Civilization Iceberg

[Mr. Salt]

This isn't strictly VI stuff, but this is the most fitting place I could find for it. Also, fair warning, I made 3 things up.
How far down can you get?

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

I love the demonic Beluga Whale. He just looks like someone who has seen things.

 

[Francel]

This must be a meme or something. Care to explain for the uninitiated?

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

Is one of those things you made up labeled "Atomic Zulu Theme is sus?"

 

[Andrew Johnson [FXS]]

Can someone explain "civ writer hates rock" and "civ2 hint guide = satanic?"

I think one of the early writers might have been annoyed at rock, although me myself I'm more of a punk/industrial person. And I put the Voidsinger Civ2 hint guide relic in there, or is this referencing something really old?

 

[Potworny]

"Atomic Zulu theme is sus" - that's an absolutely great one. For those of you that don't understand, one of the lyrics sounds very similar to the phrase "among us"; that was fun when I've first made the connection.

I've actually made an Iceberg for civ myself a while ago, I like that we've had some similar ideas, but each of us got something unique as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/civ_memes/comments/i680jj/civilization_iceberg_how_deep_can_you_go/

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

"Atomic Zulu theme is sus" - that's an absolutely great one. For those of you that don't understand, one of the lyrics sounds very similar to the phrase "among us"; that was fun when I've first made the connection.

I've actually made an Iceberg for civ myself a while ago, I like that we've had some similar ideas, but each of us got something unique as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/civ_memes/comments/i680jj/civilization_iceberg_how_deep_can_you_go/

I forgot that was a thing.

 

[Menocchio]

"Atomic Zulu theme is sus" - that's an absolutely great one. For those of you that don't understand, one of the lyrics sounds very similar to the phrase "among us"; that was fun when I've first made the connection.

I've actually made an Iceberg for civ myself a while ago, I like that we've had some similar ideas, but each of us got something unique as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/civ_memes/comments/i680jj/civilization_iceberg_how_deep_can_you_go/

I suppose I should be thankful for not being so poisoned by internet memes: I always just heard it as "oh my God!" Along with, earlier, "Aieee, seize your land," which doubles as an excellent summation of Shaka's usual strategy.

 

[fy00sh]

This must be a meme or something. Care to explain for the uninitiated?

an iceberg image meme puts text into different layers over an image of an iceberg, with the top layer being surface-level trivia and knowledge of a topic, and each successive layer containing more and more obscure/cursed/creepy entries. Here's the article on icebergs on Know Your Meme.

the "Every copy of Civ6 is personalized" is a direct reference to "Every copy of Super Mario 64 is personalized", a creepypasta about how every copy of SM64 takes your inputs and subtly tailors the game for you. It's the first entry here under "related memes".

 

[Potworny]

an iceberg image meme puts text into different layers over an image of an iceberg, with the top layer being surface-level trivia and knowledge of a topic, and each successive layer containing more and more obscure/cursed/creepy entries. Here's the article on icebergs on Know Your Meme.

the "Every copy of Civ6 is personalized" is a direct reference to "Every copy of Super Mario 64 is personalized", a creepypasta about how every copy of SM64 takes your inputs and subtly tailors the game for you. It's the first entry here under "related memes".

There's also an excellent genre of "Iceberg Explained" videos on YouTube, in which people go through all the entries in the image and explain them over the course of up to several hours. If somebody did that for Civ, that'd be absolutely awesome.

 

[cuc]

Ah, an iceberg meme. Civ is such a big family there's endless trivia to mine. Here are some.

- Board games: we have iterations of the Francis Tresham original, three separate licensed adaptations (apparently the middle one, based on CivRev, is the best?), and the Soren Johnson-designed card game included in the Civ4 Collector's Edition, not to mention countless games inspired by Civ.

- Civ1's copyright protection check is someone challenging your royal blood, which you must prove by answering tech tree questions. Failure disbands your troops. Or was that Civ2?

- Civilization for Windows 3.0 is based on Civ1 for Mac, and CivNet - the multiplayer version that MicroProse executives assume would outsell Civ2, is in turn based on CivWin.

- Civilization Gold, the canceled Civ1 remake. Apparently some impressive wonder movies were made for it; I'm not sure if Civ2 reused them.

- Different from Civ2, CivNet has its own (a bit cheap synth-sounding) CD audio soundtrack. Again, not sure if reused from CivGold.

