When did you first start playing Civilization?

[Tatran]

This TV-show, Musikladen Eurotops, introduced me to civilization.
I couldn't find the right episode with civilization, but the game is mentioned (3:04) in the video.


Link to video.

 

[CornMaster]

I started playing Civ with Civ 1 when I was in junior high (95 ish). A friend had it on his 486 computer. I had an old Tandy machine at home and it was super slow to generate a map. I'd generate maps at his place, save the games and bring them home to play on my pc.

I got the SNES version as well, and remember reading the manual in class instead of whatever we were supposed to do.

Got Civ2 MGE a few years later. That prompted me to do my first computer upgrade. At that time we had a 386 but the video card could only do 16 colours which is not pretty for a game designed for 256. I remember the excitement loading only to not be able to tell anything apart when the game finally loaded.

Played a lot of Civ 1 and Civ 2....ridiculous amounts really.

Got Civ 3 on launch day, and did some playthroughs here on CFC. Took a day off work to drive a town over to get it. Played a few games, but I was quite disappointed. Didn't play much until the last expansion, and then played a bit of MP.

I was a bit cool on Civ after Civ 3. And I waited a while before getting Civ 4. Played a lot of Civ 4 though when the last expansion was released. Played a fair few of the mods too.

Playing Civ 5 BNW now, got to say it is a pretty deep game.

 

[Hruberen]

I actually started with civrev, as I didn't own a computer with Internet until 8th grade - 2008, and not one that could play current graphics until 2012. I've always been a PS3 kind of guy, and my dad likes startegy games...

The PS3 was still relatively new, and I was keeping an eye out for strategy games, when I saw civrev previews, I saw that I could get a demo for it, so I downloaded onto my PS3. You could only play as Rome or Egypt on a prefixed map, but it was awesome, you could see the other civs abilities that made you just want more, I had to have it.

I was able to convince my mom to get it for my dad's birthday, which I felt kind of guilty about as he only did 1 unfinished game, completely with my supervision, but I loved that game.

I would pull up the armchair and ottoman (thanks to civ, I now know why the ottoman has such a strange name), right up next to our 60" tv, as I needed glasses but didn't know it yet, so I could see it all the better.

I could only play on the 2nd hardest level, but it was so fun trying out all the different civs abilities, and seeing all the sweet maps. You could only play against 4 other civs, and couldn't pick your map type except through scenarios.

I remember a game as the Mongols (who had yellow colours!) where I had a huge empire, with all the buildings built in multiple cities, so I had to build wonders, their mountain production bonus really helped, and their conversion of barb camps into cities would be much better for civ5 where they aren't on top of important resources.

SOmetime I got 2 of my friends interested, with one of them, we competed to see who could get the earliest nuke. I hold the record going as the Arabs with a lucky Oxford and strategic use of engineers and scientists, sometime in the 14 or 1500s.

I usually played random and would settle new cities on named tiles, so I didn't have to figure city placement.

I then read a Spain strategy guide online which enabled me to move up to King, it was Archipelago ICS, and it was awesome, you would use early discovery gold from named tiles to rushbuy a galleon after getting 100 gold and a free settler, put the settler on the Galleon, which can cross ocean, and find a spot which had access to whales, which you had early access to thanks to starting with Navigation, get off the Galleon and found city, then rushbuy a new settler in the new city and put it on the ship. Rinse and repeat.

I actually played a bit of a game of civ4 at the nuke players house, and basically did everything my advisors told me to do, didn't even find all civs before I went home.

The things I miss from civrev:
-How unique each of the civs are, 1 ability, 1 unit, and 1 misc seems pretty crappy after 1 starting bonus and 1 bonus for each era
-how broke you could get the game to be
-economic milestones
-ability to put cities anywhere you think would be good

 

[Rellin]

Civ1. 10 years on this forum, heh.

 

[Petiscator]

Around 2001-02 I think, with Civilization II. My mom went shopping with my dad and they found a magazine (Fullgames) that came with a game, it was pretty cheap and my mom found the cover quite impressive, so she bought it for me and my older sis. I was 5-7 years old, my sister was 9-11. I didn't understand English at all, it was quite confusing, but she used to play it with me and we enjoyed it a lot. Heck, I've never understood that game. I did like the "Cheat" function, oh that was cool! So I was quite impressed by the game, but after we found out about Croc 2, we kind of stopped playing. Well, about 10 years later, I was browsing the interwebzzz on a summer vacation (january for us), when I though "Hey, I used to enjoy playing Civilization II, perhaps they made Civilization III and I can have soe fun with it..."

Typed "Civilization" on google. I saw Civ III. And Civ IV. And Civ V. Ohmy, I saw the graphics and decided to play. Few days later, I started my first game, a random one as Arabia. Now here I am, procrastinating.

 

[Hruberen]

Mine's actually kind of embarassing.

I was in College and being how colleges are there was an inter-college sharing network in which there were hundreds of free games and movies all available via the network. So I started playing through games like a mad person.

So there it was "Civilization 2 Test of Time." Unfortunately I didn't play the normal mode. I played mostly the Midgard Scenario.

Can you elaborate more on this? I'm headed to my first year of University in 2 1/2 weeks.

This thread makes me incredibly sad and nostalgic, but in a good way. I reallly miss not having a cooler story than the one I have.

Also, all the talk about playing with friends is kind of a shot to the gut, as I used to do that a lot in middle school and the early years of high school, but then the gaming industry changed along with my friends tastes, and now i'm always playing alone or with randoms.

The most loyal i've been to a gaming franchise is the Dynasty Warriors series.

