How did you first find Civ1 and how did you learn to play it?

[Gramphos]

Earlier today someone made me remember my first civ experience what so ever: my first game of civ, and the games following it until I had learnt the game.

I don't remember what year it was any more, but I hadn't started to learn English yet and niether had my big brother nor my friend.

Setp 1 - Moving units
We were at my friends place playing with his Amiga. He decided to show us a game he couldn't make out (since the manual was in English and the keyboard arrows didn't seem to work with it). That game was Civilization. After we had clicked through the setup with default settings we got to this point were we couldn't do a thing:
In front of us were this flashing wagon in the middle of all that black. Everything was black except from one line around the wagon.
We tried for almost 10 minutes to get the game to do something, but it didn't respond to the keyboard arrows, and clicking in the area next to or on the wagon gave no result. Then we noticed that when we moved the mouse over the edge of the wagon the pointer shifted to a direction arrow and we could move the wagon.

So off we went exploring and finding the black area to become smaller and smaller until...
...we met some red icons of another type then our wagon, and they killed us. And so ended the first game of Civ we played.

Killed by "the evil red" (aka Barbarians) who come to hunt us through our learning games.

Next step: Found your first city will be posted tomorrow. (I'm to tired to write that one down now and make sure it gets right)

[GePap]

I first played Civ in school. We had a computer class, but most of it was simpyl spent playing old computer games like Oregon trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. The teachers in charge trusted me and my friedn, so one day they gave us access to a much more advanced game, civ (this would be in 1993-94) and the teacher taught me the basics. I can;t really remember how I learned everything else (its not like the game had a steep learning curve), and since I only ever played it in school for short periods at a time (by the time my family got a computer, civ2 was out, so i never owned civ) I am sure I was never more than a mediocre player at it.

[vovan]

I guess my experience with civ is kind of like that of Gramphos here.

I don't remember how old I was when I got the game (which probably means around like six or seven), and I didn't understand most of the stuff that was written on the screen either, as I had never learned english before. But I did learn gwbasic then, because before I got the game, I didn't have anything to do, and my parents bought me a book on basic. Now that I think back about it, I am actually surprised, because I know it was a children's book - it had like little cartoonish pictures in it and everything. Yet it was about basic... I don't know, still has me stumped as to who would ever want to teach five-year-old kids basic. But any way, the point of it is: I knew what the words if and then meant, as I figured it out by what they did in basic. That's where my knowledge of english pretty much ended.

So, when I got the game, my parents did explain to me that I was like the ruler of this tribe and that this thing on the screen was a settler and that I had to press b to build a city. At that, they left me. Soon enough, I had swarms of warriors all over the place. I didn't know I could fortify them or skip turns, and so I had to move every single one of them to end a turn. And then I had already explored the whole island I was on, and it was soooo tedious to move all those warriors around in circles around the city just to waste their movement, that I was about to quit, when I hit the mouse with my elbow. (That's because I was moving the warriors with the keyboard, and didn't think the mouse could be used for anything in particular.) So, I hit the left mouse button with my elbow... And lo and behold! A whole new host of opportunities opened up, as I saw the city screen! I can't describe the delight I felt when I told the city to stop producing the warriors already!

Ah... The good ol' days.

* sniff, sniff *

[Gramphos]

Setp 2 - Founding a city
The second games started like the first one by moving the settler around exploring. I remember that we got to a river and then suddenly something happenmed that didn't happen in the first game:
A popup telling us something about the letter b showed up, so we pressed it. An voila a city.
The city gave a warriors and, just like vovansim we had no idea on how to get the units to stay in the city, and the game ended like the first one. After we had killed some evil red units our units were all out of town when they come and destroyed us.


In the next game we actually realized that you could turn on the keyboard controls for movement and it got a lot easier. However, we had to figure out that the units could be moved diagonal. We learnt how to switch production and found more settlers.

And then a day in another game, after beeing destroyed by the barbarians in many games we had figured out enough to start searching for these evil red. We spent some games trying to expolre and find where they come from until we realized the truth: That they just appeared from nowhere. During these travwels we had found other colored cities than ours. And we started to understand the complexibility of civ. And we actually learnt to fortify and move in all eight directions.

When my familiy got our first computer (I thik it was in 1993 (maybe 1992)) civ was one of the first games we got. And my gaming alone, and conquest to beat the AI at higher levels started. I become a civ addict. And that's where my 'discover civ' story ends.

