Episode: 3840
Title: HPR3840: Playing the Original Civilization
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3840/hpr3840.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 06:21:41

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3840 for Friday the 21st of April 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Playing the Original Civilization.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, hence on playing the game, that started it all.
Hello, this is Ahukah for Hacker Public Radio and I am welcoming everyone in the sound
of my voice and what I want to do now is I want to continue on talking about games.
I am going to continue with the original civilization.
What I want to do is give some hints about playing it, if you were interested in perhaps
doing that.
As I said, the original civilization looks pretty primitive these days, but the basics
of the gameplay were there, really from the beginning, which is why it is regarded as
one of the all-time great games and founded a dynasty that goes on to this day.
This is not going to be an in-depth guide to playing this game.
Now, there is a civilization wiki that has a good in-depth guide.
I have a link in the show notes if you want to dive in, but there are some principles
worth bringing up, many of which continue to be useful through later versions of Siv.
First is the end of turn.
Siv is a turn-based game, which means that the action takes place into discrete turns.
I just turn-based work better for this game than so-called real-time.
I think it's because I encourage you to think about what you're doing.
That can even extend to micromanaging, which is how you become an expert.
It doesn't mean you're forced to do it, however.
It's your game, and you can do it any way you like.
Sid Meier says that the major lesson he has learned in creating games is that it's
the player who should be having the fun, not the developer.
But one thing I always do is make sure my game will stop at the end of the turn and make
me end it by pressing a button.
I always do that because I may want to take some additional actions, such as modify my
build cues in some of my cities, or engage in some diplomacy, or some trading, or what
have you.
Now, in my version, and this is the original set, it's part of the Civilization Chronicles
box set, it's the Windows version, you go to File, then Options, and then click on End
of Turn to turn this on.
Now, if you have a different version, you might need to look for the option, but it should
be there for all Civ games.
Now, the next principle that you want to get up to speed on is that in the early versions
of Civ, in particular, the key unit is the city, not the Empire, or to put it another
way, and Empire is nothing more than a group of cities.
Everything happens in cities and in a fairly simple way.
Buildings are located in cities, and there is no limit to how many buildings you can build
other than your money and resources.
Each city has a production potential, shown as the number of shields it has available.
Now, shields is the visual cue for this in the early Civ.
Later on, it becomes hammers, and you know, there's a variety of ways of displaying it,
but it's basically in Civ 1, each shield is equal to one unit of production.
So a city with lots of shields available can build buildings faster than a city with
only a few.
You cannot transfer production from one city to another except in two cases.
You can build a caravan.
Now, caravans are useful for creating trade routes, but you can also use the caravan to
add shields to a wonder of the world's project.
This was a nice trick in the original Civ and in Civ 2, it was eliminated in Civ 3.
The other way is by building a unit in one city, moving it to another, then deleting
the unit there.
Some part of the shields it took to build the unit will be added to your production,
but this is a very wasteful way to transfer production.
I really only do it when I am demobilizing after a war to save support costs, and then
what I'll do is I'll make sure I'll move my units into cities that can use the additional
production and demobilize them there.
Now related to the idea of the city being the principal unit is that there is no real
concept of national territory in Civ 1.
You can march a unit right up next to someone's city, park it there, and they may not do anything
depending on the state of your relationship with them.
If you're at war or hostile, they may attack the unit, but not always.
They may hope you will attack them and lose if they have fortified units behind city walls.
Every unit has to be built in a city, so building a large army requires more cities, and
every unit has to be supported by a city.
Normally this would be the city that created it, but there are limits.
Units need support in the form of production, i.e. shields.
If they're settlers, they also need food.
If you run out of the needed resource, you would get a message that the city can no longer
support the unit, and it has been disbanded.
One way to avoid this is to re-home the unit to another city.
Just move the unit to a new city, and when it is inside, press the H button, and now this
new city will take over the support duties.
Military units have three numbers that define them.
Your first unit is a militia unit you create shortly after settling your first city, and
it is listed as 1,1,1.
The first number is your attack strength.
The second is your defense, strength, and the third is your movement.
This is not a powerhouse unit, obviously, but in 4,000 BC, you're not likely to run
into anything stronger.
I generally build three militia units right away.
One is to keep at home for defense, the other two are set out to explore.
You want to know what territory is around you, plan on sites for new cities, and most
important, seek out the goody huts.
These actually have other names and different versions of SIF, but everyone always calls them
goody huts.
You may get 50 gold from visiting one, or discover scrolls of ancient wisdom that reveal
attack.
Best of all, you may find an advanced tribe that instantly creates a city to join your
civilization.
But there is a potential problem in both SIF and SIF, when you explore a goody huts,
you may awaken a bunch of barbarians, frequently they're weak enough to not be a real danger,
so it's usually a risk worth taking.
These first units can become a bit better if they become veteran.
