[HN Gopher] Sid Meier: More Than Just Civilization
___________________________________________________________________
Sid Meier: More Than Just Civilization
Author : ekianjo
Score : 108 points
Date : 2021-04-16 12:10 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (boilingsteam.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (boilingsteam.com)
| a_d wrote:
| One of my favorite games of all time is Railroad Tycoon 2:
| Platinum Edition. While Sid Meier didn't directly make it, but he
| spawned the franchise with RRT-1. I found a pirated version
| selling on the street-side in the capital city of India. (Later
| on, when I had a job, I did buy a proper copy - which was much
| harder to get than the pirated copy).
|
| Many sid Meier games have a remarkable sense of "time and place"
| - and Railroad Tycoon (imho) takes it to the next level. You
| really feel you are in early 1818, on the east coast of USA,
| getting your "little startup" off the ground. Even the blues and
| bluegrass music is designed to transport you there. The game
| captures a sense of adventure - that almost isn't supposed to be
| the case in a rail road sim - but all the gameplay mechanics
| aside, this game captures an amazing sense of adventure ... and
| education. You learn a lot after exploring the continents,
| tackling terrains of continents, learning about cities, gaining a
| sense of scale and the thrill of making ideas come to life...
| it's really cool how a game (a piece of software) can capture all
| this!
|
| Upon repeat playing, I have come to admire the graphic design,
| sound design and interaction design ("the UI") so much more.
| There are small but significant - even beautiful, decisions made
| that make the game fun to play and good to look at eg Train cars
| will change appearance through different eras..
|
| A part of HN is entrepreneurship driven - I think those folks
| will also get an immense kick out of beating JP Morgan and
| Cornelius Vanderbilt.
|
| The campaign is the thing to play -- travel the globe and connect
| places! Make economy happen.
|
| Game also allows simple surprises like being able to buy
| businesses outright - that you have merely connected (and made to
| prosper) - shows you clearly how far monopoly can go :). I guess
| today it will be called a "full stack" railroad company.
|
| I have dismissed my own love of the game to - "I am just
| nostalgic" -- but I played it again recently, and I have happy to
| report that it remains as engaging as ever!
|
| It's available here: https://www.gog.com/game/railroad_tycoon_2
|
| You can play on macOS using parallels.
|
| A bunch of videos come up on Google and they can quickly give a
| glimpse of the gameplay - although I will suggest diving it
| without the trailer
| (https://www.google.com/search?q=railroad+tycoon+2)
|
| The game is classified as a business sim - its not. It's a
| railroad sim - the amount of details (eg every engine has a real
| world counter part) about railroads makes it a railroad game and
| not a business game...
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| I've been playing with making an economy simulator. People in the
| economy get jobs, rent apartments, have free time, can start
| businesses, etc. Prices change based on supply and demand. Cool.
|
| But it's not clear to me what the player should be doing because
| buildings are placed by the NPCs and then they make their own
| decisions according to self interest. What is the player doing
| except watching? Setting laws maybe, but it doesn't feel very fun
| to play yet.
| jedberg wrote:
| If you read the memoir, Sid points out that the fun of games
| comes from making decisions. So you have to give the player
| something that requires constant decision making.
|
| Perhaps setting the tax rate and the money supply? Choosing
| which businesses to nationalize, and which services the
| government will provide from tax dollars?
| IAmEveryone wrote:
| If you manage to pull of the holy grail of fully simulating a
| real town, I bet it could sell as sort-of a screensaver, with
| very little or no playing mechanisms and just watching the
| world.
|
| Maybe allow players to build a scenario, then switch it on and
| watch it run.
|
| Traffic is one real-life operation done from a position of
| somewhat centralized planning, so maybe allow players to build
| bus routes or subways.
|
| Or just sell it to city planners. They are used to joylessly
| watching everything go awry.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Build infrastructure? Make the player do well if people do
| well.
| Folcon wrote:
| I've been working on something similar for the last couple of
| years, mine's more focused on a fantasy style society =)...
|
| I've built a couple of different models all of which have
| failed to be quite fun =)...
|
| I've talked about it before here[0], the newest one I'm working
| on is much simpler, and focused around player interactivity and
| giving them knobs to tweak at the outset.
