Tag Archives: Civilization Series

What did I Play in 2023 and how does 2024 look?

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2023 was not exactly a great year for playing something new and different for me.  Granted, this blog is not the place you go if you’re looking for commentary on new titles or much in the way of variety, but 2023 was an exceptionally focused year by even my standards.

My 2023 banner courtesy of our daughter

Also, despite 2022 being a hectic year that saw a significant downturn in my play time, 2023 managed to continue that trend with me spending less time on PC gaming than I did in 2022.  We’re at low ebb around here.  All of this is based on measurements taking by ManicTime, which keeps track of how long apps have the main focus on my computer.

ManicTime – For your app time tracking needs

So what happened?  I don’t know.  I work from home, so it isn’t like a long commute was keeping me away from my computer.  In the end, here is what I played in 2023, broken out by percentages.

  1. WoW Classic – 66.42%
  2. EVE Online – 23.69%
  3. Civilization II – 2.16%
  4. LOTRO – 1.78%
  5. Civilization V – 1.51%
  6. Baldur’s Gate 3 – 1.47%
  7. Civilization VI – 0.80%
  8. Diablo III – 0.51%
  9. Civilization III – 0.31%
  10. Valheim – 0.25%
  11. Astro Colony – 0.24%
  12. Civilization IV – 0.19%
  13. LEGO Star Wars – 0.15%
  14. Alpha Centauri – 0.14%
  15. EVE Vanguard – 0.12%
  16. Civilization – 0.11%
  17. Wizardry – 0.04%

That is 17 titles total that ManicTime recorded me playing, down from the 21 recorded in 2022.  If anybody is just dying to know how many hours I played, they key is that Civilization has exactly one hour of play time on that list.

Graphically, that breaks out into a pie chart like this:

Titles broken out by percentage of my play time

Anything that was under one percent on the list was lumped into the “other” wedge for the sake of readability.  And yes, I did spend a lot of time playing WoW Classic in 2023.  Wrath of the Lich King Classic was that good, so far as I am concerned.

Now, 17 is an accurate number, but by itself does not perhaps tell the full story of the year.  So it is time for the chart that breaks down what I played when in 2023.

My 2023 in video games

I do not go as crazy with that chart as Belghast or Naithin, mostly because I am not sure that much detail adds anything to my own story.  Also, I don’t play as many different titles.  Everything past the top two is just kind of details.  Most of those titles were a couple of weeks… or days, really… within a given month.

The chart shows I played EVE Online and WoW Classic pretty much all year long.  No surprise there.  I also decided, in the name of clarity and laziness, to lump all the Civilization titles up into one row, as that was all part of the same experiment last April.

The only thing I would dispute would be World of Warcraft, as time with that was barely anything like “playing,” I was generally logging in to collect some mount or pet reward for simply being subscribed, but in August when I logged in the game tried to give me some new gear and that turned into such a fiasco that it was my peak play time, so I made the mark for the year there.

I suppose the variation from my expectations set out in a post a year ago is the most notable aspect of this.  Maybe.

I mean, I was pretty darn sure I would play Diablo IV, then didn’t bother.  Meanwhile, I specifically said I wasn’t likely to play any Civilization titles, and then I played them all in 2023.  That was something.

I was also feeling like LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga might have been a thing, but it turns out that no… that was fun with my daughter on the Wii more than a decade back, but not something that captured me in 2023.

And then there was Valheim, where I started to get into the Mistlands a bit, but then our group was so wrapped up in Wrath Classic that I left that alone after a while.

Anyway, that wraps up 2023, so it is probably time to see what the new year look like.  What do I think I will play in 2024?

Likely Candidates:

  • WoW Classic – Season of Discovery
  • Cataclysm Classic
  • EVE Online

Why should 2024 be any different that 2023?  I’m playing two of those already.

Strong Possibilities:

  • Baldur’s Gate 3
  • Valheim, or something like Valheim (topic for another post)

Potshot and I might make our way back into Baldur’s Gate.  The whole Season of Discovery thing in WoW tore us away from that, but it might fade before Cataclysm Classic lands.  And there might be room for a WoW Classic break with the group to go do something like Valheim.

Seems Likely:

  • Tarisland
  • EverQuest

I think I will be in for Tarisland, if it ships this year, if only to catalog the ways in which it is not a direct copy of World of Warcraft, one of the most over used tropes this past year by some gaming sites.

And, of course, EverQuest will be hitting 25 this year, so I will probably subscribe and try to play, figure out once again that being stuck somewhere way below level cap and having nobody else I know playing will mean boredom and will quickly stop playing… but I likely will play some even knowing that in advance.

Things I will want to play, but probably won’t:

  • Forza Horizon 4/5
  • World of Tanks / War Thunder
  • Project: Gorgon
  • Most of my Steam library

It just seems to work out that way.  I have a limited amount of time and a hierarchy or titles I am in the mood to play.

Negative Interest:

  • WoW Retail
  • EverQuest II
  • Minecraft
  • LOTRO

Not knocking these as bad games.  They are on this list because there is some part of me that wants to play them.   There are just specific circumstances that make them undesirable to play.  I think we maybe have beaten Minecraft to death, for example, because every attempt at a return feels like a slog to get back to our old world and we all wander off in a week.  And, as I have made abundantly clear, LOTRO is pretty much unplayable for me on my wide-screen monitor.  Meanwhile, every time I log into WoW retail I am reminded how out of step I am with the current state of the game and I quickly scurry back to some flavor of classic.

So that is my summary, such that it is.

Past year posts:

  • 2022 – Combined summary and predictions into one post
  • 2021 – Combined summary and predictions into one post
  • 2020 – Combined summary and predictions into one post
  • 2019 – I played some things that I predicted I would, but not many
  • 2018 – Technically, mission accomplished; reality, not so much.
  • 2017 – I played nothing from the list, though arguably only two were playable
  • 2016 – I played none from the list, but most didn’t ship
  • 2015 – literally nothing I listed went live
  • 2014 – I played Warlords of Draenor, which was a gimme really
  • 2012 – Actually tried most of the items on the list
  • 2011 – Tried 3 out of 5 eventually, but then The Agency was on the list
  • 2007 LOTRO (shipped!)
  • 2007 Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (Didn’t ship)

April 2023 in Review

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The Site

This may be the last post to get auto-forwarded to Twitter.  WordPress put up a blog post about how Twitter API access was coming to an end due to Twitter charging a lot of money for that now.  May 1 is the deadline to sign up for the new pricing for the API.  An additional email went out stating that from April 30th forward the API link would be severed, which sounds like yesterday’s post might have been the last one.  We shall see.

