1/27. It has been a busy week for me so getting time to play has had to wait. I returned to the game in the middle of my invasion of France, already possessing two of their cities. While continuing the invasion, I decided to bolster my force with riflemen. My theory operated on that as I lost swordsmen and phalanxes, I would replace them with the big guns. This plan only worked in part. I was able to take several more cities with my remaining old units, but they died off pretty quick, too fast for me to replace with the long building time of riflemen. I pulled my last primitive troops back to the city of Lyons, freshly liberated from the oppressive (not so oppressive really) French dynasty. It took lots of turns of menial, repetitive movement and troop management, but soon I had a mass of riflemen ready for invasion. I did learn, however, that within the French city of Orleans there were enemy riflemen. I took the city after several turns of battle, but I took heavy losses. I saved the game with the troops turning south to take Paris. However, I wonder how difficult this will be. It is the enemy capital, and sure to have a surprise in store. Also I worry that another quiz will appear and rob me of my entire fighting force. That would cripple me. This play session has continued to make me wonder if I am “playing” or “working” while on this game. When I get to take a city I certainly feel like I am enjoying the play, and I certainly feel the rhetoric of play as the imaginary, meaning that I have to be creative and innovating to defeat my opponent. But when it comes to troop management, city management, etc, it feels like the game turns tedious and menial. Not necessarily boring or not fun but I begin to lose sight of the end goal and the point of the whole thing. I hope that I can take Paris, so that I can finish off the French and then turn my attentions to the Zulu.

My troops stand ready to descend upon Paris.

On 1/23 I put an hour into Civilization 1, same save as before. My fortunes have improved. I decided to stop trying to grow my cities, seeing as how I cannot make both science and economics flourish without either starving my cities or losing all of my structures to the maintenance. So with that in mind, I decided to focus my resources into military, meaning actually conquering other nations instead as opposed to exploration. Since I hadn’t lost any units over the course of the game, I had over 30 individual units ready for shipment, and a single Trireme able to transport two units at a time. With each unit moving only one space per turn, it took quite a while to gather my forces at my coast and then move them across the ocean into French territory. My game session didn’t last long enough for me to take more than two cities, but i discovered that every time you take a city, you get to learn a technology as a result. With the first city i took, i learned how to use gunpowder, which I hope will change the dynamics of my invasion force. As it is, I must throw five to ten militia and phalanxes to their deaths to take a single city. In each of the other Civ games that I have played, gunpowder is the turning point for l=military, and if you can get to it first, you have a good chance of winning the whole game. With how much stress that this game is giving me, I’m not sure if I am still playing it or if it is playing me. As I progress farther into the game, i get less of a sense that this is “play” as Sutton-Smith seems to suggest, and I am starting to feel like this game is work, with the payout being either the grade from this class, or just finishing the game. Also I would like to mention how twitchy I am about first discovering gunpowder by the year 1928. The history buff in me is having apoplectic fits. Next post: hopefully the destruction of the inglorious French nation.

On the 21st of January I found myself at the computer for another hour of playing Civilization 1. After loading my recent save, I found that this session was a delicate balancing act of whether to lose money or let my cities starve. I ceased all construction of new buildings, and decided to focus on military power. If a quiz came around, all of my work could be for nothing, but building structures would just put me farther into the hole economically. Since hadn’t explored anything other than my tiny island, I built several Triremes and discovered another dynamic of ships being lost at sea if they do not end their turn near a coast. With this knowledge, I had my ships skirt the coasts and discover the outlines of the rest of the world, on the way finding the other two civilizations; The Zulu and The French. The French were cordial at first, making contact and asking to trade technologies which I gladly agreed to, but after several trades, they demanded another technology or they would attack me. They must have been bluffing because when I refused, they offered peace anyway. The Zulu wouldn’t even talk to me. During all of this exploration and diplomatics, I was able to stabilize my economy more or less, and keep my cities from starving, but at the cost of my science output (the only thing that I was actually succeeding at). Despite my early struggles, this game seems fairly well balanced, in the sense that focusing on one thing specifically (for example science), causes the civilization to suffer in some other way, so the player must strike the dangerous balance of focusing on everything simultaneously, and carefully pushing emphasis on one thing more than the others, but remaining adaptable to a variable situation. My current play through seems doomed, but I will keep forging on. Perhaps my fortunes will change now that I know to keep my pursuits more equal.

All that the light touches is my domain…. At least on this island.

