Civilization (1.5 hours, PC/DOSBox, @home, Jan 16, 2017)

The Beginning

As someone who has been playing games since a young child, I’ve always heard of a game called “Civilization”. However, despite having six main game titles and numerous other sub-titles/expansions, I haven’t played a single one. The most experience I’ve had with Civilization was through watching gameplay of it very shortly. Never enough to get to know what the game was really about or how it played. The ironic thing about all of this is that I even have Civilization 4 & 5 (uninstalled) in my Steam library. When I saw that Civilization 1 was assigned to be played, I was somewhat excited. Excited because I finally get to see what this game is and what better way than to be forced to play it?

The Journey

My journey in Civilization began with booting up DOSBox and loading Civilization 1. I haven’t played a DOS-based game in several years, so it was a bit confusing at first. I decided not to look up anything about the game prior and go in blind. The options popped up and I went with the easiest difficulty option, Chieftain, picked 3 civilizations, and became the French. The game threw me into the world with barely any instructions or any hint of what to do. I started randomly moving around with the arrow keys, unveiling new parts of the world/map. Eventually I ran into a house and the game told me that I gained some sort of metal deposits. Sometimes the game would let me know that I found a good place to build, but I kind of missed that bit early on because I kept on pressing the arrow keys. I kept progressing and eventually I had mercenaries moving around with me randomly. I eventually came up to a tile with the number 1 on it, so I proceeded to move on top of it, thinking it was a just another house to get some metal deposits from. To my surprise, I destroyed and conquered Babylon! 15 minutes in and I’m already winning… I think? As I continued playing, I finally slowed down a bit and realized the game told me to build a city by pressing the ‘B’ key. Duh. So I did that and the game became even more confusing. The unit I was moving disappeared and I wasn’t able to doing anything until my city finally produced a “militia” unit for me to control. By this point I have already explored all of this island that I could so I was at a total loss. All of a sudden, a bunch of barbarian units showed up on the island. They started moving towards my only city so I got kind of scared. I tried to rush my militia units back to defend, but it was too late. The Zulu empire came and destroyed my city in a heartbeat. I wasn’t winning the game after all. At this point, I’ve only been playing for about 45 minutes so I started up a new game with the same settings to do it all over again.

What Even Happened?

After the first game of Civilization, I realized that I barely learned how to play or what the objective of the game was. However, although all I was doing was pressing arrow keys and sometimes pressing letter keys when the game told me I should, I managed to have fun. On the second game I started, my only goal was to survive longer than I did on my first game. I failed at that though as the other civilizations ended up attacking me sooner than before. Nonetheless, I learned more about the game and how to produce different units, build roads, etc. I still never learned how to travel across the ocean though. Oh well, that was more than I had ever expected to manage to do in this first session of playing Civilization.