WP.com did say they were looking into adding more integrations to sites like Instagram and Mastodon.  They also suggested people could try Tumblr, which they own now, as a Twitter alternative.  Say what?

Meanwhile, the daily post streak goes on.

You know, I had the chance, a good number, to step off the daily posting merry-go-round.  Wouldn’t 1111 have been a good stopping point?

The streak went on !!1111

And then I forgot I had something queued up for the next day and was writing ahead and the opportunity passed.  So here, at the end of April in the year 2023, I am still on the daily post routine.

In other news, I turned off the ads on the site for now.  Hopefully you didn’t notice because you browse the web with an ad blocker turned on, something I believe is a security necessity.  I was just looking at the site on my phone without ad block and decided that the ads really sucked and turned them off.  Earning $250 in 18 months didn’t seem like enough of a payoff.

I was tempted to keep them on until I hit $300, because you only get paid out at $100 intervals, but the other thing is that the quality of ads WordPress has been delivering has been abysmal.  The number of ads served up has remained fairly constant while the payout has consistently eroded over time.

But that is the story of the internet, now isn’t it?

One Year Ago

Of course things kicked off with April Fools at Blizzard, though a strange one in the shadow of the Microsoft buyout offer and all the company’s troubles.  The announcement of the Dragonflight expansion was certainly no joke.

However, the coming of Wrath of the Lich King Classic was what really had our eye.

Either way, Blizzard needed something new, their revenues were down hard.

Meanwhile in not an April Fools joke, WP.com decided free blogs would get no storage space.  They changed their mind, but never shouted “April Fools!”

Lord of the Rings Online hit 15 years.

Wordle was the latest thing, and Wordle-like clones were popping up, each with their own angle.

I was wondering what made housing worthwhile in MMORPGs.

The instance group took a break from its struggles in Outland to return to Valheim.  It was time for a new world with fresh epic voyages of discovery.  There were new features, like the cartography table, to learn about.  We also had to battle all the bosses again, starting with Eikthyr and then The Elder. We got ourselves a base on the coast to further our exploration and found something new in the swamps.

Along the way Valheim got controller support, in anticipation of its XBox debut.  I was going to try it out, but never quite got to it.

All that meant we were pretty much done with Lost Ark.  I wrote up some reflections on our run at the game and linked to more Carbot videos.

EVE Online was still doing monthly feature updates.  For April we got the Rorqual conduit jump and some nerfs to citadels.  We also got the plan for the CSM17 election even as Xenuria was spilling tea about the CSM and CCP.  Somewhere in there I hit the 240 million skill point mark.

Meanwhile, after getting lots of players riled up by his flirtations with crypto, Hilmar declared that NFT meant Not For Tranquility.  I mean, we had signs that crypto was doomed… in the form of Lord British jumping on board that train wreck with something that couldn’t be a more transparent attempt to cash in on his name and reputation.  Too bad for him that he had already wrecked the latter.

Oh, and then CCP announced that they were raising the subscription price for EVE Online to $20 a month.  That was a blow that didn’t make anybody happy and started people panic buying PLEX in Jita.

Then, in one of those Friday bullet point posts I noted that EG7 divesting from Russia, CCP gave us a history of the EVE Online database, RimWorld was legal again in Australia, Diablo II Resurrected was getting ladders, and Playable Worlds got $25 million in funding.

I was stuck in a gym in Pokemon Go for quite a while.

I was also on about using Discord as a source of gaming news and updates.

I told the story of how knowing too much history got me out of jury duty.

And, finally, Elon Musk said he wanted to buy Twitter.  I figured he wasn’t a complete idiot, that he wouldn’t burn the place to the ground or anything.  There is a post that hasn’t aged well.

Five Years Ago

April Fools at Blizzard was mostly about World of Warcraft.

Having unlocked the four allied races available with the Battle for Azeroth pre-order, I was set to take a break from Azeroth until the per-expansion events started.  The August 14th launch date had been announced.

Ultima Online‘s Publish 99 introduced a free to play option.

Speaking of things Lord British has touched, I also played some Shroud of the Avatar and then tried to figure out who it was really targeting.  That I uninstalled it later probably meant I wasn’t on that list.  I have not gone back to it since.

Pokemon Go got field research as a new activity.

On Rift Prime I was in Stonefield.  There was also a problem with claiming mounts.

There were two Kickstarter campaigns of note, one for Empires of EVE Vol. II and the other for the CIA agent training card game.  I backed them both.

For EVE Online Fanfest was on in Iceland, where the keynote announced the coming Into the Abyss expansion and the Triglavian menace.  There was a lot of other news and tidbits out of the event, which I tried to sum up on the following Monday.  CCP also got recognized by Guinness for the Million Dollar Battle.

Actually in game, we were busy up in Fade and Pure Blind, such that I am going to just list out all those posts as bullet points:

Good times in space.

But, in the end, the most bizarre moment of the month was probably when Daybreak, asked if Russian sanctions might affect them, went straight to declaring that they have never been owned by Columbus Nova, despite having told us they were for owned by them since the acquisition from Sony.  Then they went on to try and gaslight the internet (always a recipe for success) including editing their own Wikipedia page to remove all mention of Columbus Nova, then issued more statements, and then had a round of layoffs, all of which just succeeded in bringing more attention to their absurd situation, to the point that I had to write a summary post just to keep track what the hell was going on.

All of which could have been avoided if Daybreak had just said, “No, sanctions will not affect us.”  A warning to PR professionals everywhere.

That kind of took the air out of the announcement that the Angarr server on EverQuest had reached the Planes of Power expansion.

Ten Years Ago

I was remembering the SEGA Genesis and NBA Jams. 

Our Wii seemed to be collecting dust and destined for retirement.  Maybe one more round of Wii Bowling?

On the iPad I was fiddling around with Vinylize Me.

The Camelot Unchained Kickstarter had kicked off with a steep $2 million goal.  With only three days left to go the campaign was $400K short.  Not sure if Mark Jacobs’ dire vision of the future of F2P helped or hurt.

Meanwhile, Lord British’s Shroud of the Avatar wrapped up its Kickstarter campaign over the $2 million mark, having doubled its $1 million initial goal.

LOTRO turned 6 years old and I was wondering what lay it its future.

World of Tanks hit 2 years and I was pondering tank crew skills and finally driving the KV-4 along with some other new tanks.

Age of Empires II – HD Edition launched on Steam.

I took another run at Need for Speed: World, which had added achievements.

