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...................hm.
I want to talk about future plans, I suppose, but there's stuff I've been musing on and I want to see what it looks like when it gets written out as an idea in print, so I've been thinking about civilization building games. Namely, the Civilization series. I bought Civ 4 pretty recently, because I don't really treat myself often and Civ's a game with a lot of milage built into it. So I put about 24 hours into it over the last week, burnt myself out on it for a while, and it's idling for now.
In the meantime, I was playing a marathon-length game before and I hit that point in the game where I loaded up a bunch of ships with soldiers and a Settler and sent it overseas to colonize the new continent.
Civ 4 has Barbarians, just like the civs before it did, and unlike in 2, they can found cities before you ever land. They don't branch out, they're little city states, and if they take over your city, sometimes they'll sack it and sometimes they'll run it. All the barbarian states are the same color - black - and they don't seem to fight one another, and they're usually a technology level equal or a level lower to you. Declaring war is all you can do with them, but they're named after real cultures, so you might end up fighting a war of attrition with a place like Polynesia, Ananazi, Cherokee, or Gaul. (The entry for Barbarian in Civ 4 on the Wikia says, "Barbarians cannot be bargained with or appeased: they must be destroyed - before they destroy you!")
I was sitting in my chair and, of course I was going to sack the cities because they kept sending troops to raze my township. (Wisely, really, since my plan was to take over the whole continent and, later, the whole globe.) There was no negotiating with them, and nobody gets mad when you raze a barbarian civilization from the globe because that's what you're expected to do. They can build no alliances and they have no representation. Man alive, colonization at work, eh?
I'm not like... mad about it or anything. Civ is a lot of fun, but there are methods of playing that are really good for winning the game that are terrible in real life. But there's nothing that you gain from being a nicer ruler, and there's no person to talk to about it, you govern in a vacuum.
Does it say anything about me personally that I play this game? Not much more than it would if I played Grand Theft Auto and shot someone in the pursuit of a mission, except that I'm a person who is playing that game. (IE, I don't consider it so disgusting that I've stopped, or anything.) There are also technological limitations to consider, plus I could just... not engage 'barbarian' cities, though they will continue to attack me. However, the creators of the game thought it was fine to create non-autonomous nation states that can act as a threat for a player, and chose to give those non-historical actors (for the intents and purposes of this game) names from real cultures. It doesn't mean the creators of the game are terrible, or anything, just that it doesn't read especially well from that perspective.
I want to talk about future plans, I suppose, but there's stuff I've been musing on and I want to see what it looks like when it gets written out as an idea in print, so I've been thinking about civilization building games. Namely, the Civilization series. I bought Civ 4 pretty recently, because I don't really treat myself often and Civ's a game with a lot of milage built into it. So I put about 24 hours into it over the last week, burnt myself out on it for a while, and it's idling for now.
In the meantime, I was playing a marathon-length game before and I hit that point in the game where I loaded up a bunch of ships with soldiers and a Settler and sent it overseas to colonize the new continent.
Civ 4 has Barbarians, just like the civs before it did, and unlike in 2, they can found cities before you ever land. They don't branch out, they're little city states, and if they take over your city, sometimes they'll sack it and sometimes they'll run it. All the barbarian states are the same color - black - and they don't seem to fight one another, and they're usually a technology level equal or a level lower to you. Declaring war is all you can do with them, but they're named after real cultures, so you might end up fighting a war of attrition with a place like Polynesia, Ananazi, Cherokee, or Gaul. (The entry for Barbarian in Civ 4 on the Wikia says, "Barbarians cannot be bargained with or appeased: they must be destroyed - before they destroy you!")
I was sitting in my chair and, of course I was going to sack the cities because they kept sending troops to raze my township. (Wisely, really, since my plan was to take over the whole continent and, later, the whole globe.) There was no negotiating with them, and nobody gets mad when you raze a barbarian civilization from the globe because that's what you're expected to do. They can build no alliances and they have no representation. Man alive, colonization at work, eh?
I'm not like... mad about it or anything. Civ is a lot of fun, but there are methods of playing that are really good for winning the game that are terrible in real life. But there's nothing that you gain from being a nicer ruler, and there's no person to talk to about it, you govern in a vacuum.
Does it say anything about me personally that I play this game? Not much more than it would if I played Grand Theft Auto and shot someone in the pursuit of a mission, except that I'm a person who is playing that game. (IE, I don't consider it so disgusting that I've stopped, or anything.) There are also technological limitations to consider, plus I could just... not engage 'barbarian' cities, though they will continue to attack me. However, the creators of the game thought it was fine to create non-autonomous nation states that can act as a threat for a player, and chose to give those non-historical actors (for the intents and purposes of this game) names from real cultures. It doesn't mean the creators of the game are terrible, or anything, just that it doesn't read especially well from that perspective.
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