What brought you into civ?

[Robert]

New XP, new poll, what brought you into Civilization?
During which era did you became a true civ addict?
Please vote in the poll, you're free to post your first experiences here as well of course

[Robert]

To kick off, I became a civ-addict with civ1 (obviously )
A friend of me played the game, and I watched him playing.

He was busy most of the time moving caravans around the world. All I cared for while watching a game (that I didn't understand) was that he revealed more of the map

I kept asking him to sail to the blacked out parts of the map.
He gave me a copy of the game, and I started to play it. (bought it later!)
I remember that I never used caravans that excessive as he did. I haven't met him in.... 15 years or something? Don't know if he's still a civ addict

I remember my first games, I was really shocked when an foreign armor showed up in front of my spearman! (first Armor i saw!) (Yes, I was really behind!)

Later I used the tactic to nuke all chinese cities first, then land with huge stacks of armors and take his cities. I had some issues with global warming
I've had complete world swamps because of global warming. (I was 13, I had time to keep on ending turns, till everything was swamp )

I also enjoyed the bug that appeared when you got 2 rows of the little people at the top of your screen. Then the most north tiles started to turn into 99 food, 99 shields (or something) tiles. Pretty exciting cities

I've fooled around with the civ1 text files, and translated all texts in dutch
I also added new options, but they never showed up in the game! Grrrrr!

I remember coming online in 1996 looking for more civ2 stuff, and coming across the Ultimate Civilization Site. I became a member, forgot my login-name, and now I don't have this wonderful 1970 login because I had to re-register after the merge (grrrrr)

So far for my story

[sneaky]

I think I have pretty much played all CIV version. The original, CIV II, III, CTP. But I only really got in the game with CIV IV.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Ah...memories...

Civ I, back in Malaysia in 1991 when Dad bought the brand-spanking-new 80286 computer. He also got Civ, and it was as simple as that. Microprose was SO my favourite company of all time then, as I loved Hyperspeed as well - although I never got very far in the game.

I remember two games most of all - one of my earlier ones, when I was out-teched and almost completely conquered in the 1700s or so, and lost my home continent. I had two cities in the tundra sticking out of the Arctic ice (you know those sort of cities!) that impotently sat there for hundreds of years as all these weird and wonderful ships from the power that had killed me did battle near my shores with other big nations. I later looked up these advanced and massively powerful ships - they were Ironclads!

Second memorable game was after some practice, and I was in the driver's seat, with the entire world of the Earth map colonised as Babylon - including Australia and Greenland. There had been one AI city for hundreds of years at that point - Rome, which I left exactly as it had been, after I absorbed their empire. One turn before 2100AD I nuked it 20+ times and took the city - it wiped the city out and I discovered an advanced tribe in the ruins!

The only Civ game I have never played, despite owning, is CTP II. CTP I didn't get into much, despite the cool future techs and abilites, chiefly because SMAC was out at the same time.

[_BuRjaCi_]

After the geezers stop voting Civ2 will win hands down.

[Will9]

I started playing with CivIII.

[shmily_dana]

Eons ago, I bought the game "Ascendancy". The guy at the store told me that if I like that game, come back in a few weeks when "Master of Orion II" comes out. I came back and it was next to Civ II. I bought both and the getting rest was history...

[jbp26]

i started with civ 1 back when i was 9 years old. i got it on 2 3.5 floppy disks from my cousin. i remember playing on the earth map and wiping out civs with just my starting settler. since the european civs started so close together, all you'd have to is wait a turn for them to settle, them move your settler into the undefended city, and bam.

also i think i was the only person to enjoy test of time.

[Alexander I]

My family was slow in the tech race; we didn't get our first PC until 1994. Thus, my Civ addiction began with vanilla CivII. Some of my friends were playing it, I thought it looked awesome, and so I bought it. That was 1997. And I've been a Civ Junkie ever since.

[Robert]

I remember that ugly: "Our bureaucrats cannot support more cities" popup when you had more then 256 cities in civ1

Stupid bureaucrats! I need more cities!

[John-SJ]

I'm a Civ I "geezer" and looking over the poll choices, I have owned every game listed except CivNet and now, BtS. That situation will be rectified shortly however. (the one with BtS, I'm gonna have to pass on CivNet )

[Kloreep]

Civ2 MGE was the first Civ that I bought, after seeing it in action at a friend's house. Didn't get into the on-line community until Civ3 though.

[Dale]

Civ-C64 for me.

[Jvstin]

Originally posted by shmily_dana
Eons ago, I bought the game "Ascendancy". The guy at the store told me that if I like that game, come back in a few weeks when "Master of Orion II" comes out. I came back and it was next to Civ II. I bought both and the getting rest was history...

Ascendancy was awful. I hated the idea that with multiple ships in a system, I could only get *one* of them to fire in a combat. It made zero sense to me.

[Jvstin]

I started with Civ I, after I saw the book "Rome on 640k a day."

I've not played the CTP games, but I've played the other iterations of Civilization ever since. I loved Civ II, was disappointed (to say the least) with Civ III (whack a pollution square got old real fast), and I think Civ IV is probably the best of the lot.

I do also play FreeCiv when I want to go "retro".