In Rift, I was wondering why the Storm Legion expansion just wasn’t grabbing me.  I tried to press on.  Meanwhile, the instance group spent evenings one person short trying to find something to do.

The Burn Jita 2 event kicked off.  People didn’t seem to be paying much attention to it before it started, but it got extended and ended up bagging 573 billion ISK worth of ships.

CCP launched its EVE Online timeline as part of its prep for the 10th anniversary of the game.  They’ve since thrown all of that away.  But the Dev Blog about it is still there.

I also had items from the mail bag about Darkfall: Unholy Wars, MegaWars IV, and World of Tanks Blitz.

And it was kind of a quiet April Fools at Blizzard.

Fifteen Years Ago

I made up something for April Fool’s Day, SOE’s Graphite Realms!  I thought it was amusing.

Homstar Runner was getting a game on the Wii.

Lord of the Rings Online celebrated a year of being live.  Book 13 introduced, among other things, fishing.  And my video problems with the game proved to be a bad video card, so I was actually able to get into the game.

Computer Gaming World/Games For Windows magazine ceased publishing as part of the ongoing demise of print media.

In EVE Online I made the big move from Caldari to Amarr space.  I also began producing Badger transports for fun and profit.  CCP introduced the whole Council of Stellar Management thing, which I dubbed The Galactic Student Council.  My opinion on it hasn’t changed much since.

I also managed to get my hauling rigged Mammoth blown up in low sec space, which got me thinking at the recent profusion of those new heavy interdictors.

Meanwhile in World of Warcraft one million people in China logged into the game at the same time.  There is still no report on what would happen if they all pressed the space bar in unison.  While that was going on, the instance group finished up the Slave Pens and the Underbog and began the long struggle with the Mana Tombs.

I was looking around for Tetris on the Nintendo DS.  You would think that would be easy to find, right?

And then it was Tipa’s turn to bang the EverQuest nostalgia drum, so I joined in yet again.

Twenty Years Ago

Enix Corporation and Square Co. Ltd. officially merge, forming Square Enix Co. Ltd. I am not making this up.

PEGI, the European video game content rating system, came into use.

Thirty Five Years Ago

Gemstone launched on GEnie.  I played in the beta for it on GEnie and then was there for the launch.  It was the first command line MUD type game that I played.  I had played Stellar Emperor, Stellar Warrior, and Isle of Kesmai, but those were all terminal emulation focused titles.  Gemstone was more akin to Zork and titles like that which parsed text inputs for actions.

Most Viewed Posts in April

  1. Five New Eden Maps Better Than Either EVE Online In Game Map
  2. The LOTRO 2023 Roadmap – No Consoles, No UI Updates
  3. Twitter Verified User Marks Finally Disappear
  4. Blizzard April Fools No More
  5. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
  6. Who Should Have Bought CCP in 2018?
  7. CCP Closing Down EVE Anywhere on May 24th
  8. Minecraft and the Search for a Warm Ocean
  9. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II
  10. Making the Grey Pit in Valheim
  11. The Cataclysm Classic Question
  12. Fraternity’s Keepstar in X47L-Q Destroyed without a Fight

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Game Time by ManicTime

I said I was going to stop posting this last month, in part because it just points out how few titles I really play and in part because I felt that posting this might be inhibiting my desire to play more titles.  And then, in April, I did in fact play more titles… so now to show I was right maybe?

  • Civilization II – 27.63%
  • Civilization V – 19.26%
  • EVE Online – 15.99%
  • WoW Classic – 15.21%
  • Civilization VI – 10.16%
  • Civilization III – 3.91%
  • Civilization IV – 2.42%
  • Valheim – 2.27%
  • Alpha Centauri – 1.73%
  • Civilization – 1.42%

Civ II and Civ V were the winners in time spent, though I will say that I played Civ II through the whole move op from Pure Blind back to Delve, tabbing into EVE Online only when it was time to do something.  So CCP thinks I player 3 hours or so of EVE… 6 hours really, because I was running two accounts… but ManicTime thinks I mostly played Civ II.  That is a constant problem tracking EVE Online time, as I spend so much of it tabbed out of the game.

Civilization

I played a lot of the Civilization series, both in the number of titles I played and in the number of hours spent.  It is still a strong series.  That said, I might have sated myself.  In all that play time I never quite got one of those games where you really want to see it through.

EVE Online

I came into April pretty active in New Eden, with the war going on in Pure Blind and all.  We had bagged three Keepstars in Pure Blind in March, and managed to kill the X47 Keepstar after winning the amour timer through downtime.  But that seemed to be the limit.  Those two Keepstars in Venal were let go.  You can only have people alarm clock so many times for a Chinese time zone fight.  So we hauled most of our toys back to Delve, left a couple fleet options up there, and Fraternity dropped a fresh new Keepstar in X47.

Pokemon Go

We continue to send gifts and collect postcards in order to further our Vivillon count.  I now have 10 of the 20 total, with 6 more I will be able to evolve one I have the candies.  And all those postcards mean friendship levels which deliver xp, so I actually made some decent progress towards 44.

  • Level: 43 (68% of the way to 44 in xp, 1 of 4 tasks complete)
  • Pokedex status: 767 (+9) caught, 781 (+10) seen
  • Mega Evolutions obtained: 23 of 34
  • Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
  • Current buddy: Amaura

Valheim

I did get out Valheim for a bit this month.  I was kind of looking for a game where I could just do some stuff that would pay off later, but the group hit a bit of a plateau after defeating the boss in the plains, and we have to go do that again to get the drops we need for new Mistlands crafting.  Meanwhile, I don’t quite have the energy to go all in on creating a Mistlands base.

WoW Classic

I have been slowing down a bit on Northrend front.  The instance group has only one dungeon left to do to have seen them all, at least before phase two shows up.  I have two characters at the level cap and I am losing momentum on the dailies and the like.

Zwift

I did get back on the bike more so than I did in March, when I rode a rather uninspiring 27 miles.  My very modest monthly goal is 50 miles and I barely got half way there.  This month, however I managed to exceed my goal.  Not great, but better than my low ebb.  And it probably helped that the power wasn’t out and I wasn’t traveling, as was the case in March.

  • Level – 18
  • Distanced cycled – 1,602 miles (+88 miles)
  • Elevation climbed – 61,624 (+2,7353 feet)
  • Calories burned – 49,920 (+2,321)

Coming Up

EVE Online turns 20 years old on May 6th.  I expect we’ll see something big from CCP on that front… though they have been pretty quiet about things up until this point.

I suspect that Twitter drama will continue.

Activision Blizzard drama as well.

