Civ 1 - the sweet memories

[Solver]

Aaglo, the AI didn't deserve a chance to attack back then . Wish Civ 1 had the AI of Civ 3

[Method]

you should have seen me playing civ in the beginning. i was less that 10 years old and how i played civ was:

step 1: Found capitol city
step 2: build militia for 4000 years because i didn't realise that you could change what you build.

i don't remember exactly what happened but one day i just had a revelation and found out i could actually build other things and even make "that coloured stuff" (irrigation) that the AI had around its cities around my city.

i learned though and i bought civ II which i actually won. then came SMAC, and a brief and horridly disturbing period of civ III (worst $50 i ever spent).

[Solver]

Ahh, if you really played Civ 1, you would understand how horrid civ 2 was... BTW, as far as I'm aware, as long as a 10 year old reads the manual, he can play the game pretty nicely.

[dunk]

Originally posted by Solver
Cannons weren't as good as the Catapults then. Catapults could do anything for you, right till Musketeers, the Cannon just had too low of a defense for this age... Knights were the requirement. I don't agree with people who said don't research Chivalry.

I used cannon all the time. 8 attack vs 3? defense for the musketman. Better than 4 vs 3. Plus, cannon and knights cost 40 shields each. I say, no brainer. Build the cannon. Catapults also were 40 shields.

[Solver]

Remember that the Musketeers never defended at 3. It would almost always be 4.5 due to 50% fortified bonus, and when having the damn hills 100% bonus, 8 vs. 9.

[Juggler]

F-19 Stealth Fighter was made by Microprose, I believe. There were some demos on it, so I had to try them out, of course.

F-19 was a damn good game back then. I used to play it on my old 486 together with GP-EGA, DukeNukem1, Xatax and such. The graphics and explosions sucked but at least it lured me to my computer for 4 years. After that I slowly started to like a game called Civ1.
etc.

[Method]

Originally posted by Solver
Ahh, if you really played Civ 1, you would understand how horrid civ 2 was... BTW, as far as I'm aware, as long as a 10 year old reads the manual, he can play the game pretty nicely.

true, but i don't think i had the manual. the game just 'appeared' on the computer one day for no apparent reason.

[Solver]

true, but i don't think i had the manual. the game just 'appeared' on the computer one day for no apparent reason.

Those days, I wasn't even aware game manuals exist , I got the game with my CD-ROM package (I bought a CD+soundcard for the incredible price of ~42 $ then, thanks to knowing ppl ), but I read all that Help had to say, and started to understand stuff.

[DaveV]

Originally posted by dunk999
I used cannon all the time. 8 attack vs 3? defense for the musketman. Better than 4 vs 3. Plus, cannon and knights cost 40 shields each. I say, no brainer. Build the cannon. Catapults also were 40 shields.

I remember one epic battle I fought against the Zulus where they were using cannon stacked together with riflemen. They were holding their own against my tanks, especially in rough terrain.

[dunk]

Originally posted by Solver
Remember that the Musketeers never defended at 3. It would almost always be 4.5 due to 50% fortified bonus, and when having the damn hills 100% bonus, 8 vs. 9.

And you preferred knights going against this to cannon?

I'll assume a vet cannon. 12 attack vs 9. With a vet musket... 12 vs 13.5.

And a vet knight. 6 attack vs 9 or 13.5.

13.5 comes from:

3 + 50% (veteran bonus) = 4.5.

4.5 + 50% (fortified bonus) = 6.75

6.75 + 100% (hills bonus) = 13.5

Gimme cannon!

[Method]

i remember that for the longest time, the cursor could only access half the screen. it would just get "stuck" in the middle like there was an invisible barrier . thus i could never get into the civilopedia and other menus on the right side of the screen

[Mr. Oobir]

Has anyone here ever played the SNES version of Civilization? That's the version of the game that absorbed a lot of my 4th- and 5th-grade life. I can still hum the game's "Ancient" theme and baroque-ish tech discovery music...

I didn't play the game on any level other than chieftain, even when I could beat the game blindfolded and sitting on my head (I felt so proud when I conquered the world with the Japanese in 2880 BC!). Even on that most brain-dead of difficulties, I remember a rather odd case of AI superiority. Again, I was playing as the Japanese, and the rate of technology discovery was chugging along quite nicely. I had only six cities or so a bit after the BC times ended, and I'd only defeated one small civ near the beginning of the game, but I was doing all right. I was sailing out a boat (maybe a frigate) when I came upon a French ironclad. I had never seen this ship before, so I attacked it. My boat was destroyed. It didn't make sense; I was supposed to be the dominant player. A little while later, the French invaded. They had riflemen and tanks. Tanks! And Napolean wouldn't negotiate with me, so I had to try and defend my handful of cities with my slow and distant cannons. My musketeers were slaughtered, and my civ was near collapse, until I made a sudden shift of tactics.

