...Rik

After playing a few rounds of Francis Tresham’s Civilization (Avalon Hill, 1982) with my co-workers, I’ve noticed two types of warfare in the game, one within the rules of the game and one between the players.

At the beginning of the game, war is what happens when people can’t eat. As I guide my civilization over the map of Mediterranean Europe, my people expand beyond my ability to keep them fed. I can either let them die of starvation, or I can send them beyond my borders into my neighbor’s lands. If there is enough food available, my people and theirs’ live in harmony. This harmony is short lived, as both civilization’s peoples keep expanding. Within the space of the game, this expansion/starvation/war cycle becomes a long war between the player’s civilizations. If I just follow the rules unemotionally, my people’s starvation does not hurt me. It’s an inefficient use of my population, but I do not need to attempt to support them. For some reason, possibly because I’m playing the game with a critical eye, I feel I need to do right by my people and make sure that no one dies. It’s also a poor strategy that creates unnecessary population. Part of the purpose of population expansion is to guide my people towards territory in which it would be beneficial to create a city (either a spot that allows a city to be built cheaply, or a spot that would serve as protection from my neighbor’s expansion if a city were there).

I’m not yet sure if the game was explicitly designed to create the second type of warfare I experienced in playing the game, as it was the result of the combination of particular game players (me and two of my co-workers) and an extended two-day play session. There are random events, ‘calamities’, that occur during the trading phases during turns. When the players have few cities, what calamities they might take will happen immediately. Once players have more cities (6 or more), calamities will occur that only happen when traded to another player. The complexity of the calamities (requiring special rules for eliminating units from the board) and the ability to ‘screw your neighbor’ during a trade by passing a calamity to the other person as a bluff card starts to create real conflict between the players. At this point, and especially during my last play session, war becomes World War – someone gets slighted, takes it out on another player’s civilization, another player gets caught in the crossfire, and all progress stops while conflict after conflict plays out on the board.

The first type of warfare seemed like today’s modern wars over resources. In this case, the resources were food and human beings. I have too little of resource A (food) and too much of resource B (people). Is this war just? Within the simulation of the game, my civilization acted like a nation-state, even though historically, the actors would likely have been more local. What’s the difference between a dictator sending soldiers to take land, and local tribes moving into neighboring ground in search of food and shelter? Are either of these actions acts of war or is it just crime? The second type of warfare, acts of aggression because of perceived differences, resembled the romanticized reasons for warfare that I’ve read about in the Illiad, or the jingoist, patriotic reasons for the Korean and Vietnam Wars (and yes, the second Iraq War as well). Was there strategic reason for causing this conflict? Could it have been avoided? The calamity trade was inevitable as the rules required it, but was war a correct (or useful) response?

In order to win the game, a player must move their civilization across the ‘Archaelogical Succession Table’ (AST) which represents the civilizations technological and cultural progress (modeled by purchasing technologies with accumulated trade and maneuvering enough population onto regions to form cities). The winner of the game is the person who reaches the end of the AST. Wars and conquests are not figured into this equation. So at first glance, Civilization might not be considered a wargame. The constant population increases and the map, however, make the game entirely about war – or at least about the hardships and conflicts that occur when resources (arable land and good locations for city formation, in this case) are scarce. If playing to win, war often doesn’t occur because one player is trying to beat another player into submission for its own sake, but because the players in conflict each need a certain area of the board in order to increase their ability to create trade.

So what is war? I’m going to try and ask myself this question after I play a wargame. Civilization leads me to think of war as organized, justified criminal activity between political actors, often as the result of unchecked expansionism. In particular, I think this is supported by how a population boom at each turn creates the potential for conflict at a civilization’s borders. The player can either let the extra tokens perish or use them as efficiently as they can to raid neighboring territory and maneuver the pieces to locations for city building. By directly linking population with military strength (all population tokens serve as both citizen and soldier), war is a natural result of expansion, growth and technological/cultural progress. It will be interesting to see how this changes with other Civilization-inspired board games.

• Sid Meier’s Civilization Mods by Rhye – Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization
  

  The most important concept behind the mod is that civilziations don't start all at the beginning of the game, but appear at different times. For instance, picking the Arabs, the game will autoplay until 620 AD, when the player will take control and find a world that may have developed in an unpredictable way.

