Sid Meier's Civilization
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20 Giant Games
(1997) -
Award Winners: Platinum Edition
(1995) -
Golden Collection 1
(1996) -
Microprose Limited Edition: Civilization + Colonization
(1994) - Sid Meier CD Edition (1994)
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Sid Meier's Civilization Chronicles
(2006) -
Sid Meier's Classic Collection
(1995) -
Ultimate Strategy Archives
(1999)
Description official descriptions
Civilization has the widest scope of any strategy game of its time. You are a leader of a nation. You begin in the Stone Age, and complete the game in the XXIth century (unless your civilization gets destroyed earlier). Your eventual goal is to become the dominant civilization in the world, either by wiping out everybody else, or being the first to get a space ship to Alpha Centauri.
As the nation's leader, you have many responsibilities. You have to build cities, and then micromanage them, constructing various buildings. Most of the people in your cities will be working on the neighbouring lands to get food (without it, your city won't survive or grow), production (used to build military units and buildings) and trade (which can be exchanged for money, science (see below) or luxuries that make people happy. You decide how much trade you want to invest into each of these areas.) You have to make sure that your people are in a good mood; if they get too unhappy, the city will collapse into disorder, and won't produce anything until you fix the situation.
If you're ambitious, you can build Wonders of the World - epic constructions, such as the Pyramids or the Hoover Dam. Each Wonder is a unique thing, and only one of each can exist in the world. They give you a lot of benefits if you complete them, but they take a long time to build, and many of them will eventually stop working.
There are other nations in the world, and there are also barbarians, so you'll have to invest into the military to protect yourself and to attack. Sure, you can sign peace treaties with other nations, and even exchange scientific knowledge with them (although sometimes they'll demand tribute from you), but eventually you'll probably have to fight. You control each of your military units on the world map, attacking your opponents' units and cities (possibly taking over them).
Not all units are for combat though. Settlers are used to build cities, create roads (for easier travel of your units) and improve the land around cities, increasing production. Diplomats can be sent to foreign cities to negotiate with the other nations or create embassies, but they can also bribe enemy units to join you and conduct espionage and sabotage in the enemies' cities. Caravans can be sent to faraway cities to increase trade in their home city, and they can also help in building Wonders of the World.
Scientific progress is an important part of the game. The more science your cities produce, the faster you research new technologies. Initially, you'll be finding out about the wonders of Alphabet or Bronze Working, but late in the game you'll be researching Computers and Robotics. Most technologies give you some new units, buildings and other things, although some have more interesting effects - for example, after inventing the Automobile, you'll find out that your citizens started producing pollution. Pollution is a bad thing; if there's too much of it, global warming may occur.
How your cities prosper depends partially on the type of government that your nation has. Initially you're living in Despotism, but this can stunt growth of your civilization, so it's a good idea to switch to something else - Monarchy, Republic, Democracy or Communism.
Spellings
- シヴィライゼーション 新・世界七大文明 - Japanese spelling
- 文明 - Simplified Chinese spelling
Groups +
- Gameplay feature: Fog of war
- Games referenced in movies
- Games with classical music
- Games with game-altering copy protection
- Games with manual lookup copy protection
- Games with randomly generated environments
- Games with the creator's name
- Powerplus releases
- Protagonist: Female (option)
- Setting: Totality of history
- Sid Meier's Civilization series
- Sid Meier's licensees
- Sound engine: MED
- Theme: Famous politician
- Video games turned into board / card games
Screenshots
Promos
Credits (DOS version)
35 People · View all
| Game Design | |
| Original IBM Programming | |
| Original IBM Computer Graphics | |
| Original IBM Music Compositions | |
| Civilopedia | |
| Original IBM Sound Effects | |
| Tandy Sound Effects | |
| Documentation | |
| Editors | |
| Manual Design | |
| [ full credits ] | |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 89% (based on 48 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 332 ratings with 12 reviews)
I can only say this The Civ line of games can never and will never be unseated from the Throne!
The Good
Everything
what more can you say.
The Bad
nothing
The Bottom Line
I have been giving reviews to my persoal favorites. This game is number 1.
DOS · by Shawn McDonie (13) · 2000
Civilization for Windows - a great game...