And AI stuff.  That is everybody’s favorite thing right now.

Maybe we’ll hear something about Wrath Classic phase 2.  Or maybe Cataclysm Classic?  I don’t know.

Other than that, at least on the blog front, it seems like business as usual.

Another Look at Civilization VI

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It has been Civilization month around our house now and I have written a couple of posts about the game series, including how to access and play each entry.

That said, I was feeling like I had not completed the arc of the series because I did not get in and play Civilization VI, the current entry in the series.  I gave it a pass on my big list because it is easy enough to find… I think there is even an iOS and Android version these days… and was the baseline, most recent entry.

Civilization VI

Also, I have not been a fan.  In the poll in my fist post Civ6 did not do so well, most people seeming to prefer some classic version of the game, usually aligning with when the really got into the game.

But I couldn’t really remember WHY I didn’t like it.  Also, somebody said the DLC made it better and as it turned out the DLC was all on sale on Steam for the Spring sale, so I went and grabbed it then downloaded the game to give it another try.

And, guess what, I still don’t like it that much… at least when compared to the older versions of the game.

But I can now articulate why?  Or, why I do not like it as much as some other entries in the series, because it isn’t horrible.  It just doesn’t capture some of what I like about the series as well… or, rather, it steamrolls over what I often most enjoy about the series.

What I tend to enjoy, what people often talk about as the best part of any Civ game, is the first 100 or so turns.  After that the game slowly changes from the freedom of those opening moves, when you’re grabbing some territory, trying to expand, exploring the world around you, and making first contact with other civilizations, to the reality of the mid-game.

The mid-game is all about incremental changes and deciding on policy and researching the right technologies and city and building queue management and dealing with the demands of other civs.  You want to keep current on tech while building enough military units that you can’t be bullied and keeping your citizens happy, all while trying to keep your expansion going.

If you have played, you know the mid-game.  One of the reasons I still enjoy Civ II is that the mid-game is pretty simple, although it remains a ton of micromanagement.  At least your government, technology, and wonder choices are pretty clear.  I want to get the Statue of Liberty so I can change governments at will.  Then I am going Democracy until I get tanks, then I am going to swap to Communism and bury my AI opponents.

But well before then I have a nice period of free ranging across the map.

And Civ VI… well, it starts off that way… for a few turns.

Time to found a city!

And then you get a city and I swear the game jumps on you with things to do like no past version.  I know we have to build something in the city and it is time to start research.  Same as it always was.  But I am also doing civics research and I swear to you by the time I hit turn 13 I was dealing with foreign relations and government policy choices and the damn environment.

I am not sure I am a fan of the Gathering Storm DLC.  It is pretty much doom and gloom from the get go.

Everything is fine today, but it will only get worse as time goes on

My lack of appreciation might be related to the fact that my capitol city in one game was close enough to a volcano as to feel some impact with every eruption, the first of which was inside of turn 20 and then regularly thereafter.

Oh, here we go again…

So it felt like like the mid-game morass of complexity hit pretty quickly.  Sid Meier famously said, “A game is a series of interesting choices,” but here we seemed to be getting into quantity over quality because once you are making a lot of choices each individual choice can start to lose some meaning.

Finally, I am kind of pissed that unit movement is mouse only.  I am an old school number keypad movement player.  I keep tapping on the keypad and my units just sit there on the screen doing nothing.

Yes, this might very well be me

All of that said, I am more kindly disposed to it as a member of the series.  A couple of runs at it this month did show me that you can get into the “just one more turn” cycle of engrossment with the game, even if it does feel like it offers up more choices than it needs to.

If all the other versions of Civilization were unavailable, Civ VI will fill the niche.  It still is not my favorite in the series, but it still compares well to alternatives outside of the 30+ year run these titles have had.

Playing the Different Generations of Civilization Today

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Having written a bit about Sid Meier’s Civilization and its various versions over the last 30 years earlier this week, I was kind of interested to have some sort of brief reminder/comparison of the different generations.

A couple of weeks ago I was all up about the idea that you could play every generation of the Diablo series, would Civilization follow suit?

So I started going down the list… not in order, because chaos is my thing… but I will report them out in order from newest to oldest.

Civilization VI – 2016

This is the current version.  It is on Steam.  You can buy it and play it right now, it gets updates regularly, it has a bunch of DLC (19 that I see) that I have not purchased, it has a game pass of some sort because that is what AAA games get these days, and you can earn Steam achievements playing it.  It is also part of the Steam Workshop ecosystem for mods and such.

Civilization VI

While it probably runs better on my current machine than it did on the one I had when it launched, it is also 16+ GB to download.  That isn’t a huge amount in this day and age, but it is more that I was willing to invest in going back to play it.  If we got the one-time “strategy group” back together for Friday night games or some such I would grab it.  But for just me to play for maybe 2 hours… not so much.

I suppose, as a side question, is any of the DLC worthwhile?  Does it improve the game?  My impressions are all from the base game, which was unexciting enough… I am really not interested in how my cities look as long as they are producing units for war as an example… that I went back to Civ V.

Ability to play today: 100%

Civilization: Beyond Earth – 2014

I didn’t download this one.  I wrote about it previously.  We tried it as a group.  It didn’t really stick with me, feeling like a watered down Alpha Centauri mixed in with the almost maniacal love of unnecessary graphical detail that tends to grip the series.

Civilization Beyond Earth

That said, it is there on Steam, available for purchase and download, it has some DLC to buy as well, and the base install looks to be about 6GB.

Ability to play today: 100%

Civilization V – 2010

The first title in the series to launch on Steam, and it required Steam in order to play.  It was the reason I went back to Steam after Valve screwed up my original account during the Half-Life 2 retail code fiasco.  And, of course, it too had a problematic launch.  Like most Civilization titles it barely ran on my system back in 2010 and crashed a lot.  There is a reason that auto-save has been a feature of the game since Civilization II.

The new game experience, Civ version

It is still there and playable, though it can be a bit problematic.  I had to re-download it because the copy I had on my drive, last played in 2019, simply refused to launch.  A re-install fixed the issue and I was able to play.  It runs at a sprightly pace now, the computer opponents being very quick until you get into deep late-game with tons of units on the field.  I was able to get through a medium size game in an afternoon and evening.

The base game is generally available for cheap during any sale.  There are two expansions about which I am less than thrilled.  They are okay, but like a lot of Civ expansions they completely changed how the game felt.  There is also a ton of Steam Workshop mods and scenarios for the game.

Overall, a solid if somewhat divisive entry in the series.  It is, as noted, a title I have spent a lot of time with, it has Steam achievements, scenarios, and the things that make Civ fun.