  (tags: civilization civ4 mod bts simulation )

• Scoring Quality of Life in Civilization IV
  

  Instead of scoring the dominion of a governor, a social management videogame can be adapted to score the quality of life of the simulated persons.

  Play on a map of Iraq. The victory condition: improve Iraq's quality of life within 100 years (turns).
  (tags: civilisation civilization victory mod civ4 scoring )

• Project Diary: Red Land/Black Land | Play The Past
  Introductory post about:
  

  a serious game project … (currently in development at Michigan State University’s MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online) intended to explore ancient Egyptian history, archaeology, and culture change over time.

  I am very interested in this project and look forward to following its progress.
  (tags: history teaching civilization egypt civ5 )

• Experience Points: Critical Eyes on Civilization
  

  … there is a lot of value in Civilization. For one thing, it can give unique insight into the process by which paradigms and practices shape the reality they seek to describe. Players can even challenge dominant narratives of history. However, all this demands a critical perspective.

  Author Jorge Albor covers Civ 5's shallow model of diplomacy, control, and race/ethnicity, arguing that by modeling real world systems, the designers should be more critical about what they create (fun can be more important but accuracy, but not more important than uncritical inaccuracy).
  (tags: civilization gamestudies critique civ5 )

• Experience Points: Barbarians at the Gate
  

  The term "civilized" is never defined. With only the barbarians as a counter-point, we can only conclude that to be "civilized" is to be geographically fixed and committed to perpetual growth and expansion. Barbarism, on the other hand, may arise at any time period, fueled only by hatred towards civilization proper. Players can eradicate barbarism by force and cut off its source through territorial expansion. In fact, as the game progresses, this almost becomes inevitable. Progress is an unstoppable monolithic force.

  (tags: civilization barbarians civ5 )

• Gamer’s Bookshelf: Civilization or Rome on 640K a Day
  Troy Goodfellow describes what I feel is the best strategy guide ever made EVAR. Seriously, I cannot rave more about how much I love this book. Johnny Wilson and Alan Emrich show such a love for the game, the genre, the background material, and the developers.
  (tags: civilization strategy guide )
• Mindjack – Interview – Sid Meier
  Sid Meier on change:
  

  our biggest constraint is that everything is inter-related. To add a new element we have to design the interaction of that element with all the other systems. That was a real issue with Civ II – it had more of everything but it didn’t introduce any new systems because of that. I know it was tried but we found that the Civ system was amazingly balanced. We thought “oh we can change this, we can change that” and all of a sudden we realised we had broken the game. In Civ III we started early on we had to be very careful and thus we were able to introduce a new cultural system and new diplomacy. I think that is a stronger constraint than the expectations of what constitutes a Civ game. Most of those expectations are positive ones. We want to have the “one more turn” aspect to it and the “great leaders and great powers” aspect. We have changed some things – some people missed the terraforming and the Vikings but overall people have not complained about the changes.

  
  (tags: civilization sidmeier )

• The Ethics of Terraforming@Everything2.com
  

  From the very beginning of human history, humans have always desired to improve their physical surroundings as they see fit. The manipulation of the environment is certainly not limited to humans, however; we can see in the ways birds create nests and beavers make dams that changing the environment to suit your needs is a instinctive drive of many forms of life here on Earth.

  Which reminds me, Alpha Centuari was explicit in applying value/ethics to terraforming. Civilization gave terraforming an implicit positive value. there is never a negative effect for changing the terrain, in fact it was an 'improvement'.
  (tags: ethics terraforming sciencefiction alphacentauri )

This is the first of a series of posts examining the mechanics and systems surrounding the tiles in Civilization. I argue that the purpose of the tiles is more than just to be a source of resources, but rather that the tiles are where one of the series’ major themes are expressed: humankind’s ownership of the land

While the tiles that form the map in Civilization have changed in size and shape, they have served the same purpose in each official release of the series. The tiles contain within them everything a civilization needs to survive and win the game: the potential for food, wealth, and ‘production’.

When playing Civilization, a player’s main method of interaction with the map is to create cities in opportune locations on the map (that is, near exploitable resources) and to utilize units (settlers, workers, and engineers) to transform the tiles into more useful forms, depending on the player’s strategy. By doing so in a systematic way, the player works to generate enough resources to meet one of the victory conditions for the game. Exploitation of the tiles is a primary mechanic in the Civilization series, and because of this, the rules and options available for tile use have become more complicated with each version of the game.

