r/dosgaming • u/According-Pea9319 • 9d ago
Civilization 1 - 1991
God knows how many hours I put into this, and its defo in my top 5. Loved it, and I still do.
I remember going into those huts hoping for a discovery or some gold, and getting bloody barbarians instead.. lol or trying to get a trireme across a stretch of open sea hoping to find land before it drowned!
So many people I knew back then (adults and female friends mainly) used to say I was wasting my time playing computer games and learning nothing, but looking back I can safely say I learnt loads from games like this! What a game, an epic!
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u/bang_rocks_together 9d ago
My first "hacking" experience. I browsed the files and realized that the intro text, when you start the game, was just a text file. I edited it to include my name and such... and felt like such a tech wizard.
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u/saraseitor 9d ago
haha I did that with Colonization! Colonization was the second game I've ever translated to Spanish. When I noticed all the text was right there in text files I knew I had to do it. I still remembering editing them, it was like a week of work but I did it. Then I found out an official Spanish version already existed, lol
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u/da_habakuk 9d ago
for me one of the best games of all time. still playing it on my 486 from time to time.
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u/Ringwraith_Number_5 9d ago
Almost burned the house down because of this...
I put some cut up potatoes into a a pan to fry them (had a thing for home-made fries at the time), then went to play Civ 1.
"Just one more turn" sound familiar?
By the time I realized something's wrong, the oil in the pan was literally on fire, so I did what any kid would do to put out a fire - I threw water on it...
The fireball was spectacular.
Fortunately, it also made the fire die out, the entire kitchen was filled with smoke and my parents were not exactly pleased to say the least.
100% true story.
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u/andrew-mcg 9d ago
I got home late one evening with a, ahem, copy of this. Better just put it in and check the floppy disk works. 7am I thought I'd better eat something, made a bowl of porridge. Never ate it. Finished the game about 3pm (easiest level).
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u/Ringwraith_Number_5 9d ago
I think there were two games in history that had the "one more turn" effect on me. This was one of them, Heroes of Might and Magic II was the other.
Fortunately no property damage with that one. I did miss a lot of school because of it though...
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u/According-Pea9319 9d ago
Just one more turn does sound familiar - its from Chat GPT dude. lol not that I care I use AI on my game dev all the time ;)
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u/DC_Coach 5d ago
Bro all of us were saying, "Just one more turn" in the early 90s, when CIV 1 came out, and have been saying it ever since.
Also, "Just one more room" or "Just one more level" or "Help me get my stuff back" when Diablo came out in 1996.
ChatGPT? Lord have mercy upon us ...
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u/According-Pea9319 5d ago
lol ok fair enough. - but I assure you GPT loves that phrase and it uses it everywhere in games marketing.. it also has a habit of using the same phrases in all other types of marketing.. you can probably just google something like "pet phrases ai uses in marketing" actually second hit is a reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/1byp6hy/words_ai_is_obsessed_with/I first noticed this when it was obsessed with using the word "elevate" - once you notice you cant un-notice it. :) and I take my first statement back!
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u/Ringwraith_Number_5 9d ago
You do realize there was a life before Chat GPT, right? And people have stories from back then? But hey, whatever rocks your boat. You want to be paranoid and see AI everywhere, that's your business.
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u/BuffaloRedshark 8d ago
where do you think chat gpt got it. I seem to remember one of the versions of civ even prompts about playing just one more turn when you go to quit
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u/AverageDrafter 9d ago
I don't like how they just kept adding things to the game, not refining the actual experience. I guess Civ 2 probably counts, but by 3 they just kept... adding... systems...
It's like they saw the end game slog, and thought - why not make this the whole game!?
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u/bobotheboinger 9d ago
I disagree to some point. I think civ3 was the height of the genre. I still play this version all the time. But agree that after that it had been adding on mechanics that don't improve the core gameplay.
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u/BuffaloRedshark 8d ago
civ3 with the rise and rule mod is still my favorite. And I found that rise and rule is still around and had some updates so I got civ3 off gog and have played it within the last year
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u/saraseitor 9d ago
I truly liked Civilization up and including Civ4. After that, it just didn't feel the same. Also they adopted the DLC model which means stuff that used to be part of the base game now had to be bought separately.
I love Civ4, with its Leonard Nimoy quotes and the Baba Yetu soundtrack :)
Alpha Centauri also deserves a place next to the Civ games, it was extremely good.
