I know you're being glib, but no, it's the opposite. Without it we'd still be in continuous war and likely a bit backward, comparatively. Not that we have forsaken war, but we more or less need it to keep the barbarians at bay and spread your vision of not-war.
Well, that's not entirely fair. Sure, civilization has largely made mankind more peaceful, but Progress is still driven by violence. There was even a link on here recently about how the relationship between war and civilization.
A state of natural chaos, sure, but not war. War is a product of human society, prior to civilization we only had the state of nature which while just as brutal as a war would be quite different...
Ummm... monkeys and chimps are not in the same family, let alone the same species. One might as well say that humans "genocide" chickens.
Tribes of neolithic humans occasionally attacked and killed each other, but it was about something real, like the survival of their families. Civilization has given us kings and armaments manufacturers, who have us kill and die over bullshit like "God" and "freedom".
While the military-industrial complex is a thing, most armed conflict can be abstracted as resource exploitation or contention expressed as territorialism. Religion and ideology is just a convenient cassus belli.
As the Lesser Bonapartes podcast puts it, "The in-group always has a problem with... those people."
...most armed conflict can be abstracted as resource exploitation...
This might be true, but invariably it is massive excessive exploitation by the ruling class, rather than e.g. "we'd like to hunt in that creek bottom so we can eat some meat."
Not to get offbase but... people's belief systems are pretty "real" to them. Just think of the "fairness" belief system. Or you believe in oppression and others believe in not being oppressed -whatever oppression might mean.
It is one thing to act fairly, and expect others with whom one has direct contact to act fairly. It is a quite different thing to invent any interest in the fairness of situations twenty miles or more away. Civilization is definitely to blame for that.
I feel at a constant state of almost war from the first time I meet any civilization in the game. I both fear and look forward to the war actually starting.
Also projecting from a sphere to a plane at the same time as they're dealing with the rough resolution. If I had to guess NZ was dropped to make the Pacific ocean feel more appropriately vast.
Civ2's world map has New Zealand. And Hawaii, for that matter. Playing the world map is pretty boring anyway, the AI civs are fairly clueless on it when compared to how they play on randomly generated worlds.
Hashtable lookups are O(1). What are you complaining about? If they did this in plain C they'd probably end up using binary search trees and then everything would be slower.
> On the other hand, a game like Europa Universalis, which boasts many more variables than Civilization, has remained even more niche because it is too realistic. It is too constrained by history (or at least history as imagined by the game’s designers) and the innumerable details needed to render such an exhaustive vision of the past.
EUIV is more niche than Civilization because it's got a steeper learning curve, not because it's too constrained by history.
The article also makes the odd claim of Civ being so mutable, because most games of Civ run very similarly to each other, whereas you can actually do quite different gameplays in EUIV.
Civ was a revolutionary game, but the last couple of refreshes have been pretty ho-hum. I'm clearly in the minority, though - Civ was one of the most-played games in terms of live user count on Steam.
Yes, the changes were more or less cosmetic. Funny thing is that latest, more pronounced changes came from Endless Legend (multi tile cities are the most visible to me)
I wish they would get off their asses in the AI department. It is pretty lacking and playing with humans is obviously a massive drag (difference of skill levels, sheer amount of time for a single game)
I play on prince and usually steamroll everything. When I try king the AI cheats so hard at the start it's just a massive turnoff for me...
> I play on prince and usually steamroll everything. When I try king the AI cheats so hard at the start it's just a massive turnoff for me...
A lot of games do that cop-out for level difficulty, though. Higher difficulty doesn't make the AI smarter or more cunning, it just lets them break the rules progressively more or gives them a score multiplier. More like a handicap system then "levels of difficulty". It's probably easier to program.
That's a pretty useful analogy; it made me think of a chess game where the author isn't sure of how to write a strong AI, so the higher difficulty still has you play against a relatively weak AI but you have to give up some of your pawns or pieces.
The article has some very interesting background on Meier's thinking about and research of history that affected the game design, and experts' analyses of the game
Regarding the author's own analysis, he writes,
> Meier has no formal training as a historian
But what expertise does the author have? All the article says is,
> Kanishk Tharoor is the author of Swimmer Among the Stars, a forthcoming collection of short fiction from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the presenter of the BBC radio series “Museum of Lost Objects.”
But I think he had the right problem solving approach, and that led him to make the right questions and get the information he needed. That was the key.