Tiles in Civilization have the following basic properties
• yield resources when worked as part of a city
• be modified (‘improved’) to yield more (or different) resources
• yield a good that can be traded (Civilization 3 on?)
• apply combat modifiers based on unit placement
• be traveled upon by Air and either Sea or Land units

In this post I’ll be focusing on what makes up a title and the mechanics surrounding the first two properties in the above table.
The developers of Civilization have made available a variety of the biomes of Earth by categorizing tiles into ‘Terrain Types’. In general, drier tiles produce less food. Rockier tiles produce more production units (called ‘shields’ in the first four games). Land tiles with water produce more food and sea/ocean tiles produce wealth (via trade, it is assumed). These tiles are usually applied to the map according to an algorithm that places them at about the same latitudes as they are on Earth^[1].

When a citizen is assigned to work a tile within a city’s available area, the resources that are gained by the city are the result of calculating the effects of the base terrain, any terrain features and/or resource layers on that terrain, and any improvements that have been added to the terrain. Other factors may also modify the amounts gained, such as city improvements, Wonders owned by the city’s civilization, the current government, and the city’s civilization’s abilities.

A player need not be limited by the tiles given by ‘nature’. Land tiles can be modified by the player using a Settler (or Worker or Engineer) unit. At first, land tiles can only be improved by adding a human work to the tile (roads and railroads to improve travel and wealth/trade, irrigation to improve food production, mines to improve shield production). If when playing Civilization I or II you stumble upon an AI player after 20 or so turns, you’ll find that the AI has already constructed a network of roads and irrigation between its cities. In order to do this, the AI has been spending food units at each turn to feed a Settler while it performs the task of building these improvements. The AI’s behavior and that these basic human works are gained early on in the game shows that human improvement of the land is considered vital to a civilization’s success in the game.

In their strategy guide for Civilization I, Rome in 640K a Day^[2], authors Johnny Wilson and Alan Emrich demonstrate an interesting interpretation of the mechanics of irrigation. They cite the theory of hydraulic hypothesis, that the complexity of field irrigation created central governments, when explaining how the choice of government effects food yields for a worked tile. In Civilization I, a government under anarchy or despotism (non-legitimate central governments) cannot produce as much food from tiles as from other government systems. While the theory this mechanic is based on isn’t as well thought of in anthropology these days, it was “the first general theory advanced to explain the development of ancient civilizations with systematic organization of work on a large scale”^[3] and as such, a perfect fit with one of the first (if not the first – I’m still working on this) games in which the developers attempted to systematize the growth of civilization from prehistory to present as part of the game’s mechanics, not just as a fictive layer.

In Civilization I, the Settler unit from the outset has the ability to completely change the map to the player’s whim. Through the Irrigation command, not only can agricultural lands gain the irrigation improvement, but wooded lands (Forests, Jungles) can be changed into terrain more suitable for agriculture. The player, via use of the Settler unit and the resources of food (consumed by the Settler, taken from its home city) and time (the number of turns it takes for Settler to complete its task), can completely transform the map.

This is changed in Civilization II where terraforming of land tiles (Engineer Transformation, according to the manual and reference charts) is only possible by the Engineer unit, an advanced version of the Settler available only after research of Explosives^[4]. With each additional iteration of the series, the ability to transform the map is segmented out into additional needed technologies: ‘Plant Forests’ on Tundra is available after gaining Engineering in Civilization III, ‘Clear Forests’ after Bronze Working in Civilization IV… What results is a model of civilization growth where technology development is directly tied to the player’s ability to gain total mastery of the world (the ability to change the map to better her civilization’s chances of success).

Technological mastery has at times also introduced negative consequences to the map. An in-game industrial revolution of unchecked factory production will introduce pollution and global warming effects. I should go into more detail about how this has been modeled in a future post, but since I’m talking about terraforming, I feel this is relevant here as well (in the manuals, discussion of pollution is given as many pages as discussion of the terrain).

