In Civ I, on the easiest level, with 7 competing civilizations . . .
What’s the quickest way to win? Both in terms of the game year that you win and in terms of the number of hours you spend sitting in front of the game playing it.
Simplest strategy?
Build settlers only. Well, a few garrison units.
Well, the quickest way to win is obviously military conquest, as you don’t need the technology to reach Alpha Centauri that way.
I always enjoyed playing Civ 1 by reaching a de facto (i.e., not official) military “win” by becoming the dominating military force of the world, then fully developing my city size and production, and developing my technological knowledge to its greatest extent so that I would be the largest nation on earth with a spaceship ready to launch.
If you want to know how to just beat the game quick, I think starting as the Mongol civilization and building tons of cities and armies to conquer the other nations would be the best bet.
What I like to do is to plant as many cities as quickly as possible, while maintaining a solid border, and developing my technologies and wonders as quickly as possible to maintain a military advantage. I move to monarchy once I have a few cities and I move to republic as soon as I have a railroad infrastructure developed. Then it’s just a matter of developing tanks and bombers, by which point I am the most powerful civilization in the world.
I don’t even remember what it was like to play Civ I any more. The years and years poured into Civ II kind of cloud my memory.
I LOVE Civ I!! I have two versions of it actually!
Quickest way to win: Cheat.
Beyond that, I’d say settlers, settlers, settlers.
Heh, I don’t even remember a starship ending for Civ I, for some reason I thought that was introduced in Civ II. I preferred Civ III, but I am currently playing ‘Hearts of Iron’.
Mmmmm…Hearts of Iron.
Civ 1 had the spaceship ending; however, there is no way I would fly in a space ship like the one you can build in Civ 1. It looks like it wouldn’t even lift off the ground let alone fly to another star.
Civ 2 is my favorite; I have Civ 3 but I always lose half of my cities to invaders after I reach about 12 cities, even on the easiest level. I also find it hard to find and maintain resource tiles, the key to taking advantage of one’s military technologies. For the “easy” level the game’s AI seems to know exactly where to attack and hurt me the most.
I also like the Civ 2 advisors:
“All the world maaaarvels at our superior intellect, Sire!”
From what I remember of Civ I, there were some bugs in the enemy AI that made it pretty easy to win, especially on the lower difficulty settings. For example, the Chinese never built more than one city, so they never became a major threat.
My strategy was this: choose one of the civilizations that starts in the Americas (the Americans or the Aztecs). Wipe out the other one as fast as possible, if there is one. The civilizations from the Eastern hemisphere usually won’t bother you until fairly late in the game. Throw all your effort into science, don’t worry about money or luxuries, and build up a group of about 10-15 cities. Once you reach the stage where you have cannons, transports, and musketeers, start sending across big boatloads of your troops and overwhelm all the other civilizations. On the easiest level, you can always get your technology to advance a lot faster than the computer’s, so you’ll be fighting with cannons against phalanxes and catapults.
Fastest win strategy:
Build a map with a few civs and one thin line of land.
Instead of building a city, move your settler over to the next city.
Take over the city.
Rinse, repeat.
Possibel to win against 3/4 civs in 9 turns or so.
I don’t believe there was a map editor in Civ1 (not the windows edition at least). But there was an amusing little bug that as long as you saved the game prior to moving all possible units in a given turn you could reload that save file and all available units had their full movement allowance. So if you used 1 defensive troop in an uninvolved city as a “waiter,” any time he came up in the unit rotation you hit W to wait, you can save the reload and move everything an extra turn.
For the most part I’d only use this to play catch up on higher levels useing a bunch of settlers to double my infrastructure and pre build roads and irrigation for soon to be cites. But In theory you could conquer the whole world the same turn that you got 1 chariot and 1 trireme.
Good game, eh? It’s going to take a lot of work to get better at it, though, I haven’t had much luck, about any country I play as ends up in worse shape than in history. My only truly successful war was The Mexican-American War of 1942, which I won in a few months, but that wasn’t really fair.
The Mexican American war of 1942?
Oi!
Was that the one against the Australians?
I needed (well, wanted) the resources.
“You’re like a clock speed-doubled microchip!”
Yeah, I can imagine sending a ship to Alpha Centauri filled with Pentium 133s.
Hey, we got men to the moon with 1960s technology.
Weren’t we still making fire with flint at that point?
Barring any cheating, the fastest way I found to win on stock maps was to play on Earth, Emperor difficulty, Babylonian civilization.
Earth because you know the layout, and where you can find the other civs. Emperor for the high score bonus, and Babylonians because you’re centered nicely.
Develop the Wheel, and build naught but chariots. 4/1/2 is obscene for an ancient unit. Sweep the globe clean. Steal Mapmaking from someone (or developer that if necessary) and clean out the Americas. You can usually have a total conquest victory by 1500 BC at the latest.
And me, well, I just picked up Hearts of Iron a few days ago and I’m itching to have the time to really sink into it …
HoI is fun. I played Germany, and my ally Hungary annexed Mongolia and the Soviet Union!!
Then in August 1947 I nuked Washington DC. 