[AeonOfTime]

Good Idea to start a thread for this, Gramphos

My story starts with my brand new amiga, that my parents bought me some 16 years back (gosh, it's been that long?):

I had had a Commodore 64 before, so I was already acquainted with computers, and had some time to get used to the winbench before my cousin came on holidays and told me to install Civilization.

He had just bought it, and we happily started the game. We already understood most of the english, and had no major problems finding the keys to move around and so, but like Gramphos, we didn't know how to play the game at all...

Our very first try, we built cities on nearly every square - I can't remember why, but the result was that the cities could not build much, and the barbarians crushed our cities every time they came.

Eventually we managed to build a few defenders, and even took back the cities the barbarians had taken, but then the evil french appeared - I think with musketmen, and that was the beginning of our downfall.

Somewhat disgusted, we saved the game and started a new one. We had already learned that cities should be built with more space left inbetween, and soon we had our first success stories (wonders!!!).

Later, when my cousin's holidays were over, I re-loaded our first game, and managed to crush the french with my new-found knowledge - joy!

That time definitely started my Civilization addiction, and with this fantastic evolution I've been able to follow from up close to the current civ3, that addiction is far from burning out!

Aeon Of Time

[Galvatron]

Some friends recommended the game and I bought it. At first I build a city and produced militas till the end. I even was able to conquer some cities (jup the newly build ones) but in the end I've to fight against tanks and planes. My civ was destroyed within minutes. After that I realized that one should build more than one city
Than I began to build up the difficulty level but I never matched the last one (can't remember the name, think it's Emperor). I'm still trying today I will fire up a party and make a big thread here when I should achieve it one day

[Qilue]

I guess I was kind of luckier than others here. I got Civ1 in a pack called "The Meier Classic Collection" (Civilization, Colonization, Pirates and Railroad Tycoon)

The fiirt one I tried was Col and plaed it for hours. Then I tried Civ and my experience from Col made my first few games less tramautic. Although, an event occured during this time that still haunts me in Civ3.

In my first game, I was playing Russia and had a nice city going. Then the evil red guys turned up and destroyed all the improvements and killed all my settlers doing the improvements. Having only a single warrior, there was little I could do to stop this.

Since then, I only play Civ with seditentary barbs. In SMAC, I had no problems with abundant life and preferred that setting, but I can't cope with Civ's barbarians.

[Thirgaral]

I remember those "answer it right or loose your units"-questions...which made my first games a pure hell since I didn't understand a word english at that time...but eventually we learned to associate those small images with the correct answers....and after quite some playing, we learned what the questions acutally said...

[Bob_Smurf42]

I had an easier time than a lot of you here, since I could read all the words. I got mine a few years back from a friend who also had civ2. I didn't know what happened if you missed the quiz, so I didn't worry too much about it, and I didn't usually have any units by that point anyway. My first several games consisted of a variation of OCC(although I didn't know it at the time), playing as the Chinese, I would run away to Northern Asia, up by Alaska, and just sit there in my one city, building improvements and and occasionaly settlers to improve the land. It may sound strange, but I never used them to build new cities, I just added them to the old one. I had skimmed the manuel before playing, but obviously I didn't read any strategy or anything like that. I knew I could build new cities, I just didn't. I was always ahead in science b/c I got techs from huts, and most of my tax went towards science. That is, until around the industrial age, then I fell waaay behind b/c they had way more cities than I did.

[Chemical Ollie]

I aquired CIV1 in September 1994, after being home sick for three days, finally getting fed up with Pirates! There were two major events that help me remember it. First of all it was actually the day before the Estonia ferry sunk, or rather the same evening. A major topic when I went back to work the next morning. Then at my job, I had the first meeting with a very skilled and colorful business contact from Spain who died in cancer only a few years later.



Being familiar to strategy games starting with one city (Strategic Conquest), I sent out some units scouting. When they ran into some barbarians, I fortified them. Then I didn't know how to unfortify them, so they just sat there, using resources for support. I also didn't understand the city micro management, so It took forever to produce anything and I remained in OCC. After ages of space-clicking, some other tribe landed some cavallery on my island and the game was over.

[Bob_Smurf42]

Originally posted by Olaf Hårfagre
I fortified them. Then I didn't know how to unfortify them, so they just sat there, using resources for support

The same thing happened to me in my first few games.

