Who cares about a bunch of syphillitc goat farmers gazing at stars or inbred kings forcing slaves to build giant pyramid-shaped tombs. Boring!
What is interesting are the cobblestone streets of bustling industrial cities. Exciting advancements in the enlightenment and industrial ages are fun. Give us factories and men marching into hellish trenches. Give us the modern age with its nuclear weapons and fighter jets waiting to strike. Give us democratic parliaments, fascist dictators, and technocratic commissars running workers' paradises!
If we have learned one thing from Civ 3 its that it is difficult to build a game that handles early history and later history well within a single game paradigm. Something has to go, and that something is the earlier stages of human history.
The enlightenment, industrial age, and electronic age are where Civ is the strongest. Why bother suffering through the boring ancient age where there is nothing to do but settler rush and swordsman/horseman rush? You usually can't even build any of the wonders if you are playing on a decent difficulty level. The later ages give us a panoply of activities to engage in - scientific, economic, developmental, political, and military. There is simply a richness of activity in the later stages of history that the earlier eras lack. Come on, all there is to do in the earlier ages is fight wars and build churches. Forget that! I want to be the first civilization to discover blackbody radiation, corner the semiconductor market, and build an unstoppable army of tanks.
Finally, there are already plenty of games dealing with the ancient ages out there.
What is interesting are the cobblestone streets of bustling industrial cities. Exciting advancements in the enlightenment and industrial ages are fun. Give us factories and men marching into hellish trenches. Give us the modern age with its nuclear weapons and fighter jets waiting to strike. Give us democratic parliaments, fascist dictators, and technocratic commissars running workers' paradises!
If we have learned one thing from Civ 3 its that it is difficult to build a game that handles early history and later history well within a single game paradigm. Something has to go, and that something is the earlier stages of human history.
The enlightenment, industrial age, and electronic age are where Civ is the strongest. Why bother suffering through the boring ancient age where there is nothing to do but settler rush and swordsman/horseman rush? You usually can't even build any of the wonders if you are playing on a decent difficulty level. The later ages give us a panoply of activities to engage in - scientific, economic, developmental, political, and military. There is simply a richness of activity in the later stages of history that the earlier eras lack. Come on, all there is to do in the earlier ages is fight wars and build churches. Forget that! I want to be the first civilization to discover blackbody radiation, corner the semiconductor market, and build an unstoppable army of tanks.
Finally, there are already plenty of games dealing with the ancient ages out there.
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