About the Civ 1 manual

[mfornaciari]

I have a pdf copy of the Civ 1 manual (apparently scanned from a physical copy). It's dated 1994 ("First printing 1991, revised 1994", to be exact), has 155 pages in the file, and includes a section called "The dynamics of civilization" from page 117 to 138 that seems to be absent from other versions I could locate online, including the one available in this site. I downloaded it a few years ago, and I can't remember where I found it - I actually thought I got it from here.

Can anyone explain to me what's going on with this? Was this section in the 1991 manual? Was it added later? Was it removed from particular versions, and why?

Thanks for your attention.

 

[Mize]

It's been decades since I touched a physical copy of the manual, but I did some online snooping and I can tell you that it indeed appears that the section was added in a later edition, probably the 1994 one you have. It could also be that the section was there in older editions of the manual, got removed in later ones, and then got put back in it in subsequent ones, but that just seems too unlikely. It also seems a bit tacked on, like an afterthought or an apology for why things in the game are like they are: 'Hey, here's why our tech tree is like this...'

Other than the different formatting, this passage appears to be the only difference between editions, but I didn't really take the time to properly compare them.

 

[mfornaciari]

Can you point me towards what you found online? I looked around too, but couldn't even find a mention of this 1994 version. Found the SNES manual and the one that seems to be the basis for the HTML version here, which I suppose is the original version but can't be sure, since it doesn't have a date.

This is particularly interesting/important to me, because I'm writing about Civ's take on history and this "dynamics of civilization" section seems to be the one time in franchise history that it actually articulated a wide and coherent view on world history, shallow as it may be. Considering how Meier is usually evasive on this topic, knowing what motivated it's inclusion in this one version of the manual would be great.

 

[Mize]

I suspect it's illegal to post links to the manuals here, since they're also copyrighted works, so I sent you a PM.
On second glance, the 1994 version also includes a previously missing 'index' section but it lacks the 'copy protection' section of the older version.
What you want to know, however, probably requires getting in contact with the publishers or editors of these manuals (which will be quite an achievement by itself, since contact information is severely outdated), unless you're really, really lucky and manage to find a reason for the addition of the section in an interview or something.
In the end, if you're successful, it might turn out that this has nothing to do with the team behind the game -- it could just as easily have been written by an overeager MicroProse marketing intern to spruce up the new edition of the manual.