Once, I booted in DOS just so I wouldn't have to deal w/Windows to play one game, but for some reason DOS thinks I don't(barely) have any EMS, so games sometimes get screwed over. This time, it said I couldn't save b/c not enough mem, so that sucked, and after lasting untill retirement and viewing the replay(something I miss in Civ2), the mouse disappeared. I could still click on things, but I couldn't see where I was clicking. I didn't know any keyboard shortcuts, so my cities kept cranking out dips and riflemen, or just accumulating shields. Eventually, my nieghbors took me over. That was a decent game, too...

[Chemical Ollie]

I played it on my Mac Powerbook 100, a very portable laptop back then. I played in the TV sofa, in bed, at the dinner table when my girlfriend was away, in the passenger seat of cars, at parties while drinking and discussing other things with friends, in airport lounges and hotel rooms and even in the lavatory taking a dump.

[Gilgamensch]

Good old Civ 1

IIRC I played it on my old and first 386-25 MHz PC...........
And no, at this time I was able to read English (speaking was a different story..........)

As with most games, I took the 'easy' way and first read the manual. So a lot of the problems mentioned here, I never went through.

BUT: I one of my first games, which I aborted and I thnk you will agree with me:

I was on my island, having something like 10 cities, so not doing bad, having some good science running (No I didn't know how to check for the comparision, or I didn't bother about), I send some ships around to find no land.

One of my ships happily reported back:
"Land, Land in sight"

So I was about to disembark my musketman(?), when I encountered a bomber....... or better to say, the bomber encountered me.............

that wasn't even the worth part....just two rounds later, my ships and units were nuked to hell.............THAT was frustrating.......Maybe, now you agree, that I gave up...........

I think my real first game, I was beaten by the space ship race.......

[Heresson]

Civ2 was already out, but available only with some other games which I already had, so I bought Civ1/Col
pack. And I liked it very much. I never played such complicated game before... It was my first strategy...
Ah.

[Sikander]

A friend of mine quit his job in Boston and came to live with me for the summer in Boulder. He brought Civ 1 and Railroad Tycoon among other games. We were old hands at wargames, and with the excellent information in the Civilopedia we never had the sorts of problems mentioned above wrt playing the game. When my friend left my true addiction to the game was evident. I tried all sorts of strategies, including the Super Science City. Within a few months I was playing only Emporer and King level games, though admitedly I usually played King unless playing on the Earth map.

[Anakha]

The only thing I still remember well from my first game of Civ was that when I'd built a city-wall, I assumed my city was well enough defended, so I took out my units to go do some scouting. And yes, the red guys came, and just walked through my city walls like they didn't exist! I was SO annoyed...
Luckily, it got better with time, although after that first game I left civ for a while, in favor of RR Tycoon...

[Skanky Burns]

My first game was played on my Tandy 1000 - way before my computer had a mouse. Fortunately for me I could read english so I knew a fair few of the shortcuts that were needed.

Before my first game I had been playing pirates, so I was used to thinking of cannons as defencive units. So once I got the technology for cannons, that was what I produced. I produced quite a few settlers and ended up with around 7 cities before encountering another civ. I didn't want to waste my precious settlers time by building roads or irrigation, so all the land around me was completely unimproved.

Well, once I discovered a civ I decided it was time to go to war. I had a few phalanx spare, so I sent them to attack the closest city. Suprisingly, the battle went in my favour and the city was mine. I moved a cannon in for defence. As the city had a road and irrigation improved square near it, it produced more than my other cities but I did not understand why. I was happy though, it was my best city. Then the enemy counter-attacked. Needless to say, my cannons did not defend well.

At one stage the enemy moved onto the square with irrigation and forced the people working that square to work another square. That enemy unit died, but when I checked the city the next turn the people had not started working the irrigated square again. As I didn't yet know how to change the squares they worked, I left the city now consuming more food than it produced. But the city did not last long as mine anyway.

I lost the remainder of my cities fairly fast after that, despite having units lying around either fortified or sentried - I did not know how to activate them either.

[Skanky Burns]

A few games later, I discovered what those numbers beside the units meant, and started using defence units for defence and attack units for attack. I still rushed for the cannon though, and used it to good effect. I was playing the world map, and conquered Europe-Asia. Since I still had an aversion to using settlers for anything other than building cities, my gold and science income was pathetic. But since I had so many cities, the pittance each city produced added up. In that game, I managed to get to gunpowder before 2100 ad, and I felt so proud of myself for that achievement.

[Jac de Molay]

Picked it up at Radio shack when I got my first computer, a 286.