> He studied at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa with BAs in History and Literature, and at Columbia, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies.
I think Civ is a survivor from an era in which there was still more exploration around game genres. Meaning that now the industry has converged towards what risk aversion through sticking to what is known to be commercially viable.
I think there was no precedent to make a game like Civ. You could mention board games, or simulation games like Simcity, but Civ is vastly different, gives you a lot of knobs to play with and that makes very, very risky.
I admire Sid for his courage and being able to pull it off to the extent of the franchise it is today. I play Civ daily.
I've played some indie games. I think generally speaking they are creative, e.g: superhot, braid, etc... But I would enjoy seeing something that radically departs from known genres, or incurs into more abstract stuff.
On contrary, I wanted to do that but there's tons of indie games. There's both a filtering and financial problem to exploring them enough to catch everything. Some minimal exploration might still get most of the great ones using careful attention to reviews for the filtering part. I'm not sure what the resulting cost is.
Just remember when claiming that both the sheer number of indie games and the fact that many gamers can only afford a few games a year.
Indie isn't really a genre. It's a classification of small players in all genres. There's only so many AAA titles in each genre coming out from established groups. I can easily track them plus people probably know people playing them. The indie and non-indie but budget games are much higher in number. Harder to track them.
There were games like Master of Magic (iirc) which in practice have a lot of the same ingredients, so to say that there wasn't precedent is not really correct. Civ is a better game, but to say that there was no precedents is simply wrong.
I see, thanks for the clarification. I need to try it then.
So far from what I've read, Sid borrowed inspiration from board games such as Risk, as well as his own experience developing defense related simulation software.
"What can be fairly read into the game? Civilization players have noted certain telling omissions in its historical arc. Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series. "
If I remember correctly, in Civ 5 you could pop slavery to rush early wonders. Am I remembering wrong? Or maybe that was Civ 4.
Wait 5 onward doesn't have slavery? The last civ I played was 4 and that bit from the article has been quoted twice now in the comments, had me very confused.
Not sure what the ability to capture enemy builders/settlers and use them to build your roads should be considered. This has been in every single main civ game as far as I know.
It was kind of a vague notion of slavery; you could use population to hurry production. But, there are many things that cause population loss, and so it looked kinda like any other mechanism that lost population. Then again, one could say that every element of civ is just some number in memory being assigned meaning.
It represents differences between forms of government. The transition between a slave-owning civilisation and not is significant, and slavery was a substantial factor in world trade and some important historical conflicts.
I love Civilization and am enjoying this article. However one thing jumped out at me:
> What can be fairly read into the game? Civilization players have noted certain telling omissions in its historical arc. Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series. There are no Dark Ages and no Black Deaths.
"[Many] modern scholars who study the era tend to avoid the term ["Dark Ages"] altogether for its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate for any part of the Middle Ages"
Just thought it was interesting that someone stepping forward to correct the record appears to have some historical blind spots of their own.
even if there aren't hard coded dark ages on the game, you can absolutely get into a bad state where you stop really progressing for centuries at a time, because of war, or running out of resources, or barbarians, etc.
I still remember a moment when, as Rome, I realized that the barbarians at my gate were stopping me from progressing in culture and science. That was oddly poignant.
Eh, the fact that historians have revised downwards how nasty the early middle ages were as they've learnt more about it does not mean the label "dark ages" has lost its utility. For one it does somewhat convey the decline in trade and population in a way "early middle ages" does not, which is useful when exemplifying periods of decay in history for a popular audience.
Effectively, everybody in a Civ game is a slave. All of your units do exactly what you tell them to do, all the time. All of your workers in your cities work exactly where you tell them to, and build exactly what you want. It's a Soviet central planner's wet dream.
Colonization also had some mechanics that were sort of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge towards slavery. There was a convict class of settlers, and there were also "converted" natives that you could acquire. If you had missionaries in their settlements, once in a while some religious converts would come over freely. Or you could attack their settlements, which generated lots of "converts"
Not quite. In civ 5. If your happiness gets pretty bad you cities will start spawning rebel units. Revolts can happen and entire cities might even switch sides to a different civ with a preferred ideology.
Its pretty rare for a human player to have to deal with that though.
Civilization 6 is fantastic with it, when you capture a pre-industrial civilization city defended with musketeers or crossbowmen with your modern civilization using tanks and planes, but don't take good care of it immideatly, they can spawn tanks as rebellion forces.
