Gotta catch them all: Check the Civ4+6 Pokemon maps!

By | March 1, 2022

We have just seen the announcement of the lastest Pokemon titles, and obviously this is very exciting. While many people will now go and play more Pokemon, we do recommend another way to satisfy your cravings: Play the Civ Pokemon maps!

For Civ4, we have the Hoenn region, which is a flat map of roughly large size of only the Hoenn region, obviously. This map is set up for 12 civs.

For Civ6, we have another region, Sinnoh. It is a huge map with many mountains, so probably a challenge for many of us.

Credits to Saph and DragonXander PR for making these maps.

New indy game release: Dragon Evo

By | March 1, 2022

The developers of Dragon Evo have asked us to spread the word about their just released game, and we are happy to do so, if it falls somewhat in the interest area of us CivFanatics.
Dragon Evo is (per description) a turn-based deck-builder, so similar in some way to Magic The Gathering. You fight with your cards in a fantasy setting, trying to beat your opponent on the other side of the map.
According to the devs there is also some building involved, you build infrastructure, and need to manage its upkeep with gold. Right now there are no grand strategy features or diplomacy, but we got told this could be an option for the future.

The game normally costs 8.19€, but is currently discounted to 7.37€. This game is in early-access.
This game does not fall into our core focus area, but turn-based games which have building and fighting are probably somewhat of interest for us. The game is also cheap, so I guess this can’t hurt to maybe have a look if you’re running low on unplayed games in your Steam library.

Discuss this game in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/new-indy-game-release-dragon-evo.675644/

BBC: Sid Meier warns the games industry about monetisation

By | March 1, 2022

The BBC has an article with Sid Meier, where he talks about the current development in the games industry. The views in the article probably come due to the recent increase in the monetisation in this industry, not only with in-app purchases and micro-transactions, but also with the recent NFT hype. He also talks about the rise of online casinos and how many people in Italy are now turning to casinos that are built into games in the form of micro-transactions. According to Stranieri.com, Italy’s leading gambling informational resource, more than 40% of new games launched in Italy have some kind of gambling component to them, whether it be slots or games of chance.
Firaxis has gladly never said anything about the latter, and we are very happy about it.

CUSL – also known as casino utan svensk licens – operates more than 500 casinos in Sweden that are not subject to the gaming pause (Spelpaus) regulation. This includes casino games that you can play without a 3 second wait between slot spins from providers like Pay n Play and Evolution Gaming. There are options for Zimpler and Trustly deposits.

An excerpt from the article:
“Sid Meier says that if major companies continue to focus on ways like this to monetise gaming, they risk losing the audience: “People can assume that a game is going to be fun and what it needs for success are more cinematics or monetisation or whatever – but if the core just is not there with good gameplay, then it won’t work.

“In a sense gameplay is cheap… The game design part is critical and crucial but doesn’t require a cast of thousands in the way some of the other aspects do. So it’s perhaps easy to overlook how important the investment in game design and gameplay is.””

Read the whole article here: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-60304123

Discuss this article in our forum: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/bbc-sid-meier-warns-the-games-industry-about-monetisation.675634/

(The image of Sid Meier is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, and is taken from here).

The Telegraph: Sid Meier interview: ‘Before Civilization, strategy was a dirty word in gaming’

By | February 25, 2022

The Telegraph has published an article two days ago, probably also related to Sid’s birthday, about his story and the experiences with Civilization. They talk about how Sid himself started up in gaming, the relationship to education, and development rules like the 1/3rd rule: 1/3rd keep, 1/3rd improve, 1/3rd new.

An excerpt:

“Can Civ games – which feature numerous leaders from human history including Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, Abu Bakr, and Mahatma Gandhi – serve an educational purpose? Meier, who studied history and computer science at the University of Michigan, likes to think so. He says that Civ may have even helped to “legitimise” gaming as an intellectual pursuit. “I mean, I’m remembering back 30 years ago, and it wasn’t considered all that good an idea to play games. People would say, ‘Oh you’re wasting your time playing those games, can’t you do something useful?’ But that has really turned around today, where I think it is a reputable and worthwhile use of time. It might even prepare you for a career in the wonderful world of the gaming industry, whether that’s as a designer, or an artist, or as a journalist.”

