Video: Ars talks Civilization with the man himself: Sid Meier

This "War Stories" video explores how <em>Civilization</em> almost wasn't a turn-based game.

Read the whole story

 

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I think the second game was an improvement in gameplay over the first. IMHO games 1, 3 and 5 changed up the gameplay whereas 2, 4 and 6 refined the previous games. So if I had to choose one to have a "HD" upgrade, it'd be 2.

The funny thing about this meme is that this is almost the opposite of how they were developed. Civ II was written by Brian Reynolds in England, initially without access to the Civ II source, and even after he got it, he didn’t copy any code. Civ III, meanwhile, was based on SMAC, a game that was very similar to Civ II in its basic mechanics. Civ IV is the one big ground-up rewrite, which then formed the basis for Civ V and VI.

(Source: Designer Notes podcast, where Soren Johnson interviews other developers, including Sid Meier and Reynolds)

BTW, I disagree with the characterization of Civ IV as a polish. It is a much more fundamental reimagining than the iterative Civ III, which really only added strategic resources and great people to the formula.

 

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Great as Civilization was, Sid's Alpha Centauri was better by far. I still play it every other month or so.

But where, oh where, is the reboot? Don't tell me it was Civilization: Beyond because it most emphatically was NOT!

It’s in copyright hell.

It was published by EA, who retains the rights, but lacks the studio (or interest) to make a new one. Firaxis (now owned by 2K) has the skills, but no rights, and no Brian Reynolds who wrote all the lore. Reynolds himself apparently doesn’t like the game that much (which absolutely broke my heart to hear) and isn’t interested in 4Xes anyway anymore. He did leave the window open to making some other game in the same universe that wasn’t a 4X, but he didn’t seem particularly interested in that either.

Firaxis did the only thing they could - Beyond Earth. For all that it was nowhere near the original, the expansion made it a quite enjoyable game. Worth another try if you haven’t played it since that came out. It isn’t SMAC, however.

 

[mpat]

I think the second game was an improvement in gameplay over the first. IMHO games 1, 3 and 5 changed up the gameplay whereas 2, 4 and 6 refined the previous games. So if I had to choose one to have a "HD" upgrade, it'd be 2.

The funny thing about this meme is that this is almost the opposite of how they were developed. Civ II was written by Brian Reynolds in England, initially without access to the Civ II source, and even after he got it, he didn’t copy any code. Civ III, meanwhile, was based on SMAC, a game that was very similar to Civ II in its basic mechanics. Civ IV is the one big ground-up rewrite, which then formed the basis for Civ V and VI.

(Source: Designer Notes podcast, where Soren Johnson interviews other developers, including Sid Meier and Reynolds)

BTW, I disagree with the characterization of Civ IV as a polish. It is a much more fundamental reimagining than the iterative Civ III, which really only added strategic resources and great people to the formula.

I disagree with calling Civ III iterative. It did much more than add strategic resources and great people. Diplomatic victory, cultural victory (heck culture period), borders, national wonders (called small wonders in Civ III) all debuted with Civ III.

Borders are from SMAC. Diplomatic victory is from SMAC. Culture I suppose is new, but the same loyalty mechanism existed before - all they did was make it obvious and tie a new victory condition to it. National wonders? Wow, impressive game-changing idea. No, Civ III is not particularly new. It uses the SMAC engine with dumbed-down combat and a historical skin. There is a reason that game didn't sell.

 

[mpat]

I think the second game was an improvement in gameplay over the first. IMHO games 1, 3 and 5 changed up the gameplay whereas 2, 4 and 6 refined the previous games. So if I had to choose one to have a "HD" upgrade, it'd be 2.

The funny thing about this meme is that this is almost the opposite of how they were developed. Civ II was written by Brian Reynolds in England, initially without access to the Civ II source, and even after he got it, he didn’t copy any code. Civ III, meanwhile, was based on SMAC, a game that was very similar to Civ II in its basic mechanics. Civ IV is the one big ground-up rewrite, which then formed the basis for Civ V and VI.

(Source: Designer Notes podcast, where Soren Johnson interviews other developers, including Sid Meier and Reynolds)

BTW, I disagree with the characterization of Civ IV as a polish. It is a much more fundamental reimagining than the iterative Civ III, which really only added strategic resources and great people to the formula.

I disagree with calling Civ III iterative. It did much more than add strategic resources and great people. Diplomatic victory, cultural victory (heck culture period), borders, national wonders (called small wonders in Civ III) all debuted with Civ III.

Borders are from SMAC. Diplomatic victory is from SMAC. Culture I suppose is new, but the same loyalty mechanism existed before - all they did was make it obvious and tie a new victory condition to it. National wonders? Wow, impressive game-changing idea. No, Civ III is not particularly new. It uses the SMAC engine with dumbed-down combat and a historical skin. There is a reason that game didn't sell.

Civ III sold more copies in its first two months than SMAC did in its first year. Also culture is a huge part of Civ from III on, and that's true no matter how good Alpha Centauri and Civ IV are.

Civ III almost certainly sold less than every other mainline Civ game (the possible exception is Civ I, which was very close to Civ III in any case). It sold less than half of what Civ II sold, and while exact sales of Civ IV are a little bit tricky to figure out, they appear to have been more than 4 times Civ III. I know SMAC didn't sell, but it didn't have the Civilization brand and it didn't have the Microprose brand. It had a brand new studio and a publisher that was already hated - no wonder it didn't sell.

And sure culture became an important thing eventually, but it wasn't a radical change when it was introduced. There was a hidden culture value already in the first game - all they did was make it visible and tie border expansion to it. Since absolutely no code from Civ III lived on in any future game (according to Civ IV developer Soren Johnson), it's influence was very limited.

 

[mpat]

While I generally agree with your argument, and consider Civ III the worst of the series, and a serious letdown after SMAC, one change it did introduce was quite good: strategic resources. They made gameplay in future games quite interesting (hunting for copper in early Civ 4, for instance).

Strategic resources and Great People are the two good things that Civ III added to the formula. My main point that started this thread was that that was pretty much it (note: the forum software forced me to trim quotes, so you can't just expand it above, but you can see it in the thread above), so to call I, III, V the big changes and II, IV and VI iterative is dishonest. Even if we add culture to the formula, III is a very careful polish of existing code. It doesn't remove anything fundamental to the game, unlike every later game that pulled at least something.

There is a drive in the Civ community to try to make the entire development seem cyclical, as if it were yearly iPhone releases or something, and that just isn't true. This is just one example, but people also have tried to argue that every civ game was unusable at launch and required several expansions to be playable, that the community always kept playing the old version for long after the new was released, or that they were always slow with never-ending turn times. None of this was true before V, but to try to show a trend, people try to make Civ III into something it wasn't. For all that I don't like Civ III all that much, it ran well from the start, the patches were balance-related rather than stability/performance, and the expansions barely touched the core gameplay (they added multiplayer, various scenarios and more cookie-cutter civilizations to play as). This is the exact opposite of how Civ V was.