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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23058 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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I was just at the African American history museum recently. My mother recently published a paper on the graves, names, and locations of slaves that our ancestors owned.

I bring those both up just to say that in my observation there is a large amount of myth and uncertainty even in things that feel like recent history.

Even internet history is convoluted and difficult to untangle. And we often have all the logs and evidence available!

Harriet Tubman's general exploits seem plausible. There were almost certainly former slaves that worked in semi clandestine roles to ferry other escaped slaves up north. There were almost certainly stories of harrowing close calls. We know for certain there was an "underground railroad" for those escaped slaves, or at least as certain as we can be about these things (maybe a bunch of people all lied convincingly in a similar way).

It also seems like she isn't a very trustworthy narrator. She probably lied about her personal role or took on the stories of others she had heard from. Or maybe she under embellished and the truth is crazier than the stories we got. History sometimes has some off the wall weird shit happening.

I'm not entirely sure how much it matters. Even prominent placement in a video game seems underwhelming. Those leader portraits can and are replaced by game mods. I'm almost certain there are mods that switch out the German leader for Hitler.

Most importantly of all, stick with Civ 4. It's the best in the series, and the peak of the genre. We need more autists like the dwarf fortress guys making video games. Work on the same thing for twenty years and retain all creative control within a family sized social unit. If it was them making the civ game they would have just encoded a whole leadership class that represented Tubman and stuck a random name generator on top of it. We wouldn't have this silly controversy, and more importantly no one without an extreme interest in the game would even be able to articulate a culture war critique of how it was handled.

I've been a big fan of the Civ series since buying the Civ II disks at Kmart in 1996. I'm somewhat up to date on the Leader drama, and I haven't really seen much about Tubman tbh. There has been Leader choice drama since the first Civ forum (Civ Fanatics) was made in like 2002 or so. Most of it is international, and less about which leaders are chosen and more about which nations are included. The fan groups for Korea and Poland both launched aggressive, decade long campaigns to get included, which were successful. Both also got female leaders who were minor characters from their nation's histories with very little good information about their actual lives. Tubman at least lived in the moden era.

Hot take, Civ rankings from best to worst imo. 4 - 6 - 2 - 5 - 3 (I never played 1) . Honorable mention to Colonization II, which is built on the Civ 4 engine. Alpha Centari (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.

The biggest thing going for Civ 4 that makes me (any many, many others) consider it the best was the incredible freedom for modders to alter the game. Vanilla out of the box Civ 4 was mid, the mod community was amazing. Civ 5 changed a great deal about how the game worked, a significant overhaul of the underlying mechanics that turned a lot of people off. Civ 6 addressed many of the problems with 5, while bringing back a lot of the modding freedoms of 4. 3 was a buggy disaster with the main challenge coming from the AI acting in ways that were largely considered cheating by the players, ie. the AI opponents always had perfect knowledge of the entire game world that its decisions were based on, and very limited modding.

never played civ 1

I'd recommend giving it a try sometime. First because its such an iconic piece of gaming history, and its amazing they managed to include so much and get it right on the first try. But even today, it holds up.

Its very simple and streamlined, compared to later civ games. There's a quirky charm to its simple cartoon graphics. Theres no "filler", so you can play a full game reasonably quickly.

And the combat! Its highly random, just a single dice roll based on the stats. A tank (attack 10) vs a spear (defense 2) has a 1 in 6 chance to lose, even without any defendive bonuses. And if you lose on defense, you lose everything. This leads to wild fluctuations back and forth, so you have to be flexible and adjust on the fly. It also means that the technologically inferior civ still has a good chance to catch up and win, whereas the later games are something of a foregone conclusion once someone gets a solid tech lead.

edit- now that i think about it, a lot of the stuff they added in civ2 really broke the balance of civ1. The harbor makes ocean tiles way too strong, and being able to negoiate with barbarians and other civs makes your undefended cities way too easy to defend. Throw in the pikemen to deter early mounted aggression, and the ridiculous power of Mike's Cathedral in civ2 to deter unhappiness, and it's just way too easy to expand in civ2. civ1 has a much better balance between economy and warfare.

Alpha Centauri (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.

Its story holds up better than its mechanics, the exploitability of which limits the replay value. But I'd still give it more than a "pretty good".

Civ IV wasn't just about the mods. It was also that the developers were bold enough to include things like slavery and religions in a way that had some real mechanical meat. Made you think, as the player, without preaching at you.

3 was a buggy disaster with the main challenge coming from the AI acting in ways that were largely considered cheating by the players, ie. the AI opponents always had perfect knowledge of the entire game world that its decisions were based on, and very limited modding.

Of the limited mods, though, 3 does have a very enjoyable LoTR mod, if you just want a 4x LoTR game. Which I often do, and have yet to find a good game/mod equivalent.

There has been Leader choice drama since the first Civ forum (Civ Fanatics) was made in like 2002 or so.

The first major Civ forum was Apolyton, established in 1998, which used to be considerably bigger than CivFanatics until it started dying sometime after mid-00s (around that time I also stopped participating, incidentally). Fond memories of that forum, including first encounters with a very smart teenager who later established a moderately successful blog.

Alpha Centari (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.

Very good! But, bad replay value. And I still don't know why we haven't had a remake.

It's been a long time for me, but IIRC there was only the one map, and no real functionality for good random maps. So, same map, same factions, same locations every time. Is very limiting.

I believe AC had randomized maps?

Like I said it's been a long time but iirc the random maps were non workable for some reason.

Like maybe there was functionality that only worked on the default map.

What do you mean bad replay value, I've been playing it for 25 years

The vibes are great, the mechanics are deep, the controls and discoverability were dogshit. Or maybe I'm just too zoomer brained.

No, I'm a millennial and ideal target audience for SMAC and played the hell out of it when it dropped, but when attempting to replay it, I just can't get over how ass the graphics and controls are by modern standards.

They made one (or at least, a spiritual sequel). It was rubbish.

I mean, there was Sid Meier's Beyond Earth.

It was OK I guess.

I really wish we had the level of UI accessibility of that game combined with the deep mechanics and settings of alpha centauri. Friends have played beyond earth with me, nobody wants to play alpha centauri.

I will risk drama and say that I enjoyed V and VI more than IV.

IV just has too much that doesn't work that well in hindsight - in particular, IV has really bad and tedious combat.

The key element in IV that makes it work is how smooth industrialization feels. There’s not just two or three key techs that unlock massive growth. Almost every single advance between printing press and electricity gives a tiny productivity advantage too small to notice individually, but each one compounds all of the others. Nothing before or since has quite matched it in terms of aesthetics of play.

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