|
| Let me know if you'd like to do a call and chat about this, it
| would be fun to see what kinds of things we've been attempting
| =)...
|
| - [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186912
| setr wrote:
| My thinking is that games are inherently all simulations, to
| varying depths of complexity, and the players goal in nearly
| all games is really to learn and understand, optimize and
| eventually break the simulation to achieve game-specified or
| player driven goals.
|
| Thus, the primary thing you need to introduce in a sufficiently
| complex simulation is those points of interaction, to influence
| the simulation. Essentially god games and dwarf fortress are
| the points of inspiration -- and then you need a reason to
| optimize the economy, which is either internal (need to
| eventually produce some expensive thing to win, like factorio's
| rocket) or external (e.g. need to continuously improve the
| defensive infrastructure against ever-stronger foreign
| attacks).
|
| Another way of looking at it is on levels of operational
| complexity -- whether the player is acting at the level of
| tactics (a single fight; Starcraft), operation (a single
| campaign/theater; total war), or strategy (resource control and
| long-term politics; grand strategies).
|
| From the sounds of it, if your AI manages the cities themselves
| on their own, then they key interaction point is on the
| resource dependencies - land acquisition, trade routes and
| manipulation, etc. The player's goal is to learn to select
| resources the AI can best make use of, and acquire them
| efficiently, to ever-expand the city itself (or perhaps
| multiple).
|
| Also note there must always be some negative feedback loop,
| e.g. pollution, to contend with.
|
| Also note that IMO random events like Godzilla attacks and
| disasters are a bit of a cop-out -- it's just shit that
| happens, but you can't do anything about. It's more a nuisance
| than anything else. Jurassic Park tycoon was slightly more
| interesting -- dinos always had some chance of escaping,
| becoming more common as you had a bigger park (negative
| feedback), and disasters like typhoons just exploded that risk.
| The typhoon damage wasn't of note -- it was the rampaging
| t-rex's it unleashed because of your fragile placement of
| barriers.
|
| That last part is important, I think, because you can still
| interact with the disasters such that they weren't plainly
| random events. SimCity on the other hand is just a nuisance
| trigger every now and then that you can't plan for, mitigate,
| or really do anything about.
| airstrike wrote:
| You can make this into a somewhat nationalistic game and leave
| the domestic and foreign spheres separate. In the domestic one,
| the player is looking to regulate / optimize competition and
| collaboration to maximize output, whereas in the international
| one you're looking to beat other nations with favorable trade,
| attracting talent, staying ahead in research, etc.
|
| From that, there countless trade-off themes emerge -
| industrialization vs. sustainability, regulation vs. laissez-
| faire, bilateral negotiations vs. multinational institutions,
| and so on and so forth
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Make it a game about being a guardian angel.
|
| Set objectives for the people, a few non intrusive tools
| (moving cats around, blowing wind, changing light traffic), and
| as the angel, the player must influence the world so that
| objectives are reached.
| xkeysc0re wrote:
| I think the game will age better if the objectives were
| optional and it was more like an ant farm. If the OPs model
| is really good, then emergent behavior will make things
| interesting and create a self-sustaining gameplay loop as the
| player explores the potential of the model.
| chongli wrote:
| Sounds like the game Actraiser for the SNES. A favourite from
| my childhood. Excellent music and graphics that really
| showcased the advantages of the SNES vs the NES.
| xkeysc0re wrote:
| Excellent game. It was kind of like a medieval Sim City x
| Dark Cloud. Unfortunately the platforming portions were a
| bit too "floaty" for me and the next game went hard in that
| direction, although they did tighten up the controls.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Ghost Master is the game like you describe. Basically you
| summon various types of ghost, wraiths and spectres and they
| have special abilities like manipulating temperature, siren
| song to lure humans in, shriek to scare them away and others
| in order to manipulate the human NPCs to achieve your mission
| objectives.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| It's called populous :)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I don't know how other people played populous, but I was
| more an asshole than an angel with my believers.
|
| Not doing what I want ? Eat this volcano !