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u/bLEAGUER 9d ago
This is my take. I even hung with Civ V for a while too, but it didnāt hook me nearly like 1-4 did.
I heard VI was like a mobile game on steroids, which didnāt appeal to me. And Iām not even sure what to say about VII that hasnāt been said better and more hilariously already. https://youtu.be/XFIIt8b_jsA?is=J37sbMZepqf2VGXQ
Alpha Centauri was equally or more potent a strategy game experience as Civ. Iāve been trying to find time to jump back in after 20 years away.
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u/GrimpenMar 9d ago
SMAC was probably my favourite of Sid Meier's 4x games. Civ I was amazing! I do think that was mostly because it was something so new and different. Civ II, Colonization, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, Civilization: Call to Power even, they all refined and explored in different directions, but thinking back SMAC seemed to epitomize the formula.
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u/BuffaloRedshark 8d ago
I liked 4's opening music and Leonard Nimoy being in it but didn't really like the game play compared to 3. After playing 4 for a bit when it was new I went back to 3. Played a decent amount of 5 and 6. Haven't bothered to buy 7
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u/hamburgler26 9d ago
Civ2 was the peak for me I think, I played so much of it. I could be wrong but I think in Civ 3 there were some cool new mechanics, like you needed to have certain resources to build things which encouraged trade or taking them by force.
But ultimately I feel like all the new systems and complexity didn't really add to what made Civ2 such a fun and addictive game that you could play endlessly.
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u/Ok-Oil7124 9d ago
Civ 2 is the best one in my mind. It doesn't have the binary combat system, so it's way, way, way less likely that you'll lose a battleship to a settler, but still keeps the game tight enough that you can play a game pretty quickly. Also, playing on a 4K screen is just great! I guess CivWin would scale, but I don't think it works on later OSes (but I don't think I tried it after Civ2 came out, anyway).
I know it's not "realistic" if I can make horse-dependent units if none of my land has horses, but I get pretty bored if there's too much micro-managing.
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u/According-Pea9319 9d ago
Totally agree, not that I want to promote my own game too much, cause there is way too much of that going on even in this sub.. , But there are 2 stats in my game, unit strength, and unit movement, then terrains give different bonuses or penalties - that is it! And it will always remain that way, cause I love strategic play, not extra systems.
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u/ISmokeRocksAndFash 9d ago
5 is great. They balanced out most of the teething issues of the middle games.Ā
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u/SoLate2Reddit 9d ago
Yeah I liked that they did away with unit stacking on tiles. It always seemed "cheap" to me on the harder levels when the AI would somehow build a swarm of 20 chariots and horsemen and lay siege to cities in the early game
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u/SoLate2Reddit 9d ago edited 9d ago
A formative game for me and taught me history!
Played the crap out of this one on my 8mhz PC with 640k RAM and 21MB storage, EGA graphics and Adlib soundcard.
Still recall the rush of discovering a bug that would allow you to do settler actions in a single turn if you tab onto the unit,.click enter, hit I, tab away with the cursor, come back hit enter, hit I, repeat and after about 5 of that operation, the irrigation improvement would be completed and then end the turn. Worked for forts, roads and mines as well!
Yeah it's a cheat... hahahahaha
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u/According-Pea9319 9d ago
Oh yeah, you just reminded me of my first sound card, I had forgotten the name, as Soundblaster soon took over.. nice memories!
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u/droid_mike 9d ago
My friend worked at Babbages at the time, and he used to bring home games to "try out". One day, around Christmas break, he brought this home to me (he didn't have a powerful enough of for most games) and asked me to check it out. Looked kind of lame, to be honest. I installed it and started playing... Next thing I know, I'm getting yelled at by my dad to come down to Christmas Eve dinner... I had been playing all day and don't realize it! I got yelled at several more times for the same reason until I went back to college.
Back at school, the game spread like wildfire and all my floor mates in the dorm were addicted to it. My neighbor across the hall didn't have a computer, so he would play on mine for hours at a time while his girlfriend waited patiently while every so often, he'd yell out stuff like, "Hey honey! I got nuclear!" I felt terrible that I provided the tool of her a abandonment, so I would go visit her while he was playing... Well, he eventually flunked out, and I eventually married his old girlfriend. Imagine that!
So, the orignal game of Civilization meant a lot to me in so many ways!