I hit the SNES's power switch. Whew! Crisis averted

[Ecthy]

Sounds familiar. Even on easiest level, there can be a quite successful AI civ.

[khyron]

Civilization. First time I played it, I was at a friend's house back in...the day. Can't remember when, but back when the game was new. He had a computer, and some cool games. Showed me Civ. I only played it a couple times, and I never did get it, but it fascinated me, and I would play it at other friends' houses over the subsequent years.

Forward to 1996. As a graduation present, my uncle gave me an old 386 with a grand total of 2MB of RAM. Wasn't much, but when you go from nothing to that, you're amazed, even by Windows 3.1. That first night, my best friend and I tried to get AOL installed, because it had a 9600 baud modem, but AOL needed 4MB. Then we had an idea. Somebody had given me a copy of Civ against the day that I would get my own computer. Out it came. We played for hours, first with me at the helm. I can't remember who we were, but we had the Russians on the continent to the south. At 2am, I had to nap, and my friend took the conn. He started a war with Russia and was rather successful at it. And at 3am, he woke me up to let me know we had a carrier loaded with nukes and a transport full of armor off the coast of Moscow. In violation of treaty, we pounded four Russian cities with nukes. I told him to land troops in Moscow to split them up. It worked! Egypt was born! So we moved on to the next nuked Russian city, and wham! Another schism! The whole face of that game changed from there, with Mother Russia who once threatened us so badly put in her place for all eternity, and we had a blast till we both died at dawn.

Nostalgia....

[Jac de Molay]

Played mine on a Tandy 286 Laptop. Thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Dave

[badman]

once upon a time ( ) my aunt gave civ1 as a present to my brother, he never liked the game though. but i fell in love with it right away. at first i didn't understand it, but the idea of leading a nation through history fascinated me and i wanted to learn how to play civ1.
so i told my classmates that i had civ1 and actually there was somebody else who had it and loved it. he told me what to do and after school i walked to my computer and tried to do what he told me. he told me always to switch to democracy as soon as possible so i did that. i was really pissed off when my citizens always would start a revolution after i had established democracy until my friend finally told me to keep my armies inside my cities. i never really fought alot of wars, i was and still a true isolationist, even though i had to learn to fight for my existence at the high difficulties.
but i never completely understood civ1, only with civ2 it made "click" and i learned how civ really worked.

[simonaiken]

My top 10 memories of playing Civilization:

(10) The first time I played was at school, supposedly as an educational exercise as part of History lessons, (we had also played Simcity as part of Social Studies... I suspect this is what the teachers thought was multimedia learning) we weren't allowed to read the manual before hand.

I built I nice little civilization of one city that produced more and more militia, until it was crushed by the Zulus with their tanks. It had been an isolated little civilization on a little island.

(9) Not long after this I got Civilization at home. The first time I liberated my peoples from the yoke of a foriegn invader and evicted them from my little island was fun.

(8) My first game at Prince level with an industrial age war with the Mongols, who just always seemed to hate me, no matter what I did.

(7) The first and only time I discovered a civilization (The Chinese) who asked me to protect them from the Mongols (again), and in return they'd be brothers.

(6) Figuring how to use the Tax and Luxtury settings at King level to keep cities productive and also just off a revolt.

(5) Catching up to the French in an advance race, them declearing war on me in the middle of our space race, and then using nuclear weapons and an amphibous assult to seize their 9 cities in four turns.

(4) The first patch that correct the error that would occur in the first edition when you looked at your score while playing the game (it would create a landmass at the top of the map that would eventually screw up the map.

(3) First time I used the EARTH option at the start and played long enough that it actually was Earth, before that I'd also created new maps.

(2) The patch that allowed you to change the names of your cities. New Cario, New London, New Paris.

(1) A nuclear exchange with the Zulus, which I started to save my civilization from their continued invasions.

[aaglo]

Originally posted by simonaiken
I built I nice little civilization of one city that produced more and more militia, until it was crushed by the Zulus with their tanks.

LOL!

[Solver]

Yeah, good one

[MattyBoy]

My best friend at the time introduced me to this game and showed me what he was doing for a couple of turns in mid game. He explained every decision in great detail. At the end of that I couldn't see any possible joy in the game and whenever I caught him at it, I couldn't help finding him a little pathetic to keep spending time on it.