| zabzonk wrote:
| "It's A Wonderful Life"
| Hiopl wrote:
| Huh, I've been working on something similar. One of my
| suggestions would be to play it as a God simulator. Let players
| make changes to the simulation, play with the variables and see
| how it affects things. Add goal states based on economic
| metrics that provokes players to experiment. Sort of like a
| puzzle-like experience.
| msg wrote:
| Good on you.
|
| Certainly the player can just be one more player in the economy
| against/among the AI. This is basically the premise of Rise of
| Industry. And more actively, less realistically, Offworld
| Trading Company.
|
| Running one business is sort of the premise of the tycoon
| genre.
|
| Generally, trouble is fun (Losing is Fun), so you may want to
| put pressure on the player to make the thing work. Maybe it
| naturally runs to ruin or is fragile to balance properly. (In
| Dwarf Fortress, danger follows growth and success.) There could
| be adversaries. Or the world could be dangerous.
|
| They could be in charge of the macro economy or a town or a
| business. There could be pickles that the player has to work
| their way out of. Recessions and Depressions. Think about how
| towns collapse, businesses fail, people lose jobs. Businesses
| also cheat, wreck the commons, avoid taxes, break the law,
| exert monopoly power, form cartels, fight for dominance. There
| is a lot of trouble here for the player to cause, or to
| struggle against.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| "Trouble is fun" is not something I'd heard before but makes
| a lot of sense. Need to think about that, what sort of
| trouble the economy can get into and how to alert the player
| and let them fix it...
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Good stories need drama or tension. Though I'd argue games
| have grown to a broad spectrum, as have movies and books.
| And one end of the spectrum has so little interactivity
| it's just movement and observation, like a virtual fish
| bowl or "walking sim". Elaborate screen savers served this
| market long ago. Then games offered cheats as a form of
| customization outside the usual difficulty knobs, even if
| their original purpose was just to aid testing.
|
| Sometimes I like to watch sim games run to see what will
| happen 'naturally', or setup AI battles in strategy games.
| The best toys allow players to enjoy them however they
| want.
| dqpb wrote:
| Maybe the players job can be to disrupt the economy. A game
| of sabotage.
| Jarwain wrote:
| My first thoughts are:
|
| Add some sort of story or goals. Encourage business starting,
| innovation trying to get more futuristic or get to space or
| something? But to Achieve these goals, the player has to pass
| the right laws, manage their economy, ensure sufficient funding
| & taxes, etc. The core game loop being passing laws and seeing
| how it impacts behavior, then repeat to achieve a goal
|
| Could be an interesting colony sim or something
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Thank you, perhaps setting laws or policies and then seeing
| what happens isn't a bad game loop. Goals could work too. I
| will hack on it a bit today and see what comes out :)
| mysterydip wrote:
| You might be able to do something akin to early simcity or
| simtower where you decide on the zoning (what's allowed to be
| built where) while your simulation decides if it's successful
| or not. Your NPC's may want to start a new business but there's
| no commercial spots available, or lease office space etc. They
| move out if they close down or decide to move to a better
| place. The player's job is to monitor citizen's happiness/goals
| and plan the town accordingly.
| Folcon wrote:
| Have you looked at or heard of the Humans of simulated New York
| project?
|
| It reminds me of what you're looking at [0][1](github[2]).
|
| The project broadly covers what you're doing with agents also
| starting businesses and going out of business with simple
| supply chains. There's even some stuff to do with health.
|
| -[0]: https://www.trytobegood.com/projects/hosny
|
| -[1]: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/apr/03/humans-of-
| simulate...
|
| -[2]: https://github.com/frnsys/hosny
| roenxi wrote:
| If you are trying to capture life as faithfully as possible,
| maybe the player represents breakthroughs, inspiration and the
| social networks outside the simulated community pushing in
| ideas, fads, trends and technologies?
|
| I can imagine it being a fun game for spreadsheet players to
| try and tease apart how to recover a death-spiralling community
| by applying new ideas in the right order at the right time to
| the right people. Ideas can be unleashed into key parts of the
| sim and only live for so long before they become 'proven
| discredited' and ignored, or whatever.
|
| Good luck! Simulations are fun.
| xwdv wrote:
| The player should be playing the role of the Fed.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Write a traffic sim and you have got the core of a SimCity
| clone.
