How Very Civilized

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd have to write.

Last night I played some Civilization IV.

Heh. After all those years of reading other people blogging about the Civ series and 4X games in general and thinking "Well, it's all very interesting to read about but I can't imagine ever playing something like that". A bit like EVE or Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, I guess. Some games are just more fun to read about than play.

Or so I thought. And quite possibly still do. Too soon to say for sure.

Obviously, I wouldn't have tried it at all if I hadn't gotten it for free from Prime. I'm scratching around at the moment, trying to find something to play that can hold my attention but which can also be stopped at a moment's notice. I was going through the options when I noticed it and thought, well, why not?

Talking of options, boy, there are a lot of them! Everyone likes to talk about their Steam backlogs but I've always said I don't really have that much of one. Which is true, as it goes, although not as true as it used to be. My Amazon Prime Gaming backlog though...

I have 162 games on Prime, of which I have played nineteen and finished five. On GOG I have 60, with just three played and none finished. On Epic Games I have another 40 titles, of which I have played exactly two - and one of those is Fortnite. All of them, across the three platforms, bar a handful, were freebies from Prime - and I probably claim less than half of the games Prime gives away.

And yet somehow, even with almost 250 unplayed titles to choose from, I can never seem to find anything I want to play. Worse, when I do pick something and give it a go, it doesn't stick. 

Which is how I came to install and open CivIV a couple of days ago. It seemed like it might be worth a try. I mean, everyone else seems to enjoy it...

So, did I? Enjoy it, that is?

Hmm. Tough question. I'll get back to you when I have an answer. 

So far I've played for a couple of hours in two sessions and it's been... occupying. Time certainly passes. There's a lot to do. It keeps you busy.

For my first session I jumped straight in and started playing. That wasn't so much a choice as a mistake, by which I don't mean it went badly, just that I didn't mean to do it. I assumed there'd be an in-game tutorial. There is not.

There is a Tutorial, of course. I just didn't notice it was a separate option on the main menu. I'd completely forgotten that's how they used to do it in the old days.

Starting without any kind of lead-in or explanation was an odd experience. Confusing but also fairly straightforward, by which I mean the game is somehow still playable, even when you have absolutely no idea what you're doing or indeed what you ought to be doing.

That's mainly because every single UI element seems to have a mouse-over tool-tip and most actions seem to require not much more than a left click. I just moused over everything and started clicking and something approximating a game seemed to coalesce around me.

I left everything on the defaults. I built a city. I killed some bears. I explored to clear the fog of war. I built another city. I kept picking from lists of options and the years rolled by. I started at the dawn of civilization, 4000 BC, and by the time I finished an hour later it was the Renaissance.

For some reason I kept founding religions, which seemed extremely weird. I was playing as Spain and yet I still managed to found Buddhism, then Confucianism, then Taoism. I would have thought a necessary corollary of founding Confucianism, for example, would be that you'd have to be Confucius, or for a ruler to take the credit, they'd at least need to count Confucius as a subject. It seemed unlikely either he or Buddha would have been living in Barcelona or Madrid at the time but I guess they must have gotten there from China somehow...

Other leaders kept popping up to ask me to make deals with them or break deals I'd made with other nations. I always agreed with whatever they wanted and always made peace not war. I hadn't figured out how to get my army to fight anyone except bears and lions so peace seemed like the best option.

I had trouble getting any of my units to go where I wanted anyway. I lost Barcelona because someone attacked it and I couldn't figure out how to get a Warrior unit over there in time. It didn't seem to matter much because by then I had a third city and I was having more than enough trouble managing two of them. I was quite glad to see Barcelona go.

I could tell there was some kind of score being kept in the lower right-hand corner of the screen but I didn't really know what made the numbers change or what the victory condition might be. I figured bigger numbers were probably better, though, and Spain was either at the top of the list or at least in the top half most of the time. There were always other civilizations doing a lot worse than me so I was happy enough with how things were going.