This was outside the Sid Meier series, but Civilization: Call to Power had a Slaver unit, a stealth unit which could capture enemy citizens from their city.
Also, in Civilization 6, from what I've read, the Aztec "Eagle Warrior" unit has an ability to "turn defeated enemy units into Builders". I think the subtext is clearly that the defeated units are enslaved, though it's curious that they don't say so. I do suspect that they don't highlight the subject because players might find it unpleasant.
"Dark Age" certainly doesn't mean the whole Middle Ages -- Petrarch was (a) an ass and (b) writing in what was still the Middle Ages -- but I think that modern historians try to minimize how much really was lost in late antiquity and the "Viking Age" after Charlemagne. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization discusses the first of these periods; A History of Private Life has some interesting discussion of the second, and there was a memorable discussion of the Viking Age in the Archdruid Report blog not long ago. The Archdruid Report's author put it this way, more or less: "a dark age is a time in which the memory of what was lost, is lost."
As for slavery, I object to how Civ makes it almost inevitable; at least back in Civ 4, you underperform for the whole game if you don't work your people to death in the Classical period. Disease definitely needs a larger part in the game as well...
I'd also argue for food insecurity and Malthusian limits (as in reaching the carrying capacity of an ecosystem -- or surpassing that carrying capacity, damaging the whole thing, and producing great mobs of the starving and desperate who'll eagerly listen to anyone who tells them who to kill to fix their problems) being conspicuous by their absence. Population growth wasn't all upside in the long ages that had neither the Haber process nor Norman Borlaug's hybrids...
But then, I've heard that an early version of Civ 1 tried to depict the rise and fall of civilizations, but players hated the fall part, so they just made it rise and rise. The mass market doesn't pay to feel uncomfortable...
Civ hid the Malthusian limits behind the accumulation of food units in the granary. What was stranger was that starving cities for a few turns (as often happened after capturing a large city) tended to improve happiness, as the unhappy citizens died off.
You can argue slavery is going on the whole time in civilization. It's not like your workers or armies can decide to stop working for you on their own.
Civ seems to basically survive on its ability to capture the imagination, but doesn't offer much in terms of strategic depth, competitive multiplayer, or verisimilitude. It feels like it's open to a disruption by a more adventurous indie offering, same as Cities: Skylines did to Simcity.
Civ is really a turn-based grand-strategy combined with rpg-esque Skinner-box elements. I enjoy it when I play, but I don't pretend it's deep. Games like that are all about "yay, I unlocked a new goodie!" and "numbers must go up so I can make more numbers go up" more than deep planning.
Personally I would recommend Crusader Kings 2 as a good intro to the deeper grand strategies. It's more limited in scope regarding time frame however there's far more detail and politics involved.
Is it easier to get into than Europa Universalis IV?
In EUiV I have started the tutorial several times, and everytime I get stuck moving some armies or so, because it oesn't seem to work the way the tutorial showed just seconds before.
Both games are made by the same company and have a similar feel. EUIV has a high learning curve but is very fun once you get a hang of it. There are play-throughs you can watch on YouTube or Twitch, which I'd argue are more informative than the tutorial.
Both are quite similar although CK2 is definitely easier to learn how to play. It's far more geared around interpersonal relationships than EU4 which I've always found more compelling.
I tend to prefer a smaller scale - I played the hell out of Advanced Wars back in the day, which impressed me with its strategic play despite the cutesy Nintendo styling and comparatively simplistic list of actions.
C:S doesn't really deepen over Simcity, that was more a case of EA flying Simcity into the ground with a whole set of unpopular design decisions.
I think both depth and verisimilitude are limited by the desire to make it possible to complete the sweep of history in a reasonable amount of time while still having the player micromanage most things.
I loved the first Civs and then Alpha Centauri, but since Civ 4 I haven't been a fan.
I feel as if they've tried too hard to incorporate RTS elements, ie. you need X units at this point, or else the enemies will attack you. Now you need to research X/min, or else you'll fall behind, etc. It became too rigid.
I think they lost something from Alpha Centauri, where victory could be had with a large range of playstyles. If you held back you didn't automatically get attacked. You could overwhelm with units, small units, or go for odd strategies like adding water survivability, then nuke everyone to raise the water level. You could affect the weather, make super cities with tons of crawlers, or place a regular close grid of a ton of cities.
