Game played: Civilization
Time played: 7:00-8:00 PM (Thursday 1/19/2017)
Location: At home on my MacBook Pro
For this second play through, I again chose the easiest difficulty setting (Chieftain), with the country of France, and three other “players”. While my settings were the same, I allowed myself to watch the beginnings of a gameplay video on Youtube to grasp (at the very least) the basics of starting the game. The player I watched emphasized exploring early on, and settling new cities quickly (while maintaining enough of an army to guard those cities). My basic formula was create city, create militia unit, create settlers, settle new city, repeat.
With this slightly better grasp of the game, I was able to make more visible progress than in my first attempt. I found I was stuck on an island, which did limit my expansion and interaction with other nations – it took me until 1802 AD to find the Romans. Still, I managed to create around seven or eight cities on my little island and got to the point in technology where I could start building ships to navigate across the ocean. I did lose a few of the first ones though, as they were not able to sail off the coast (a fact not made clear by the game upon their creation).
Once I had actual ships I was able to explore further out. I also had a revolution for monarchy. This ended up leading to almost constant civil disorder in one city or another, a roadblock that frustrated me endlessly as I could not figure out why it was happening or how to fix it. If I had another revolution it would remedy the issue for a turn or two, then the disorder would return. My general “strategy” (if you could call it that) was to build what the game advisors prompted whenever a city was able to start on something new; since I tended to stick with these instructions, I couldn’t figure out why my citizens were so unhappy.
I also could not figure out how to initiate diplomacy (i.e., I didn’t know you could put caravans and diplomats on ships). The Romans had to come to me offering a treaty; I had no clue how to approach them. The game also prompted me to implement taxes as my cities grew to large to fund themselves as they had throughout the game, another aspect of the gameplay that I could not for the life of me sort out how to implement.
After an hour of gameplay I saved an exited the game (without ending it).
Once again, the prevailing emotion during this gameplay was frustration. I had more fun initially since I had a grasp of the basic early game mechanics, but this understanding did not carry me into the late game. Still, I had more fun during this play through than my initial attempt, as I was able to watch my little cities grow every time I added something to them. While it was disconcerting that the city remained on one tile, I understand that was just a limitation of the technology at the time. I have played other similar games where you create and grow a civilization, and I always like the physical representation of farms, buildings, citizens, etc. as it gave me more of an idea of what I was creating. I’ve seen screenshots that show later versions of Civilization games with this kind of detail, though.