- DOS and Windows versions of Colonization have entirely different graphics.

- The Japan-exclusive PlayStation version of Master of Magic is called Civizard: Majutsu no Keifu ("Civizard: Genealogy of Magic") to capitalize on Civ's fame.

- Civ2 was titled Civilization 2000 during development.

- What is the stock photo archive they used to make Civ2, and why does it have so many photos of China? What about the stock video archive for CivGold/Civ2 and Alpha Centauri's wonder movies?

- You raise me Shakala and Nazca, and I raise you the PlayStation version of Civ2. The devs wrote each leader a bio, meaning they had to change the particularly outrageous ones.

- "Guunhilde" is replaced by Gyda Eiriksdatter; "Shakala" by Nandi, Shaka's mother; "Nazca" by "Nezcaltiloyan", which the bio claims to be a "Great Earth Mother" in Aztec mythology, but actually is one of the Nahuatl words for "school", literally meaning "the place where I grew".

- They mistakenly gave Frederick II, the Great's bio to Civ2's male German leader Frederick II HRE.

- Near the end of MicroProse's days, amid the Sid team's exodus and the copyright lawsuit, they could not use the name of either Sid or "Civilization". Civ2's second scenario disc had to be titled "Civ II: Fantastic Worlds".

- All the weird scenarios you find in Civ2's expansions, including Jules Verne, dinosaurs, and ones based on X-Com, Master of Orion and Master of Magic. Since 2K never owned the latter two, their scenarios were excluded from the Civilization Chronicles anthology, the last time Civ2 was re-released.

- Early plans of Alpha Centauri that differ from the final game, like slightly different faction names, and binary "liberal vs. neutral vs. ruthless" choices on policies, replaced by the Social Engineering system we know and love. Also, remember the University leader was named Saratov (not a real person's name) before Russian players protested?

- The Alpha Centauri spinoffs, including novel trilogy, graphic novel and GURPS tabletop RPG.

- According to Michael Ely (Alpha Centauri cutscene director & official novel writer; however most of the tech quotes and the manual were written by Brian Reynolds), its wonder movies were harder to make than CivGold/Civ2, because - obviously, you can't build a science fiction universe with nothing but stock videos.

- Sid started a dev diary on GameSpot to record the prototyping process of his next project, Dinosaurs, which together with Civ and spinoffs, would form an epic "Sweep of Time" metaseries. He could never find a gameplay model that satisfied him. That partially explains the dinosaur unit model set in Play the World.

- All the issues of Civ2 Multiplayer Gold (aggressive AI, replacing the beautiful Macromedia Director-powered Civilopedia), Alien Crossfire (deadlock bug, imbalance), Civ3 Conquests (AI behavior, poorly conceived units & wonders) that make players claim them inferior versions.

- Some Conquests scenario wonders have unique artworks - rare in Firaxis games!

- Cut features of Civ4 like throne room (in Beyond the Sword) and cultural variations of cities. They only added the Classical and Asian variants in Warlords.

- Names of fansites and players in Civ3 city lists. Names of community testers in Beyond the Sword Great Spies.

- One World, SteamDB-revealed development title for Brave New World. Frankenstein team, the community playtest group.

- You may know Mao was replaced by Tang Taizong in Chinese releases of Civ3 and 4, but the truth was weirder than that. For those releases, the publishers avoided all mentions of Chinese history. China was renamed Jiuding Guo - Nation of the Nine Tripod Cauldrons, and Taizong renamed "Tang Gong" - Duke of Tang. The Mongols became Oirats; Three Gorges Dam became the Aswan Dam, and so on. That didn't happen to most later games because they were never legally released in China.

- In Civilization Revolution's files, you can find the Spice Market, a seemingly-finished cut building that boosts cultural defense. There are two unused Civilopedia photos, one of an aircraft graveyard, one of a man doing welding or cutting.

- Some other CivRev features feel incomplete, like those useless DLC wonders, the cosmetic unique units, and there being only two Great Leaders, who are bizarrely Agamemnon and King David.

- The simple fact that CivRev was designed (with gameplay code) by Sid himself, and represents his own take on evolving the Civ formula, true to the elegant Sid style (seriously 2K, please remaster CivRev for PC!)

- What about Sid's foray into the social game space, Civilization Network (not to be confused with licensed Korean MMORPG Civilization Online), renamed Civilization World, never left beta?