Apart from that the game had a lot of atmosphere, unlike for example Beyond Earth.
This article spends time attempting to portray the 'wrong' about Civilization, but it still comes off as more interesting background about the game's creators than remorse about Western views. Then the last paragraph ends on a very low note, way too low to be supported by the rest. Still an enjoyable read, but damn it didn't need to come crashing down!
I definitely feel like the author was trying to write a very different article.
An article about the way that Meier's western-centric view of history caused the system he implemented to have interesting systematic biases that limit the set of behaviors that can be simulated in interesting and unexpected ways, Zizek-style, would have been interesting. But this isn't that article; mentioning the lack of dark ages and the enlightenment grand-narrative view of progress as a game mechanic doesn't deliver, since it's crit 101 stuff that anybody would immediately notice.
The author should have probably recognized that the article wasn't the one she intended to write, & eliminated the points that didn't add to its organic form, rather than trying to force it into the intended form. But, its flaws don't detract enough to justify not posting it or reading it.
One thing bugs me about this article. There is no acknowledgement of the "Civilization" board game that MicroProse licensed for the game. They are very different designs, but I suspect the board game influenced the early tech tree and the challenge of civil disorder from over population.
Civilization is a great game, maybe the best computer strategy game of all time. But I think it's namesake deserves a mention.
It's probably folly to expect games, even very rich history-based games like Civilization, to be accurate on every detail, even big details, like slavery. Everything gets boiled down to a number (+2 culture, 15% combat strength in friendly territory, etc.), anyway, so it's kind of arbitrary which real world elements find their way in as one of those numbers. Slavery has been in Civs in the past, where it could be used to trade population and happiness for hammers (rushed production).
That said, I miss some of the mechanics in earlier Civ games. Civ IV, with all expansions, is still my favorite of the Civs (though I haven't played Civ VI, yet, and won't until the Linux version arrives), partly because it was so complex. On the whole, Civ games are far more educational than the average video game, even "educational" games. If you dig into the Civilopedia and look past the numbers in memory (e.g. Stonehenge is +5 faith, and pyramids are free workers and faster tile improvement, but also have real world history).
But, I don't expect Civ games to be "realistic"; I mean, I wouldn't suggest that pyramids were used to store grain because I saw that pyramids in Civ II/III and FreeCiv provided a granary in every city (effectively providing food storage in every city). Though I guess if a presidential candidate can make that mistake, it's not so unreasonable to think people are considering Civ games a reliable source of historic information.
I was hoping Beyond Earth would be the new Alpha Centauri, but most reviewers have been lukewarm, at best, about it, so I still haven't bought it. I figure I'll wait until it's available really cheap on a Steam sale, and then give it a try. It'll probably tide me over until the Linux port of Civ VI arrives.
If you played Alpha Centauri and liked any aspect in it then I wouldn't get Beyond Earth that aspect has probably been cut from Beyond Earth (I have played both)
Complaints about Civ's omission of the dark side of history ring hollow to me. Civ is, at its heart, a deeply aspirational and optimistic game. Watching the Baba Yetu intro from Civ IV[1] gives me the same sense of wonder and pride in humanity that Chris Hadfield's rendition of Space Oddity[2] does. Dwelling on the darkness in our history would be so discordant for a game like Civ.
In it he explained how Civilization tested random negative events that could shape your world. He mentioned how this had a negative effect on the player experience and many times people would just grab a past save to avoid them IIRC.
>Agreed; the point of the game is to make you feel like a God.
I would actually disagree. There are plenty of power fantasies, most notably the spectacle fighter genre, which seek to make you feel powerful. Civ isn't about that.
Civ makes you feel purposeful. You nurture and grow your civilization, not for personal aggrandizement but for a feeling of progress and accomplishment. Your goal is not to be the most powerful ruler, but to have the greatest civilization. Human achievement and ambition is the theme of the game.
I agree. I tell people about some of the things I've had to do in Crusader Kings 2 and they are horrified. Civilization 6 is a history themed 4x strategy game, not some hyper realistic history simulator.
The original Rome: Total War felt similar. You can't have enough sanitation to keep a truly enormous city happy, so what to do?
Well, knock the population down. How? Either raise taxes until they revolt and then put them to the sword, or move plague carriers into the city to keep things in check.
That was a properly dark game, and I'm glad Civ isn't.