Pollution usually occurs in the later half of the game once cities start producing too many resources or having too large a population (in Civilization I, after the Automobile advance is reached). In the manual for Civilization II, this is explained specifically as Industrial Pollution (because of shields produced) and Smog (people, once Industrialization has been researched). Pollution can also be caused in Civilization II and III by nuclear fallout from a nuclear power plant meltdown, or by exploded nuclear arms. Designer Soren Johnson said his goal for Civilization IV was to reduce the amount of busywork for the player. Civilization‘s previous models city revolts and pollution was not fun because it involved too much repetition on the part of the player to manage. Pollution was removed from being managed on the map and subsumed into a more abstract city health system. Pollution-causing actions would contribute to this system rather than be reflected by changes to the map.

While pollution has changed between games, global warming exists throughout the series as a system that changes tiles on the map. Global warming raises the temperature of the map, destroying forests and changing terrain to desert. In Civilization I and II, whenever any nine squares are polluted, there is a chance for a global temperature rise. Once the temperature rises, even if the pollution is cleaned up, the temperature will not go down. This irreversible damage is the only place within the game where there is no way for the player to take action and ‘fix’ the map. Before an official patch for the Beyond the Sword expansion to Civilization IV, global warming was linked only to the use of nuclear arms. The players responded by creating mods that would ‘fix’ these systems, and with the official 3.17 patch for Civilization IV these fixes became canon.

For Civilizations I through III, humanity has absolute mastery over the world through technological progress. Global warming is the only thing humanity cannot fix, but can be avoided. For a brief moment, global warming was a random event in Civilization IV, unavoidable and divorced from any simulated cause, but the fans brought it back. The system of improving the land through human works and terraforming leads me to believe that a basic theme for the Civilization series is that human civilization exists to transform the world into a better place for humanity to survive, and the way that this happens is through efficient exploitation of natural resources and technological progress. We’ll see if this holds up as I work through the rest of the systems in play (combat, trade, diplomacy, etc…).

1. ^[1] A more detailed look at the random map generators for the games will be the subject of a later post ↩
2. ^[2] Long out of print, see Troy Goodfellow’s review for an understanding of why I will continually mention this book whenever I talk about Civ I ↩
3. ^[3] from a summary of a summary of Karl Wittfogel’s work, in particular his 1957 work Oriental Despotism ↩
4. ^[4] See this handy chart of the terraforming changes in Civ II ↩

When talking about the core elements of the Civilization series in the interview featured in the Chronicles of Civilization book, Soren Johnson (co-designer for Civilization III and lead designer for Civilization IV) says,

…most of the core Civ elements usually revolve around the concept of, “what tile am I founding my city on and what tiles is my city working? What does it mean to pillage this square?” All of these rules sort of build on each other so that it’s not that hard to understand what’s going on because they are all using that same underlying mechanic: the tile and the turn.

My goal for this blog is to unpack this statement. I don’t think Soren is using the word ‘mean’ the way I intend to in this blog, so it might be unfair for me to use this quote for my own purposes. For me, I want to know why it felt weird to me when I first burned down a town in Civilization IV. But I also want to know what it means within the context of the game when the tile is pillaged.

“What does it mean to… ?” is a hard question to answer definitively. Applying this question to the Civilization series will require exploring the ideas of interpretation, authorship, and meaning (or procedural rhetoric: and I’ll get back to this once I get through Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games book). So this post, and the rest, aren’t meant to be “this is what Civilization is and this is what it means, end of story” but are instead to serve as a personal exploration to figure out what it means to me. I’ve invested years of my life to this game above all others but until now I have never stepped back to figure out why I enjoy this game and what playing this game has contributed to my life and my understanding of the world.

Sid Meier has oft been quoted in interviews as saying that Civilization is not a political game or an educational game, that it’s just a piece of entertainment.^[1] More recently, however, he was quoted saying the following about his intent for making something, in the interviewer’s words, ‘more than just a “game”‘:

We tapped into the idea of learning and progress, that you would go through the game experience and come out the other end as a different person, knowing a little more about the world, and maybe knowing a little bit more about yourself.

So maybe it isn’t a stretch to ask what is the meaning behind Civilization? What is the game telling me about how the world works, how much of this am I bringing to the game as assumptions on my part, and how does the game challenge (or confirm) those assumptions?

