. You could win an OCC game with Kuala-Lumpur in Civ 1. In Civ V, you'll have to mod a city state out and mod a nation in in order to try it.

You can just rename your capital Kuala Lumpur in Civ V (and your civ name to Malaysia, I suspect) - the CS isn't in all games (though it seems to turn up in most of mine), and if it's not there the system will let you change the name. It's true that you'd have to preselect one of the existing civs whose abilities you judge best reflect KL, however.

It's not at all about the anarchy mechanics. It's about the presence of brutal changes. Even with 1 turn of anarchy, going from democracy to theocracy was possible in Civ 2. It is not in Civ V. You have to stay along the road that you paved. Civ V pretends that if you chose options that make your civ a democracy, it can never turn into a totalitary state. None of the previous civ incarnations was that optimistic.

There is an anarchy mechanic for changing from, say, Piety to Rationalism or from Freedom to Autocracy, but the social policy system doesn't encourage its use (why go for a full policy branch and then get rid of all of its benefits, instead of taking a compatible branch?) So as I say, it's still there - but again, not well implemented. Since policy trees are generally defined by game stage (mainly in when you can select them, but to a large degree when you'll get most use out of them), it would no doubt be possible to have a system whereby you unlock policy branches and can unlock any other, with anarchy resulting, but you can only have one active at a time. Unlike the current system you would keep the knowledge of all past policies you've accumulated, so if you want to switch back to Patronage and gain its benefits after exploring Freedom, you could do so (with attendant anarchy).

I am not talking about gameplay. I am talking philosophy of the simulated history. Yes, UUs are fun. City-states I feel are far too gamy and badly implemented, because you do diplomacy with them in a way different from other players. Other games with 'minor civs' (f.e. Galactic civilizations) managed to have minor civs interact in-game as major civs did, and I feel that is way better in terms of gameplay.

Civ ultimately is a game - it surely should have "gamey" elements. And looking at it as a game, city-states add an element largely lacking in previous civ games - a way for civs to interact with and interfere with one another's strategies other than warfare.

How could putting culturally specific units into a civilization's game mechanic be racist. If anything its historically accurate and respectful to the civilization.
For those of us that love history it is offensive for you to suggest that historical accuracy in unit types is prejudiced.

The 'racist' appellation is certainly bizarre, but he does have a valid point that many of these units aren't especially notable for their historical accuracy (or at least relevance - certainly it's accurate to show the French using musketeers, but it's equally accurate to show the Spanish of the same period using them. And inaccuracy is certainly introduced by the exclusive nature of UUs - it's true that the the Americans used B-17s, but it's not true that they didn't use any other bombers).

But to say the Indians where more of a civilization than the French (which I'll use as an example because it was brought up by a poster before me) is both a kind of meaningless statement (there's no real applicable scale or measurement of civilization-hood) and a biased one. Because modern day India is different from Mughal India and different from the Indus Civilization in a similar way modern France is not the same as the civilization of the Gauls or say, Charlemagne.

This certainly comes from a particular use of language, but I understand his point. "India" is a large assortment of different 'national' groups and former kingdoms that is culturally largely unified, but has historically been politically divided for most of its history. What the British inherited as "India", and from which the modern nation state largely derives its boundaries, was less than a century old when the British took control, and British India was essentially a continuation of the Marathas Confederacy's effort to unify India as a single political entity.

Transplanted to Europe, places like England, France and Germany - all areas originally populated by culturally similar Germanic peoples, with continual historical migration and cultural interchange between them, and until recent times similar styles of monarchic government, shared religion, shared technology and, indeed, shared interactions with the external world from crusades to imperial expansion and scientific exploration - are more akin to the individual kingdoms of pre-unification India than distinct cultural groups. They're the principalities of the "Western Europe" civ.
 
Whats wrong with Civ being nationslist, Eurocentric, and militaristic.
If you dont like it go play Barbie.
Moderator Action: Please don't troll around.
 
This is not to say that non Western civilizations are not inclined to development, only that in Civ the path to world dominance appears to mirror the path that countries like Britain, America, and Germany took for the last several centuries.
You happen to quote three countries which atm do represent leading forces in present day world. But the lessons from history would suggest that it cant stay this way forever. Just like other empires have perished so will so-called western civilization. We can only say that meanwhile we can indulge in playing game which only remotely represents the true story of human civilization as it would be too complicated to go into greater detail not to mention that even western scholars still fail to reveal the full scope of dynamics behind civilizations development.
 
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