In III, at least, everyone will completely ignore everything you do to a common enemy, and in fact having a common enemy will help your diplomacy, so the way to get everyone else to like you when you’re at war is to form alliances. And it’s only specific actions that other civs don’t like: Starting a war is one, of course, and razing cities, and if you have a Right of Passage with the other civ, having units in their territory at the moment war starts. But as long as you avoid that short list, nobody gets mad at you at all just for fighting a war against someone else who attacked you, and even a small number of such offenses won’t hurt your reputation too much.
^^^Civ V usually helps you if you share a common enemy. From what I’ve read, Civ V really went overboard with the war penalties.
It seems it’s okay to fight a war against an aggressor, but once you start taking cities, the penalties increase. I’ve found that gifting some of the shitty cities to other civs makes them more apt to like you.
I mean, I guess the alternative explanation to why the other Civs are always calling me a warmonger is that I’m a warmonger…
Hey, thanks! I didn’t realize religious units can attack each other during peacetime (in hindsight, duh). I just played as Poland-Lithuania and won. All this time I thought theological combat was only when you are at war…
~Max
I like having some kind of loyalty mechanic. As it stands, though, while it can cause some local problems, it’s dwarfed by the overall problem of exponential power.
Let me ask everyone this; why DO empires fall? The first truly mighty empires were places like Egypt, the Akkadian Empire (Iraq, mostly) and China. Egypt and China don’t rule the whole world now, though, and in fact have at times been pretty beaten up, and you don’t meet many Akkadians anymore.
Well, there’s no easy answer to that, I guess.
tl;dr Loss of authority due to natural disaster, crisis of succession, corruption, military defeat
I remember correctly Old Kingdom Egypt and Akkad both fell right around the time of this huge drought lasting about a hundred years. The theory is that people just packed up and left the cities due to a lack of water. It may have taken out the Indus Valley civilization too. The Chinese had not invented writing yet and so weren’t properly a civilization.
Middle Kingdom Egypt collapsed due to the lack of an heir - we can tell because they let a woman reign in her own right. Right about then the Hyksos, a large immigrant community from the northern Levant, rebelled. They brought horses, composite bows, and possibly body armor. The Hyksos would end up ruling over the eastern delta region for at least a century. The Egyptian successor state waged a long war of liberation from Thebes in Upper Egypt.
New Kingdom Egypt was already shaky what with the priesthood holding the purse, constant Libyan and sea people incursions, and a big cloud of ash from Iceland messing with the sunlight and thus crop yield. You see, after Rameses III was assassinated, three of his sons would be pharoah, each succeeded by their own son, who would die heirless. With the pharoahs busy burying their predecessors and their trading partners disappearing due to the bronze age collapse, the economy tanked. The price of grain skyrocketed and Egypt simply abandoned Canaan and neglected its military. Against this backdrop, Libyans emerged from their concentration camps (est. by Rameses III to assimilate them) and overran lower Egypt.
The Han Dynasty famously collapsed because of corruption trickling down from the eunuchs who dominated the court. Then the emperor died. General He Jin took up the reigns of government and was killed by the eunuchs before he could manage to have them killed. In response, his friend warlord Dong Zhuo stormed the palace, murdered the eunuchs, and deposed the young emperor in favor of his (the emperor’s) younger brother. Dong Zhuo ran the government harshly, and other warlords didn’t take this apparent “kidnapping” kindly, so a civil war broke out.
~Max
Indeed. Religion is almost a totally parallel, but separate combat and currency system. So religious units are nearly, if not completely immune to conventional military. They also can cross borders without incident, and even spreading religion doesn’t seem to bother civs that haven’t started their own Religion.
I don’t think I mentioned that I was generating enough faith for a missionary each turn, so I had a flow of them going out to establish a religious beachhead and conquer the rest.
Also apostles remain effective in theological combat even if they only have one spread charge left, so they are a good dual-use unit I found.
I’ve gained some appreciation for religion/faith recently. My effort to win by religion is part of why. But even pretty much ignoring it has little downside, and eventually a player can turn useless faith into Great People with the right civics.
It’s the espionage that I want to ditch, personally.
Yeah–if you’re a warmonger, you’re definitely going to be hated. If you really want to be hated for the rest of the game, attack a few city states and eventually they too will hate you.
theres plenty i dislike about civ 6 but since 2 theres usually an expansion that balances things out afterva couple of years after release but i dont think thats happened yet
But my biggest gripes are 1 they totally changed the workers …you cant automate them like in the first 5 games for land improvements and they dont build roads anymore they have your traders do it
gripe 2 is is the district thing becuase if i was in the mood for detailed city building id play simcity 3 or 4 and you end up having to build over previous improvements
theres about a half dozen things i think 8 need to fix or roll back to previous versions like the wonders…
Oh, in Civ III, if you start a war, you’ll definitely see messages like “The Egyptians don’t trust us because we attacked France”. But that just means a -1 to your reputation, more than countered by things like having active trade with Egypt. A penalty exists, and the game lets you know that a penalty exists, but it’s not a particularly big penalty. Except, of course, from the nation you actually attacked-- They’ll hate you. And so if you attack everyone, everyone will hate you.
