GA101 - Civilization

Microprose was founded in 1982 by Sid Meier, a computer programmer whose sole experience in the game industry had been creating a Formula 1 racing simulator in BASIC, and Bill Stealey, a retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Colonel. For the first five years of its operation, Microprose produced 15 computer games, with Sid functioning as the designer and programmer. Most of these games were combat flight simulators, or tactical wargames in the style of Avalon Hill's board games. Among the most popular of these were Spitfire Ace, F-15 Strike Eagle, Crusade in Europe, Silent Service, and Gunship.

In 1987, Microprose released F-19 Stealth Fighter, which Sid regarded as his magnum opus. It allowed players to fly the still-hypothetical and unacknowledged F-19 aircraft on international stealth missions, with the most intricate, realistic, and authentic flight dynamics, radar, and AI behavior yet featured in a flight simulator. It became an enormous hit, and the de facto combat flight sim for years to come.

The same year, Sid Meier's Pirates! was a radical departure from MicroProse's niche of 20th century combat simulations. Set in c1560-1700, players captained a vessel and were free to sail around the Caribbean at their own pace without any structure to dictate their goals or actions. Gameplay was a blend of nautical simulation, action/adventure, real-time strategy, and business simulation, punctuated with brief arcade-style sequences to represent events such as sea battles, land battles, and swashbuckling. Notably, each of the 50-odd towns and cities in the region were distinct entities, with measures of population size, wealth, supply and demand of various goods, and political relations. These changed over time, in response to events such as epidemics, wars, gold rushes, and imperial influence, and in response to the player's actions. This became Sid's most successful title yet. He would re-use the formula for Sword of the Samurai and Sid Meier's Covert Action, but with less success.

Railroad Tycoon was the next game to be released under the Sid Meier brand, and was co-designed by newcomer Bruce Shelley. Players managed an industrial revolution-era railroad company, and were responsible for building stations, planning railroad track networks to connect cities, harbors, and resource-rich sites, and buying and scheduling trains to transport freight, passengers, and mail. The region's industry, economy, and quality of life were directly impacted by the player's operations, and it was in their best interests to help them grow, for large cities had greater demand for land transportation, and wealthy cities had more money to spend on it.

Then, in 1991, Sid and Bruce created their most ambitious title yet; Civilization. It was Microprose's first turn-based strategy game since their tactical wargame "Command Series" ended in 1986. Taking the role of a tutelary deity, players guided a tiny tribe of nomads in a millennia-long quest to build an empire. Immense in scope, and yet tightly focused - this quality being a lesson learned from Sid's prior games - Civilization created an accessible and addictive simulation of humanity's history from the earliest stone-age settlements to space colonization in the near future.



Starting in the year 4000 BC, your civilization initially consists of a group of settlers in a vast and unexplored world, represented by a simple icon, some adjacent mapped geography, and a sea of black fog. These settlers can scout and survey the immediate region, and build a permanent settlement in a suitable location. The natural resources within the city range determines its general strength in agriculture, wealth, and industry. The population will naturally increase for as long as the city can support it, which is determined by several factors, the most immediate being food supplies. Cities can be improved with public facilities, such as granaries and barracks, which take time to build but offer benefits to the city. Cities can also produce armies, who can fortify and defend the city, or scout new territory, or conquer neighboring cities of foreign empires. And cities can produce new settlers, who can found new cities, or improve existing ones by digging mines for greater wealth and industry, irrigation ditches for greater agriculture, or build roads for faster travel. Finally, cities are learning centers, where new technologies, social advances, and ideas are discovered, allowing better city improvements, better armies, and sometimes entirely new development opportunities altogether.


Over the course of generations, your city-state grows into an empire. Old cities grow, and new ones are founded. Inter-state roads connect your empire, facilitating internal trade and boosting the economy. Long term projects, "Wonders of the World," are initiated and completed to the awe of the civilized world, and to the benefit of every city in your empire. Universities continue to discover advances, bringing on new eras of civilization. Governments may fall to revolution and become replaced, or even decentralize. Other empires are inevitably discovered, and depending on diplomacy, terms of relation may include allegiances, peace treaties, trade treaties, tribute, threats, aggression, or total war.

Ultimately, there are two possible forms of victory. Complete imperial hegemony can be achieved by conquering every city of every other empire, leaving yours as the sole power of all of humanity. The other is a peaceful scientific victory, achieved by discovering enough advanced technology to build a colony ship to Alpha Centauri. Should you retire before reaching either goal, which happens automatically some time in the 21st century, the game ends and your performance is rated according to the sum of all smaller achievements, and compared to historical leaders ranging in accomplishment from Solomon the Wise to Dan Quayle.



Civilization drew influence from contemporary strategy games, particularly Populous for its aspects of terrain manipulation and of indirect control over a population, and Sim City for its aspects of city building. But by having a tight focus on grand strategic gameplay at the imperial level, and abstracting nearly all of the operational details, Civilization avoids becoming a mash-up of several dissimilar game styles, and becomes something more. Civilization has many discrete systems, but none are particularly complicated or difficult to understand. There are systems representing concepts such as resource gathering, population growth, building roads, international trade, diplomacy, theaters of war, and scientific research and advancement, but all are kept simple enough to be explained in one or two sentences. Sim City, for a contrasting example, has very complicated and sometimes obscure rules for building structures and municipal facilities within the city limits. Civilization simply presents you with a list of things the city may build, and offers no details other than the expected time it would take to build it, the cost of maintaining it, and the benefits it would bring to the city.

