Why play Civ 1?

For me it's about the fact that Civ I is designed as a single player game. This means it has a lot of things that could be exploited, but that you don't have to exploit. Later versions had all sorts of highly unfun mechanics designed to nerf strategies you might not even be playing, but that could hurt your freeform game greatly.

For me the order of preference is I,II,IV,V,III. Largely because III had the most unfun corruption mechanic ever (and took forever to tune it to reasonable levels).

Civ I also got me interested in programming and exploring how programs work. I remember hacking around with the credits to get it to display me and my friends names for a while (reinstalled it later to give real credit where credit is surely due).

I think a few UI tweaks would be really nice, I hate that you can build a settler to destroy a city, ZoC would do better with tweaking, and borders + slightly better diplomacy engine + better AI would be great. I've never felt the improvements I most wanted to make to Civ were graphical, yet that seems to be where most of the work goes in newer versions.
 
Probably for the same reason I drive my 20 yrs old convertible - but civ also works when it's raining :-)
 
LordTC said:
For me it's about the fact that Civ I is designed as a single player game. This means it has a lot of things that could be exploited, but that you don't have to exploit. Later versions had all sorts of highly unfun mechanics designed to nerf strategies you might not even be playing, but that could hurt your freeform game greatly.

For me the order of preference is I,II,IV,V,III. Largely because III had the most unfun corruption mechanic ever (and took forever to tune it to reasonable levels).

Civ I also got me interested in programming and exploring how programs work. I remember hacking around with the credits to get it to display me and my friends names for a while (reinstalled it later to give real credit where credit is surely due).

I think a few UI tweaks would be really nice, I hate that you can build a settler to destroy a city, ZoC would do better with tweaking, and borders + slightly better diplomacy engine + better AI would be great. I've never felt the improvements I most wanted to make to Civ were graphical, yet that seems to be where most of the work goes in newer versions.
Click to expand...
i remember translating all the Diplomatic talks to Dutch with the most ridiculous phrases and lines.
 
You should play Civilization 1 just because it is simply the best strategy on Android phones, via emulation of DOS there. I've played so many games on android and.. still there is nothing better.
 
Somehow Civ1 is appealing enough to stick with it. It has simple and streamlined game-play with dynamic conquest. It's quite unpredictable and even in sure-win you can find yourself in withdrawal. Ha, I know that people hate it when battleship is sunk after battle with a transporter. But I just love emotions that go with it. Even governments are raw as they should be, with annoying features, not the polished ones from Civ2 and on. And yes, I like to read in Civilopedia that anarchy was seriously proposed as an alternative to the government, not that it's only chaos and civil war with nothing more to it.

But basicaly it's all going down to the fact that Civ1 is the only Civ that really looks and feels like a classical board war game with squared, coloured armies, etc. It's because of, not despite, the simplicity of game-play and graphics.

What I would like to see is multiplayer in dos version. Even hex-edited hot-seat game like in the original Sid Meier's Colonization would be nice. Better AI, maybe, but current patterns are nice. Expansive Civs even use city spamming! I would hard-code two additional levels of difficulty and I would add borders as solely graphical feature, like city radius, that would be nice. Anything else would turn this game into Civ2. What I want seems possible but I'm no programmer so if anyone knows or can get to know how to expand Civ, just post!

Civ1 is beautiful. I really like the trireme on my map or the looks of cities walled or undefended.

Besides anything else, with Dos-Box Civ1 is truly cross-platform and above all, it's so light-weighted (even with Dos-Box installer included) that it will stay with me for life. Except for the extraordinary virus attack accompanied with sudden disappearance of Civ1 from the Net! God, save us from such unfortunate circumstances!
 
I think it is so wonderful because the it is feeling very arcade by its looks (and some of its flaws) but still is advanced in terms of complexity and detail.

Even after more than 20 years you can play a game that you have never played before.

What I liked the most was learning to play Civilization. In one of my first games at one point I saw a size 16 city that seemed enormous and I had no idea how I would ever be able to build such cities :)
 
Sometimes old is better. I hated civ four even though it had more civs, Part 3 was better in every way so that's what I play.
 