| notahacker wrote:
| About 60% of SimCity is watching the algorithm grow the city
| (including placing buildings) according to rules you set. The
| only bit you _must_ build is core infrastructure
| swilliamsio wrote:
| A game of study for comparison might be Victoria 2. It's a
| grand strategy set in the Victorian period and has a decent
| economic simulator that the player can influence in a fair few
| different ways.
|
| A few different ways a player can effect their nation's economy
| include: unlocking technologies, conquering territory for
| resources, expanding a nations sphere of influence for
| resources and markets, electing parties with different economic
| policies (planned economy vs laissez faire), playing with
| taxes/tariffs, encouraging certain industries, etc. The
| economic simulation isn't super deep, but it is deep enough to
| be engaging and fulfilling to a player who likes these sorts of
| spreadsheet simulator games.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I haven't played as much Victoria 2 as I have EU4, but I
| recall some of the economics related screens being wildly
| complex, so much that many of the Steam guides I read noted
| that few players actually understand it and that it's best to
| let the automation run.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Thank you, that sounds like a cool game and excellent
| research opportunity, I will check it out.
| greggman3 wrote:
| Not an answer to your question but Sid Meier gave a talk at
| like GDC 1995 (+/1 4 yrs) on "How I almost ruined
| Civilization". One of his points was, "I almost ruined
| Civilization by making the game fun for the AI but not fun for
| the player" (or something like that). Basically, game devs,
| particular programming ones, imagine the algorithms that are
| running in their sim and they get enjoyment from seeing the
| results (the NPCs doing things, the economy running, the
| traffic flowing, etc...) but none of that is fun for the
| player. You have to design the game around interesting things
| for the player to do, not interesting things for the developers
| to develope
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Haha, I will google for that talk if it still exists, but I
| take your point and agree (and suffer from this)
| dataduck wrote:
| Sounds like Capitalism Lab:
|
| https://www.capitalismlab.com/
| billfruit wrote:
| A similar feeling I get from some of the Paradox games, they
| claim to be complicated simulations etc, but eventually much of
| gameplay boils down to waiting for progress bars to fill, which
| is exactly what is the gameplay in idle-clicker phone games.
| Thats what got me out of Paradox games.
|
| Even Civilization games are essentially computerized board
| games, there is nothing of fidelity in its historical topics or
| in its simulation aspects.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Looks like you are basing things on Austrian Economics.
|
| A friend of mine who's a strong advocate of this philosophy
| said that the reason why Keynes is so popular in the real world
| (fiat currency, national banks, micro/macro economics) is that
| it gives politicians something to do.
|
| It's worth thinking about what economic philosophy your game is
| following or is biased towards (I always felt that the older
| civilization games were biased toward "research is good" and
| against democracy as the senate made it too difficult to go to
| war. Last one could be argued to pro democracy if you try to
| bring the lesson out of the game and into the real world. )
|
| But zoning, setting taxes, building infrastructure, police and
| military are things that no one has really managed to leave to
| the market forces.
|
| I believe sim city added disasters because they felt players
| didn't really have anything to do...
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Yes, good point. One of the key things I'm trying to explore
| is the effect of automating jobs (through researched
| technologies which business owners then apply) and how this
| leads to income disparity. Basic income schemes will also
| come into play. So automated socialism I guess, haha.
| subw00f wrote:
| Interest rates are also important, if your game has a
| banking system with a central bank that makes monetary
| policy. If agents can start businesses, or take mortgages
| to buy a house or a car, that would be very cool to see the
| impacts of that in the simulation. Also, heritage has a
| very important role on wealth accumulation, if there's a
| way to make wealth and return on capital part of the
| system. This whole thing is too interesting.
| shagie wrote:
| Game bit... look at the game Democracy (in any of its
| variations) by Positech Games.
|
| You can dabble in what happens by enacting and funding laws
| policies.
|
| For an economics simulator, score the simulated economy on
| say... a dozen things. Make that into a radar plot and the
| overall score is the area of the plot.
|
| Now the player can do things by enacting rules that cause
| changes in how the AI plays the game in an attempt to
| maximize their score.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > A friend of mine who's a strong advocate of this philosophy
| said that the reason why Keynes is so popular in the real
| world (fiat currency, national banks, micro/macro economics)
| is that it gives politicians something to do.
