Sid meier s civilization for windows

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Sid Meier’s Civilization was a watershed for the 4x genre before the genre even had its present name. While there had been earlier games that incorporated many of the features, such as conquest, tech trees, and city management, Sid Meier’s landmark game brought them all together and with the necessary oomph and flair to appeal to a large demographic beyond just wargamers that gave it a staying power as one of the most dominant and recognizable PC franchises in history.

The premise is simple but has become timeworn: you take a faction from Stone Age primitivism to either global conquest or interplanetary colonization. You research technologies, which allow you to build better units and new city improvements. You’re presented with opportunities for peace and trade or war and conquest.

Advances are less linear than RTS games and improvements are permanent [unlike, say, Age of Empires, where you play multiple scenarios with your civilization and start essentially from scratch each time]. This gives you a bit of flexibility in your strategy, though there’s only a limited amount of optimization—it’s not rock-paper-scissors; units progress with each era in a straight-forward manner—it’s more about when you get one of one type over one of the other. The biggest strategic factor is Civilization’s signature “Wonders of the World” improvement; these unique city projects are as numerous as they are expensive, so building them all yourself is next to impossible on any reasonable challenge difficulty.

One of the notable aspects of Civilization was the rather motley and incongruous crew of historical figures used to represent each faction. Choices of leaders are less puzzling here than in later installments, perhaps, but it must have been a programmer’s sick joke to make Mahatma Gandhi a bullying warmonger.

Civilization has some interesting world creation settings, which I strongly suggest you use, because the Earth map for it is absolutely terrible (crowded, poorly scaled, and god help you if you picked the English, who are stuck on an island).

Civilization is bright and colorful and is a fairly casual play compared to later installments. One can easily get an entire game in over the course of one late night or a lazy weekend.

Review By P. Alexander

The legendary game of the Civilization series, it defined a new genre of turn based strategy.

When Sid Meier’s Civilization was released in 1991, it single-handedly changed the strategy video game market forever. Its format has since been copied by a number of ‘turn-based’ games, and the basic plot of the game was to build an empire. Once this had been successfully established, the aim of the game was to get your civilization to grow and flourish.

The game itself covered a wide period of history, stretching from the prehistoric ages to the futuristic development of Outer Space. This included an in-depth look into the Ancient Greeks, as well as detailed gameplay that covered the Roman Empire. This variety of content was enough to keep players hooked on this gaming classic for countless hours — the publisher was also ultimately responsible for the Sim City series of games across a number of different platforms.

One of the greatest games ever made for a computer, and also one of the most addicting. Civilization launched the entire franchise. It is, quite simply, a master work.

That said… Civilization 1 is brutal and broken. Expect no mercy as the computer flagrantly cheats to make up for AI limitations when playing on higher difficulty levels. There are also a great many events that happen in the game that lack explanation (in fact the game doesn’t even tell you they are happening). One example of this is your civilizations production getting cut in half as soon as 1 A.D. hits.

Also, beware «stacks of doom», in which 20+ powerful units can occupy the same square, becoming neigh invincible. Unit strength is VERY relative… chariots can beat tanks. In Civ 1 these things do happen….

Patches

• Patch 474.03 (01.04.1992) : several errors are fixed, the balance has been corrected, the ability to rename cities, etc. has been added
• Patch 474.04 (21.07.1992) : install after patch 3.0
• Patch 474.05 (13.10.1992) : fix bug when hovering advisors. Beta version of the patch, the final version did not work