You become veteran by being built in a city with barracks, or you have a chance of getting
promoted if you win a battle.
Now veteran units are 50% stronger on attack and defense.
Now you can get the ability to build stronger units through researching technologies.
For instance, a good early defensive unit is the phalanx, which has the numbers 1, 2,
1.
Attack strength is only 1, but defense strength is 2, so defense twice as well as a militia
unit.
And that's unlocked when you research bronze working.
Now barracks are a good way to build veteran units which are stronger, but there's a catch.
There are two texts that wipe out your existing barracks, and they are gunpowder and combustion.
Gunpowder unlocks building musketsmen, and combustion unlocks building tanks.
They make all of your barracks obsolete, and they are removed from the game.
So expert sift players know that the minute they start researching one of these technologies,
they should go through all their cities and sell their barracks for 40 gold a piece.
Now in sift 2, they made a friendly change to have the game sell them all for you and
save you the bother.
Now to money, IE gold, as it's all I referred to.
Now this can get confusing because we use gold to refer to the generic money, but gold
itself can also be a resource in versions of sift.
But Sid Meier himself has said the key to winning siv is to focus on the money.
Now you get money in several ways.
It's produced by trade that cities generate, and building roads helps to increase this.
You can also develop trade routes when you've unlocked the technology for trade, and you
do that by building caravans and sending them to other cities.
You get a small amount of gold when the route is established, and then a little bit each
turn.
Early on this isn't a lot, but the longer the route is around, the more gold it produces.
You can also sell buildings to generate gold, though never enough to pay back all the
production you put into them to begin with.
And you can demand tribute from other sivs, though that depends on whether you are sufficiently
stronger than them.
And of course in the early game, goody huts are important for this.
While it isn't a lot of gold they provide, it comes when gold is scarcest.
This is important, because every building you build requires maintenance, which for
early buildings is one gold per turn, but it goes up for the more sophisticated buildings
of later eras.
Run short of cash, and the buildings will get sold off to raise the money.
Then there is how you allocate your revenue.
It can be used to fund three things, your treasury, your science, and your luxuries.
This is of course important, since you can't win without researching tax, and if you fall
behind the AI, it can get pretty bad.
Luxuries are important for keeping your people happy, because if they get unhappy, the city
will revolt, and all production will cease.
And if you don't restore happiness right away, your government will fall, and your whole
empire will be an anarchy.
So how you allocate the revenue matters.
Finally, you can take a citizen in a city and remove them from production and create
a specialist, and one of your options is tax collector.
Now, having a full treasury makes a lot of things possible.
For instance, you can use a diplomat unit to go into a foreign city and bribe it to revolt
and join your empire.
Obviously, this works best if you have a very full treasury.
And you can buy units and buildings.
In the original DOS version, there was a buy button in the production screen, but in
the Windows version, you had to go to the city menu, where you would have a buy unit or
buy improvement button, depending on what was in the production box.
Finally, some tips on happiness.
When you found a city, the citizens will tend to be happy, but as the city grows, some
will be unhappy, and they will show as red on the city screen.
The number of happy citizens you can have before unhappy ones show up decreases, as the
difficulty level increases.
Now you can increase the number of happy citizens in several ways.
The first, you can build buildings that increase happiness.
Civ uses religion in these early games.
It changes in later versions of civs, but in the first civ and really civ too, religion
is kind of the opiate of the masses in this respect.
So you build a temple, later on a cathedral, it just makes your people happy.
Colosseum is also helpful for happiness, but has higher maintenance and lower effects
than a cathedral, so you would always choose the cathedral first.
Another way to increase happiness is through building wonders.
Hanging gardens, Shakespeare's theater, JS Box Cathedral, Michelangelo's chapel, women's
suffrage and cure for cancers, are all wonders that either make more people happy or fewer
people unhappy.
And last of all, you can create a specialist called an entertainer to make more people happy.
Now, if you look in the city screen where you see the squares that belong to your city,
the ones with icons for trade, food and production are the ones being worked by your citizens.
If you click on a square that is being worked, that citizen will then become an entertainer,
and the icon for that looks like Elvis, kind of a running joke and civ over several versions.
And that means that instead of productively producing food, et cetera, he is now entirely
devoted to entertaining the others.
So, to sum up what civilization does, and this applies to all versions really, it makes
you balance many competing needs.
You need to have a military to defend yourself, but you also need to do scientific research
and build buildings to improve your cities.
You need to keep people happy and also make sure that your treasure is full.
You need to explore the map, because unexplored areas are where barbarians are likely to come
from.
But the funny thing about all that, I found out my copy of Civ 1 to refresh my memory
in some details, since it had been some time since I played it, and the next thing I knew
several hours had gone by.
So even though the first version is pretty unsophisticated, in comparison to later versions,
I'd mostly play Civ 6 now.
It still has that addicting quality that makes you play one more turn.
So, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and encouraging you as always
to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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