r/todayilearned • u/DueNeedleworker5036 • 4h ago

TIL that the Civilizations games (and others) include creator Sid Meier's name in the title because Robin Williams joked that it would help sell more copies of 1987's Sid Meier's Pirates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier#MicroProse
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u/albatrossSKY 4h ago

The man is singlehandedly responsible for millions of hours of lost sleep. Just one more turn... and suddenly its 4am and you have work in three hours.

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u/JellyfishSavings2802 4h ago

I'll never forget the day that I woke up at like 5am and came downstairs to my wife still playing Civ 5, dead eyed. She asked me if she was keeping me up. I just giggled and pointed at the the sun coming up behind her while she's like "oh no, its a good game?"

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u/Fritzkreig 2h ago edited 1h ago

I love that story as I can totally relate!

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

I blacked my windows after spiders decided to live in the curtains and what I'd get were the birds chirping.

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u/[deleted] 4h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/just_one_more_turn 4h ago

I'm sorry, what?

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u/WalterWhitesBriefs 4h ago

The games have short term goals, medium term goals, and long term goals. You end up feeling like you are constantly on the cusp of completing a goal, and inevitably telling yourself, "Just one more turn."

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u/throwitawaynownow1 3h ago

Did you just tell /u/just_one_more_turn how many turns you are going to do?

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u/Stouts 3h ago

To expand on that a little: because there are always so many things in motion, it always feels like it's a bad stopping point. You're juggling so many things in your head that it feels like if you were to step away, there's no way you'd remember all the stuff you were working on.

So it's constant push-pull of "I just need a good stopping point" and "but this thing is almost done!"

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u/guto8797 2h ago

Expanding even further, games tend to have a gameplay loop.

Think for Skyrim: you pick up quests on settlements, travel and explore on the way to said quests, do the dungeons, return to settlement to sell loot and upgrade gear, complete and acquire new quests, repeat.

And where do people tend to stop their gaming sessions? Either after clearing a dungeon or after finishing their business in a settlement, it's when the next step in the cycle would be a new significant task.

Civ generally has a very smooth cycle, you react to the previous turn, move units, queue buildings, hit next turn. But hitting next turn is a trivial task with a high reward, namely seeing the consequences of your actions and choices, so you just click it. But then moving your units in response to what happened last turn isn't a very time consuming thing either unless it's late game. And queuing a few buildings is fast too, etc etc etc. You are seemingly never presented with a natural cut off point, the next task is always something you can do quickly.

Factorio does the same thing. The cycle of optimizing the bottlenecks, expanding the factory, etc keeps presenting you with small tasks you could get done quickly

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u/D3rpyDucky24 3h ago

Sums up my expirience perfectly.

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u/Dobber16 4h ago

Just playing one more turn. Perpetually. Until 4am

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u/papadopus 3h ago

Excuse me, come again?

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u/PotatoOverlord1 3h ago

Just taking one more turn. Continuously. Until 3am

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u/Major-Finger6194 3h ago

Sorry?

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u/AarontheGeek 3h ago

FUCK IT'S 4 AM WE HAVE WORK IN 3 HOURS

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u/Electromotivation 3h ago

But why the male models?

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u/Spiderkeegan 3h ago

I love that everyone else replying to your comment has missed your username

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u/BongoProdigy 3h ago

Oh damn.

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u/comik300 3h ago

I'm glad you said something because I missed that as well

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u/Pomodorosan 2h ago

It's a bot trying to be relatable by reiterating what was said with some added LLM quirk.

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u/Logical_Writing3218 3h ago

Boo this guy he doesn’t game

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u/peniseend 3h ago

Boo this guy doesn't read user names

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u/antici________potato 3h ago

Boo this guy he doesn't read usernames

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u/Pomodorosan 2h ago

Bot trying to be relatable by reiterating what was said with some added LLM quirk.

Default username, 1 month old, adds nothing.

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u/nowitscometothis 4h ago

and you have an irrational hatred of Spain

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u/Nazamroth 4h ago

No, it is perfectly rational. Im pretty sure that Spain was the first to ever declare war on me in a civ game.