|
| That's a projection of the Austrian school's overtly anti-
| empirical approach onto Keynesianism.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Perhaps dealing with ongoing event? Like a pandemic? Political
| upheaval? Foreign incursion and so on.. Too many possibilities,
| and as the law/policymaker, the player can make decisions in
| the fly, changing parameters that force the NPCs to make hard
| choices. Some profit, some lose and that can be seem with the
| resources/buildings/neighbourhoods affecting in real-time or
| semi-real time.
|
| It will definitely make things more complicated, but a morale
| mechanism will speed up visual feedback on other things.
|
| I like your idea, and it is very enjoyable in games like
| Crusader Kings/Europa Universal is where player can technically
| put down buildings, but almost all interactions with the world
| are via policy making and event based interactions, and most of
| the actual world moves on via actions of NPCs.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Ah, that's a good idea. I'm tracking things like wages,
| employment rate, GDP growth, hunger, happiness, education,
| health/disease. Less concerned about product differentiation
| (how many types of juice can I make?) and more concerned
| about how the various sectors of our modern economy interact
| and how AI/automation changes the equation. Based on yours
| and other replies, sounds like setting various policies would
| be a good way to go.
|
| A couple prototype screenshots in case you are curious as to
| what I'm talking about:
|
| https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1377196666663677957
|
| https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1375063612281217024
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Looks pretty nice, and I am very much looking forward to
| someday playing through your make.
|
| Now something that I must say, but know that it may not be
| universally shared.
|
| I see you are making a 3D game. But there is a very
| particular reason why games like Crusader Kings/Europa
| Universal is/Civilization/Rimworld/Prison Tycoon/Factorio
| are 2D. They are inherently numbers games, and appeal to
| specific crowds. These are ultimately tabletops or rather
| very complex spreadsheets and ultimately as a player you re
| being statistician. There many successful franchiseare s on
| the contrary, like Tropico, StarCraft, SimCity but after
| playing through all of them, I've realised that fancy 3D
| worlds, while very pretty, take the toll on cognitive
| processing. Dwarf Fortress, while 3D with multiple layers,
| forces player to look at, deal with and think about only
| one at a time, with very distinct..uh..visuals and they do
| the job better than anything else.
|
| Ultimately you want to convey the information to player as
| fast as possible, make it as instantly identifiable, and
| intractable as possible. Graphics, especially faux 3D like
| Ck3 or Civ4/5/6 are pretty nice and help with that ultimate
| goal, not hinder.
|
| Just my 2c, and something to think about. Be assured that
| I'll play your game regardless (I spent many an hours on
| Tropico series, along with every other game listed above.
| No regrets :))
| roschdal wrote:
| https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv-web
| pvsukale3 wrote:
| I really like Sid Meir's Railroad Tycoon. I have tons of memories
| in summer fighting with my brother over computer time to play
| this game. I used to play a pirated copy back in highschool (Did
| not have money to buy the game, certainly didn't have a
| credit/debit card to do online transaction, downloaded it in an
| Internet cafe and brought it back on pendrive to play on home
| PC).
|
| Recently I remembered that I used to play this game a lot. Now
| that I have a job and can pay for stuff online I bought a copy
| for myself on steam.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I remember to play it on my Dad's laptop on the weekend I had
| to type 5-1-2. Railroad tycoon supported CGA graphics and no
| mouse was needed -- Civilisation had to wait until we had a
| colour 286 at home.
|
| In my mind, nothing really has come close to replacing the
| original RT - not RT2 or later, not A-Train, not TTD
| hasmanean wrote:
| Yes, even though RT2 had better graphics, it didn't capture
| the simplistic feel of the original.
| blux wrote:
| Sid Meier's Memoir! describes all of this and more, I can
| recommend it if you liked this article.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50489373-sid-meier-s-mem...
| martey wrote:
| _The article is a review of the memoir_ - not only is it linked
| in the first paragraph, but the article even states near its
| end that "there's of course a lot more than the above
| anecdotes in the book."