The Civ intros are an impressive display of the game's whole aesthetic. Beyond Earth disappointed me in a lot of ways, but starting it up and feeling like it was a 'next step' from the history of Civ was beautiful.
The voiced quotes for each tech in Civ V were downright haunting for me, and I'm pleased to see the game kept so bright. Even the military quotes strayed to optimism like "Happy are those whose walls already rise."
Article implies that capitalism & communism are of the same domain (ideologies), no they are not. Capitalism is an economic system, communism is a political system. Apples and oranges.
101 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12798058
Tribes of neolithic humans occasionally attacked and killed each other, but it was about something real, like the survival of their families. Civilization has given us kings and armaments manufacturers, who have us kill and die over bullshit like "God" and "freedom".
While the military-industrial complex is a thing, most armed conflict can be abstracted as resource exploitation or contention expressed as territorialism. Religion and ideology is just a convenient cassus belli.
As the Lesser Bonapartes podcast puts it, "The in-group always has a problem with... those people."
Should just be one "s": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casus_belli
This might be true, but invariably it is massive excessive exploitation by the ruling class, rather than e.g. "we'd like to hunt in that creek bottom so we can eat some meat."
https://longreadsblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/civilizati...
http://worldmapswithout.nz/
Considering the resolution they were dealing with, I'd say they did a pretty decent job with that map.
https://www.facebook.com/DoesNewZealandExist/
EUIV is more niche than Civilization because it's got a steeper learning curve, not because it's too constrained by history.
The article also makes the odd claim of Civ being so mutable, because most games of Civ run very similarly to each other, whereas you can actually do quite different gameplays in EUIV.
Civ was a revolutionary game, but the last couple of refreshes have been pretty ho-hum. I'm clearly in the minority, though - Civ was one of the most-played games in terms of live user count on Steam.
I wish they would get off their asses in the AI department. It is pretty lacking and playing with humans is obviously a massive drag (difference of skill levels, sheer amount of time for a single game)
I play on prince and usually steamroll everything. When I try king the AI cheats so hard at the start it's just a massive turnoff for me...
A lot of games do that cop-out for level difficulty, though. Higher difficulty doesn't make the AI smarter or more cunning, it just lets them break the rules progressively more or gives them a score multiplier. More like a handicap system then "levels of difficulty". It's probably easier to program.
Regarding the author's own analysis, he writes,
> Meier has no formal training as a historian
But what expertise does the author have? All the article says is,
> Kanishk Tharoor is the author of Swimmer Among the Stars, a forthcoming collection of short fiction from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the presenter of the BBC radio series “Museum of Lost Objects.”
> He studied at Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa with BAs in History and Literature, and at Columbia, where he was a FLAS fellow in Persian and South Asian studies.
I think there was no precedent to make a game like Civ. You could mention board games, or simulation games like Simcity, but Civ is vastly different, gives you a lot of knobs to play with and that makes very, very risky.
I admire Sid for his courage and being able to pull it off to the extent of the franchise it is today. I play Civ daily.
Just remember when claiming that both the sheer number of indie games and the fact that many gamers can only afford a few games a year.
If I remember correctly, in Civ 5 you could pop slavery to rush early wonders. Am I remembering wrong? Or maybe that was Civ 4.
Also, the formation of many Caribbean nations were the result of bloody slave revolts.
> What can be fairly read into the game? Civilization players have noted certain telling omissions in its historical arc. Slavery, the single-most important economic institution of recent millennia, is entirely absent in the series. There are no Dark Ages and no Black Deaths.
"Dark Ages" is a somewhat dated way to refer to the Middle Ages. From the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)):
"[Many] modern scholars who study the era tend to avoid the term ["Dark Ages"] altogether for its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate for any part of the Middle Ages"
Just thought it was interesting that someone stepping forward to correct the record appears to have some historical blind spots of their own.
Colonization also had some mechanics that were sort of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge towards slavery. There was a convict class of settlers, and there were also "converted" natives that you could acquire. If you had missionaries in their settlements, once in a while some religious converts would come over freely. Or you could attack their settlements, which generated lots of "converts"
http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Happiness_(Civ5)#Brave_Ne...
Not quite accurate. Civilization 4 has a Slavery civic, which allows you to work your own population to death for faster production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization:_Call_to_Power
Also, in Civilization 6, from what I've read, the Aztec "Eagle Warrior" unit has an ability to "turn defeated enemy units into Builders". I think the subtext is clearly that the defeated units are enslaved, though it's curious that they don't say so. I do suspect that they don't highlight the subject because players might find it unpleasant.
