What I’ve learned from playing Civilization for the last year-and-a-half

2004.07.11 — Culture | Games | by Wegal Pinsky

For Christmas a year-and-a-half ago, I got all the usual things for a man of my age (34)—tube socks, underwear, another replacement for my endless line of lost pocket knives, a Dave Matthews CD, etc. But I also got a computer game called Civilization III. I had greedily run through a variety of "first person shooter" games in the past, but this was my first "turn-based strategy" game. I did not know what I was in for.

After all the Christmas day activities wound down, I finally got to try out my new game. This was a new kind of challenge for me, and I was determined to learn what it was all about. I dove in with all the enthusiasm of a youngster trying to assemble their own new bicycle. I did not look up again from the computer until my wife came downstairs for breakfast the next morning.

Wife, surprised: "Have you been playing that all night?"

Me, grinning stupidly: "This game is way cool."

That next evening I was excited to sit down again and pick up right where I had left off. My wife went upstairs to bed and then, next thing I know, she is coming back down the stairs; it was morning again. Hmmm. Now, for some people, this is nothing unusual. But let me tell you, in all my five years of college, I had never stayed up two nights in a row for anything.

Although I stopped the all-nighters, I still played voraciously for the rest of my Christmas vacation. This was typical of me even with the Doom-type games of the past. The difference with Civilization was, even when you played it out to the end, which took many hours, you had only played one variation. The geography selections you made at the beginning of a new game (map size, land to water ratio, etc.) and which civilization you chose to play (Rome, Greece, Aztecs, Germans, etc.) combined with the randomization of opponents and resources and disturbingly good artificial intelligence to make every game unique.

Over the course of several months, I got better, and so, notch by notch, I increased the difficulty level, until I reached "Emperor." At this level something happened. Amazingly, you were not faced simply by more foes. Instead, the AI changed, the foes gained unfair advantages, and I gained disadvantages. The game changed perceptibly. Strategies that I had honed over countless hours of play were rendered useless. I was decimated time after time.

It was infuriating, and yet victory seemed tantalizingly possible. I played it again and again. And then, like some hapless Bad News Bears rightfielder, I found the fly ball in my mitt. What had I done? How had I done it? It didn't matter. At that moment, the victory was sublime.

During many more months of playing at Emperor level, I went through many oscillating phases of cursing my foolishness and celebrating my supremacy, all within the confines of the game. I put the game away for long periods, but always, eventually brought it back out.

During all this time, I marveled increasingly at the game's designers. This game seemed to model real-world behavior so accurately that I felt like I should put it on my resume and run for political office (at least in my supremacy phases).

"Mr. Pinsky is an accomplished long-term strategist and large-project manager, consistently succeeding at Civilization III at 'Emperor' level."

Eventually, I reached a point where, even on the "Emperor" difficulty level, I could typically win in the end as long as I had a good "beginning" to the game. I started playing a new game every night on the smallest maps, the goal being to reach a point within 2 or 3 hours where I could reasonably determine that I "could" win if I played it out.

So now I needed a new fix. I purchased expansion packs, which included a game editor that allowed me to experiment with changing the rules, changing the behavior of civilizations, changing and adding new units (types of soldiers, ships, etc.). Heroin, baby.

Today, I'm still tweaking my early game and waiting for Doom 3 to come out, which I hope will be my Methadone. For posterity's sake though, and as part of my own 12-step program, I have compiled a short list of things that I've learned from playing Civilization III for a year-and-a-half.

Drum roll please....

• Attacking something is at least 3 times more expensive than defending it.
• Building something is ten times more expensive than tearing it down.
• Preparation is a great leveler.
• Giving a potential enemy something they need only guarantees that they have more potential.
• When a situation degrades into hostilities, the very slimmest of margins in the behavior of two peers can make one of them your ally and the other of them your enemy.
• Diplomacy is relatively cheap.
• Alliances always fail at the worst possible time.
• If you are the biggest and strongest, then sooner or later everyone will despise you. Second is the most comfortable position to be in.
• You never know what kind of thing you could become addicted to until you're addicted to it.

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