The depth of Civilization occurs when these simple systems interact with each other in increasingly complicated and interesting ways. For instance, a surplus of food leads to population growth, which allows more farmers, which leads to more food surplus, which continues until food consumption rates increase faster rate than food production, and then population growth slows and eventually halts. In the meantime, the city's industry grows, and can produce weapons to arm a militia to defend the city boundaries, temples to placate unhappy citizens, and granaries to stave starvation in times of famine. You are never far from accomplishing something major - any given turn, you might finish besieging and conquering a coveted foreign city, or building a wonder of the world, or mapping an uncharted land, or completing a continent-spanning network of roads, or making a scientific breakthrough. Such gameplay mechanics are not difficult to imagine as parallels to events that might have happened in an alternate real life history, and it is these qualities which give Civilization its legendary immersion and addictiveness.



Of a particularly special note is the technology tree system. Few prior games had any sense of technological progression, and those that did were linear and seldom influenced by the player. Sid Meier's Pirates! had several playable eras, with later eras granting access to the best ships and weapons, but the level of technology remained fixed once the era was chosen. Railroad Tycoon gradually introduced better quality locomotive engines over time, but always at a predetermined date, and no other forms of technology ever changed.

With Civilization, technology becomes a concept that you must invest in. "Research points" are accumulated through a variety of means - a strong economy forms the backbone of technological advancement, and is supplemented through facilities such as libraries and universities, and by dedicated scientists in your population. The rewards of technology affect every aspect of the game. Bronze working, a technology available early on, allows your militia to wield bronze pikes and become phalanxes, doubling their defensive power. It then becomes possible to research currency and iron working, which respectively permit the building of economy-boosting marketplaces and legions with powerful iron weapons. Later, with the right technology, it becomes possible to build railroads, riflemen, airplanes, mass transit systems, tanks, hydro plants, and even atomic bombs.

To aid and educate the player, Civilization features the Civilopedia. Split into five sections, Civilization Advances, City Improvements, Military Units, Terrain Types, and Miscellaneous, the Civilopedia catalogs over 170 game concepts, with two pages for each - an encyclopedia-style page defining it and detailing its real-world history and impact on society, and a page explaining how it effects the rules of the game. This in-game help not only greatly reduced the need to have a thick manual handy for constant reference while playing, but stealthily educated as well.



Civilization revolutionized strategy games in ways that few games can claim to. It was the birth of the 4X genre - deep, complex strategy games with an emphasis on economic, technological, and militaristic advancement, achieved through exploration, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating. Some such titles that followed in Civilization's wake included The Settlers, Master of Orion, Colonization, Master of Magic, and Heroes of Might and Magic. Many real-time strategy titles took on 4X-style properties too, such as having a complex, multi-branching tech tree.

Although Civilization has many sequels, I strongly recommend the original to anyone who has not played it, newcomers and veterans of the sequels alike. Civilization II is certainly a bigger game, but it is less beginner-friendly than the original, and later games lost some of the focus and immersive qualities. The DOS version is my recommendation, and certainly the easiest to get working on modern computers thanks to DOSBox, but sadly, is not offered by Steam, GOG, or any comparable services.

Beginner tips:

• Keep the manual handy. You don't need to read it cover to cover before playing, but it is a useful reference for specific gameplay mechanics you will encounter, especially ones that Civilopedia does not adequately explain.
• Play on Chieftan mode the first time. It will give you invaluable hints and tips and explanations of game concepts as you play.
• Early on, don't waste time in picking a site for your first city. A good rule of thumb is to build it on a terrain tile that produces two food (like rivers and grasslands), and has at least one adjacent tile that also produces two food. Right-click on a tile to see its specs in the Civilopedia.
• Later on, build cities near clusters of special resources, like game, oases, and fish. Learn how the city boundary is shaped to ensure that you build in a spot that maximizes coverage. And again, build it on a tile that produces at least two food.
• Civilopedia is your friend! When a dialog box states "help available," right-clicking on an option will take you to the Civilopedia's entry for that option.
• Phalanxes are the best defensive unit of the ancient era, and cheap too.
• If a city is restless, remove a worker by clicking on a "worked" tile. The worker will become an entertainer by default. Repeat until the city's unhappy citizens no longer outnumber the happy citizens. Then have it build something to placate the unhappy citizens, like armies or temples. If absolutely necessary, raise the luxury rate. Once placated, put the entertainers back to work as you can afford to.
• Settlers can irrigate, mine, and build roads, which greatly enhance the terrain's resource output, and enhancing large clusters of land is one of the most efficient ways to make a city more prosperous. But these enhancements are mostly wasted under despotism. Also, settlers consume food - never build them in cities without a food surplus.
• Irrigating a forest or jungle will convert it to plains and grasslands, which can be irrigated again. This is usually desirable, even if the forest has game. Jungles with gems or oil are exceptions - irrigation will destroy these valuable resources.
• Hills can be irrigated or mined, but not both. Mining is probably better.
• Railroads are insanely useful development. Try to have them surrounding every city you build for a massive increase in resources. Quick transport also makes them useful for pro-active defense - a unit with high attack can use the rails to preemptively strike an invading force at the city outskirts.
• Caravans are quite powerful, especially if you have many cities interconnected by roads. Have one city start building a useful Wonder, then have the rest pump out Caravans, and have the Caravans go to the city and help build the Wonder. It will be finished in no time.
• If you aren't at war, the Colossus of Rhodes is a very useful Wonder and fairly cheap to build. Build it, change your government to The Republic, build lots of roads around your cities, and you'll be swimming in cash for centuries to come.

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