Maybe my second favorite version of the game, interesting choices, the end of massive unit stacking, though still prone to some quirks and not as fast as I would expect a title this old to be.

Ability to play today: 95%

Civilization IV – 2005

We are now in the pre-Steam era, though I recall I bought my copy online and downloaded it over what passed for the internet back then, some flavor of ADSL.

I think my main bias against this version is that at launch it ran VERY slowly on my system and was part of the three game generation that insisted on being full screen and would crash when I tried to alt-tab out to look something up.  I wrote to their support about the issue and they told me I shouldn’t tab out of the game.  That was helpful.  They did eventually add a windowed mode, which has been a part of the series ever since.  At least that is my memory of events.  Maybe it was always there and I missed it back in the day.

My memories of it are also of a much more complicated game than previous versions… doesn’t that apply to every title in the sequence… but today it seems oddly light and sparse.  Plays fast and smooth… more so that Civ V I would say.  It also looks fairly good; the UI doesn’t look like it was from Windows 3.1,  Oh, and actually supports the Steam overlay so you can take screen shots, though there are no achievements.

There is also some DLC for it on Steam.  I only have the base game, so my quick replay used that.

Civ IV DLC

Over all, rock solid.  Would recommend.

It is available on Steam in bits and pieces, or as a complete edition with all DLC for a much cheaper price over at GoG.com.

Ability to play today: 100%

Civilization III – 2001

In my brain Civ III is always “the new one” despite it now being more than 20 years old.  At launch, aside from being slow and demanding full screen, it seemed so much more complicated and busy and a lot of the wonders from Civ II which were game breaking in their power at times felt a bit diminished.  It also seemed so shiny and new.

Get it all on Steam

Today a lot of the UI feels really dated… not bad, but much closer to the earlier games in view an concept… and it has to be played full screen at a resolution that means all the open windows in the background will be completely messed up.  It also took a few tries to get it to launch and it crashed out to desktop… a completely resized and reorganized desktop because of screen resolution, something I will never stop complaining about… so once again we’re reminded why auto-save is a default option in the series.

That said, it plays pretty well.  It looks a bit it raw, but my current CPU meant that processing computer players during their turns was no big deal, so things went along quickly.

I had forgotten that this version was the start crazy stacking era.  In Civ II if you stacked units and one died, they all died.  In Civ III your optimum attack mode was a mega stack of units that the enemy could peel back one by one, but not before you took their city.

Still a good game, I like a lot of the mechanics.  The graphical choices feel dated now however, especially UI elements, and it is prone to crashes on my system.  It is available on Steam and at GoG.com.

Ability to play today: 90%

Alpha Centauri – 1999

I had a short (in retrospect), but hard core addition to this title.  It introduced a series of features, like boarders that I really liked.  I wasn’t completely keen on the magenta heavy landscape setting, and it was the first of the full screen versions of the game and is locked in a 1024×768 resolution.

But it is available over at GoG.com in the Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack, which includes the base game and the expansion.  After some big downloads above, this rings in at a little over half a GB, so pretty quick to get at broadband speeds.

The game plays well and has that ethereal other planet feeling.

Down on the planet

The main problem for me is that, as with Civ III, the full screen resolution lock will screw up every other window you have open.  It is also a bit unhappy about tabbing in and out.  Having a second monitor helped me a bit.

But otherwise, seemed pretty solid.  I did not play as much of this as some of the other titles, but it moved fast and was still good.  If you can put up with the fact it only runs full screen at 1024×768, this is still a very viable title.  If you get annoyed by the full screen business like I do, then it is less of a choice.

Ability to play today: 80%

Civilization II – 1996

Now we’re into the MicroProse era, where there is no support and a lot of uncertainty over whether this now qualifies as abandonware or if there somebody out there who will sue your ass if somebody like GoG tries to patch up a copy to work on today’s machines.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of this game more than 25 years down the road was that they bought fully into the Microsoft Foundation Class UI, which means it ALWAYS runs in a window that can be resized to fill your screen.  So it filled my 800×600 screen back then and it fills my 3440×1440 screen today, which is awesome.  Part of my resentment against the next three titles in the series is their strict adherence to the full screen mode at resolutions that seem tiny by today’s standards

A whole lotta Civ II on that screen

Granted, on my current screen the units are so tiny I need to play with my glasses on, but I need to do most things, including write, with my computer glasses on.

Getting it to run however… hrmmm.   First, you need a copy of Civilization II Multiplayer Gold, which has a 32-bit executable.  The previous versions were 16-bit and Windows gave up support for that when it went all in on 64-bit back with Windows 7.  Then you need to find the patcher that somebody did ages ago that fixes an issue that will keep it from launching (which I have squirreled away).  And you need to have the CD mounted because that was its copy protection.  I am sure there is a way to get around that, but I have an optical drive in my current machine still, so I just insert the disk… if I can find it. (And when I can’t find it, I have an image of the disk on my drive and some cheap software to mount it in memory.)

All of that said, if you can get it up and running, this game plays great.  It is still a huge achievement and honestly feels less dated than Civ III does.  I cannot overstate how good this game still feels.  Because of the UI framework choices a lot of things scale and look good even at a screen resolution nobody would have guessed at back in 1996.

This just looks so much better than Civ III pop ups

And, of all the titles I played since last weekend, this is the one that got me stuck in “just one more turn” mode, in part because the game plays so well and is so familiar to me, but also because it runs so damn fast.

Really, I wish somebody like GoG.com could take this on, because it really only needs a couple of modest fixes and it runs like a champ.  I would overpay for this.

Ability to play today: 10%

Civilization – 1991

I thought surely I was done for here.  The original 1991 Civilization, it pre-dates stainless steel, so you can’t get it wet.  I mean, there are not a lot of 30 year old video games that run, certainly not many which come up and ask me which of the then current video standards my system supports as an opening step.

Oh yeah, that era

I actually played the Mac version, which had slightly tuned up graphics, since back then color Macs could do 16-bit color by default.

Anyway, I was going to despair because Microsoft even has a service bulletin specifically about this game declaring it will not run on any 64-bit operating systems. I thought I was going to have to play a bit of FreeCiv, which has modes for Civ, Civ II, and Civ III rule sets.

I was not looking forward to that because, while I hate to dump on fan made passion projects like this, when I have tried to play it in the past I have found it to be an unsatisfying experience, where the UI conventions get in the way of the fun.

But the game itself has fallen into the abandonware side of the house and you can find web sites that host it so you can play in a browser.