 

[mike1117112]

it was III where I was hooked. My wife gave it to me s a Christmas gift the year it came out. I was immediately hooked. I did go back and play II, Even Test of Time and Call To Power (?). But Civ became my game. Stayed with IV, and now V. I play no other games on any kind of regularity. A steady series, never let me down. With BNW, V becomes the best Civ game so far.

 

[Brimstone]

Civ 1 on a Tandy 1000, with 2 5 and 1/4 disks, while I was stationed in Japan. I'm assuming the year it came out. I was there 87 to 93.

 

[ToodleElNoodos]

In...2002 or 2003. Found Civ II for the SNES, gave it a try. Had some fun, didn't really look into it.

Got into Civ V when Polynesia came out, and didn't really play much after. G&K came out, and I was in for a little bit longer. BNW is in...and now my free time has gone down the drain.

 

[Roltel]

The Avalon Hill 1982 Civilization board game, and all PC variations since.

 

[Falconiano]

Civ 2. I found it in one of those magazines that came with full games back then.
I actually played it quite a bit, though I'd still prefer Age of Empires over it.
Then jumped to 4 then 5. Haven't played 1 and 3.

 

[Matthew.]

Civ5 for me. I remember seeing the other games while growing up, but was sucked into the RTS and RPG genres so never gave them a chance.

 

[ajok]

civ5, my brothers gave me his laptop with games inside, look, now i've played it for 2 years

 

[fotonut]

Civ 1! And before that I was playing Empire, which is sometimes considered a pre-cursor. Played all variants since, including Alpha Centauri and Colonization.

And coincidentally I was cleaning out the garage when I came across this:





Still have the floppies and even an Amiga. Wonder if it works...

 

[troublmaker]

Can you elaborate more on this? I'm headed to my first year of University in 2 1/2 weeks.

This thread makes me incredibly sad and nostalgic, but in a good way. I reallly miss not having a cooler story than the one I have.

Also, all the talk about playing with friends is kind of a shot to the gut, as I used to do that a lot in middle school and the early years of high school, but then the gaming industry changed along with my friends tastes, and now i'm always playing alone or with randoms.

The most loyal i've been to a gaming franchise is the Dynasty Warriors series.

Maybe they're not even around I don't know. Universities have insanely powerful Internet... within the university. So most universities will have a really powerful Intranet in which you can use a program called Direct Connect to connect to the entire school's computers safely. Basically you would just download directly from people's computers.

So one guy would download a safe illegal copy of a game and then everyone would download off of him. As well people were downloading pornography, movies, and what not. People had to share a minimum of stuff so you'd see some weird stuff on there too.

Everyone would grab off of these people and everyone would be playing the same games and watching the same movies. Whenever you hear about how movies became Internet cult classics like "The Big Leboeski", it's because university intranets shared this movie to thousands of people.

I'm not entirely sure in this modern age people still have them. The whole "Facebook story" started with something called "Face Smash" or some variant of it. Marc Zuckerberg goes on the university intranet and takes pictures of girls which girls are posting on there and places them on a website where guys rate the girls.

In the movie "The Social Network" they portray him as hacking these pictures out of the computers. In reality they're all freely given through a community intranet. All so these women could get their hands on Dirty Dancing and Pretty Woman.

 

[Ajay Sabharwal]

Started with Civ 3, it was first turn based strategy game I played. I've been playing a lot of games and am member of several gaming forums, so it was hard to miss it.

Played C4 a lot, then only dabbled in C5 vanilla. When G&K came out and totally reworked the game, played it for a while but kinda switched to MP games like BF3 and SC2 after that. Then BNW came and I'm hooked again.

My path on the Civ track was pretty much the same, although I bought the base game and g&K together in the Gold Edition.

 

[Arachnofiend]

Played Civ III as a real young gal (I think I was somewhere in the range of 9-11 at the time?) but didn't understand it at all and ended up quitting. I didn't pick up the franchise again until V, about a month or so before Gods and Kings came out.

 

[MarshalN]

I started with Civ1 with a friend's computer. Played the most of Civ2 - was playing French in deity almost exclusively (not that civ mattered back then) and remember I had it down to a science - despotism, monarchy, democracy, then fanaticism when I researched armor, leading to an unending state of war for the rest of the game which ends in worldwide domination. Fun times.

Played some Civ3, never really got into it. Something about it wasn't quite right and I never really liked the game. Skipped 4 entirely, and still haven't played it. Picked up 5 about a year ago and love the new BNW expansion - I think if they fix diplo victory this game is pretty well balanced.

 

[danieladler]

When an older friend showed me this new game called Civilization back in the day i was hooked immediately. I had a hobby where i made up this whole world with fictional countries and stories about them, like a mirror of the real world and its politics. So this game was right up my alley. It wasnt until Civ2 that i became really obsessed though, maybe because by that time i had moved away from home and was free to play all day if i wanted to...which i did, hehe. Civ2 felt like such a giant leap forward compared to the first game. And since then i have been a die hard fan, even though i view Civ3 as the only true disappointment in the series.

 

[Karatekid5]

I first heard about the series when my friend mentioned his "Civ-a-thons" a few years back during some IM conversations. These Civ-a-thons were on Civ IV. However, I had never actually seen any Civ games until I watched the same friend and a few others play a multiplayer match of Civ V. Since the game + the DLC and Gods & Kings was on sale, I decided to buy it, and I gave it a try last August. I was instantly hooked when I started playing it. It's been almost a year since then, and I've enjoyed the many experiences that came along with it!