“And it only took about 4,000 years.”
Hey. Guess what number blog this is for me. It’s sixty-nine. 69. Heh. Heheh. That’s pretty funny. Funny sex number.
Okay, now that that’s out of my system, I want to tell you about the time that I conquered the world through diplomacy, espionage, science, good friends, bad enemies, the march of progress, and good old-fashioned luck. When and where did I accomplish this feat, you ask? Clearly not in the real world, because if I took control of the real world, there would be a lot more birds around. No, I conquered the world in the greatest 4X strategy game of all time, a game developed by Sid Meier, Sid Meier’s Civilization V, by Sid Meier.
For the uninitiated, Sid Meier’s Civilization V (or, as my friends and I call it, Civ 5) is a 4X strategy game about building cities and raising your civilization throughout the ages of humankind. You can play as a ton of different historical civilizations, starting from one city with just agriculture and working your way all the way up to science that we haven’t even perfected yet in the real world, Taking People to Space for Science and the Betterment of Technology and Humankind Instead of a Geopolitical Conflict. What a fantasy game.
Basically, you play the game as a kind of god-king who has total control over nearly everything that happens in your kingdom, from where people work to how units move and what buildings are constructed. You see everything from the top, and you can make decisions based on what you want your civilization to produce or based on how the other civilizations in your game treat you. Because one of the key parts of this game is that, technically, it’s multiplayer-only. You’re always competing against other civilizations to win the game, whether they’re computer-controlled or a human opponent. And, unlike real life (I hope), there’s a clear way to win.
In Civ 5, there are five main ways to win, and some are more straight-forward than others. There’s Domination, Science, Cultural, Diplomacy, and Score. Because this is a video game, and everything can be scored. The domination victory requires you to eliminate every other capital city on the map, while the science victory requires that you send people to Alpha Centauri and, presumably, start the events of Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth. The cultural victory (at least with the expanded game) requires you to be the most influential culture in the world in things like art, media, and travel, whereas the diplomacy victory asks the player to be voted in as the world leader. And if no one completes any of these within the standard 500 turn limit, the player with the highest score wins. Because video games will never escape their arcade score-chasing roots.
Oh, by the way, I should mention that the game is turn-based and takes place on a hexagonal grid and kind of works out a bit like a very complicated version of Settlers of Catan. You play the game by indirectly controlling your cities or directly controlling your units and telling them to eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate the world around you. That’s where the term 4X comes from, by the way. And the turn-based nature of this game differentiates it from Real-Time Strategy games (or RTS games) like Starcraft, or Age of Empires, which don’t have turns. It’s all very much like a global game of chess, where the pawns are the working class. Actually, that’s probably how some world leaders think of things in real life, too.
Although maybe it sounds boring or overly complicated, the game is ridiculously fun almost to the point of being addicting. It’s a great way to spend time with friends, as you can either cooperate with them or compete with them, and since each game takes anywhere from five to ten hours or more, it’s something you can come back to weekend after weekend, like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign or something. It is, in fact, sometimes a popular LAN party game.
I play this game every so often with friends of mine from high school, and I’ve had my fair share of Civ 5 games to play in. My Steam profile says that I’ve played that game for almost 100 hours, which feels like a hell of a lot of time. But when you compare it to games that people can play for 1500 hours, like CS:GO or Soccer Cars, 100 hours is a pretty small number. But still, even in all that time, I never actually won a game of Civilization.
This is for a couple reasons, the first one being that, you know, a single game can take upwards of eight fucking hours, so it’s an investment. The second reason is that I’m not very good at the game; to really win well, you have to know the game’s systems inside and out and know exactly what you should build and how. I’m kind of bad, and regularly have my ass beat by the computer players and my friends. But not this time.
This time around, I actually won the game not through shrewd military conquests or explosive scientific prowess, but by manipulating the economy to my whims. See, very much like in real life, if you have a lot of money everything becomes infinitely easier and also rigged in your favor. By building up my treasury to absurd levels, I was able to buy every building, soldier, and ally that I needed. Because, you see, I went for the diplomatic victory, and to be voted in as world leader, you need a lot of friends in the game’s city-states. And good thing money can buy friends after all.
By the end of my game, I was producing over 400 gold per turn, which in retrospect is absolutely bonkers. That’s an absurd amount of money and it very much allowed me to steamroll everyone else in the game by either buying infinite units for my army or by paying off my allies to vote in my favor. The best way to win influence with the city-states (or single cities that can vote for you) is to give them money. And I gave my city-states a lot of money.