1/20, At home again on my desktop computer again. This game certainly wouldn’t lend itself to play in many other places. The game mechanics are slow and cumbersome, a product of the technology of the time. Regardless of this, the game is addicting. My second session only lasted for an hour and a half, but this one was moderately successful. I started a new game, seeing as how my last one was a complete failure. I chose the Romans again because now my stubborn gamer nature has committed me to winning this. If I’m going to win, its going to be with the Romans. So this time around, while making sure I was armed with the game manual in another browser tab, I made sure to put more emphasis on creating fewer warriors, and developing my cities. I created 3 soldiers for each city o founded, for security while focusing on building every structure and wonder on the build list, and honing my research to find gunpowder first. I got lucky in that I was spawned on a rather small rectangular island, so I was able to advance my civilization in relative comfort and safety. Each of the quizzes I aced due to the manual. But again my plan backfired. I discovered another game play mechanic accidentally and that is Maintenance. Apparently every single building constructed has a turn-by-turn maintenance cost, which must be balanced against the players standard turn by turn gold income. Well I had built so many buildings that I was losing 30 gold per turn, and if a player gets to 0 gold, then a structure is destroyed for money. So for several turns, I struggled to figure out how to increase my gold income. After I had lost four or five structures, I retreated to the Internet, where i quickly discovered that it was possible for me to increase the tax rate, as well as turn farmers or civilians into tax collectors. With this knowledge, I explored the game mechanics and menus until I found the tax rate, but even with 100% tax it wasn’t enough. I was still losing money. After creating two tax collectors in my capital (the only city large enough to create tax collectors) I brought my money loss to a stand still. Satisfied for the moment, I kept working on researching technologies, but yet another obstacle stood in my way. Rome was facing food shortages because the farmers i turned into tax men no longer were producing food. It was at this point that I almost screamed in frustration and pulled what is commonly known as a “rage quit”. Its fairly clear to me in retrospect that this game relies heavily on a persons knowledge of the manual and by extension all of the rules of the game. Like I mentioned in my last post, this game does not age well, especially in a time where manuals don’t even really exist outside of $60 strategy guides. So this means that a persons skill at this game is directly related to how many trial and error sessions that they have. I am also beginning to get the feeling that this game suffers from us being required to return to the game after breaks. Having played other Civ games, they tend to benefit from binge playing, because it is pretty easy to lose track or forget where you left off, and that leads to mistakes, which a single one can be the end of your play through. I plan on returning to this game tomorrow and trying to fix my starving, impoverished digital island empire. And maybe tomorrow I will finally encounter another civilization and give me some more insight into the dynamics of this game.

At home, on January 18th, using my desktop computer, it began so smoothly. Civ 1 began loading a nostalgic pixel cut scene, showing the birth of a planet. Having played several of the more modern iterations of Sid Meyer’s Civilization, I felt confident in my abilities. I was given the option to begin the game as one of six different countries: German, Roman, Babylonian, French, Zulu and Egyptian. I chose the Romans because I figured, who doesn’t want to be the Romans? Also it helped that the Romans conquered all of the other options (or that area of the world anyway) at one point or the other, with the exception of the Zulu. The screen shifted to black, and then a square of terrain surrounding a symbol representing my first settler, with the rest of the world unknown to me. I founded Rome with the settler, and began the construction of a vast army. Science and culture would not be my approach, oh no. I would go for a horde of Roman troops to engulf the world before it had a chance to develop. I found this plan to be fairly effective. I was able to gain approximately fifteen warriors and a Phalanx (from a nice friendly village). The world was quickly becoming viewable by me, with my loyal army venturing far and wide, yet not discovering any other empires. It seemed that the world was much larger than I had anticipated it would be. Then one of my warriors stumbled onto a seemingly innocent village. but instead of gifting me with gold or maps, they were hostile. Three barbarian cavalry burst forth and murdered my poor warrior before I could cuss out the screen. Furiously, I mustered my forces and sent them marching back towards Rome to defend their capital. I had left several troops inside the city, but I didn’t want to see if they would be enough. But half way through the race to my capital, a message appeared, covering the game. Some villager was challenging my validity as a ruler. In order to remain in power over my forces, i had to prove that I was actually of royal blood by answering a question. I was provided with a picture of a factory, and asked what two technologies lead to that structure. Since I hadn’t read the manual, I naturally had no idea what the answer was. So I tried to logic my way out of it, but it turns out that “Metallurgy and Industrialization” was not the answer. My subjects laughed at my feeble response (the games words, not mine), and I was allowed to try again, but like before I failed. To my horror, all of my troops fled the battle field, abandoning me in my hour of need, and I watched helplessly as the barbarians stormed into Rome and I was treated to my first complete and utter defeat to the barbarians. In retrospect, I cant tell if i like the function of the population questioning the ruler. On one hand it seems like an interesting and cool dynamic, forcing the player to gain a wealth of knowledge just to remain in control of their forces. However, this dynamic does not age well. In an age where game manuals are mainly used in-game, or not even existing anymore, outside of $60 strategy guides, people just don’t have the patience for that kind of study for their games. For my next play session, I plan to have a second browser window open, with the manual open and ready to browse. I haven’t given up on the horde of Romans descending on unwary AI civs.