Tossed aside the instructions and started playing. Had some difficulty running the city managment screen, but after that played for about 3 days straight.

[da_hal]

i bought the game when it first came out, and nobody knew who sid meier was or why his name was prominently displayed on the box. ("simcity sucked ass" was the general consensus when we asked the apple guys who he was.)

i looked at the tech tree poster in the box. i thought, jeez. i read the manual. "what a pain in the butt." i played a few games in the earth world, built spaceships, and "won" the game. i thought, boy this game is garbage. i threw it in the same pile as warlords 1.

like warlords, i learned how to have fun with the game after about 6 months. my friend came over, and he started playing it at my house. he played king level, and showed me how to manage workers for maximum benefit, and that less than max pop was actually better for most cities. i also started using random maps, because the 'real world' has too many damn deserts.

i then went on prodigy for tips, and started using super settlers and building railroads in the ocean, along with caravans and maximizing terrain production. (cities in the desert were actually pretty good.)

what almost killed the game for me: 20+ turns to get across the sahara and kill the mongols.

what hooked me: caesar and the romans hiding out in australia, building a tecno-metropolis with only 3 cities connected with a major freeway system, surviving against waves of invaders through a tech advantage and skilled diplomacy.

why i eventually quit: moving units a pain in the butt. late game turns took like 10-20 minutes if you had any substantial number of troops. i usually ended up with 1 group to fight, 1 armored tank for defense. any more than 1 settler also took forever.

best thing about the game: elvii.

[Madog Velkor]

In middle school, a friend of mine's dad had it on his computer. We weren't allowwed to play it, so we made a copy and installed it on my computer (sorry Microprose).

Not having the manual handy, I had to rely on the Civolopedia and pop-ups. I thought I was doing well in my first game, I had comquered the other civ on my island and had a bunch of nice cities. Unfortunately, I didn't understand the finer points of governments and keeping populations happy and soon every city worth anything was revolting. I might have done something about it if I had know what was going on, but it was a few centuries before I figured out what it meant.

Eventually, in the 1800s I decided to load a few of my new knights onto by new little boats, but just as I was about to depart, some German transpots showed up and began disgorging tanks. Too bad for me.

I played non stop for months, and then on and off for years until I got Civ2. It was the first strategy game I had, but I loved MoM, MoO, and Colonization when I came across them.

[da_hal]

Top 10 funniest things about civ1:

10. A rocket scientist loses their job and becomes a lounge singer.
9. 2,000 year old pikemen.
8. Getting nuked by Abraham Lincoln.
7. Caravan camel stampedes.
6. Ghengis Khan begging for his life.
5. Los Angeles covered with pollution, as usual.
4. Barbarians jump on your railroad, invade your town, and try to board your rockets.
3. Making an area resemble your neighborhood.
2. "Lemmings town": everybody is so happy, they screw like crazy, even though there isn't enough food to support them.
1. Ghandi opening a six-pack of whupass.

[SCG]

Originally posted by da_hal
Top 10 funniest things about civ1:

10. A rocket scientist loses their job and becomes a lounge singer.
9. 2,000 year old pikemen.
8. Getting nuked by Abraham Lincoln.
7. Caravan camel stampedes.
6. Ghengis Khan begging for his life.
5. Los Angeles covered with pollution, as usual.
4. Barbarians jump on your railroad, invade your town, and try to board your rockets.
3. Making an area resemble your neighborhood.
2. "Lemmings town": everybody is so happy, they screw like crazy, even though there isn't enough food to support them.
1. Ghandi opening a six-pack of whupass.

you left out:
You have discovered scrolls of ancient wisdom: NUCLEAR FISSION

and as a corollary to that, Nuclear Power plants with no concept of electricity (lit by candles and producing magnetism???)

[Gilgamensch]

What about:

discovered scrolls of ancient wisdom: Alphabet

How you supposed to read them?

[ottok]

In my first games... I let My sertteles go to anywhere!

And listening that... Some games later i have thinks...

i cannot do ships so if i am english... Some one game i discovered Bronze Working after Chivalry!

First with 2100 ad (english)
First kill ewery all (chieftain+3 ,babylonians)
first at ac(americans 2100)
fastest at ac 1970(?!)

