So how did you get into Civilization?

1991, I had a friend which we used to play video-games on Amstrad an Atari. He had a big brother who studied data processing. They had a PC at home.
One day, he grabbed me to show a new game. We spent 10 hours in front of his big brother's PC this day. I had to wait one year before its release on Atari.
There was a protection where you need to find the good tech. If you failed, all you units are disbanded. 20 years later, I still know Civ I tech tree.
Civ I is also the only game I had played with all my computers since 1992.
 
Many years ago, probably in the early 00's, I read a review on either Civ III or IV that got me really excited. I asked for it for Christmas and got it...but my computer could barely run the game! Instead of doing the sensible thing and upgrading, I shelved it and forgot about it.

Late last year, I found it on my shelf and popped it into my now much newer computer, and it was so old it couldn't install! I went online and did some research and realized there was a much newer version out, so I bought Civ 5 on a steam sale and was hooked almost immediately. Since last December I have over 500 hours :mischief:
 
I was playing AoEO up until February of '14, when those unprintables at Microsoft said that they were killing the online part of the game .
A friend (undisclosed) urged me to try CivV, so hey, I bought it !!
I have not spent a dime on games since, and, with the savings per month not spent on new games; I just paid off the new flat-screen TV !!
Even better, the TV got the wife OFF bingo .
 
I skipped school one day with a friend to play Battletech and he had this odd little computer game called Civilization. So I was hooked while playing hooky from school I guess :)
 
In March of 2008 I attended a Video Games Live concert, where the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra allowed me to hear Baba Yetu for the first time. I figured a game with that quality of music must be awesome in other ways and was worth a look. A month later I visited my brother-in-law and his wife, and as it happens he played a lot of Civ IV, and he introduced me right then. Bought BTS later that year and got some good time with it, especially during a brief period of unemployment. One day I think I played for 10 hours, the refreshing autumn breeze flowing through my home office windows. I eventually got my high school choir to sing Baba Yetu at their fall concert, and it was the standout hit of the night.

Tragically, a long dry period followed: I discovered Facebook later that year and spent more time with its games (much of it wasted, admittedly). I knew I wanted to get back into Civ, but only once I was ready to commit enough hours-long blocks to it. I bought vanilla Civ V for my birthday in 2012, but, hearing about deficiencies in the game experience, stuck it out until G&K arrived and I felt more committal. I bought it a year later, just in time to share it with my niece during a weekend visit. The game was my birthday present to her the following month, and we got in a few online rounds before her mom's laptop crapped out.

These days, with me parenting a 1-year-old, I'm lucky if I get an hour a week to game. Four months ago I won a domination victory I'd been working on for the year prior. I know that will change as my daughter becomes more independent. I can't wait to introduce the game (VI?) to her, and I would love for us to eventually play together one night a week and--homework permitting--pick one Saturday a month to play ALL DAY. :D
 
Civ 2 was addictive... i started with civ 1 and then skipped to civ 4 and then 5.
 
I bought an Olivetti Computer in '94 and very quickly tired of the first person shootem ups - I used to be a big fan of Elite on the BBC B computer (an English stone age relic!) and my best friend said "If you liked Elite, this thing called Civilization is that whole deal, but just on Earth".

Roll on twenty years well spent, in my humble opinion!
 
When I was a kid in the early 70's I liked to play strategy games like 'Panzer Blitz'. Hex boards and 20 sided die and turns that took 2 hours to work out.

In the 90's when I saw Civ II I thought 'wow, a game like those I used to love but where the turns take just a minute or so'.

Since then I've owned them all and played way too many hours!
 
Back in undergrad, one of my roommates had a copy of Civ III and shared it with the majority of the guys in our house. The next morning, I went to class and three guys in the downstairs bedroom had pulled all-nighters and were still playing. They skipped all their classes that day. I had to see what all the fuss was about, started playing after that and haven't missed a beat since.
 
Caution: It's a bad idea to be mentioning sharing a copy, even if that was a decade ago as that could be interpreted as in violation of the forum rules.
 
The phrase, FYI, is "unofficial offsite backup".

:lol: Actually pretty funny.
But I'm afraid that every time directly stating something is against one of the rules, implying the same thing is as well.

But seriously, you just say he let you play it on his machine or you guys saw him playing on his machine and just leave out "copying" and any other euphemisms entirely.
 
I'm one of the dinosaurs that got into Civ with the very first one in early 90's. I still remember how fun was it, even on such prehistoric graphics, to nuke the bugger that's been annoying whole game.
 
I got Civ 2 for the Playstation way back in 1999, and for years it was the only Civ I ever had; I must have poured thousands of hours into that game over more than a decade. Next I got Civ Rev for the 360, and that was a massive disappointment tbh. I've maybe played a dozen hours at most of that game. I finally got a "proper" Civ game (Civ V) last Christmas, and haven't looked back since.
 
Southamerican Spring of '92... young wannabe engineer finishing up his Master's Thesis in Engineering, goes to his local electronics shop where he has a friend that is a techie... asks him if he has something new to have fun on the PC, as the masterpiece F-15 (yeah, guess from who...) was getting too easy... friend answers: "well, there is this game where you have to build some sort of country or empire, but I don't get it... when I finally can build some archers for my empire, the computer shows up with bombers and goodbye archers..."