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Pirates! was superb. I've never visited the Caribbean yet, but
| I'll be hearing the sound effects from this game when I do.
|
| If only those war wounds didn't stop you playing... and the crew
| wanting to mutiny or divide the plunder.
|
| It truly was the golden era of games, for me, as a kid. Remember
| thinking how the incremental improvements in hardware would make
| games more life like, and when that day would come. Wonder if
| kids now think the same?
| frequent wrote:
| Same here. My brothers and me could name all the Caribbean
| islands, we tried to sail to Europe from Bermuda and I remember
| my Dad sinking a half our galleons in the span of minutes we
| let him play on our Commodore64.
|
| Thanks for the memories :)
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I loved that game as a kid. Is there a spiritual sequel?
| ekianjo wrote:
| King of Seas is kind of like Pirates with some overarching
| story on top of it.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| There's a Pirates! Gold version I bought a few years back.
| Same game, graphics/sounds revamped
| shmerl wrote:
| There is also Sid Meier's Pirates! which is a newer
| redesign from 2004.
|
| https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_pirates
| steamboiler wrote:
| Tangential, but here goes.
|
| I enjoy miniature wargaming. Sid Meier's 'Gettysburg' is one of
| my all-time favourite computer wargames. Thanks for creating it!
| Marazan wrote:
| Yes, truly one of the best computer wargame ever made.
|
| So many very, very clever decisions went into its design.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| check out "war in the east 2" just came out, i've been having fun
| learning the mechanics.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| I'm curious what this has to do with Sid Meier.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| you must be new here
| op03 wrote:
| > what happens next?
|
| I want to see civ games where social media dynamics enter the
| picture.
|
| Echo chambers, polarisation, pandering, where different unit
| types cops, military, city workers, journos, scientists etc start
| chasing Likes and Followers causing all kinds of side effects.
| And then the player is given various tools to keep things from
| collapsing...
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I guess he could make a dedicated game titled Internet Ad
| Tycoon.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Perhaps we should stop adding new mechanics to civilization,
| and go back to refine a few really good ones. Civ6 with all of
| the DLC turned on is absolutely oppressive with the number of
| choices you have to make beyond turn 100. It turns off all but
| the most dedicated players.
|
| Most of my friends went back to Civ5. If you really don't want
| to be bothered with all the decision making, you can always
| play Venice. Makes it easy to bring in more outsiders.
|
| In my experience, the most fun I have ever had in civilization
| is struggling with simple barbarian mechanics in early game
| while all of my equally-casual friends encounter the same
| difficulties. The player who got the island by themselves
| usually wins the science victory, but I don't mind the win
| conditions. It's more about the journey.
| toast0 wrote:
| I would love for a Civilization (or Beyond Earth) to get
| simultaneous mode multiplayer that works better. It's too
| easy to be fiddling around with something and accidentally
| delay the turn, or somehow trigger a resync, and I lack the
| patience to play sequential turns with humans.
| mhh__ wrote:
| That sounds like a Democracy game rather than Civ
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Yes, or kinda like VictoriaII.
| Iv wrote:
| The plan I have had in my drawers for about 3 years now is that
| I want to make a civilization game but where the focus is on
| keeping your own civ together.
|
| Civilizations fell more often because of internal dissensions
| than because of enemy attacks.
|
| Tech and actions would all be about finding things that make
| two cultures a bit closer, two groups work together.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Civilizations that fell because of internal dissention were
| big examples because they were so big that there was no
| threat from outside. When there is not outside enemy, one is
| created within to suit the needs. Not to mention internal
| strife can invite and give another party an opening. See US
| before/after WW2/Cold war, or Rome before/after Punic wars
| elijaht wrote:
| There are a couple great mods for older Civilization games
| that capture this particular dynamic. Rhye's and Fall [1] has
| a lot of this. In particular it follows the "real" history
| and capturing a-historical areas or expanding too quickly
| makes it brutally hard to keep your empire together
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhye%27s_and_Fall_of_Civili
| zat...
| op03 wrote:
| Good idea really. Did you work out what type of actions?
|
| Made me think of Gregory Batesons schismogenesis work.