Civ 1 is a good game. It allows you to play world police in a way that is not so easy when it comes to the later Civ-games.

I especially like when there is one civ per continent. It makes it more exciting and you can travel across the other continents just to provoke.
 
Sometimes an idea works so well that any modification has to be justified rather than automatically becoming an improvement. If this happened many years ago then we end up playing an ancient game.

On my machine I have Epic Pinball and Angband (Moria with a couple of tweaks) which are dated 1993 and 1986. They both show their age but they haven't been superseded.

Then there is Simcity (1989). (Okay I prefer Simcity 2000.) Just a construction toy. Later they made it more 'realistic'. Well people get paid huge sums of money to manage real cities. I'll keep with my construction toy.

Civ was a huge leap forward in games. Simcity with the bite of competition. There are a few improvements that could be made - better user interface for example - but in essence it is as good as it gets. Civ II isn't an improvement. It's a different game.

Civ is simply a jewel from 1991. I don't play it everyday but every so often it is fun to go back to it.
 
Es un gran juego que me trae recuerdos de la infancia, de cuando tenia 8 - 9 años, mi primer juego de estrategia que lo jugue en entorno DOS, en una 486, recuerdo me lo pasaron en un disket junto con supaplex y por ello es que me puse a buscarlo y felizmente lo encontre en este foro, muchas gracias a todos
---------------------------------
It's a great game that brings back memories of childhood, when I was 8-9 years old, my first strategy game that I played in DOS environment, in a 486, remember I went on a diskette with Supaplex and is therefore I started to look for him and fortunately I found it in this forum, thank you very much to all
 
I actually like the old-fashioned, board-game like graphics. They are rather appropriate, since Civ was loosely inspired by a board game. I actually played the board game before Civ1 existed, and it was a fun session (or couple of sessions, because the thing is almost impossible to finish in one go). However, there was too much book-keeping involved for it to have much replay value. The computer is much better at book-keeping.

OK, back to reasons to play Civ1: Relative simplicity. Sometimes, more is less. The game is well-balanced and works quite well. I love Civ2, with more technologies, wonders and units, but there's something to be said for the sobriety of the first version of the game. Besides, the games are generally shorter (although they tend to be longish too). Long games are fine, especially if you have the time, but making them a bit shorter doesn't hurt. Does the addition of Research Centers where we used to have just Libraries and Universities add much to the game experience, after all?

It's just fun and eminently re-playable. Civ2 (the only other version I'm familiar with) is addictive too, probably even more than Civ1, but in Civ1 the concepts that made this series of games great are already there and working well.

For me there's nostalgic value, too. I was introduced to this game as a young teen with civ1. Then it was just civilization, of course, since there were no other versions.

Of course, there are some shortcomings, like the lack of a map editor, or a scenario editor. The lack of Capitalization is frustrating too, when you have many cities and have already developed many of them. You can always build something and then sell it, but that's a boring, perfectly avoidable task.

Also, when playing this again after a long time, I was surprised by how many wonders, particularly the early ones, where less useful that they are in Civ2. The Great Library, for example, expires so soon in Civ1 that it's almost useless.

But, all in all, it's still a great game to play. Lots of fun.
 
For me it's mostly nostalgia at this point. Mostly I like my games more complex rather than less complex, and Civ 1 is a lot simpler than 2/3/4, and maybe even simpler than 5. For a long time I kept an old black and white 386 laptop with DOS that I used to play Civ 1, Railroad Tycoon, Covert Action (all Sid Meier's games) and Jetpack. (Not Sid Meier's game) That was great fun for a long time. If you've played Civ 1 before, even a long time ago I'd recommend firing it up again. If you've never played it before though, I think you'll have a hard time getting past the archaic graphics and some of the game mechanics. For example in Civ 1, Civ 2 and Alpha Centauri your units cost production in their home city (where they were built) rather than having a gold upkeep, if your used to it it's fine, if you're used to gold it'll most likely frustrate you to no end.
 
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