I went and played it at Classic Reload, which didn’t trigger any virus or trojan warnings.

Civilization calling from 1991

Playing in a browser is a bit annoying.  It is certainly far from the ideal experience.  But, even with that hindering play, I have to say that the original title is still a very good game.

I mean, I knew that at some level intellectually.  It had to be good to have set off a 30 year series of games.  But sometimes the old versions of a game don’t live up to your memories.  That is not the case here.  The original Civilization would be kind of a strong title if it came out today with some update graphics and such.

I would certainly spend $10 on it if GoG.com could spiff it up and get it running at reasonable resolutions on my current machine.  Otherwise you have to scrounge a CD from somewhere… wait, no, this was on floppy disks.  Even I don’t have a 3.5″ floppy drive anymore.  Good luck there.

Ability to play today: 70%

Conclusions

I think the big, obvious revelation here is that there is a reason that they are making a Civilization VII; this has been a very strong series of games over the last 30 years.  I am still annoyed by some of the design choices the team has made over the years, full screen being the worst transgression on my list, but the core of the series has been pretty much carried forward for three decades.

I also feel very much renewed on my fan boy devotion to Civilization II.  But I have some renewed respect for Civ III and Civ IV and have been reminded how strong the original was.

The whole series isn’t as playable today as the Diablo series is.  However, everything after Civ II is available in some supported form from a service is you feel the need to go back in time.

And I am now a bit into the whole Civ thing, so we’ll have to see which one I end up playing the most this month.  Aside from the web version of Civilization, ManicTime records them all correctly with a recognizable name. (Which puts them ahead of EVE Online, which shows up as “exefile” in ManicTime now.)

But what if you have never played Civ and wanted to start today?

Civ VI is the latest version, so that has the focus and is probably a safe choice.

But if you want something at a bit of a discount or do not have a high end machine by today’s standards, both Civ IV and Civ V are excellent options.  Both feel reasonably up to date.  Civ IV is the end of the stacked unit juggernaut era and feels like the last title in its generation, while Civ V changed up the play style enough to be something of a divisive entry in the series for a while, but represents the path forward that the franchise has taken.  And Civ V also has easy access to mods on Steam, something built in from day one.

Or there is always original Civilization in a browser for old school fun.

Fiddling with FreeCiv

1 Reply

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I was digging around for possible things to play for a bit earlier this month, and one path I went down for a few days was FreeCiv.

FreeCiv simple start screen

I was actually thinking about getting out Civilzation II yet again… I have the disk on my bookshelf, so I know I can get it running again… but then I thought about FreeCiv, which is an open source project and no doubt up to date and compatible with 64-bit operating systems and large screen monitors and all of the usual pitfalls that come with trying to play older titles.

FreeCiv has been around for more than 25 years at this point, having started off as a way to make a version of the original Civilization that supported network multiplayer gaming.  Big stuff back in 1996.

The Civilization II came and that got looped into the project and then Civilization III and then other ideas were melded into the project and… well, more than 25 years down the road this is an engine that does a crazy amount of things.

Just starting the game gives you a first glimpse into the options available.

Starting a game…

And that doesn’t even get into the breadth of network play options captured in a single entry on that list.

You have to read the manual that comes in the install package, or go to the wiki, to start getting a handle on what the options mean.

Also, given the time this project has been alive, it is probably no surprise that there are also a myriad of nation options to choose from, each with a long list of city names and possible leaders.

50 in the core choices, 555 in the extended

So you make your choices… you can play traditional Civ style, with top down squares, Civ II style with the 2.5D isometric view with squares so popular in the 80s and 90s, or you can have Civ III hexes and boarders with Civ II rules in an interesting mix, or one of the other options… I favor that Civ II Civ III mix currently… and you end up in a game that looks like the start of any Civilization game really, which is what one should expect.

You’ve probably seen a situation like this before

As I noted, it is up to date in a lot of way and can, for example, expand to use all the real estate that my 34″ monitor has to offer.  It plays like the early Civ titles for the most part.  They key commands are mostly the same.  And it looks decent enough, with its own home grown tile set and units that are different from the original games but similar enough to not take too much guess work to figure out.

How it plays though… well, you have to get used to it.  Any open source project will end up with the “good enough” issue or compromises in UI to be able to support things as widely as possible.  You can play on Linux as well, which means the UI has to stay at a somewhat primitive level of development when it comes to giving feedback to the user.

The first stumble for me is getting used to shift-enter to end a turn, rather than having to mouse around to find the end turn button on the left side info bar.  But you get over that pretty quickly.

The UI though, the flip side of it being happy to use up all my screen real estate is that it outputs the information you need in tiny text in windows and tabs that appear at the lower edge of the window, which is easy glance past on a large screen monitor.

Little tabs showing up at the bottom of the screen

Now, before you point it out, those text tabs look pretty substantial in that screen shot, but only because I made the game window a manageable size (~1500 x 1100) rather than the full native size of my monitor (3440 x 1440) just to keep the screen shot from being enormous and completely illegible when scaled down to 600 pixels wide to fit into the column width of the blog.

Nothing like finding that somebody has started attacking you because you missed the Diplomacy alert in blue (it should be flashing red) or realizing you’re not researching anything because you missed the Research alert showing up (should be double flashing red), but then you see if pop up and it is just telling you that it finished something in your queue with the same quite level of assertion.

My immediate solution has been to play at a much smaller resolution in order to not miss so many notifications.

But most of the annoyance is just figuring out how to read some of the windows.  The research screen is interesting and convenient because it allowed you to queue up your research goals… but then reading what is in the actual queue isn’t exactly clear to me.  And there are several windows where you can do things in the wrong order and the games just lets you and moves on because you didn’t, in effect, say “please” to get what you wanted.

Basically, it is the confluence of a very deep game with a lot of features, a mid level “good enough” UI, and having grown used to the Civ series putting up a modal alert that you can’t ignore or move forward past without at least acknowledging the event in question.

The UI thing is pretty much an object lesson in how much UI design impacts playability and why it is an important aspect of any game.  Here we have a title that is rich and deep in features but which often left me stumbling around trying to figure out things that have been simple in similar commercial titles.

None of which is insurmountable.  But it definitely feels like a game you don’t play casually.  It is more a game you need to invest in, one that becomes a hobby or a regular group activity with friends.

Which, again, isn’t a bad thing.  And it is hard to argue with the price.

Waiting for Civilization

Last week my focus was a huge game of Civilization V.