[Miao Tsay Kat]

I guess it all started for me with Sid Meier's Pirates! on my C64.
This was my first games system and I was ADDICTED. I got Pirates! with my C64 around 1993, so I started playing it more or less every couple of days since then for about the next 4 or 5 years or so, when my C64 broke down -C64s were quite old by that stage and most of my friends had thrown away their Amigas.
I was obssessed with this game, so when I got my first PC around 1996 (P120 with Windows 95) I couldn't believe my luck when I found that they'd done a Win95 version. I played it even more, coz I didn't have two wait 2 minutes for the game to finish loading every time I wanted to plunder a city.
So then I got the internet and one of the first things I searched for was Sid Meier. I wanted to find out what other games my hero had done with Microprose.
I found that he had created a game called Civilization and it sounded like it had the same kind of feel as Pirates! and by now I trusted ANYTHING with the Sid Meier stamp, so I looked for it in stores and I couldn't buy it anywhere and noone knew where to order it (I live in New Zealand, y'see... very small country with few stores). I had the good sense to see if anyone had posted a copy on the internet and lo & behold, there it was in all it's glory all 9 Mb of it. It took me about 90 minutes to download with a 28k modem.
I had not looked for a manual, when I downloaded the game. I figured i'd just pick it up as I go. I should have known better from Pirates! how complicated it would be... and I taught myself Pirates! without any help of a manual!
The user interface was pretty straightforward for me with the commands. I learnt those pretty quickly through trial and error. Even the fortify/unfortify sentry/unsentry came naturally to me. But I had no idea what sentry did.
The only thing that held me up was the micromanagement of the cities. What were all those shapes [food, resources, science, tax, luxuries, trade]? This I didn't find out for years, after playing very solidly. I started playing civ more or less once a day about 1997 and finally worked out micromanagement about early 1999.
About now, I should point out that my fixation with Civ 1 was transferred when SMAC was released. I spent FAR too many nights without sleep blowing the crap out of Sister Miriam and her freaks.
Then shortly after CTP was released, I played that a little bit, but was largely disappointed with the user interface and general changes to layout that came as part of the 'revision'. Also, it took a great deal of the small amount of RAM I had on my last PC, so that was the main reason I went back to SMAC.
I was trading online at an auction site about 3 months ago and as I was browsing the strategy games section, I found someone advertising the Civ 1/Civ 2/Test of Time pack. At that point I had no idea they were still making these, so I placed a very large autobid immediately- I'm glad the limit was not reached before the auction ended. It was a LARGE autobid, coz I thought it was rare and I wanted to make up for all the years fun I got out of the illegal copy I had been using.
So about 3 weeks ago I started playing Civ 2, so I guess it's interesting how I think of Civ 1 as the main version of Civ, coz I've been playing it for the last 5 years or so.
First impressions of Civ 2? Very positive. seems like all the better afterthoughts were added here in this version. It's got slightly more going for it than SMAC, in that it's classic Civ, rather than ultra-modernized Civ and it is 10 times the game that CTP was.
Is it better than Civ 1? No. I prefer the lower budget cheap & nasty visual effects of Civ 1, but MODs & custom trade routes make Civ 2 interesting.
Favourite thing about Civ 2: Sun Tzu's Academy. My favourite wonder of all Civ games.
I have not played CTP2 yet. I don't know if it is much different from CTP1, but unless I get rave reviews from someone, I probably won't be checking it out any time soon.
I may want to progress to Civ 3 more quickly though, if it's as good as I keep reading about. Unfortunately, it cannot be bought in NZ currently as all unsold copies have been recalled by Atari to make way for C3G! Whch I will probably buy by the end of this year or start of next... once I have graduated from Isaac Newton's University of Civ 2!

Wish me luck!

ps Can anyone let me know what the Democracy games are? If they are turn based Multiplayer, where can I learn more about them? my e-mail is larakin@pin.co.nz

[The Pioneer]

Hhmmm IIRC I got to Civ through the board game Civilization by Avalon. The two only share a name and along the years Avalon Hill and Microprose and others fought over the name but that is a different story. Back in those years it was DOS that ruled the scene and I still have the original discs around.

Back in those years it was college time which also meant that I had the time to get addicted and addicted I was and have been ever since.

I remember nights when after playing for hours upon hours I could never turn the damn thing off and go to bed, despite the pleas from my girlfriend.

I don't recall reading the manual although I do still posses that too. As always I installed and dived right in, the rest is history!


So long...

[War4ever]

found it on an ex'es computer and lost too many nights sleep playing it....been addicted ever since

[ottok]

nucle or trade!

[Andemagne]

saw it on a friends house for the first time.
the game is quite intuitive and easy to learn.