Clash of Civilizations
Posted 30 Nov, 2005 at 12:40 by matt in /Games | Permanent link
Much like last year, Brent and I spent a goodly portion of my visit to his world last week playing Civ: in this case, the newly-released Civ 4. (Well, newly-released for his platform, albeit not mine... yet.) Each Civ game has been deeper/more complex than its predecessor, and so it is with this one; while I still find it absorbing, in a lot of ways this new release has reminded me exactly how/why I'm not a (computer) gamer.
I am, perhaps, the only person in the Goldenempires/DC social circle who really liked Civ 3. I liked a lot of the innovations: the game's concept of culture and the attendant bloodless "conquests" of nearby foreign cities, the establishment of trade routes, diverse innate advantages possessed by different civilizations. I liked some of the refinements to the interface, like how mountains on the map will block line-of-sight to things beyond them. Mostly, perhaps, I liked it because it was well-suited to my preferred playing style, whereas many of my harder-core (hard-corer?) gaming friends had optimized their strategies to the foibles of Civ 2, which is a great game, and lost patience with Civ 3 when things didn't work out as expected.
So I'm pleased that almost all of the features of Civ 3 that I liked have been carried over into the new release, albeit moderated in a couple of respects. Moreover, they've carried some of those ideas further: now in order to harvest any resource, you need to know certain technologies and construct some particular structure on the relevant square. The re-jiggered tech tree is neat, since now you've got more options: pre-requisites are more often "or" rather than "and", and so it's entirely feasible to ignore some of the early techs pretty much forever: the things that they lead to, you can often get from some other path.
And then there's the new religion system (which treats all religions as isomorphic; the important thing is whether you have a state religion and whether you have a holy city, for the most part), and the "civics" system that supercedes the old "governments" mechanism and gives you a little more control over the exact workings of your society, and...
...and really, it's a much, much richer game than Civ 3 or its earlier ancestors. It seems, actually, that the complexity gap between 3 and 4 is much greater than that between 2 and 3... or even between CivNet (1.5, I suppose) and 2 was. And this is my problem with it.
I am not, I feel, much inclined to attending to details. I'm capable of it -- you have to be, if you're going to be a professional mathematician, and particularly so in the discrete fields where I do my research. And being a geek about certain things -- Western popular music from the late 50s to the present, for instance -- knowing the details does inform a significant piece of my character. But I'm not, and have rarely been, a fan of complexity for its own sake.
What I mean is: tracing through a proof in graph theory, or following the various connections and changes within my social networks, or knowing and understanding the significance of the Velvet Underground in the music scene of the time... these things require the ability to dealt with complexity, because they are intrinsically complicated. There are subtle things going on there, which require at least some small depth of thought to understand. But, significantly, these are real things, and so I'm willing to accept the irreducible difficulties.
When it comes to games... I don't like games with overly complicated rules and systems, because I don't want to take them that seriously. They're not real; they're a diversion. My preference, almost always, is for games with very simple systems and very simple rules, from which complexity can naturally arise. Bridge is a complicated card game, but almost all of the difficulties can be perceived and deduced from the really very simple set of rules of the game; while there is a lot of background knowledge (about the significance of bids, e.g.) that a good player has to have, none of it is a priori complex. All of it can be said to follow from a fairly simple set of principles.
I have the sense that in its newest incarnation, Civilizations has crossed over from emergent to intrinsic complexity... and that's not what I look for in a game. A lot of people do: serious gamers seem to enjoy having a rich, intrinsically complex world to play in. I don't have the patience for it.