#Civilisation game how to
#Civilisation game series

Here are some examples: horses are a new addition to the Americas, having arrived with European settlers and then gradually permeated throughout the continent. After all wasn’t anthropology founded in accordance with this idea? But therein lies the problem, the idea of a single evolutionary ladder was the founding assumption of the discipline, an assumption that quickly ran into all sorts of problems. Or look at Crusader Kings II that had a whole expansion (Sunset invasion) premised on the notion of the Aztec Empire invading and colonizing Europe.īut, you might argue, even if social evolutionism is offensive it might nonetheless be right, a harsh truth we need to come to terms with about “human nature”. The implicit argument, even if unintentional, is that “we” are all playing the same game, you just sucked at it. So hopefully it’s clear why it’s so heinously offensive to present day indigenous populations such as the Poundmaker Cree to be featured in games like Civilization. The rest of the game sees them destroy it.

Those early turns players like put them into contact with difference. Make the world homogenous, make the world boring. This is easier to perceive in tech trees, but it’s also true of those two other Xs: expand, exterminate.

#Civilisation game how to

Effectively your only decisions are how to advance through a predetermined trajectory culminating with “us”, 'the US”.

#Civilisation game series

Games are supposedly a series of interesting decisions, but one of the dirty tricks of social evolution is to obfuscate political decisions under the guise of progress. Now I don’t believe there is one single reason for this, but I would argue that this evolutionary worldview is a reason. Or rather, until you quit the game because you’re bored.Īs Civ 5 dev Jon Shafer has noted, nobody finishes Civ games. The first city being built you start transforming the surrounding environment, researching technologies and expanding until, by the end, you achieve hegemony over the world. All Civ games begin with a settler unit, and your first choice is where to settle, to become sedentary. The closer you are to “us”, the more you have progressed. But what is progress in an historical 4X game? To be blunt, it’s the elimination of difference. Even non-historical 4X games feature uniform tech trees, they just use the present as a starting point and not an endpoint. And what do we find in most historical 4X games? A largely uniform tech tree that all factions will progress through in a unilateral direction.