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u/JohnnyLeven 3h ago

Mine was the Romans in civ 1. I remember because I asked my dad about them when I encountered them, and he said I should try to make peace with them since they were powerful at the time (in the real world). I did, but they ended up declaring war on me and destroying me any way.

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u/aesemon 2h ago

You were playing civ during the Roman empire?

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u/TitanicJedi 2h ago

He did say Civ 1 that is about the same age.

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u/aesemon 2h ago

My god, I was born in the prehistoric times then😅

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

Don't worry, there were no record before writing. Hope you were never the great library though. Stay away from me and the pyramids.

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u/aesemon 1h ago

Stories passed down from parent to child of the old one that groans when sitting or standing.

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u/gregorydgraham 26m ago

You played Civ against the Harappans?

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u/superbekz 1h ago

Civ1 is such an RNG demon

i raged how i somehow lost my musketeers against a fortified phalanx in a mountain....like how??????????

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u/brainacpl 57m ago

That's nothing. Losing Bombers to Phalanx was enraging.

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u/Hegario 52m ago

Back in Civilization 1, I lost a battleship to a settler.

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u/Nazamroth 1h ago

Clearly, you foolishly ordered a bayonet charge up the mountain.

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u/frymaster 12m ago

If you squint, you can juuuust about see how a military unit with no guns but time to prepare in a mountainous area might defeat musketeers. Not if the phalanx used a phalanx formation, mind you - if they made good use of terrain, ambush tactics etc. I guess it's possible, maybe, sorta?

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

Gandhi betraying me when I was boxed in Civ V.

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u/Which-Towel5826 4h ago

Mine was Gandhi and he started as a pal, but it quickly became extortion lol

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

And they never yield! Ruined my super Africa project.

 

I also once kept Polynesia out of compassion and that micronation made my life a nightmare the rest of the game.

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u/WhereIsTheInternet 1h ago

Weird. Your comment just floated the first game of civ v I had and it was Rome who declared war on me first. That was a long time ago, with thousands of hours of civ since then but I still remember somehow.

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u/T-T-N 3h ago

Would you like a trade agreement with England?

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u/Zeromius 2h ago

Every time I hear her say that I just hear "Hoi oim bri'ish"

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u/AshleyTyrian 1h ago

It's very much one of those 'what yanks think English people sound like' vocal performances.

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

I beg you pardon?

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u/Stun_the_Pink 2m ago

Would you be interested in a trade agreement with England?

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u/DownstairsB 4h ago

And a deep fear of pissing off Ghandi

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u/hulksmash1234 4h ago

You’re about to learn of his peaceful ways, by threat of nuclear war

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

The Mahatma Project are backed by nuclear weapons.

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u/CzarDale04 3h ago

You realize that is the computer character that is most likely to use nuclear weapons..

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u/DownstairsB 3h ago

Yes if I recall there was some kind of integer overflow bug in his attitude, that ended up making him very aggressive instead of kind

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u/manicMechanic1 2h ago

I assumed it was a joke by the developers

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u/Illustrious-Line-660 2h ago

It became a joke in later games. They wanted him to be the least likely to use nukes, and they accidentally made him the most likely.

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u/Initiatedspoon 2h ago

This isn't true. .

Its a fairly well known myth now.

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u/sillysausage619 1h ago

I hate how everybody has agreed to this being fact, making up stories of their game making it happen regularly, when it was barely ever possible.

I don't really understand why people do it haha

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u/Initiatedspoon 1h ago

It's been programmed in since Civ 5 so for some players it has basically always been true.

For the older games especially the very earliest ones Gandhi's preset civilisation was a decent mix of traits that ment they prioritise certain techs faster than others so they often got nukes before other civilisations might have and once you have nukes well you want to use them and the juxtaposition is strong.

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u/Brambarian 2h ago

As a Dutch person, any level of hatred of Spain is rational in my opinion.

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

Polders for days. All marshes belong to us.

 

Edit: Chocolate got over my mind I suppose. Polder, not powder.