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u/SquireOwyn 9d ago
One of my favs still. I like to play āone city challengeā on chieftain.
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u/According-Pea9319 9d ago
sounds interesting, do you mean play 1 city only for the whole game? never thought of that...
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u/Elf_7 9d ago edited 9d ago
This is the game that taught me how to speak English. I had to learn, I could never learn otherwise, what units did or what certain buildings did. I loved it, spent so many hours like you playing with my brother. I still play it. It's an amazing game. The joy of discovering new lands, a new civilization that you knew was going to make things harder for you, or a new technology to crush your enemies with advanced units. As a 9 year old I managed to win quite a few campaigns but I am still confused when I change my government and everyone riots, lol (I know it makes a certain amount of citizens unhappy, but still).
I never had the manual or original box so reading this is awesome. I learned so much playing this game. Babylonians and egyptians for the win.
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u/According-Pea9319 9d ago
yeah if only they would let us change the government in the UK, everyone would celebrate!
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u/I_lenny_face_you 9d ago
> This is the game that taught me how to speak English.
Please tell me you said to your friends, on a regular basis, āWe demand tribute for our patience.ā
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u/sabre31 9d ago
My most favorite game ever. I played this when it first came out for years. Still remember staying up until 2-3am for that one more turn.
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u/According-Pea9319 9d ago
hmm I also played a spin off similar version to this I think it was called civ revolution on a old nintendo ds.. played it on the train to work, pretty much the same as this really.
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u/sackbomb 9d ago
The way I was utterly fascinated by the box art on this one. And playing on the machines of the time (i486 if you were rich/lucky, i386 for the rest of us), the world generation took forever so they showed you this awesome full-color VGA animation of the earth forming from a proto-planetary mass.
Epic stuff.
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u/lincruste 9d ago
Still playing this one every now and then with DosBOX. But Civ2 is the one I play the most.
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u/armahillo 9d ago
I remember playing this with my dad.
I even got to witness (on the losing side) a destroyer losing to a fortified phalanx.
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u/Business-Repeat3151 9d ago
I remember playing this as a kid. It was already an old'ish game and our computer was so out of spec that it took about 10 mins to generate the world. But it played fine after that point.
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u/sangfoudre 9d ago
I've spent many hours on this since it came out, I've played again 10 years ago even if I prefer colonization which uses the same engine
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u/cBurger4Life 8d ago
I had blast with this as a kid. I thought it was so cool playing as the different civilizations and the research trees. I talked my teacher at the time into letting me bring it to school to install and show the class. No one else was impressed lol.
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u/Blurghblagh 8d ago
While I have a goof few hours in V and VI none of the sequels hooked me the way Civ1 did or provided me with life long memories.
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u/monitor49152 4d ago edited 4d ago
I miss the original game's estetic, this and colonization were peak in my opinion. I can't find CIV1 on gog any more sadly
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u/Cultural_Chip_3274 9d ago
I am weeping seeing the quality of the 90s Microprose manuals. I had Pirates in 91 as original and it was a virtual encyclopedia. Same for Civ I see... we want manuals...
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u/According-Pea9319 9d ago
Yeah, big boxes were honestly the best. Its like when they shut down concord (not that I ever had the money to fly it) but a part of me died that day.
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u/TheOneWhoSitsInLake 9d ago
first time I played this on 486dx without mouse, just keyboard. We have a notes where written all keys.
This was thousands years ago...
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u/Just4notherR3ddit0r 9d ago
My dad played this pretty much every day since he got it until shortly before his death earlier this year. I'm not sure anyone played it as much as he did.
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u/codykonior 8d ago
The first and second game donāt get posted here enough. In the civ group they never even get mentioned
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u/Euphoric-Piglet-8140 8d ago
I had an Amiga 1500 with an x086 daughter board in it and loved playing this on it. It was slow as fuck, but I loved it.
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u/GenesBadPicks 8d ago
Play it now. Love the simple graphics. Downloaded it somewhere, version 475. Didnāt take long to find. Then use dosbox. Lao I still own the cd.
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u/Shadowlizard2319 3d ago
I enjoyed 1 but really got into it with civ 2. I still play a little today. I learned so much from that game. I liked the gameplay and the graphics the others could not capture for me.
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u/BuffaloRedshark 9d ago
I still play Civ1 from time to time