- Sid also started a CivRev2 project that was to exploit its spinoff status to push boundaries with more unique civs like Atlantis, Amazons, aliens and zombies.

- In a game jam, Sid prototyped an "escape from zombie hotel" game, showing his interest in zombies as a subject (too bad the game jam documentary seems no longer viewable). We may have finally see it come to some form of fruition in Civ6's zombie modes.

- The CivRev2 that we actually got was ported to PS Vita as CivRev2 Plus. It was aimed at the Japanese market and has an emphasis on Japanese leaders and scenarios.

 

[Uberfrog]

Can someone explain "civ writer hates rock" and "civ2 hint guide = satanic?"

I think one of the early writers might have been annoyed at rock, although me myself I'm more of a punk/industrial person. And I put the Voidsinger Civ2 hint guide relic in there, or is this referencing something really old?

No idea. The meme clearly doesn’t remember Civ 4, where Soren Johnson liked Rock & Roll so much he made it a world wonder. And spent more money than he should have licensing 20 seconds of The Velvet Underground to play during the wonder movie!

 

[Banazir864]

“Oh most untrustworthy leader of the infidels...” - the actual leader of the Infidels

Spoiler Explanation :

In Civ II, leaders who didn’t trust you would address you this way. Civ II Gold had a fantasy scenario where one of the civs was called the Infidels. This line was still used.

 

[cuc]

A little Brian Reynolds trivia:

- Brian's belief in empowering the player is why he made Civ2 to have a cheat menu, highly editable data, and scenario support. He built the WW2 Europe scenario to showcase it.

- The game industry can be a small place. You see the composer of Rise of Nations writing CivRev's music, and its UI designer directing the art of Civ6.

- Some Conquests scenario wonders have unique artworks - rare in Firaxis games!

- OTOH, none of the new wonders and buildings added in C3C are visible in the City View mode. The Readme.txt mentions this and says "Sorry."

- There are mountains of random placeholder & remnant files in games from C3C to CivRev. Not that others don't have these; they just have more.

- C3C has historical photos as placeholder Civilopedia artworks.

- Civ4 has tiny, barely visible placeholder portraits for unused leaders, including a few unlikely to appear in an official Civ game like Muhammed and Emperor Meiji.

- CivRev is wilder, with Flash prototypes of the game UI, and scan of a Firaxis invoice (!).


Now here's the deepest C3C lore.

It expands Civ3's military Leader feature with Scientific Leaders, shaping the future of Great People in Civ series - even if the feature is quite broken, never fixed.

The series has always had choices that look odd to natives and field experts, but it never gets weirder, slapdash-er than Scientific Leader names which are civ-specific.

"However poorly chosen, at least they should be real people. Maybe they substituted in gods and legends like Civ2?" you thought, thinking of vanilla Civ3's Japanese military leaders Tojo (WW2 prime minister & war criminal, considered a poor general), Hirohito (the emperor, never a general), and Fujiwara (the clan closest to the imperial family. There were many dozens of famous Fujiwaras, which one did you mean?).

And yes, maybe. See the Koreans:
Seok Tong-sik - Can be a real Korean name. There's no notable person with this or a similar name.
Taro Aso Han - As you may know, Tarō Asō is a modern Japanese politician.
Roh Moo Sun - Sounds like Roh Moo-hyun, the South Korean president.

Indeed, one way or other, these still count as people's names. Not historical Korean scholars or scientists, not necessarily people that can plausibly exist, but people, right?

Let's look at Mongolians. Did you expect Turco-Mongol scientists like Ulugh Beg, or any of the Perso-Arab or Chinese scientists they recruited?

Ulan Bator - The capital city of modern Mongolia, meaning "Red Hero".
Minzu Wenyibao - That's the Chinese name of a newspaper in Inner Mongolia, China, roughly "Literature and Arts of Ethnicities".
Kumujil-yin Qoro - Far as I can tell, this is Mongolian, meaning "Education Publishing House", part of the names of several publishers in China.

See what the writer did there? They… googled some article citations and clipped random words from them, thinking one of these must be a person?

Asian localizers would have to change these up in their local releases, which I don't have on hand. I also don't know enough to tell what names they pulled for other civs like the Zulus, so I will have to leave you here. Maybe there's deeper still C3C lore to be found, after all.