I’m not worried so much about historical accuracy in the games. The Civilopedia (the in-game encyclopedia) was created after the game’s mechanics in order to add the flavor of fact (and not accuracy of fact). The technologies available in the first game were basically taken out of a hat (not literally – but accuracy in technology development was not a concern). What I find accurate and factual about the series is not the details of what’s spelled out in the Civilopedia, or even the correct progression of technology, but instead how Civilization models human expansion. To me, Civilization isn’t a game about history, but about anthropology.

As I examine the systems that make up a Civilization game, I will try to track the history of how that system has changed throughout the series. Once authorship of the game moved from Sid Meier and towards the fans (the lead designers for Civilizations III through V came from the fan community surrounding the previous games^[2]), additional designer bias was introduced into the games. Sid’s original ideas are still in the game; development of the series is under the constant constraint that this isn’t any game about civilization, it is Sid Meier’s Civilization. When asked about this constraint, Sid says the constraints do not stem entirely from fan expectations but “[t]o add a new element we have to design the interaction of that element with all the other systems.”

Each additional fan-designer added to the series has had to add their ideas within the original context of the existing design. Much of what I find interesting about these changes is that I tend to react very strongly to small changes. My overall experience with the series has been largely the same, from Civilization I through V. The shift to a 3D view, or the addition of religion in Civilization IV or social policies in Civilization V were large enough that I did not have to question them, I just had to learn how they worked.

The example I gave at the beginning of this blog, about pillaging villages in Civilization IV, is a small change that completely through me off when I first realized what was going on. The combination of context (the fictive label of ‘village’ or ‘town’) as well as graphical representation changed what was once the simple reduction of resources for another civilization into something with emotional gravitas. I hope that over the course of writing for this blog I will find more experiences like this with the series that will help me understand what the game means and why it means so much to me.

1. ^[1] Sorry, I’ve been trying to find a specific quote, but I’m damned if I can! ↩
2. ^[2] Soren Johnson has talked about being a fan of the series before applying to work at Firaxis, about which Sid has said that he wanted the developers of Civilization III to be fans of the game. John Shafer was a contributor to the CivFanatics community (he wrote the definitive tutorial for Python modders of Civ IV) before he was hired to develop the Beyond the Sword expansion for Civilization IV and be lead designer for Civ V ↩

• Civ IV BTS Mod: History Rewritten
  

  In History Rewritten a civilization does not necessarily represent a single ethnicity, period or nationality, but instead strives to represent the political and cultural diversity of the region and it’s people through the ages (This is a work in progress).

  Also adds new victory conditions, including ‘Inquisition’ and ‘Religious Victory’
  (tags: civilization civ4 mod history )

• Fixing the Zone of Control (Influence) » Forum Post by CariElf
  Excellent graphical explanation of why zone of control is hard to do on square grids. It is either mathematically correct, but looks wrong, or it looks correct to the player but is inaccurate.
  (tags: zone-of-control tiles )
• DESIGNER NOTES » Ancient Strategy Games
  Soren Johnson on the combat problem in the Civ games I through IV:

  Nonetheless, the simplified combat system has not been an overall success because – with infinite unit stacking and single city tiles – the game strongly encourages single-minded “island hopping” offensives, where the player concentrates their entire force on taking city A, then city B, then city C, and so on. The abstraction breaks down. Ultimately, Civ has succeeded over the years in spite of its combat system, not because of it. Overrunning knights with tanks is still enjoyable, of course, but the core fun of Civ comes from executing an over-arching strategy, not from the tactical military game.

  So, Civ V is an attempt to make combat fun and to avoid the strategy above. All players play differently however, and a con for one player (or many others in this case) was neither pro nor con for me. While I could have done the city-hopping strategy, it was ultimately a boring way to play the game. So I didn’t use it.
  (tags: civilization )

2. Smoke heavily. A pipe is excellent for making gurgling sounds when there is a slug in the stem. These sounds should be emitted only while your opponent is trying to unsnarl your last move. Don’t become overly enthusiastic when gurgling or you will suck the slug into your mouth. Not only do slugs of tobacco juice taste bad but your opponent will probably rejoice at your misfortune, and you will have nullified all your efforts to create tension. Before your snorkle gets to the juicy slug stage you can exhale gently through the stem and blow soot on the board. Naturally a foul smelling tobacco is preferred. Rubbing garlic into the bowl before stokeing up will cause even the most indifferent opponents to recoil every time you exhale. Blow smoke in your opponents eyes when he is in range. When he isn’t, blow smoke on the side of the board he is intently studying. When you finish the pipe routine bum a cigarette from him. If it’s his last one take it and mention to him that he’s running low. Talk about smoking and how good this particular butt is. This will make him want the cigarette you are smoking. If he looks longingly at your fag, blow smoke in his eyes. Sometimes it’s better to put out the cigarette after you’ve had only one or two puffs. This enables you to bum more cigarettes from him in less time and he will resent your wastefulness.