The Good
This game has, in my opinion, a few points over the DOS-version:
- The screens with discoveries and things can be clicked away.
Rather than having to wait for it to fully fade in, you just click thus get more time to play the game.
- Extra tribes?
I think there are more tribes to play than in the DOS-version, but not sure since I haven't played the DOS one in a while now (still have it on my hard-disk though).
- The mouse works in the Windows version.
Having an usb-mouse means DOS won't let me use it... and the DOS version can be run under Windows, but the mouse responds much slower and dodgier.
- It looks better...
While this is not a gameplay-issue (gameplay is great in both versions), it does help that this version looks a bit better.
The Bad
There is only one point I didn't like so far:
- It seems impossible to find working cheats for the Windows-version!
Unlike the "counterpart" of Civilization (both Dos and Windows versions), Colonization which has well-documented cheats that can be found just about everywhere, for Civilization only the DOS cheats keep turning up in websearches...
The Bottom Line
All in all I would say this is a great game that has earned it's merits.
Both DOS and Windows versions feature a great gameplay that guarantees you'll be playing them for hours, but the Windows-version described here would be the version I am rooting for in a comparison, due to the fact that for me it's a bit more streamlined.
Anyways, I'm going back into the search to find some cheats... I know they exist, I used them years ago.
Windows 3.x · by Cesar Saez (5) · 2003
If you have read any of the other reviews then you can guess what's in this one :P
The Good
What did I like about this game? Uh, where to start.. I guess the epic, open ended, engaging nature of the game that keeps me up night after night. The diplomacy, warfare, city building etc.. The thought of the fact that the whole of WWII can be compacted into 6 turns and D-Day can be put into a single transport unit moving one square and unloading one rifleman unit. It's stupidly epic.
I also like how each game could be easily written into a dozen volumes of stories. You know that book you've got about the history of the earth? One of those could be written about each game of civilization.
This game is hands-down the best game ever. All praise civilization! It owns every and any real-time strategy game on any console and OS.
The Bad
If this game had auto-settler and a build-wealth option in each city (civ gamers will know what I'm talking about) it would be the ultimate game. And you can quote me on that.
The Bottom Line
This is more of an intoxicating wine then a game.
DOS · by Trada PIB (2) · 2005
Trivia
1001 Video Games
The PC version of Civilization appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Avalon Hill
The game was partially inspired by the Avalon Hill boardgame Civilization and later Advanced Civilization. When Sid Meier's version became so popular, Avalon Hill actually came out with Advanced Civilization for the PC. Avalon Hill then sued Hasbro/MicroProse for copyright infringement. Activision got involved as they want to license the Avalon Hill version for their Civilization: Call to Power. MicroProse then went on, with Hasbro's help, to buy out the original inventors of the Avalon Hill's version, thus negating the suit. Finally they settled out of court. Activision gets the license to make Call to Power, MicroProse keeps the computer game name Civilization, and Avalon Hill gets nothing.
Board game
Coming full circle from its apocryphal roots in the 1980 Hartland Trefoil / Avalon Hill boardgame Civilization, 2002 saw the release of Sid Meier's Civilization: the Boardgame.
Development
Dan Bunten, creator of the M.U.L.E., wanted to follow this game up with a computer port of the Avalon Hill board game Civilization. Unable to drum up enough support from his Ozark colleagues, he instead went on to create Seven Cities of Gold. After leaving Electronic Arts in 1988, Bunten signs a deal with Microprose and has a choice between the Civilization port and a conversion of Milton Bradley's Axis and Allies. Fellow Microprosian Sid Meier convinces him to tackle the latter, which becomes Bunten's Command H.Q.. Meier, of course, goes on to make Civ.