Early in the week I started a few games on the largest map size (going with the Lakes option, so lots of land warfare) with a dozen competing civilizations and the usual complement of city states until I got a situation that looked good.  The first time out I was wedged in a corner between the Huns and the Mongols, which did not bode well.  The next time I was the Huns, but I managed to get into a war of annihilation with three other civs very early in the game, and while I managed to get to peace while still holding on to my capital, I was set back so badly that any rematch was going to go badly for me.

The third time out I drew the Germans which helped me build up my military quickly and avoid getting penned in early.  The Germans have a somewhat imbalanced attribute that allows them to recruit barbarians to their side a certain percentage of the time when they defeat a barbarian camp.

Loading... still loading...

Loading… still loading…

I actively went after barbarian camps, which allowed my city production to stay focused on buildings and wonders.  You don’t get the best units that way, but you get a lot of them.  My barbarian strategy actually ended up yielding too many units and some points, though I was able to gift them to city states in return for influence.  The Germans also pay less for land unit maintenance, so that helped with the budget.

I ended up playing all the way into Sunday evening in sessions of an hour or more.  In the end it was down to five civs, all of whom feared my military might and all but one of which, the Carthaginians, who were my game-long ally, I was chipping away at, declaring war, taking a city, getting another city as part of a peace settlement, and then turning to the next in line.

However, my enthusiasm for conquest was starting to wain, so I decided at around turn 1,100 to just go for the cultural victory and end it about 30 turns later.  I saved before I started, so I could go back and continue the military victory… or the political victory… or the religious victory.  All were still viable.  But I was tired of waiting.

I was tired of waiting because, in the last 500 or so turns, that was what I was doing most of the time; waiting.  I would make my moves, update production, tweak some improvements, then end my turn only to wait and wait while the computer handled each of the other civilizations, the city states, and finally the barbarians.  Then the game would come back to me.

It is a truism of the Civilization series that each version is launched at a time when they really need the next generation of CPUs to run them effectively.  I remember getting a new computer and seeing the time it took to play a game of Civ II drop dramatically.  I recall writing a note to Firaxis about the slow performance of Civ IV back when it launched, at a time when I had a pretty high end machine in terms of processing power.  Their response was quite snotty in my opinion and could be summed up as  “play smaller campaigns if performance matters to you, there is nothing wrong with our game.”

So I am left wondering when we will reach the point where average CPUs will be up to the task of speedy turns in Civ V and where the bottlenecks really lay.  The game appears to at least be multi-core aware.  Looking at Task Manager, at least four of the eight cores in my CPU look like they are in use, though none of them are capped out or even showing usage beyond 50%.  So the game doesn’t seem CPU bound.  RAM appears to be available, so it isn’t like the game is paging out constantly… or it shouldn’t be in any case.  And while there appears to be some issue with I/O… the game takes me four long minutes from launch before I can resume a game already in progress… and four minutes might not seem like much time, but try sitting in front of your screen waiting, clicking to skip through any video possible, and listening to the required speech about your civ and its leader, then it is the “watched pot” scenario… I cannot imagine that they are doing much of that for each turn.

So when will we be set on this front?

I hope that the next Civ V expansion, Brave New World, will include performance improvements like those that came with the Gods & Kings expansion…  yes, performance was even worse at launch… because CPUs not only are not getting faster in the ways they used to back in the day, but the CPU doesn’t seem to be the limiting factor at the moment.  A long campaign like last week’s, where the last third of the game was mostly me waiting on the computer, puts me off the game.

But it does make me want to dig out my Civ II disk, which is still lost somewhere in my office.  The game isn’t as sophisticated as Civ V, though there is some appeal to its sometimes crude simplicity.

A simpler time...

A simpler time…

But the game itself runs like a dream, the AI zips along, and most of any match is spent doing rather than waiting.  There are many reasons I always go back to that game, and speed is certainly one.  Yes, you can get mired into epic stalemates, but at least the turns move quickly.

Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit

When last we left my quest to play Civilization II on my Windows 7 64-bit system, I seemed to be pretty much out of luck.

The original version of the game was a 16-bit executable and simply would not run on Windows 7 64-bit.  No way, no how.

So I started to look around for a newer version of the game.  Eventually, over at Amazon.com, I came across a vendor in the Amazon Marketplace that was selling a copy of the later Civilization II Muliplayer Gold Edition for just $15.  It seemed like a deal to me, and when it showed up a couple of days later, it appeared to be the full package.

Box, manual, disc, and chart

That box is actually considerably bigger than what games ship in today.  And I haven’t seen a game manual that comprehensive in a decade at least.

Anway, that was the version I needed, as I had read over at Civilization Fanatics that somebody had created a patch for that version that would allow the game to run on 64-bit.  There is actually a thread in their forum with the patch.

At first I was not even sure I would need the patch.

The game installed, launched, and ran for a bit.  It wasn’t until I started my first city that the game terminated.  So I went and grabbed the patch, applied it, and gave it another go.

And, hey presto, I had a running game!

Exploring the World

Now to play a few games to decide where Civ II really belongs on my top Civilization games list.  The poll taken in the last post on the subject seemed to indicate that Civ II was pretty well regarded.  With 136 votes in, this was the list:


My own first impressions, having been away from the game for a couple of years, is how light and easy and uncluttered it is.  Relative to the later versions of the game, there is a simplicity to it.  That and how much I like that it was designed to run in a window, a popular design choice back in the mid 90s, so that it sized correctly to my monitor, which has about 4x the area that my monitor did back when the game first shipped.

Barbarian Uprising!

I pretty much fell right back into playing the game.  I started at the Warlord level for my warm up, which meant that I pretty much dominated from the start, even with the barbarians set to “raging hordes.”

Who's happy? I'm happy!

So now I have another retro gaming option on my system.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in a little Civilization retrospective about the original game, Tim and Jon at Van Console Time Murdering Hemlocks have a show up about the original Civilization.  Step back 20 years and hear how Civilization grabbed so many of us.

Civ II – Found the Disc, Can’t Use the Disc

After some searching tonight I found at least one of my copies of Civilization II.  It was hiding in a generic white disc sleeve on a shelf with some music CDs.

Civilization - 16-bit Era Disc

Unfortunately, this disk is from the stone age.  Look at it.  “IBM/Compatibles” is printed on it.  How long has it been since it was IBM and Compatibles?

Sure, Windows 95 was out when this game launched… barely… so this disc had to install on Windows 3.1.

All of the executables on it are 16-bit.

And, as I found out after an hour or so of screwing around and trying to fool it into believing it was installed, the 64-bit version of Windows 7 is not at all down with 16-bit.  I couldn’t find anything official on the Microsoft support site that definitively said, “No 16-bit,” but I found plenty of unofficial things that said it wasn’t going to happen.

