Now we get to choose which culture - i.e., which civilization - we wish to play as. We’ll go with a relatively sparsely populated world of just four civilizations because this introduction would prefer to focus on the core mechanisms of the game rather than on diplomacy and other interactions with our rivals. Next we choose how many civilizations, including ours, will occupy the planet. We’ll take the cakewalk level of “Chieftan” today, if for no other reason than to ensure that we don’t get ourselves wiped out somehow before we’ve gotten through this whole introduction. In the real world, King is widely considered to provide a very stiff challenge indeed, and Emperor is sometimes simply unwinnable even for the very best players. The official line has it that the penultimate “King” level offers an equal balance of power, with levels below that giving the advantage to the human player and the ultimate “Emperor” level giving a decided advantage to the computer-run civilizations. This choice doesn’t so much affect the artificial intelligence’s ability to reason, which is at best limited under any circumstances, so much as it does the amount of cheating the computer does on behalf of one side or the other. Now we need to choose our difficulty level. Neither the writing nor the graphics are perhaps all they might have been, but it nevertheless gets across the right note of auspicious grandeur.
Sid meiers railroads mac windowed run movie#
While our new world is being generated by the computer in the background, we see a little movie showing how our nascent civilization came to be through the forces of geology and biology. For this introduction, we just take the default, middle-of-the-road settings. Having chosen a random world, we can change four parameters that will affect its personality. When you play on Earth, not only are you playing on a world whose geography you already know, but the various civilizations, including your own, will always start in their historic locations. Playing on Earth robs the game of the magic of discovery that Sid Meier had found so appealing in Empire, one of Civilization‘s biggest inspirations. As any Civilization veteran will tell you, this is really no choice at all. The first choice we have to make is whether to play on our own planet Earth or on a randomly generated world.
So, let’s start today with a brief guided tour of a typical game’s beginning phases. That said, it would be helpful for the articles I do want to write if those of you who haven’t played the game before, or who haven’t played it in a long time, could have a basic understanding of how its systems fit together. You can find heaps of that sort of thing elsewhere, written by players much more skilled than I’ll ever be.
Sid meiers railroads mac windowed run series#
I don’t intend for this series of articles to be a tutorial on the game of Civilization, much less a strategy guide. And with this ultimate power comes very little responsibility. As a game designer, you have ultimate power.
0 kommentar(er)