| According to his theory the divisions are sort of almost a
| given within groups, but they don't lead to
| schism/conflict/collapse when society produces Rituals. Would
| be really cool to see games exploring or capable of producing
| rituals as a route...no idea how that would work...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This post says Sid Meier didn't take part in Magic: The Gathering
| (1997) but Wikipedia lists him as the game designer.
|
| Anyone know the answer?
|
| Also that game was incredible and it's shocking they haven't made
| anything like it since. Card game RPGs are very hot.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _This post says Sid Meier didn 't take part in Magic: The
| Gathering (1997) but Wikipedia lists him as the game designer._
|
| That particular claim seems to require a citation:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering_(1997_vid...
|
| Looks like this was the revision that added it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Magic:_The_Gather...
| ekianjo wrote:
| According to the book, at the time he was in between Microprose
| and the new company they were establishing and working like a
| contractor to help the team at Microprose to finish Magic the
| Gathering - so while he has had a role in directing the
| project, he appeared to be not deeply interested in it because
| it was a licensed game, and it seems he was mainly making sure
| it ships in a reasonable state.
| darrenoc wrote:
| I'm not sure if he designed the game as such, but it's widely
| reported that it was Sids last project before his departure
| from Microprose.
|
| It's still a cult classic among MTG fans for the novel RPG
| aspects.
| bernardand wrote:
| Maybe the players job can be to disrupt the economy. A game of
| sabotage.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Sid Meier's Colonization , without knowing it, was in all
| likelyhood the first iteration of a Factorio-like game
| ekianjo wrote:
| Despite the name, it was not created by Sid Meier, as pointed
| out in the article.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| >More Than Just Civilization
|
| Well yeah, there's Alpha Centauri, too.
| sbacic wrote:
| I'm surprised to see Alpha Centauri mentioned only once. It was
| a real gem and truly ahead of its time with some of its
| mechanics. The storytelling (something Civilization never
| really bothered with) was also something special.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _The storytelling (something Civilization never really
| bothered with) was also something special._
|
| The quotes in the SMAC tech tree were some marvellous pieces
| of original work as well.
|
| Civilization, keeping with its theme, had to use quotes from
| history.
| mercer wrote:
| I played Civ 2 for many hours, but after Alpha Centauri I
| could never get back to the Civ series. Been meaning to check
| it out again, but my experience with Civ 3 and 4 just wasn't
| as enjoyable after having played AC.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I remember playing the Americans in Civ 3, all was going
| well, I was nice and peacful, but then got to the later
| stage and oil appeared. I had a fairly large empire, but no
| oil.
|
| Without oil a lot of the later units aren't available, so
| invasion it was. So realistic.
| chongli wrote:
| I agree. SMAC is the reason I'm doing a philosophy minor in
| university. The game is so incredibly interesting and
| varied. There's no other game that lets you experiment with
| so many different utopian or dystopian philosophies and
| witness your choices interacting with other ideological
| societies.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Brian Reynolds was behind that one, not sure how much Sid was
| involved in it, if at all.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| So many hours of my life gone trying to build the 50 city states
| of the union before declaring independence in Colonization. Such
| an amazingly fun game, though it encouraged slaughtering the
| natives so not likely to get much good press in the modern era.
| ekianjo wrote:
| If you played as the French, you actually benefited from
| working with the natives (additional bonuses) if I remember
| correctly, which was to mimic the French approach in the New
| World (also well depicted in the Last of the Mohicans).
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| I always played as the Spanish (who gain twice the gold from
| slaughtering a native village) because in order to fit 50
| colonies on the map of the US you had to take up all of the
| land, and most of it was already occupied by native villages.
| It was impossible to defend most of the inner villages so the
| only available option was removal, hence picking the Spanish
| to gain double gold since I was clearing the land anyway. I
| never was able to get all 50 cities built in time and still
| try from time to time.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| French had a lower threat level generation amongst natives
| (you can encroach into their territories more without
| generating hostilities). But as far as I remember, when you
| declared independence, the natives always ally themselves
| with the royal forces, so it makes sense to get rid of them
| before (especially if you've been supplying them with horses
| and muskets).
| ekianjo wrote:
| > the natives always ally themselves with the royal forces
|
| Did they? I don't remember that part in details anymore
| (even though I played Colonization again just 4-5 years
| ago).
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-18 23:03 UTC)