“Sage Sarge Sez” from Avalon Hill The GENERAL newsletter, volume 1, number 1 (May 1, 1964)

• Game Developer Column 12: Theme is Not Meaning (Part II)
  2nd part of Soren Johnson’s GDC2010 talk about how the ‘meaning’ of the game is found within the game mechanics (playing the game) and not the theme (the fiction the game is placed within).

  a game’s meaning springs from its mechanics and not necessarily from its theme, especially if the two are in conflict. Such a dissonance can leave players feeling lost, perhaps even cheated. Thus, designers should strive to keep the two in harmony. At the very least, they should not be fighting each other.
  …
  To touch people, the play itself needs to deliver on the theme’s promise.

  
  (tags: game-mechanics meaning )

• The State of Wargaming » Armchair General
  

  I was shocked when Panther Games, whose superb Conquest of the Aegean features the most sophisticated AI on the market, says it expects to sell just 3,000 copies (a mass market game like The Sims sells in the millions). At $50 a pop, 3,000 copies would only produce $150,000 in revenue. Panther president Dave O’Connor notes that such paltry sales can’t pay for one full-time designer, let alone the $750,000 needed even for a small six-man design team to design a cutting-edge computer wargame. He’s going to do contract work for the Australian military to make ends meet.

  In order to make wargames for pleasure, the same skills are applied to creating wargames for military purposes. I wonder how a wargame creator’s ability to create an entertaining product influences their serious simulation design, and how the simulation experience influences the commercial product.
  (tags: wargames )

• Little Wars
  Greg Costikyan’s introduction to a re-print of H.G. Wells’ rule books for his Kriegspiel:

  Wells was not striving to perfect the definitive military simulation of his day; he sought to turn “toy soldiers” into something a little more sophisticated, to produce an enjoyable pastime that male children, adolescents, and adults of carefree disposition could alike enjoy.

  This is something I need to make sure I keep in mind as I research and play wargames. Ultimately, most are created for recreational purposes first. This doesn’t mean they aren’t open for interpretation and analysis, just that in most cases, recreation and entertainment are the primary reasons for the author’s creating them.
  (tags: wargames hgwells )

• VASSAL
  

  Vassal is a game engine for building and playing online adaptations of board games and card games. Play live on the Internet or by email. Vassal runs on all platforms, and is free, open-source software.

  (tags: boardgames)

• How Beyond the Call of Duty: Gunfight! will help you as a gamer | Wolfgang Hammersmith Books
  

  When your strategy is to kill the enemy more times than they kill you, this book helps you to not only keep that in mind in the heat of battle, but gives you the strategies and tactics to consistently accomplish that objective.

  (tags: war gaming

• Gamasutra – News – Interview: Black Ops Veteran Talks Video Games And The Real World
  Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander talks to a Black Ops combat veteran about his new book of gunfight tactics, the interest he’s received from gamers — and his thoughts on how games and the real world relate.Interesting quote regarding the audience of wargames (particularly Call of Duty-style war games):

  “… what I did find in mixing with the gamers is that they were extraordinarily respectful of the service contributions, and I found that to be a surprise. I found the gaming crowd to be highly intelligent, motivated people who were excitable and thought when they asked questions.”

  In his view, the teenagers and young men and women he met while speaking at GameStop locations in the promotion of his book had more sensitivity, passion and interest than the average people he tends to encounter in that age category. “I find it a very focused response that’s very positive,” he adds.

  (tags: war gaming)

In my last post, I explained complained that the introduction of a hex grid map (as well as a 1 unit per tile limit) to Civilization V would introduce major changes in playstyle that would be counter to how the Civilization series has felt to me. In this post, I detail how the map and tiles have changed through the Civilization series, and what each change brought to the game play.