Which is hilarious thing to worry about in a game where you can nuke a whole city no problem.
Cultural tabu is a funny thing.
As for slavery, I object to how Civ makes it almost inevitable; at least back in Civ 4, you underperform for the whole game if you don't work your people to death in the Classical period. Disease definitely needs a larger part in the game as well...
I'd also argue for food insecurity and Malthusian limits (as in reaching the carrying capacity of an ecosystem -- or surpassing that carrying capacity, damaging the whole thing, and producing great mobs of the starving and desperate who'll eagerly listen to anyone who tells them who to kill to fix their problems) being conspicuous by their absence. Population growth wasn't all upside in the long ages that had neither the Haber process nor Norman Borlaug's hybrids...
But then, I've heard that an early version of Civ 1 tried to depict the rise and fall of civilizations, but players hated the fall part, so they just made it rise and rise. The mass market doesn't pay to feel uncomfortable...
In EUiV I have started the tutorial several times, and everytime I get stuck moving some armies or so, because it oesn't seem to work the way the tutorial showed just seconds before.
I think both depth and verisimilitude are limited by the desire to make it possible to complete the sweep of history in a reasonable amount of time while still having the player micromanage most things.
I feel as if they've tried too hard to incorporate RTS elements, ie. you need X units at this point, or else the enemies will attack you. Now you need to research X/min, or else you'll fall behind, etc. It became too rigid.
I think they lost something from Alpha Centauri, where victory could be had with a large range of playstyles. If you held back you didn't automatically get attacked. You could overwhelm with units, small units, or go for odd strategies like adding water survivability, then nuke everyone to raise the water level. You could affect the weather, make super cities with tons of crawlers, or place a regular close grid of a ton of cities.
Apart from that the game had a lot of atmosphere, unlike for example Beyond Earth.
An article about the way that Meier's western-centric view of history caused the system he implemented to have interesting systematic biases that limit the set of behaviors that can be simulated in interesting and unexpected ways, Zizek-style, would have been interesting. But this isn't that article; mentioning the lack of dark ages and the enlightenment grand-narrative view of progress as a game mechanic doesn't deliver, since it's crit 101 stuff that anybody would immediately notice.
The author should have probably recognized that the article wasn't the one she intended to write, & eliminated the points that didn't add to its organic form, rather than trying to force it into the intended form. But, its flaws don't detract enough to justify not posting it or reading it.
Civilization is a great game, maybe the best computer strategy game of all time. But I think it's namesake deserves a mention.
That said, I miss some of the mechanics in earlier Civ games. Civ IV, with all expansions, is still my favorite of the Civs (though I haven't played Civ VI, yet, and won't until the Linux version arrives), partly because it was so complex. On the whole, Civ games are far more educational than the average video game, even "educational" games. If you dig into the Civilopedia and look past the numbers in memory (e.g. Stonehenge is +5 faith, and pyramids are free workers and faster tile improvement, but also have real world history).
But, I don't expect Civ games to be "realistic"; I mean, I wouldn't suggest that pyramids were used to store grain because I saw that pyramids in Civ II/III and FreeCiv provided a granary in every city (effectively providing food storage in every city). Though I guess if a presidential candidate can make that mistake, it's not so unreasonable to think people are considering Civ games a reliable source of historic information.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo
Sid Meier gave a talk at the GDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtzCLd93SyU
In it he explained how Civilization tested random negative events that could shape your world. He mentioned how this had a negative effect on the player experience and many times people would just grab a past save to avoid them IIRC.
I would actually disagree. There are plenty of power fantasies, most notably the spectacle fighter genre, which seek to make you feel powerful. Civ isn't about that.
Civ makes you feel purposeful. You nurture and grow your civilization, not for personal aggrandizement but for a feeling of progress and accomplishment. Your goal is not to be the most powerful ruler, but to have the greatest civilization. Human achievement and ambition is the theme of the game.
Well, knock the population down. How? Either raise taxes until they revolt and then put them to the sword, or move plague carriers into the city to keep things in check.
That was a properly dark game, and I'm glad Civ isn't.
The voiced quotes for each tech in Civ V were downright haunting for me, and I'm pleased to see the game kept so bright. Even the military quotes strayed to optimism like "Happy are those whose walls already rise."