All of that went on for a little over an hour before it started to get on top of me a bit. I figured out how to save the game and stopped. I could see how someone could get into that "Just one more turn" frame of mind I've read about, especially if they knew what they were doing. It is quite compulsive, pushing the button to see what happens next.

I guess I must have enjoyed myself at least a little because yesterday I felt like having another go. I thought maybe I ought to try and find out at least a little about how to play so I googled around for a while and learned... there is a Tutorial after all. I did think it was strange there wasn't one but then I thought maybe, back in the day, the game would have come in a box with a manual as thick as a novel and you were probably supposed to read that before you got started.

Last night I tried again, only this time I didn't load up my saved game. I opened the tutorial instead. 

I learned a few things, not least what Sid Meier sounds like. At least, I assume that's him, reading out the instructions, like a high school history teacher, following a familiar lesson plan on a warm afternoon in front of a drowsy classroom, just before school breaks up for summer. And the balding fellow with the fixed smile, dressed like a sales assistant at a discount warehouse? That must be Sid, too. The guy clearly doesn't have much of an ego.

The tutorial was helpful, anyway. The most important thing I learned was that you have to right-click to get anyone to go where you tell them. That explained a lot.

There was some useful information about why you might want to do certain things, too, not just how you'd make them happen. As I said, for the most part it's not too hard to figure out what things do from  the tool tips but it's much harder to see why you'd want to do any of them. I mostly just picked stuff I like, like art and literature and music and ignored all the boring agriculture and industry. I probably should have played Greece.

What became clear from the tutorial is that the game is basically a management sim. In all the thousands and thousands of words I'd read about it, I don't think that had ever really come across. People always blog about the interesting stuff, don't they? Who declared war on whom or who invented what. They never tell you how many tiny little repetitive actions it took before anything interesting happened at all.

I was about to say I've never liked management sims but then it occurred to me that's not entirely true. Right at the beginning of my gaming life, I used to play them quite enthusiastically. I remember one my ex-wife and I used to play a lot on the ZX Spectrum, a political sim where you had to manage all kinds of factors to keep yourself in power. I remember we used to sit there in our bean bags and shout at the screen. 

I think it was called Dictator. Yep! That's the one. I bet I still have the cassette somewhere.

I even wrote a management sim once. I think it might be the only game I ever coded from scratch. I wrote it one afternoon at my mother's house on my step-father's Oric computer that he'd won in some competition and never used. It had some ridiculously tiny memory measured in kilobytes and I wrote a moonbase sim for it that worked, just about. I wrote it in RAM, though, so it only existed for that afternoon and never again.

All of that was back in the eighties. The early eighties. I don't believe I've played a management sim since. 

Of course, the 4X genre is a hybrid, with other gameplay beyond resource management. There's a big map to explore and you can fight animals and people but most importantly there are all those familiar names. That's what makes it interesting.

And surreal. It's very peculiar to have Elizabeth I suddenly appear and start schmoozing you, especially when Julius Caesar just left. It reminded me a bit of that Philip Jose Farmer series, Riverworld, where everyone who ever lived has been brought back to life at the same time, in the same place. Without that, I doubt it would be half as engaging.

I stuck with the tutorial for about an hour but then it was time for Beryl's evening walk so I had to stop. I couldn't see any way to save the tutorial so I just logged out. If I have to go back to the beginning and do it over, I don't think I'll bother. I reckon I know enough to get started now.

Will I, though? Am I engaged enough with the concept for another session? Possibly. It does, as I said, occupy the mind, which is welcome at the moment, as I negotiate some changes in routine, with my 93 year-old mother suddenly needing a lot more support to stay in her home than usual and her living an hour's drive away and we only having the one car.

On the other hand, there are plenty of games that do a pretty good job of occupying the mind and I can think of plenty whose gameplay would be more to my taste than 4X offers. Just none of the ones I already own, apparently. 

Maybe this is the time to buy Baldur's Gate 3.