Meier is on a roll and becomes more animated. “Where parents used to think it was a waste of time for kids to play video games,” he says, “now they might think this is an opportunity for their son or daughter [to learn something]. Kids can amaze their parents with things that they know about Caesar, or Gandhi, or Genghis Khan.””

The full article is available here (but saldy behind a paywall).

From Firaxis: Happy Birthday, Sid Meier!

By | February 24, 2022

As it was promised 2 weeks ago, the Civilization Twitter account has made a video with all the best birthday wishes for Sid. You can find this video here on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CivGame/status/1496915329984843814

Happy Birthday, Sid Meier! 🥳🎂

Enjoy this special message from the best fans in gaming. pic.twitter.com/K9OswLKKV7— Sid Meier’s Civilization (@CivGame) February 24, 2022

Discuss this video in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/from-firaxis-happy-birthday-sid-meier.675566/

Humble Bundle: Sid Meier’s Ultimate Collection

By | February 23, 2022

The Humble Bundle has made a Sid Meier Bundle, containing a lot of our favourite games!If you pay at least 13.25€, you get

  • The original Colonization
  • Civ3 complete
  • Civ4 complete
  • Civ5 complete
  • Civ: Beyond Earth – The Collection
  • Sid Meier’s Starships
  • Civ6 and all addons and DLC (besides the NFP, where you get a 15€ coupon)

As other minor games included are the early games of Sid, Sid Meier’s Pirates, Sid Meier’s Railroads, Covert Action and the remakes of Ace Patrol, Sid Meier’s Ace Control and Ace Control: Pacific Skies.

All keys are available via Steam for Windows, some are available for Mac and Linux. All donations coming from this Humble Bundle go to Trees, Water, People, a charity which has started by planting trees, but is now doing a lot more. The recommended price for this Humble Bundle is 25€, and we can’t say this would be too much for all these games, it’s rather too little for all the play time you get out of it.
This humble bundle is avialable for the next 14 days, until March 9. But get it now, and contribute to the already 730€ which have already been raised for charity!

Discuss this Humble Bundle in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/humble-bundle-sid-meiers-ultimate-collection.675540/

Play the new Civ6 “Game Of The Month” #128

By | February 22, 2022

And it’s again time for our next Civ6 “Game Of The Month”, where you can show us that you’re best at civ-ing!

This time you play as Gorgo of Greece on a standard-size TSL Europe map on King level. As additional challenge you have to go for culture victory, while the AI is not restricted and can beat you in all other categories. You have time until March 13 to finish this game.

You can find all the details here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/6otm128-announcement.675328/

Robert Zubek: Humankind and the rhetoric of tech trees

By | February 21, 2022

Robert Zubek, the author of the book “Elements of Game Design”, has written a blog post about the tech tree differences between Humankind and Civilization 5. He first talks about the tech tree as a game mechanic device to simulate progress, and afterwards talks about the differences between the two games, mostly that Humankind’s tech tree focuses way more on warfare than the Civ5 tech tree, while omitting other fundamental achievements of humanity.

An excerpt:

“In this tech tree, the arts and sciences are simply not a part of the model. They don’t exist in the game world, they can’t be researched, they’re not part of human history at all. Instead, war technologies are first-class innovations, and must be researched in order to progress through history.

This is a very martial view of history, of what kinds of human developments are worthy of rememberance.

But this isn’t the only way this could have played out. For instance, if we look at another game like Civilization 5 (which was a clear inspiration behind Humankind), its tech tree is very different. All the items I mentioned as missing, the various arts and sciences, show up there.”

You can read the full blog post here: http://robert.zubek.net/blog/example-humankind.html, and discuss it in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/robert-zubek-humankind-and-the-rhetoric-of-tech-trees.675499/

(The picture is availabe under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0, from Humankind Wiki: Technology)