The most important unit in the Civilization series is the terrain tile. While each iteration of Civilization lauds new and more varied combat units, and while much of the fun in playing these games is researching and gaining access to these units, these units are no more than rock-paper-scissors simulators and are to me the least interesting aspect of the series. All decisions made while playing the game are based on examining how the tiles are placed, either in the map as a whole, or just those tiles in the immediate surroundings of the currently selected unit or city. When making decisions, one tile on its own is not enough information for the player. Which is why the most important element in Civilization is the map.

At the most basic level, the map is a collection of tiles which are displayed in one of three states to the player: hidden (unexplored), viewable containing old information (explored, but only representing what the tile looked like the last time the player was able to see it), and viewable containing updated information (they are close enough to a city, border or unit under control of the player). These tiles represent land and sea, the only difference between the two being that sea units only travel in the sea and land units only travel on land (air units ignore them both). All tiles have a terrain type which gives that tile a number of statistics that are constant (that is, that are constant so long as the terrain type of the tile itself is unchanged). Tiles within the influence of a city can be worked by citizens and give the city resources (units of food, production, and trade/gold). Special resources on tiles give goods and/or increased resource units, depending on the version of the game. On top of each terrain tile are tile improvements that modify the base statistics. The player (and her opponents) create and destroy tile improvements over the course of playing the game. Tile improvements modify the number of resource units that are available when the tile is worked. Certain units (Settlers/Engineers) are also able to terraform the land, permanently changing the terrain type of the tile.

The map serves as the primary communicator of information to the player. Through analysis of the map, the player makes decisions about where to build her cities. Much of this analysis is decoding the terrain types on the map to ensure that the city is able to draw as many resources as possible (and of the type that is needed) from the land. Strategic placement of cities also creates borders, and hence territorial control of the entire landmass. The simulation used to determine borders has changed through the years, but all games share one border formation aspect in common: as the city grows, its sphere of influence and control grows. Well placed cities cause these spheres to connect the cities together. In Civilization I, population size was the sole generator of territory size and control. Civilization III added cultural control of territory, where tiles not immediately adjacent to any of the player’s cities could be considered owned by her civilization if the nearest city’s culture index was high enough. But in either case, the size and shape of the tiles plays a major role in how borders are created and how cities should be placed.

In Civilization I, the tiles are rectangular; not quite square, they are a bit taller than they are wide. In Johnny Wilson and Alan Emrich’s Sid Meier’s Civilization, or Rome on 640K a Day, the authors calculate each tile to be about the size of New England, 497 miles tall and 311 miles wide. They base this estimate on the map’s size of 50 tiles high by 80 tiles wide and the assumption that if the map were a Mercator projection, the Earth’s true equator and polar meridian circumferences could be used to arrive at this estimate. This scale is useful to understand how the world map works, and gives a good reason for multiple units can filling the same space, and why cities should be placed as close together as possible (with no more than 4 tiles between each other).

Due to the rectangular shape of the tiles, units traveling on the map in Civilization I covered more distance using fewer movement points by traveling diagonally. When having the computer instruct a unit’s movement using the ‘Go to’ order, the computer used as best it could this diagonal movement, but would also take into account the terrain types lying between the origin and target points – whether mountains and jungles would restrict movement by requiring additional movement points, or if roads and railroads existed to reduce the movement points needed to traverse the tile. The algorithm used to place resources and hidden villages on the maps in Civilization I also formed across diagonal patterns.

Possibly because of the hidden diagonal nature of the map, Civilization II adopted an isometric view of the map, at about 45 degree angle. The tiles then became rhombuses. What was the best way to travel, diagonally, now because of the angle of the map and shape of the tiles, becomes movement across the compass points. This isometric style of map was carried over in Civilization III and modified to show not just that tiles were owned by a city, but to show the cultural borders of civilizations (tiles under influence by the civilization but not close enough to a city to be worked on).

Civilization IV gave the option of either an isometric or regular map, but the tiles appear to be regular squares, although the same 1.41x distance covered for diagonal movement still exists. The camera is placed at an angle from the map, similar to a ‘real time strategy’ game like Warcraft III. The player can zoom out until the map is shown as a sphere, or zoom in until only a few tiles are visible. In each case, the diagonal lines feel more natural than in the previous games. As the shortest distance for a line on a sphere is a curve, it almost makes sense that the shortest distance on the map is a diagonal line.