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u/TheKanten 3h ago

Civ VII has been giving the gift of sleep the players desperately needed for decades.

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u/TDYDave2 49m ago edited 8m ago

Luckily for me, Beyond Earth broke me of the habit of pre-ordering Civ games.

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u/gregorydgraham 24m ago

Sacrifice your sleep to Sidmeier, or the crops will fail!

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u/Gyrgir 3h ago

"Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you."

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u/typewriter6986 1h ago

Love Alpha Centauri. Too bad there's no online multi-player.

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u/GargantuanCake 4h ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRrTEFZs60

NO MORE TURNS

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u/WendellSchadenfreude 1h ago

Oh man, that video is 16 years old, and I remember it so clearly.

I've completely overcome my own Civ addiction since then - it was easily replaced with an addiction for Paradox games.

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u/FlailToMace 2h ago

When he had it bad he would play for a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty turns at a time...

Umm...

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u/ameatbicyclefortwo 4h ago

I've no doubt the man who named his daughter after The Princess Zelda knows all about just one more turn, just one more room, I almost have this puzzle, if I don't do this before I save I'll forget tomorrow so I gotta stay up a bit longer.

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u/Crazy_Information816 2h ago

Also his third child Cody was named after Robin's favourite character from Final Fight. No idea who Zac was named after though!

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u/thisisfreakinstupid 1h ago

I'm not sure but I bet they live a suite life.

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u/Keffpie 2h ago

The first time I ever called in sick to work was because of Civ 3. I bought it on the way home from work, got back to my flat and booted it up "just to mess around in the menus" before I made dinner. I was jolted out of my flow state at 6am by birdsong, my dinner still unmade. I was still wearing my jacket.

That was the day I learned that "uncontrollable diarrhea" is the perfect one-day-illness: when you call in, people will actively tell you to stop telling them details, it's clear to everyone you can't be expected to go on public transport when you need to take a shit every 5 minutes, and it's 100% per cent normal to be totally fine the next day

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u/dan_dirik 1h ago

He single handedly designed and developed the game, did the artwork, composed the music. QA and everything. What a guy

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u/TheManfromVeracruz 2h ago

That turn system is like crack for gamers

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u/Draidann 3h ago

And it actually was just one more turn

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

That lasted 45 minutes

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u/Jack-of-Hearts-7 3h ago

Those fucking Aztecs been stepping over my toes too much

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

Gotta deal with their warriors or I won't be able to sleep.

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u/Gizmorum 3h ago

ive tried to recapture that feeling sfter civ v and it hasent worked. Paradox games on the other hand....

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

Classic total war for me

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u/GeneralTang 4h ago

This is thw worst game I have played for it. Blink and you've lost 3 hours.

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u/EhMapleMoose 3h ago

I looked at the clock and it was 11:30, I played one more turn and now it’s 1:30….

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u/Optimal_Anything3777 2h ago

i installed the latest one years ago, never played one of them before, and i stopped within like 10 minutes. had no idea what to do.

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u/Raid-Z3r0 2h ago

Well, it's past 3 am. And I have work tomorrow?

Guess what I was doing...

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u/JonatasA 1h ago

Never play if you don’t have days available. I remember thinking in X month "only y months until I can Civ".

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u/No_Atmosphere8146 32m ago

All that, just to get the end of the game and read a banner that says "Jimmy the Adequate" I got you pricks to Alpha Centauri in the 1840s and I'm "Jimmy the Adequate"?!

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u/bopeepsheep 26m ago

I used to work weekend nights, get home 6.30am Monday, sleep, go to uni Tuesday morning. CivII came out... and suddenly it's Tuesday afternoon, 3rd lecture of the day, and I haven't slept since 7pm Sunday.

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u/MatthewHecht 23m ago

On PC civ 4 had a clock. I think that is gone on steam

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u/MrFeles 22m ago

It's always nice to lose sleep doing something you enjoy and want to keep doing. Than losing sleep because it'd be like fast forwarding to something you don't want to do in the morning.