Civ4 Chronicles

In Search of Lost Gaming Time

So there’s this game series called Civilization. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It coined the term “one more turn,” because its relentless exponential growth system meant that every single new turn felt so impactful that you just couldn’t stop. This is the story of how I went from messing around with it as a kid, to learning it deeply as a college student, and eventually becoming one of the best in the world at its strange competitive online multiplayer scene, before eventually breaking out of the addiction.

Not a bad representation of what I looked like.

Civilization took the gaming world by storm when it first came out in 1991. People were buying it without even an interest in playing games; they seemed to think it was some sort of educational experience. Included in the game was the “Civilopedia,” which functioned as both the game manual and a genuine mini encyclopedia., with short simple descriptions that even a child could understand. Much of it was about military history, but it did have some cultural, political, and economic concepts.

I have vague memories of playing Civ as a very young child, too young for any real history class, so in many ways this game was my first introduction to history. It taught me to say things like: “Democracy is way too much of a pain to be a good government. Communism works way better. Or we can just stay in Despotism, that’s the simplest.” I was just playing to win, so I didn’t spend much time reading the history descriptions, but I did read some.

As I grew older, I started to learn how to properly play the game, especially its sequel/remake Civ2. But it was still very much a single player experience, more focused on relaxation and exploiting the limits of the computer opponents than on actually mastering the game. There was a multiplayer community, enough that they made a special remake of Civ1 called Civnet just so people could play online, but it was so niche that I never heard of it (probably for the better). I slowly lost interest in the game, and never even touched Civ3.

Digital Crack, New and Improved: Version 4

But when I was in college, they released Civ4, much to the detriment of my studies. This version included, not only the history-themed exponential growth of its predecessors, but also a deep economic engine, a variety of ways to win including religious and cultural victories, and a multiplayer system that was balanced by heavy in-house testing.

One of the people they brought in to test it was a guy named Sulla¹. Like me, he had been playing the previous games for years; unlike me, he lived nearby the dev studio and he had a blog. He posted extensive written reports of his games there and on gaming forums, which attracted quite a following. Some of his early game reports are quite… naive, if you know how to play the game competitively, but they did an excellent job showcasing the new features and getting us all sucked in to the excitement. He also inspired a lot of us to post our own written game reports for comparison, sometimes for competitions.

But where Sulla really piqued my interest was in the multiplayer scene. Before this, I had thought of Civ as a purely single-player experience, where the computer opponents lumbered along sort of like Andrej the Giant in The Princess Bride—strong but slow-witted. Sulla’s multiplayer game reports showed me that there was another way, where top-notch players used every possible trick to compete head-to-head. They weren’t just better than single-player games, they had to use entirely different strategies, because intelligent human players weren’t going to just sit passively while one player raced ahead into the lead. In particular, they had to use diplomacy and intelligence-gathering tactics to figure out what was going on and form coalitions for protection.

Bear in mind, Civilization isn’t a real-time game like StarCraft. It’s turn-based, so everyone else has to wait while one player takes his turn. And a typical game takes several hundred turns to finish, and with five to ten-ish players you’re getting at best one turn per day² so… do the math. These games were long. Long enough that after playing a turn, there was enough time left over to write a full forum post documenting your turn, analyze future turns, send diplomatic messages to all the other players, and possibly start some forum drama. It attracted a peanut gallery of people who weren’t playing, but still wanted to watch what all the fuss was about, including yours truly.

Finally, Some Worthy Opponents

Seeing Sulla’s performance there inspired me to join my first ever large-scale Civ4 multiplayer game, Realms Beyond Pitboss 4. It was… how do I describe it? Ten players from around the world ran a highly complex wargame nonstop for six months. We collectively wrote something like 5000 posts describing our turns and attracting roughly one million total views, but each siloed in our own unique threads, with a strict honor code to not look at anyone else’s thread! Amazingly, as far as I know, that worked out and no one looked, which shows the kind of tight-knit community we had. I felt an intense stress as I played in front of a live audience, pushing myself to the limit to maximize each move and constantly paranoid that I might misclick (there was no mercy given for misclicks).

The first neightbor that I encountered was a guy named Mackoti. Later I got to know him pretty well, but at that time I had no idea who he was. He was sending me inscrutable messages like:

Well from what i see until now, first you had to go from chat and second played 2 turns and no answer to my mail , i will straight with letting diplomacy aside(ye not small talking) , if you setle after the wine our NAP its void then, because when we signed the NAP until turn 100 that was the frontier between us.You can check al my games i respected all my NAP’s but only if the other respected.

Why i ask you that? Because i will remain without space to setle and war be my only option, i have a strong NAP with Sleepingmoogle and he is respecting his part of agreement,and dont believe if i am a rooky here i will not fight.Probably will get both of us out of game.

