How did you first find Civ1 and how did you learn to play it?

[Anakha]

The only thing I still remember well from my first game of Civ was that when I'd built a city-wall, I assumed my city was well enough defended, so I took out my units to go do some scouting. And yes, the red guys came, and just walked through my city walls like they didn't exist! I was SO annoyed...
Luckily, it got better with time, although after that first game I left civ for a while, in favor of RR Tycoon...

[Skanky Burns]

My first game was played on my Tandy 1000 - way before my computer had a mouse. Fortunately for me I could read english so I knew a fair few of the shortcuts that were needed.

Before my first game I had been playing pirates, so I was used to thinking of cannons as defencive units. So once I got the technology for cannons, that was what I produced. I produced quite a few settlers and ended up with around 7 cities before encountering another civ. I didn't want to waste my precious settlers time by building roads or irrigation, so all the land around me was completely unimproved.

Well, once I discovered a civ I decided it was time to go to war. I had a few phalanx spare, so I sent them to attack the closest city. Suprisingly, the battle went in my favour and the city was mine. I moved a cannon in for defence. As the city had a road and irrigation improved square near it, it produced more than my other cities but I did not understand why. I was happy though, it was my best city. Then the enemy counter-attacked. Needless to say, my cannons did not defend well.

At one stage the enemy moved onto the square with irrigation and forced the people working that square to work another square. That enemy unit died, but when I checked the city the next turn the people had not started working the irrigated square again. As I didn't yet know how to change the squares they worked, I left the city now consuming more food than it produced. But the city did not last long as mine anyway.

I lost the remainder of my cities fairly fast after that, despite having units lying around either fortified or sentried - I did not know how to activate them either.

[Skanky Burns]

A few games later, I discovered what those numbers beside the units meant, and started using defence units for defence and attack units for attack. I still rushed for the cannon though, and used it to good effect. I was playing the world map, and conquered Europe-Asia. Since I still had an aversion to using settlers for anything other than building cities, my gold and science income was pathetic. But since I had so many cities, the pittance each city produced added up. In that game, I managed to get to gunpowder before 2100 ad, and I felt so proud of myself for that achievement.

[Jac de Molay]

Picked it up at Radio shack when I got my first computer, a 286.

Tossed aside the instructions and started playing. Had some difficulty running the city managment screen, but after that played for about 3 days straight.

[da_hal]

i bought the game when it first came out, and nobody knew who sid meier was or why his name was prominently displayed on the box. ("simcity sucked ass" was the general consensus when we asked the apple guys who he was.)

i looked at the tech tree poster in the box. i thought, jeez. i read the manual. "what a pain in the butt." i played a few games in the earth world, built spaceships, and "won" the game. i thought, boy this game is garbage. i threw it in the same pile as warlords 1.

like warlords, i learned how to have fun with the game after about 6 months. my friend came over, and he started playing it at my house. he played king level, and showed me how to manage workers for maximum benefit, and that less than max pop was actually better for most cities. i also started using random maps, because the 'real world' has too many damn deserts.

i then went on prodigy for tips, and started using super settlers and building railroads in the ocean, along with caravans and maximizing terrain production. (cities in the desert were actually pretty good.)

what almost killed the game for me: 20+ turns to get across the sahara and kill the mongols.

what hooked me: caesar and the romans hiding out in australia, building a tecno-metropolis with only 3 cities connected with a major freeway system, surviving against waves of invaders through a tech advantage and skilled diplomacy.

why i eventually quit: moving units a pain in the butt. late game turns took like 10-20 minutes if you had any substantial number of troops. i usually ended up with 1 group to fight, 1 armored tank for defense. any more than 1 settler also took forever.

best thing about the game: elvii.

[Madog Velkor]

In middle school, a friend of mine's dad had it on his computer. We weren't allowwed to play it, so we made a copy and installed it on my computer (sorry Microprose).

Not having the manual handy, I had to rely on the Civolopedia and pop-ups. I thought I was doing well in my first game, I had comquered the other civ on my island and had a bunch of nice cities. Unfortunately, I didn't understand the finer points of governments and keeping populations happy and soon every city worth anything was revolting. I might have done something about it if I had know what was going on, but it was a few centuries before I figured out what it meant.

Eventually, in the 1800s I decided to load a few of my new knights onto by new little boats, but just as I was about to depart, some German transpots showed up and began disgorging tanks. Too bad for me.

I played non stop for months, and then on and off for years until I got Civ2. It was the first strategy game I had, but I loved MoM, MoO, and Colonization when I came across them.

[da_hal]

Top 10 funniest things about civ1:

10. A rocket scientist loses their job and becomes a lounge singer.
9. 2,000 year old pikemen.
8. Getting nuked by Abraham Lincoln.
7. Caravan camel stampedes.
6. Ghengis Khan begging for his life.
5. Los Angeles covered with pollution, as usual.
4. Barbarians jump on your railroad, invade your town, and try to board your rockets.
3. Making an area resemble your neighborhood.
2. "Lemmings town": everybody is so happy, they screw like crazy, even though there isn't enough food to support them.
1. Ghandi opening a six-pack of whupass.

[SCG]

Originally posted by da_hal
Top 10 funniest things about civ1:

10. A rocket scientist loses their job and becomes a lounge singer.
9. 2,000 year old pikemen.
8. Getting nuked by Abraham Lincoln.
7. Caravan camel stampedes.
6. Ghengis Khan begging for his life.
5. Los Angeles covered with pollution, as usual.
4. Barbarians jump on your railroad, invade your town, and try to board your rockets.
3. Making an area resemble your neighborhood.
2. "Lemmings town": everybody is so happy, they screw like crazy, even though there isn't enough food to support them.
1. Ghandi opening a six-pack of whupass.

you left out:
You have discovered scrolls of ancient wisdom: NUCLEAR FISSION

and as a corollary to that, Nuclear Power plants with no concept of electricity (lit by candles and producing magnetism???)