Immediately hooked after that description, if only by the challenge represented in such sentence... Thesis delayed at least 6 months. Hooked for ever. Owned all of them ever since.

Now daughter (14) and son (11) play with me. Dream come true. Wife does not like the game, but loves to see her children playing something for the brains instead of killing zombies and other crap.

All because some archers could not fight back some bombers...
 
It was fall 1992, and I was in my first year of college. My best friend had a Macintosh laptop (a dark gray plastic thing with the old rainbow Apple logo - it was the John Sculley era) and he was raving about this new game he had - the original Civilization. His laptop could only display black and white, so the graphics were a bit hard to look at, but we were hooked. The game got much better when I played my own copies on computers with color monitors - both Mac and PC.

In Civ I you would see an animation of your troops marching into an enemy city after conquering it. In the diplomacy leader screens you could tell how strong and how advanced a civilization was from how many advisors stood behind the leader and by the way they were dressed. Stalin was the Russian leader and Mao Zedong was the Chinese leader. Stalin was just as aggressive as Shaka or Genghis Khan - if you saw him nearby you had to prepare for war. The Pyramids had a weird effect - you instantly got the most advanced government possible (Democracy). So you were a pharaoh running for re-election... :confused:

I have played all the versions of the game since then. Civilization II was a quantum leap in sophistication, especially the graphics. They had a visual theme that tied everything together, based on 19th century engravings. There were two leaders for every civilization, male and female, and that helped keep things fresh as you didn't see the same leaders every time. Some of the diplomacy leader screens had stylized art inspired by that civilization's real life art, like Japanese prints or Celtic manuscript illumination. There was a scenario-building and modding method, but it was pretty clumsy. There were overpowered Wonders like Leonardo da Vinci's Workshop, which instantly upgraded all your military for free, and oddities like Women's Suffrage, which made it easier to wage war as a democracy. (How much wood and iron and cement do you need to "build" votes for women? Can a building contractor give you an estimate on that? What is this, I don't even... :crazyeye:) The AI was even stupider than that in Civ V. Wimpy backward civs would try to threaten you into giving them gold or tech, and if that didn't work they would try to lay a guilt trip on you - "Your decadent lifestyle makes us ill, our people demand that you share 500 gold with us". Basically every AI personality was like North Korea. Even so I still loved that game, especially the fantasy and sci-fi variants introduced in Test of Time. The Wonder movies and the animated advisors are sorely missed, especially the "Elvis" happiness advisor - if you were doing well on happiness he would tell you "Sire, the people - they can't help fallin' in love with you" LOL.

Civilization III was fun, but I was always annoyed by the way the corruption mechanic made it impossible to do anything with cities planted far from your capital. Overseas empires like those in real history were impossible. Civ III still has a place in my heart because it had the best, and easiest, building/modding mode that was built right into the game. Sure, you can do more with IV and V, but only if you know programming pretty well. Civ I through III also had two happiness mechanics we could use today: citizens could be designated "entertainers" to maintain local city happiness, and all religious buildings gave happiness.

There was a board game called Civilization published in the UK (1980) and USA (1981) which may or may not have influenced Sid Meier in developing the first of his computer versions, but I never got to play it.
 
I remember watching the elders play original Civ during (instead of) their IT class back in '92. I was 10 back then and the Game immediately seemed very interesting, even though i hardly understood what was going on. So i sat there silently, for 3 hours, watching, listening.. until dark, when school principal kicked us all out and shut down the electricity. Tried all iterations for few hours each since then, but none really hooked me, i was more interested in racing, shooting and such at the time. Civ 5 is when i came back to the series and finally recognised the genius of this strategy game.
 
Early 90s I attended a wedding in another city, and during a visit to the bride's home, I noticed her younger siblings playing a game called Civilization. Not sure if it was on an Amiga or IBM, but I was greatly interested in the concept for the game.

Six to twelve months later I got my first proper computer; a 486 DOS system, and I acquired Civilization from a friend. I soon became addicted, and vividly remember needing to leave for work one night, but suffering the one more turn thing.

I spent a great deal more time playing and enjoying Colonization. I was overseas during the release of Civilization II, but eventually got to play it in late 1998. I thought the High Council was pretty tacky, and generally considered the game an uninteresting rehash of the original, and very much inferior to Colonization. But I did enjoy the Mars senario included in one of the expansion packs.

Then came Alpha Centauri, which to me seemed fresh, innovative, and had superb graphics and atmosphere. I was so enamoured with SMAC, I barely noticed the coming and going of Civilization III. Eventually I needed something new, so I tried Civilization IV with the Warlords expansion, and enjoyed it. Then Beyond the Sword was released and it kept me busy until recently. Now I'm hanging out for Beyond Earth, which I can already tell will be my new SMAC. Looks like I'll probably bypass Civilization VI if Beyond Earth has some compelling expansions.
 
Civ 3 was my first. Civ 4 I didn't really care for but got back on the bike with Civ5.
 
Best game I ever played on the Atari ST, back in the very early 90's. For Civ 2 I went out and bought my first cd drive just to install it lol. Civ 3 is actually one of my favourites though many believe it to be the worst.
 
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