Having all that money enabled me to sweep the floor with the other civilizations, since I could both fend off any invasion and buy every vote I needed to become the world leader. I suppose the diplomatic (or, more realistically, economic) victory is probably the easiest one in the game, since gold is incredibly useful in all things. Hell, really, if you have enough money, you can take every capital by force pretty easily, and can build everything to get a science victory, too. And since your gold also contributes to your score, you can get a time win by having the most money, too. And since you can use gold to buy luxury resources for your citizens, you don’t have to worry about rebellions or uprisings in your country. Money really can buy happiness.
Finally beating the computers and winning Civ 5 made me feel like a strategic genius. All my plans, set in motion 500 turns ago, finally came together to produce the greatest victory that this save-file has ever seen. Everything went my way because I made it go my way, and my immense wealth allowed me to expand my influence across the planet. It all went so well, and I won, completely and uncontested.
Of course, I was on one of the easier difficulty settings, and the game has its fair share of random number generation in where you spawn, what resources you have, and how the computer players react, but I can probably say that at least some of my victory was strategic prowess. Or, more likely, happening to know how the system works and playing it to my favor, but that doesn’t matter. I still finally won, and whipped Siam’s ass.
That’s the other thing about Civilization that makes it so fun; while it’s maybe a rough model of how society works and a rough outline of history, it isn’t a very accurate one when you look at the little details. It still is a video game, after all, and video games aren’t known for their accurate depictions of just about anything. Which is why the biggest threat to me, myself playing as the Ottoman Turks, were the forces of the Irish and the scientific achievements of the Siamese. It’s also why my greatest allies were the Shoshone Native Americans and, like in my real life, the Dutch.
History and geography are a little muddy in Civilization. And while there are options for making the map look like Earth and having civilizations appear in their relatively analogous locations, every civilizations starts at exactly the same time with exactly the same resources. So you get George Washington fighting the Chinese in the 3rd century BCE while Gandhi plots to build nuclear bombs and the Maya cry in the corner, and all the while the French are plotting their military domination. I know, the French. Isn’t this game ridiculous?
There are a couple of these sorts of humorous incongruities that appeared in my own game. For example, my neighbors were the Irish Celts, the Netherlands, and the Shoshone. I was friendly with all of them except the Celts, and they didn’t like me, the Ottomans, very much, either. Things reached a turning point, though, when I saw the Irish amassing an army on my western border. Well, that can’t be good, I said to myself, and immediately bought myself a far more advanced army, and set them up around the border, just taunting the Irish and daring them to attack.
I must have intimidated them because they soon moved all their military units away and instead decided to attack my allies, the Native Americans, who were not yet eradicated by the European Americans, probably because America didn’t exist in this timeline. So instead of the British, now it was the Irish committing genocide against a native people. Huh, how the tables have turned. I figured that I couldn’t allow them to bully my allies and instead, in my turn, razed the army of the Irish and took their capital city. Oops. I may have gotten a little overzealous, because by the end of the game the Irish had only a single city left. The best part, though, was when I used a bazooka to blast their cities, which were still struggling to master the art of gunpowder. It’s a strange game.
Without the Irish as a threat, my kingdom prospered and we continued to produce more gold every day, especially now that we had four new fancy Irish cities in our control. But I soon realized that the Irish had been the least of my worries; across the ocean, Siam had eclipsed my scientific knowledge and was preparing to go to war against my themselves. Uh-oh.
That was about the time that I realized I had been neglecting my science, so I shifted all gears to focus on stealing from the Siamese. I was successful, and eventually regained control as the most scientifically-advanced civilization in the game. Siam wasn’t happy about this but there wasn’t much they could do since they were unable to have their army cross the ocean between us.
Of course, even though we were the most science-based civilization around, we didn’t invent the internet until 2035 and the barbarians were producing World War 1 infantry by that point, so perhaps Civilization isn’t a great comparison to the modern world. But it was around that time that I began to usurp Siam’s place as the friend of all, and I used my vast wealth to buy my way into the hearts of the city-states. Taking Siam’s place as their allies, I secured their votes to make me world leader, all while diminishing Siam’s power. And then, when I finally won by pouring billions of dollars into overseas allied development, I wished that I could have seen the look on the leader of Siam’s face as his nifty advantage over me came crashing down. Should have invested in trade routes, motherfucker.
So I finally won and completed a personal goal of mine to see one of those Civilizations games all the way to the end and win. And now that I’ve done it, I’ll probably not touch the game for another two years until I decided to pick it up and do it all over again. Except next time, I won’t be the Ottomans. I’ll be Japan, and I’ll make Oda Nobunaga eat his shorts and unify the world. And the only thing that would stand in my way is that pesky Caesar and his gang of meddling kids. Damn you, inaccurate virtual Rome. Damn you.