There are also ways to goad another nation into declaring war on you, and you don’t suffer any reputation hit at all for that. It’s most effective if they’re at war with someone on the other side of you: Revoke your Right of Passage agreement, and they’ll keep on sending troops into your turf, on their way to that other nation. If there are enough of them, or they’ve been there long enough, or they’re close enough to a city (I don’t know the precise criteria, but I think it’s a combination of those three) you can complain “Remove your troops from my territory instantly or declare war”, and after a few turns of that, they probably will. And then you don’t get the blame, and you get a big morale bonus as people rally around their leaders against the attackers, and a big chunk of the enemy forces are sitting in your road network where you can easily attack them.
Civ 1 was the reason I bought my first PC, after a decade in the Atari/Commodore/Apple IIe wilderness.
Civ2 is my favorite game of all time. I used to play a strategy where I would wipe out all but (3, I think) opponents, build my dozens of cities up as much as possible, get nukes… and then purposely allow my capital to fall, splitting my civilization in half, allowing me to start Armageddon. Good times!
Civ 3 kinda cured me of excessive game playing. I was on my first game, sometime in the 18th century, when, upon logging out for the night, the game told me I had spent 37 hours playing that one game so far, which struck me as an extremely excessive amount of time to be playing games, so I’m not too sure if I ever started it back again.
How do I get Civ 2 to work on modern machines?
So how can these be built into the game?
It has natural disasters, but they don’t kill your civilization.
You would have to emulate an older Windows machine. That could be DOSBox + Win 3.1/9X (3.1 guide here), or something like VirtualBox+Win XP.
~Max
37 hours excessive? I usually spend at least 200 hours to work through a playthrough of Fallout 4. Mostly based on liking to build settlements as well as bringing justice to the Wasteland.
Easiest way to play a game like Civ or Civ II is to check www.gog.com, which will generally come with a PDF manual and, more importantly, a DOSBox wrapper that allows you to one-click load the game. A lot will also have things like cloud-based saves.
I haven’t played the most recent expac so I don’t know about the natural disasters. But on my screen loyalty goes down when there’s starvation. While succession may have been an empire-killer historically, it wouldn’t be very fun to put that in the game since you are playing as the ruler for all of history. Likewise corruption is a political problem, I’m not sure how best to model that for a game. I like the idea of it being roughly tied to the form of government (as in Civ III).
Military defeat is a thing but looking at history it wasn’t always foreign states conquering the empire. I mean, that did happen (Achaemenids->Assyria and Kushite Egypt, Macedonia-> Achaemenids, Mongolia->Song China, etc.) But more often what happened is, essentially, subjugated states or peoples constantly revolt. I don’t think Civilization makes this as big of a deal as they should. Nationalism wasn’t a thing in empires like it is today - the Babylonians never considered themselves Assyrians. Even in the United States, people didn’t consider themselves Americans until after the civil war. Emperors of old would be very concerned about what they do with conquered people, enslave, resettle, assimilate? Other historical options might include murdering them all (genocide) or forced assimilation (cultural genocide). This should be a decision you can make in the games.
Rameses III resettled the defeated sea peoples in Canaan, what is now the Gaza strip. As soon as Egypt withdrew its military garrisons (due to lack of food), that part of the empire gave way to five new city states (known in the bible as the Philistine pentapolis). He also attempted to force assimilate defeated Libyans in concentration camps along the western border. During the reign of his grandchildren, discontent Libyans overran the fortresses and used them to stage a successful campaign against lower Egypt.
~Max
I mostly agree with all of this. I don’t have the experience with Civ VI to comment on your specific objections, but in Civ V I really do feel like it’s just too much a lot of times. The temptation to do ALL THE THINGS is almost irresistible. Science, Culture, Religion, Population, Trade, Civics, War and so on, it’s hard to manage them all. And that’s just the big picture stuff, you then have to do all the tactical stuff to improve and manage cities, position and build military units, choose technologies, etc. I can’t fathom how some people can manage a game on a large map with 10 other players on the higher difficulty settings.
I think they’ll get criticized if the release a game that’s smaller. IIRC they took a lot of heat for Civ IV: Colonization because it was simplified relative to Civ IV. Lazy reviewers and fanboys can be vicious and it’s hard to convince people who have adjusted to the status quo that the experience is actually better with fewer features (story of my work life). But, if they had the will to simplify the game somehow and get rid of some of the micromanagement without harming the nuanced cause and effect of certain choices it could be awesome. Supposedly Civ VII is coming in 2021 or 2022 so we may find out what they have in mind.
You’re likely right, which is why the solution is probably for some other studio to make a hex-based game like it called “Emperor” or something.
I don’t know, there’s a lot of special sauce in the Civ franchise. I’m sure there’s been plenty of imitators over the years. Perhaps I’m being whooshed here, but there was a game called Emperor that looks Civ like. A game that’s too derivative isn’t going to work.
I think in a world of shrinking budgets for turn-based strategy games on the PC 4K/Firaxis can probably get away with a scaled back game. It’d have to be good of course, and there will be critics, but I think the time could be right to take a crack at it.
Edit: thinking on it, it seems like there’s probably two dozen mobile games that attempt to do this already. I see the lame commercials all the time.
The Crusader Kings games do this pretty well. A big part of the game is cultivating your family line and setting up successions so your smart and healthy kid becomes the next ruler, and not the inbred one with leprosy. You’re following lineages, not nationalities, so even if your kingdom collapses, you just jump to the next surviving person in your family tree and play as them, which might be a cousin who’s a minor lord in an entirely different empire.
They’re not doing the whole, “stone age to space age,” thing though, just specifically the Medieval age.