Each iteration of Civilization has changed aspects about how the map was displayed, but until Civilization V, there were a few key constants that were unchanged. The map was built of quadriangular tiles (rectangles, rhombi, or squares) allowing movement in 8 directions. Diagonal movement was favored compared to rectilinear movement. Each tile could support any number of units. Minor changes of each of these aspects caused changes in game play: best strategies for city placement, shortest distances for unit movement, and distribution of resources in map creation. Hex grids will fix some of this. Movement along a hex grid reduces the available directions to 6 angles, but diagonal and rectilinear movement are equal.

One aspect in which Civilization V will be a return to form is the return of Zone of Control. Civilizations I and II had a system in place where a unit could not move from a tile adjacent to an enemy into another tile also adjacent to the enemy unit. Correctly showing zone of control is hard on a square grid. You either choose mathematical correctness, or player correctness. Zone of control was removed for Civilization III because in its place was added the concept of cultural borders. Before cultural borders, the only way to prevent enemy units from wandering through territory that was not in direct control of a city was to fortify a border using units. The adjacent tile rule would prevent enemies from crossing perceived borders without being forced to declare war.

Zone of control, one unit per tile, and hex grids have all been added to Civilization V in order to ‘fix combat’ (evidently combat was broken in Civilizations I through IV). Over the past years of play I have been blissfully unaware of this. To me, combat was difficult and lasted for what seemed like forever. So I never used it unless I had to. With Civilization V, combat has been designed to be useful and interesting. In the previous games, combat has always been terrible and devastating. Armies, the ‘stack of doom’, were representative of how war has always felt to me: an expensive way of sending a bunch of people to their death (ostensibly the death of their target, but that wasn’t guaranteed). I never really attempted combat in this way, as offensive strategies (especially in the late game) were just boring. The new strategic implementation of warfare will truly turn Civilization into a wargame. I might actually play at war this time.

• Gaming the Kill Chain – COLUMNS – Current Intelligence
  Compares reactions to the games Six Days in Fallujah (never released), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), and Medal of Honor (2010):Based on these reactions, the author comes to the conclusion:

  It’s important to remember that all forms of wargaming are ultimately simulations, and that the parameters of these “models” shouldn’t be confused with actual conflict. Perhaps any attempt to adequately frame the sociocultural and ideological complexities of wars-in-progress within an immersive mass market medium are doomed.

  My opinion: the general public is not yet ready to accept that video games as a form of entertainment could possibly approach a controversial subject like war with any amount of respect. Films like Platoon, The Hurt Locker, and Saving Private Ryan are allowed to depict war graphically and while challenged but not openly condemned. Video games are immediately condemned before release.
  (tags: gaming ethics wargaming )

• Conquest, Plunder and Tyranny: Explaining Dubious Morality in Strategy Games « Matchsticks for my Eyes
  

  Why do we play strategy games in ways that, in real life, would land us in the dock for crimes against humanity?

  In response to the Three Moves Ahead podcast about ethics of wargaming. The author gives an explanation by means of explaining why war is successful (in both historical and gameplay context).
  (tags: ethics wargaming 4x )

• Three Moves Ahead Episode 88: Ethics, Morality and Motivation
  Strategy game podcast. This episode features Michael Abbot and is about “ethical and moral dimension of wargames and wargaming.” In particular, they are talking about the ethics of playing wargames, and not necessarily the ethical systems in the games themselves.
  (tags: ethics wargames wargaming )
• Assassin’s Creed and the appropriation of history | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  

  Assassin’s Creed has proven that historical games don’t need to be literary or intellectually worthy. The games are smart and engaging, they pique your curiosity about the Templars and the nobles of the Renaissance, but they don’t shove it down your throat.

  While I agree historical games need not be intellectual masterpieces, when crafting an alternate history (or using a historical setting for more than just superficial dressing) it is important to first be accurate before introducing fantasy. The designers and artists had to visit the locations and explore the history in order to anchor their story in rich, immersive details.
  (tags: history games )

• Aide de Camp II
  Play-by-email board game conversion system for Windows
  (tags: pbem boardgame gaming wargames to-hex )
• CyberBoard
  Play-by-email (PBEM) board gaming system for Windows.
  (tags: pbem boardgame gaming wargames )