I am sure that we will not get to war and find a solution but i will not negociate first thing from our NAP, that we will respect wine like frontier between us .Man imagine i go and setle near your rice, ye is same distance from my capitol to the land south , the only thing wich made me not clamiming until now is some nasty peaks(tanks krill).

Regards,

Mackoti

So what’s a gamer supposed to do? We were in vicious competition for the same limited space, he was threatening war, and we couldn’t communicate like civilized people, so clearly a preemptive strike was the only option³… This was my first civ multiplayer war, and also just the second war of this game, which triggered immediate diplomatic reactions from everyone else. Bear in mind that we were playing this in front of a live audience, with months of commitment, and no take-backs for any mistakes… my heart was pounding with adrenaline with every click.

The plan initially worked. I was able to catch Mackoti by surprise, and capture all of the disputed zone between us with military force, which set me up as a major power in the game. I also had a dominant navy, which allowed me to simultaneously threaten his capital city, defend my own, and reinforce the disputed zone all at once.

What I didn’t realize⁴ was that Mackoti was some sort of cracked Romanian game genius, who was at the top of his own tiny Romanian competitive Civ4 community. So while I thought the war was won and started to relax into peaceful economic development, he was somehow able to mount a military comeback and even threaten my capital⁵. Meanwhile, my neighbor on the other side, “Lord Parkin,” was also the head of his own New Zealand-based gaming guild, and was much better than any of us suspected. So while I was busy with war on one side, he grabbed land on the other, and ran away with the game before any of us could stop him. We attempted one last grand coalition to stop him—we called it the “Parkin’ Violation”—but it was too late.

Suddenly, Everyone Wants to Play

After this there was a storm of new multiplayer games being started. Everyone wanted to prove how they could do it better… usually only to realize that actually being in the game was quite different from watching on the sidelines. Eventually some community norms became established:

• You were highly encouraged to play your turn each day, or at most within two. Longer delays demanded an explanation.

• 10 players was far too much for a normal game. Games ran more smoothly with five or six.

• There was no official ladder or Elo system, but players were encouraged to self-identify as “greens” or “vets.” There was also quite a bit of unofficial chatter about who the best players were.

• You didn’t have to write turn reports but it was highly encouraged if you wanted people to play with you and not think you were cheating.

• There were some ways to cheat the game more blatantly but they were strictly forbidden.

• Most games were “no diplo” meaning you weren’t allowed to send messages to the other players about the game. The general consensus was it just required too much time, effort, and emotional drama, although there were exceptions.

Another memorable game that I was in featured me, Mackoti, and another player named SevenSpirits who was generally acknowledged as being the best overall player⁶. I was teamed up with a guy named pindicator who, in a lucky coincidence, happened to live in the same city as me (I didn’t know this before the game started!), so we met in real life to talk strategy and examine game spreadsheets together⁷. I was able to defeat our nearby neighbor (who didn’t have much experience), and somehow arranged an alliance with Mackoti despite the no-diplomacy rule, but we were still too late to stop SevenSpirits from running away with the game. This one lasted about eight months, with significant effort from us every day, and it was a bit of a come-to-Jesus moment for me as I realized “wow, I just spent a lot of time on a pointless game and I didn’t even win… what am I doing with my life?”

Here’s an image of what that looked like, when we were deep in discussion. This isn’t even a full post, just part of it. The separate info boxes aren’t normally in there all at once, they have to be manually edited together from separate images. All of this was accompanied by multiple test games, spreadsheets, and private planning conversations. Most moves were planned at least ten turns in advance, so that everything could be hyper-optimized. I’m not going to explain all the jargon, I just want to give a taste of how complicated this all was and how much effort went into every single turn:

But whatever, I was in too deep to quit. Soon after that game ended, some ambitious person organized a “game of games.” As I briefly mentioned, the Civ4 community was highly fractured, with each little community having its own dedicated forum. Some motivated outgoing person named 2metraninja invited them all to a “multi-team democracy game,” where each site would have its own civ being played by democratic rule. To my great surprise, this game actually got off the ground and ran reasonably smoothly, despite the massive number of players involved. We at Realms Beyond formed something of a “dream team,” with all of our best players working together, and quickly ran off to a huge lead. We were a bit arrogant, but deservedly so, because this sort of multiplayer competition was what we did best, while the other sites were more focused on casual or single player games. It was quite gratifying to see the initial skill gap between us and the other sites at this kind of competitive multiplayer game. However, we ran into personal problems when the pace of the game slowed down, leaving us with nothing to do, and we could no longer function as a team. As one person memorably put it: “this team is like a muscle car—very powerful down the stretch, but it doesn’t idle very well.” We fell apart and eventually lost due to intense bickering and a general lack of coordination to actually play the turns.