[Gilgamensch]

What about:

discovered scrolls of ancient wisdom: Alphabet

How you supposed to read them?

[ottok]

In my first games... I let My sertteles go to anywhere!

And listening that... Some games later i have thinks...

i cannot do ships so if i am english... Some one game i discovered Bronze Working after Chivalry!

First with 2100 ad (english)
First kill ewery all (chieftain+3 ,babylonians)
first at ac(americans 2100)
fastest at ac 1970(?!)

[Miao Tsay Kat]

Sid Meier's Fan! from way back

I guess it all started for me with Sid Meier's Pirates! on my C64.
This was my first games system and I was ADDICTED. I got Pirates! with my C64 around 1993, so I started playing it more or less every couple of days since then for about the next 4 or 5 years or so, when my C64 broke down -C64s were quite old by that stage and most of my friends had thrown away their Amigas.
I was obssessed with this game, so when I got my first PC around 1996 (P120 with Windows 95) I couldn't believe my luck when I found that they'd done a Win95 version. I played it even more, coz I didn't have two wait 2 minutes for the game to finish loading every time I wanted to plunder a city.
So then I got the internet and one of the first things I searched for was Sid Meier. I wanted to find out what other games my hero had done with Microprose.
I found that he had created a game called Civilization and it sounded like it had the same kind of feel as Pirates! and by now I trusted ANYTHING with the Sid Meier stamp, so I looked for it in stores and I couldn't buy it anywhere and noone knew where to order it (I live in New Zealand, y'see... very small country with few stores). I had the good sense to see if anyone had posted a copy on the internet and lo & behold, there it was in all it's glory all 9 Mb of it. It took me about 90 minutes to download with a 28k modem.
I had not looked for a manual, when I downloaded the game. I figured i'd just pick it up as I go. I should have known better from Pirates! how complicated it would be... and I taught myself Pirates! without any help of a manual!
The user interface was pretty straightforward for me with the commands. I learnt those pretty quickly through trial and error. Even the fortify/unfortify sentry/unsentry came naturally to me. But I had no idea what sentry did.
The only thing that held me up was the micromanagement of the cities. What were all those shapes [food, resources, science, tax, luxuries, trade]? This I didn't find out for years, after playing very solidly. I started playing civ more or less once a day about 1997 and finally worked out micromanagement about early 1999.
About now, I should point out that my fixation with Civ 1 was transferred when SMAC was released. I spent FAR too many nights without sleep blowing the crap out of Sister Miriam and her freaks.
Then shortly after CTP was released, I played that a little bit, but was largely disappointed with the user interface and general changes to layout that came as part of the 'revision'. Also, it took a great deal of the small amount of RAM I had on my last PC, so that was the main reason I went back to SMAC.
I was trading online at an auction site about 3 months ago and as I was browsing the strategy games section, I found someone advertising the Civ 1/Civ 2/Test of Time pack. At that point I had no idea they were still making these, so I placed a very large autobid immediately- I'm glad the limit was not reached before the auction ended. It was a LARGE autobid, coz I thought it was rare and I wanted to make up for all the years fun I got out of the illegal copy I had been using.
So about 3 weeks ago I started playing Civ 2, so I guess it's interesting how I think of Civ 1 as the main version of Civ, coz I've been playing it for the last 5 years or so.
First impressions of Civ 2? Very positive. seems like all the better afterthoughts were added here in this version. It's got slightly more going for it than SMAC, in that it's classic Civ, rather than ultra-modernized Civ and it is 10 times the game that CTP was.
Is it better than Civ 1? No. I prefer the lower budget cheap & nasty visual effects of Civ 1, but MODs & custom trade routes make Civ 2 interesting.
Favourite thing about Civ 2: Sun Tzu's Academy. My favourite wonder of all Civ games.
I have not played CTP2 yet. I don't know if it is much different from CTP1, but unless I get rave reviews from someone, I probably won't be checking it out any time soon.
I may want to progress to Civ 3 more quickly though, if it's as good as I keep reading about. Unfortunately, it cannot be bought in NZ currently as all unsold copies have been recalled by Atari to make way for C3G! Whch I will probably buy by the end of this year or start of next... once I have graduated from Isaac Newton's University of Civ 2!

Wish me luck!

ps Can anyone let me know what the Democracy games are? If they are turn based Multiplayer, where can I learn more about them? my e-mail is larakin@pin.co.nz

[The Pioneer]

Hhmmm IIRC I got to Civ through the board game Civilization by Avalon. The two only share a name and along the years Avalon Hill and Microprose and others fought over the name but that is a different story. Back in those years it was DOS that ruled the scene and I still have the original discs around.

Back in those years it was college time which also meant that I had the time to get addicted and addicted I was and have been ever since.

I remember nights when after playing for hours upon hours I could never turn the damn thing off and go to bed, despite the pleas from my girlfriend.

I don't recall reading the manual although I do still posses that too. As always I installed and dived right in, the rest is history!


So long...

[War4ever]

found it on an ex'es computer and lost too many nights sleep playing it....been addicted ever since

[ottok]

nucle or trade!

[Andemagne]

saw it on a friends house for the first time.
the game is quite intuitive and easy to learn.