Gandhi and nukes
A long-standing urban legend claimed that the Indian civilization's leader Mahatma Gandhi was especially prone to using nuclear weapons due to a game bug. In the game, each leader has their own statistics that define their personality towards others. According to the legend, once a player researches and adopts democracy in the game, all leaders would have their aggression stat towards the newly-democratic player reduced by 2. However, India's leader Mahatma Gandhi already had that stat set to 1 by default, and the effect of democracy caused an integer overflow - it would have theoretically gone to -1, but the stat apparently used an unsigned 8-bit integer format for its value, setting Gandhi's aggression to 255 and having him threaten players with nuclear weapons. The story first appeared on the TV Tropes wiki in 2012, spreading from there until it was widely reported by gaming media. However, in his 2020 autobiography Sid Meier's Memoir!, designer and programmer Sid Meier debunked the story, stating that such a bug never existed since government types do not affect the AI leaders' aggressiveness rating. And even if they did, the C dialect used to program Civilization used signed integers as a default, meaning no overflow would happen. The supposed bug became a running joke among the fans and the "Gandhi using nukes" meme made an appearance in the Civilization series itself: Gandhi's nuke production and usage stats in Sid Meier's Civilization V are always set to the maximum value, and in Sid Meier's Civilization VI, Gandhi has an increased chance of having the "Nuke Happy" hidden agenda. Since Civilization V was released before the first claim of the supposed bug, it was not influenced by the legend, possibly influencing it instead.
Further reading: Nuclear Gandhi at Wikipedia.
Inspiration
Although clearly inspired in part by Avalon Hill's Civilization boardgame, Sid Meier's Civilization also draws very heavily upon the original conquer-the-world computer strategy game Empire: Wargame of the Century.
Intro
The lines of text shown in the intro cinematic/animation are read from a plain text file in the game's directory, and thus can be easily modified.
References to the game
Strangely enough, but in Sliver, a thriller movie with Sharon Stone, William Baldwin and Tom Berenger, you can spot a poster on the wall to secret room of the bad guy in the movie, a close up of the front cover of Sid Meier's Civilization game. It is hardly noticeable as it appears for a split second.
Soundtrack
An orchestral version of the game soundtrack was released on the CD-ROM (as audio tracks) of Sid Meier's CivNet in 1995.
Strategy guide
Sid Meier's Civilization was one of the first games to have a paperback strategy guide released for it: Alan Emrich and Johnny Wilson's Rome on 640K a Day.
Awards
- Amiga Joker
- Issue 02/1993 – #3 Best Game of 1992 (Readers' Vote)
- Issue 02/1993 – Best Simulation of 1992 (Readers' Vote)
- Computer Gaming World
- November 1992 (Issue #100) – Overall Game of the Year
- August 1993 (Issue #109) - Introduced into the Hall of Fame
- November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #1 overall in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
- March 2001 (Issue #200) - #1 in the "Top Ten Games of All Time" list (Editors' vote)
- March 2001 (Issue #200) - #7 in the "Top Ten Games of All Time" list (Readers' vote)
- Game Informer
- August 2001 (Issue 100) - #62 in the "Top 100 Games of All Time" poll
- GameSpy
- 2001 – #4 Top Game of All Time
- GameStar (Germany)
- Issue 12/1999 - #1 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
- PC Gamer
- April 2000 - #11 overall in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll (the oldest game to make the list)
- Retro Gamer
- October 2004 (Issue #9) – #29 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
- The Strong National Museum of Play
- 2022 – Introduced into the World Video Game Hall of Fame
Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Andrew Grassender, JimmyA, Kasey Chang, lethal guitar, MAT, PCGamer77 and Pseudo_Intellectual
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Related Sites +
-
Apolyton Civilization Site
Comprehensive site about the whole Civilization series -
Civilization Fanatics Center
A great site devoted to the Civilization Series. Includes strategies, chat board, downloads and more. -
IGCD Internet Game Cars Database
Game page on IGCD, a database that tries to archive vehicles found in video games.
Identifiers +
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by MajorDad.
SNES, Windows 3.x added by PCGamer77. Amiga added by Rebound Boy. Atari ST added by Martin Smith. PlayStation added by qwertyuiop. Macintosh added by Игги Друге. PC-98 added by Unicorn Lynx. SEGA Saturn added by Thiago Simões.
Additional contributors: Ummagumma, Terok Nor, MAT, Robert Teichmann, PCGamer77, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Alaka, monkeyislandgirl, formercontrib, Patrick Bregger, Plok, Victor Vance, FatherJack, SoMuchChaotix.
Game added December 21, 1999. Last modified May 27, 2024.