For me personally, I went out on something of a high note⁸, albeit with a touch of controversy. I joined Pitboss6 with an unconventional strategy to win a team cultural victory. One of our opponents was the very same Sulla who had jump-started the entire Civ4 multiplayer scene with his lively game reports. Amusingly, even though he was the first to demonstrate the nonstandard victory conditions of Civ4, he somehow missed that we could use one to win a multiplayer victory. You can read his blog of the game here; I feel a little bad if he came away frustrated, but I have to admit that it’s highly amusing to read his account saying things like “I have no idea what [my team] is doing”, “[Sulla’s team] is sure to win”, etc… ending right before my team won the game and he abruptly stopped writing. We finished in dramatic fashion, with one of the largest armies ever built in competitive multiplayer struggling to defend our capital with sheer numbers against another team that had superior technology trying to take us down in a race against the clock.

New Versions, and New Life Balance

Also of note is our community reaction against Civ5: almost all of us disliked it, or at least considered it a huge step back from Civ4. Why that is is… complicated. Probably a mix of good reasons (bugs, simplification) and not-so-good (refusal to change, snobbery). Civ5 has gone on to become probably the most popular version of the Civ franchise, so it’s always a bit awkward for me to explain to people that I love Civilization but dislike Civ5 (although I’ve come to accept it and enjoy it now that it’s been patched and updated). I believe that I was the first player anywhere to discover and show off how to break the city limit on Civ5’s economic engine, which the game had been designed around. I played a public joint single player game with Sulla, SevenSpirits, and some other players to showcase and analyze some of Civ5’s weaknesses… some were addressed in later updates, some weren’t. Sulla eventually wrote an excellent editorial summarizing the issues, which includes some quotes from me (Luddite).

The next version of the game, Civ6, was a step up, although still not as beloved by our niche dedicated community as Civ4. The newest version of the game though… Civ7 really has issues, and it’s not just our insular multiplayer community talking about it. It’s had major issues in sales and player retention. The franchise has clearly run off the rails, and they’ll have to do something drastic if they want to win back the community. It seems to be dead in the water. I don’t know if the franchise will ever be the same again.

But honestly? Perhaps that’s for the best. Civilization is a harsh mistress, especially at the competitive multiplayer level. It simply takes too much time, thought, and emotional commitment to be a healthy pastime. Sulla has found a more casual and emotionally healthy way to enjoy the game by streaming AIs playing it in real time⁹. You can’t just casually log in and play a turn if you want to understand it, you have to lock in, and frankly that effort could be better spent on almost anything else. Those early game reviews which praised the game as “addictive” sometimes seem to me like how early cigarette ads praised brands as “you won’t be able to stop smoking!” I’ll let the excellent Digital Antiquarian have the last word:

Big expectations for the immediate future and a lack of obvious stopping places make for a potent combination indeed, one that has led to countless bleary-eyed workdays, to meals untasted, to responsibilities neglected. Once Civilization sucks you into its world, it can be incredibly difficult to climb back out again.

1. Obviously that’s just his gamer handle, not his real name. Despite playing games with him for years, I don’t know his real name.

2. We later started to call this the “PYFT” factor. Our interest in starting a long game with someone depended less on their skill or personality than on his ability to “Play Your Fucking Turn.” It wasn’t enough to just play every day, you had to play at a specific time every day in order to keep things moving smoothly.

3. OK, maybe also I just thought it would be more fun to try a war…

4. No one knew this at the time; it took us all a while to realize this. I never really got the chance to talk to him much because his English was so limited, it’s just something that you notice after spending a long time playing competitive games together. He went on to win a bunch of forum games after this.

5. Meanwhile we continued to exchange diplomatic messages, with limited understanding. Sometimes his stilted English achieved an almost poetic effect, like this one:

I declare war on you this turn.

why i didnt wait to more turn:

you cut the silver suply.

When we where discusing about selling you resource you atacked me.

Never sedn me a copy of you military.

i know you just got rifling.

best whishes Mack.

6. Or possibly tied with Krill, I’m not sure. That’s the person Mackoti was referencing in that first message to me as “tanks krill.”

7. By this point, the top-level multiplayer scene was so competitive that the only way to win was with spreadsheets and simulations.

8. I had to stop playing competitively once I found a full-time job.

9. Of course “AI” here just means a traditionally coded script with some RNG. A big part of the reason we played multiplayer was because the computer opponents just weren’t smart enough. It would be very interesting to see what happens if someone teaches a modern AI to play Civ4.