 

[Potworny]

A little Brian Reynolds trivia:

- Brian's belief in empowering the player is why he made Civ2 to have a cheat menu, highly editable data, and scenario support. He built the WW2 Europe scenario to showcase it.

- The game industry can be a small place. You see the composer of Rise of Nations writing CivRev's music, and its UI designer directing the art of Civ6.



- OTOH, none of the new wonders and buildings added in C3C are visible in the City View mode. The Readme.txt mentions this and says "Sorry."

- There are mountains of random placeholder & remnant files in games from C3C to CivRev. Not that others don't have these; they just have more.

- C3C has historical photos as placeholder Civilopedia artworks.

- Civ4 has tiny, barely visible placeholder portraits for unused leaders, including a few unlikely to appear in an official Civ game like Muhammed and Emperor Meiji.

- CivRev is wilder, with Flash prototypes of the game UI, and scan of a Firaxis invoice (!).


Now here's the deepest C3C lore.

It expands Civ3's military Leader feature with Scientific Leaders, shaping the future of Great People in Civ series - even if the feature is quite broken, never fixed.

The series has always had choices that look odd to natives and field experts, but it never gets weirder, slapdash-er than these names which are civ-specific.

"However poorly chosen, at least they should be real people. Maybe they substituted in gods and legends like Civ2?" you thought, thinking of vanilla Civ3's Japanese military leaders Tojo (WW2 prime minister & war criminal, considered a poor general), Hirohito (the emperor, never a general), and Fujiwara (the clan closest to the imperial family. There were many dozens of famous Fujiwaras, which one did you mean?).

And yes, maybe. See the Koreans:
Seok Tong-sik - Can be a real Korean name. There's no notable person with this or a similar name.
Taro Aso Han - As you may know, Tarō Asō is a Japanese politician.
Roh Moo Sun - Sounds like Roh Moo-hyun, the South Korean president.

Indeed, one way or other, these still count as people's names. Not historical Korean scholars or scientists, not necessarily people that can plausibly exist, but people, right?

Let's look at Mongolians. Did you expect Turco-Mongol scientists like Ulugh Beg, or any of the Perso-Arab or Chinese scientists they recruited?

Ulan Bator - The capital city of modern Mongolia, meaning "Red Hero".
Minzu Wenyibao - That's the Chinese name of a newspaper in Inner Mongolia, China, roughly "Literature and Arts of Ethnicities".
Kumujil-yin Qoro - Far as I can tell, this is Mongolian, meaning "Education Publishing House", part of the names of several publishers in China.

See what the writer did there? They… googled some article citations and clipped random words from them, thinking one of these must be a person?

Asian localizers would have to change these up in their local releases, which I don't have on hand. I also don't know enough to tell what names they pulled for other civs like the Zulus, so I will have to leave you here. Maybe there's deeper still C3C lore to be found, after all.

Alright, I'm a little bit too young to know most of these
Thank you so much! I'm curious about the Civ4 placeholders, are they available to see somewhere?

 

[cuc]

I'm curious about the Civ4 placeholders, are they available to see somewhere?

Haven't touched it in a while, you need to either unpack Civ4's FPK files (PakBuild) and browse the files with an image viewer that support DDS texture files, or use a tool that can read from the pack. I used Dragon Unpacker.

 

[Vandlys]

an iceberg image meme puts text into different layers over an image of an iceberg, with the top layer being surface-level trivia and knowledge of a topic, and each successive layer containing more and more obscure/cursed/creepy entries. Here's the article on icebergs on Know Your Meme.

the "Every copy of Civ6 is personalized" is a direct reference to "Every copy of Super Mario 64 is personalized", a creepypasta about how every copy of SM64 takes your inputs and subtly tailors the game for you. It's the first entry here under "related memes".

This reply should be included in the starting post... People just dropping smt without any explanation...

 

[TeddyMain]

"Atomic Zulu Theme is sus"

I'm going insane I thought I could be safe from that meme here but NOPE GUESS NOT.

 

[Banazir864]

A little Brian Reynolds trivia:

- Brian's belief in empowering the player is why he made Civ2 to have a cheat menu, highly editable data, and scenario support. He built the WW2 Europe scenario to showcase it.

And that’s one of the reasons why my fondest Civ memories are of Civ II Gold. Even as a child, I could make complete overhaul mods.