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/its_mabus 4h ago

Has anybody ever completed a game of Civilization against a human opponent?

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u/mascouten 3h ago

Yes several, sometimes up to 6 or 8 human opponents.

In Civ 4 they had a "vassalage system" where winning a war meant forcing the other player into an alliance with you, not just taking their cities, and you'd get some of their score and resources.

Could be fun if started as a FFA and people didn't intentionally just capitulate

They also had a unit called the "privateer" which looked like a barbarian and you could use to pillage tiles or blockade water cities for money and ignored open borders. Great for pissing people off if they were just focusing on economy and had no navy, without it coming back on you.

In Civ 5 they had balanced maps that were fun for 2v2 or 3v3, anything higher was kind of a slog. But the key was having each team with simultaneous turns.

Civ has always had a problem with taking forever when nations are at war, and trying to speed it up meant taking simultaneous turns at war, so you could be cheesy sometimes when moving and attacking compared to playing with the AI.

Simultaneous team turns made it fast and also fair.

I played a lot of Civ 6 as mostly peaceful or vs AI with friends but we usually stopped when one player started together too far ahead so rarely played long into modern or later eras.

Civ 7 is kind of fun multiplayer because the reset does sort of prevent the snowball from becoming an avalanche. It's harder if you fall behind, but doesn't feel as impossible as it used to to have a comeback which is important in any multiplayer game, so we usually do play out the modern age.

Civilization is a lot like DND, you need special people and a dedicated time each week to meet up and play, expecting a session to last an hour at least, maybe two.