Later he gave me the game and I became hooked worse than he ever was.

I think the turning point was when I saved a game and played "well" for a long while, then went back and replayed from save for a *much* better result. Once you have done that you cannot go back.

[War4ever]

Found it on a girlfriends computer, needless to say, at first i stunk, then i got better, actually it didn't take too long.

i lost sleep, eventually my girlfriend, and wasted many hours of my life.

civ2 mp has provided more hours of play than civ1..but civ1 is the game that set it up , and civ2 SP never compared in the same way,

civ3 doens't compare to the first two and i never did play civ1 mp or civnet as it was called

but i would say that civ1&2 were severe drugs in my life

[OneFootInTheGrave]

civ1

The first ever game was at uni first year, clicking on some icon ot of curiosity... civilization... that intro clip played, and I thought "interesting"... first game I still remember, I was the chinese, had a little city producing militias...and going west... on the world map, and being well suprised when I have seen Indians... I thought cool... and even more suprised when horseriding science was discovered, and I got those horses that could move two per turn... wow! this was it ... I haven't stopped until post Civ II.

Anway my favourite game was when I figured out that cities can be bought with diplomats ... heeee... I was in an severly inferior position to Russians, on warlord level ... however sailed around the globe with the trireme to find a city that I can buy... to start counterattack, fortified some phalangs in the mountains... and won at the end... immense satisfaction lovley memories

[xxjiggawhoxx]

I started out playing Civ 2 on the playstation. I mastered that within about a month or so, and I was only 12 at the time! Two years later I got a computer at around November or so and I surfed warez and abandoned ware sites for Civ 2, but to my surprise they only had Civ 1. So I downloaded and started playing and man was it addictive. I seemed to have a harder time with it than I did with Civ 2, but soon I figuered out how things worked and all.

My favorite part about it was just murdering everyone in the ancient age with all my legions. Hahaha! The only draw back I could find was the limitations on diplomatic negotiations... But the game was awesome... The best game I can remember playing was where I was the Greeks on this Japan-style island in the very center of the world, I conquered the other country on this island rather quickly and built my island into a fortress. I waited a while and gained techs then went exploring... After conquering about half the planet the AI civ's started to get pretty angry. Hehe.. I don't remember how that game ended but I know it came down to a space race against the English.

But one day I got the idea to delete stuff I didn't use that often or wasn't a top priority to use.. So I deleted my Civ 1 since I had gotten tired of it... Suffice it to say that was a big mistake. Now that all the gaming companies have waged war on the abandonware sites, Civ 1 isn't available for download anymore.. :-(

I miss that game so if anyone knows where I can get it tell me!!

[Solver]

Email me at solver@apolyton.net and we can discuss how can I send you Civ 1.

[Rasbelin]

Solver, trying to sperad some warez software?

[The Pioneer]

I don't remember my first game of civ 1 or how I got interested. It may had to do with the fact that I was an Avallon Hill board games fan and that I was looking for similar PC games.

What I do remember though is sleeples nights, a pile of dirty plates next to the keyboard since I had no time to put them in the dishwasher, my girlfriend calling me to bed and me forgetting about her, missing classes, etc. I played that game straight to civ 2 which I liked even more.

Nowdays life is different I am not a student anymore, hence I have less time to devote to games. I still play Civ 3, which is a very good game too but the series has lost that something and I think it's mostly me!

So long...

[statusperfect]

Originally posted by The Pioneer
Nowdays life is different I am not a student anymore, hence I have less time to devote to games. I still play Civ 3, which is a very good game too but the series has lost that something and I think it's mostly me!

Same here. It's HARD to grow up and stop enjoying Computer Games as much as you did as a kid.

[War4ever]

the fact that civ3 has a totally different feel to it as well, is the biggest part of the change for me....and yes , growing up is hard

[High_Lord]

I watched my friend play civ for a bit one day at his house..this was about '90 at my junior high\high school junction period..we usually always played the old D&D computer games (yes, dammit, because we played a LOT of D&D,ok? ) ...it seemed neat, he started me up a new game adn I remember I just ran around with my settler thinking 'woopadeedoo!!'...when my mom bought a computer a few months later my friend gave me a floppy copy of civ and since I didnt have any other games yet...man I tell you when I sat down and had a few hours to myself I really got into Civ! I remember a new sickly sensation that Id never felt before that I would always feel after about 6+ hours of straight Civ!! As someone posted (way) above, I too--even today with CivIII--play so long that when I go to sleep I dream about it

[High_Lord]

oh I just had to say that one time I didnt have any memory cards for my PS so I left CivII on for about a week