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It’s my belief that the Civilization series has always been unable to represent the modern age in any way realistically. This is not meant as negative criticism on the creators of Civilization: it is simply impossible to represent all the different societies in the millennia of human history well.
Let’s have a look at some basic characteristics of the Civilization series:
This is a pretty decent system to represent pre-industrial societies, After all, roughly speaking those are agricultural and the size of the population is closely related to the food production in the area. The economic value added to raw materials to get to finished products is fairly limited, so abstracting that to shields + resources = finished good isn’t too far-fetched. On top of that, most production is for local use, and trade is mostly limited to luxury goods, as anything else is too hard and too expensive to transport over long distances. (Though it would be nice to have a trade route system to represent in-between traders such as Venice, the Dutch and Portugal, who didn’t always control the production – ie in civ terms, the tile the resource is on - but did control the trading of the good to their great advantage.)
This model can still function to some degree during the Industrial Revolution, as – at least in the colonial period – the focus of governments lay not in promoting free and international trade but in building up their own national and cohesive economy and obtaining effective control of the necessary raw resources. (Though of course here too the period is much better represented by games that focus specifically on this time period, eg Victoria with its factory system.)
However the system completely fails for the modern (post)industrial societies. To give a few examples:
That’s why I say: Limit Civilization to what it can represent well: pre-modern societies, the age of states and kingdoms! Limit the technology tree to 1945, so that we can still play in the end with tanks, bombers and nukes, but no further. If there still needs to be a space race, make it the Apollo Program and the journey to the moon, instead of a journey to Alpha Centauri, which would require many more techs. Cutting off a piece at the end would allow the game to mold more around the earlier periods, and focus more features on the early areas. After all, that’s the part of the game we play most, as many rarely finish a game because by the end they’ve become so powerful there’s no decent competition left.
So while on most aspects of the game I’d disagree that “less is more”, here I think limiting Civilization’s timespan to pre-modern times would add to the game.
Let’s have a look at some basic characteristics of the Civilization series:
- It’s a tile based game. Production is derived from the land (and seas).
- Population growth is related directly to food production.
- Raw materials are immediately converted into finished products, with no steps in between.
- The player is a god, omnipotent and omniscient about his civilization, and can guide his civilization independently from what’s happening in other civs.
This is a pretty decent system to represent pre-industrial societies, After all, roughly speaking those are agricultural and the size of the population is closely related to the food production in the area. The economic value added to raw materials to get to finished products is fairly limited, so abstracting that to shields + resources = finished good isn’t too far-fetched. On top of that, most production is for local use, and trade is mostly limited to luxury goods, as anything else is too hard and too expensive to transport over long distances. (Though it would be nice to have a trade route system to represent in-between traders such as Venice, the Dutch and Portugal, who didn’t always control the production – ie in civ terms, the tile the resource is on - but did control the trading of the good to their great advantage.)
This model can still function to some degree during the Industrial Revolution, as – at least in the colonial period – the focus of governments lay not in promoting free and international trade but in building up their own national and cohesive economy and obtaining effective control of the necessary raw resources. (Though of course here too the period is much better represented by games that focus specifically on this time period, eg Victoria with its factory system.)
However the system completely fails for the modern (post)industrial societies. To give a few examples:
- There’s overproduction of food, and population size or growth is no longer related to it, as the economic value of a child has declined, and there’s wide access to contraceptives.
- Most of the economic value is added in the production process. To say it simple, economic power lies where the factories, banks and research labs lie, not where the raw resources lie, as would be the case in Civ.
- There’s a very large mobility of capital, and the biggest corporations are multinationals unbound to any country, investing where it suits them best. So the idea of a player-god in control of the entire economy, without any money flows to foreign countries, doesn’t work anymore.
That’s why I say: Limit Civilization to what it can represent well: pre-modern societies, the age of states and kingdoms! Limit the technology tree to 1945, so that we can still play in the end with tanks, bombers and nukes, but no further. If there still needs to be a space race, make it the Apollo Program and the journey to the moon, instead of a journey to Alpha Centauri, which would require many more techs. Cutting off a piece at the end would allow the game to mold more around the earlier periods, and focus more features on the early areas. After all, that’s the part of the game we play most, as many rarely finish a game because by the end they’ve become so powerful there’s no decent competition left.
So while on most aspects of the game I’d disagree that “less is more”, here I think limiting Civilization’s timespan to pre-modern times would add to the game.
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