Not that I am totally surprised.  I was doing WinLogo certification for the company I was working for in 1997, and even then you had to get a special exemption to have 16-bit executables… including the installer… on your disc.  That was a long time ago.

Anyway, no Civ II for me right now.  I’ll have to go find a more recently rolled version of it.

In the mean time, since there was some discussion over the best version of Civilization, I will put up a poll.

Justify your pick in the comments, if you feel the need.

 

They’re Dogs… And They’re Playing at Being Cultured…

CivWorld.

Erm, Civilization World.

But it says “CivWorld” on the splash screen.

It is a Facebook game, it will be in “beta” forever

The Civilization series re-envisioned as a Facebook game.

It is enough to make you think that… just maybe… Facebook isn’t going to be a “serious” game platform ever.

Whatever that means.

Okay, fine.  I knew I was going to have to build houses for my population.  And of course, farms had to go along with it.  Sound familiar so far?

Houses and farms and… oh, stop please…

I suppose that I should be thankful that I did not have to click on farms to harvest.  There is a button in the corner that takes care of that for you.

But when I found that advancing my scientific knowledge involved solving a maze that wouldn’t stump a 3 year old, I was bemused.

And when increasing the culture of my society required me to re-arrange tiles to make the painting of dogs playing poker, I was annoyed.

A friend in need… would put a bullet in this game

And when establishing trade involved yet another little puzzle, I was about done.

Yeah Sid, and the camel you rode in on!

What an awful game.

It has all the drudgery of FarmVille with some mini-games thrown in.  But unlike The Agency: Covert Ops, which had a couple of fun mini-game, these are crap.

I hate to think that somewhere, someone who was involved in creating any of the Civilization games thought this game was a good idea.  Because if feels like somebody just said, “What is the shortest route we can take to crap out some Facebook game with ‘Civilization’ in the title?”

I heard a wise game dev once say that the first two hours of a game of Civilization can be the best gaming experience you are likely to have.

With CivWorld, the first 10 minutes were the most uninspiring gaming experience I have had in a long time.

It is crap.

And it makes me wonder if it the medium and not the artist that is causing it.

Does Zynga make crap games because they are Zynga, or do they make crap games because they insist on running them on Facebook?

46 Minutes of Civilization V

Civilization II is probably the single player game I have spent the most time playing since I first purchased a computer.

And that is saying something, given the hours I spent, when I have many excess hour to spend, playing games like Wizardry or Ultima III back in the day.

Apple II+ and Wizardry

I played the original game Civilization and was hooked by its game play, so when Civilization II came out I was right there, day one.

Civ II was great, a huge improvement over its predecessor… so much so that I never considered and going back an playing the original game.

This is in contrast to Civilization III and Civilization IV, both of which eventually sent me back to Civ II.

There is a whole post in why I prefer Civ II.  But for the moment I’ll leave it with the simple fact that I can still play the game on my current PC, more than 14 years after it originally shipped.  It runs great and, in a move that seems genius in hindsight, it plays in a standard, re-sizable window so it even takes advantage of the fact that my monitor has gone from 800×600 to 1600×1200 in the intervening time.  There are a few games I could mention that I wish did the same.

But back at launch the game was a beast.

The Civilization franchise has never bought into the Blizzard philosophy of low system requirements.

I don’t think I was able to play the game at its full potential until I picked up a 400MHz Pentium II years later.  But by the time I had a Pentium IV, it ran smooth and fast.  But it was a long time getting there.

And was Civ II stable at launch?  Well, let’s just say that the auto-save feature was there for a good reason.  Resuming games after a crash was a common occurrence.

So when I was tempted into buying Civilization V based somewhat on SynCaine’s posts about it, I was pretty sure the game was going to live up to the Civilization tradition of being a complete beast on day on.

I bought it via Steam, as much as I dislike Valve’s service.  I’ve been screwed by Valve and their requirement that you must have an internet connection to play a single player game in the past. (Yes, that was a long time ago, but I can hold a grudge like no other when I’m in the mood.)

But since Civ V seems to be tied to the service no matter how you buy it, there didn’t seem much point in going another route.

And while I wasn’t happy about it, I certainly wasn’t expecting Steam to mock my misery.

How long have you managed to play?

Five days with the game and I’ve been able to play for 46 minutes.

And a good portion of those minutes were spent waiting while the game sat hung, driving all four cores of my Intel Core 2 Q6600 processor beyond 50% capacity.  I had to bring up Task Manager just to see if the game still had a pulse.

I was not able to play at all for the first day.

It wasn’t until I turned off the intro movie, got into the options and turned down every possible setting to its absolute minimum, picked the default minimum game (changing any game setting is like hitting the fail button), and shut down every possible process on my system that I was able to hit my peak and get 46 turns into a game before it hung.

And I consider myself lucky to have gotten that far.  Most times I just see this at launch.


And there is no recovery, no launching the game again.  It is straight to the Start menu to reboot the system after any failure.  I’ve tried.  There is no hope without a reboot.

Okay, my system is aging, and not so gracefully.  It isn’t at its most stable of late.  But this is ridiculous.

I should have the horsepower to run the game.  My quad 2.4 GHz CPU should be up to the task, being beyond the recommended system requirements, which specify a quad 1.8GHz or better.  Woe to those who have only a single or dual core system.

And running with everything off, including virus protection, but the OS and Steam the game doesn’t appear to be trying to claim memory beyond the 2GB I have installed.

But it fails every time.  Sooner or later, the carpet is yanked out from under me… and usually it is sooner.

Steam seems to have a patch for the game every night that fixes one crash or another.  I’ll give Steam that, the patching happens fast.  But each such patch only leads to disappointment as the game ab ends in the black rectangle where the intro movie should be running. (Couldn’t they put up a logo or something if you’ve turned the intro movie off?)

And all of this wouldn’t annoy me so much if the game didn’t appear to have promise, if it didn’t seem to have erased some of the sins of its two predecessors, if it didn’t feel like perhaps, maybe, it was getting back to the feel that made Civ II such a great game while keeping the bits of III and IV that actually improved the series.

I’d really like to play it and see if that was true.

But I can’t it seems, not yet.

I run Steam each evening in hopes that a new patch will make the game behave.

I wander through game sites looking for suggestions on how to tame the game.

But so far I’ve only managed 46 minutes.  Barely enough for a EuroGamer review.

I guess I’ll have to go back to Civ II if I want a Civilization fix while I wait for Civ V’s day to come.

It should play really well in about 5 years.  History repeats itself.