I would have preferred they partner with some UI experts.
I'd go for AI! The problem I have with Civ is that they create these really sort of interesting and elaborate systems, but they've clearly long surpassed the capabilities of their AI systems to the point that the only way to create the illusion of competitiveness is with giving the AI ever more massive cheat bonuses (200% faster research, 200% more resources per tile, etc type stuff).
That really ruins the 'real' game and creates this sort of meta layer where you're specifically aiming to compete against these cheat bonuses rather than actually playing the game. It'd be analogous to a really weak chess AI trying to create the facade of challenge by randomly giving itself a new pawn every 2 turns, a a knight every 5 turns, and a rook every 20.
If they partnered with a modern UI expert, the buttons would be replaced by hieroglyphs even more cryptic than symbols from the Shawnee Tribe and organized into at least 3 separate hamburger menus.
I don't think it was lack of experts. I suspect the UI people are professionals.
I much more strongly suspect it was "we're going to hire one person to do the work of three" and the result was "get it working as quick as I can".
Definitely LOL'd watching the video when it opened up with the singing native American trope. Marketing content is torture. I'll die on this hill.
Marketing content has definitely destroyed Google search. So much harder to find in-depth content
If you don't mind this unsolicited product-recommendation, I use Kagi now and I'm won-over. Turns out that when users pay for a search-engine it ends-up focused towards the users' needs and not advertisers; funny that.
(Though Kagi isn't perfect: I find it slower than Google: it'll take maybe 500ms for a result compared to <100ms on Google; Search-autocomplete is also less responsive, and their privacy-first approach means they don't save your search-history, whereas I want them to save my search-history for me, but anyway).
The way Google randomly deletes words in your search term drives me insane.
Given that the content described in the partnership here is part of a DLC, I wonder if the Tribe is party to any profit sharing agreement with the game company.
I've worked with the Shawnee Tribe, they don't do anything for free. In fact, when they owe you money, they will send you a letter notifying you of a generous contribution you made to their hospital. They are flat out thieves and you can't do anything about it. They are a sovereign nation.
Seems like a fair play given the history...
Yes and no. The history is pretty fucked, but on the other hand nobody currently alive screwed them over. In a lot of cases, people's ancestors weren't even living here back then. I think that it's not as fair in light of the lack of culpability.
There are still many current issues; eg: the Dakota Access Pipeline was routed to pose a threat to native water supplies and avoid being a threat to non native water.
There are still native women alive who were given "free sterilisation" (ie unrequired, undeclared and unasked for sterilisation procedures) while having appendixes removed, kidney operations, and straight out made up procedures as an excuse to carry out eugenics ideals of breeding out Indians. IIRC some of those "doctors" are still alive.
> There are still native women alive who were given "free sterilisation" (ie unrequired, undeclared and unasked for sterilisation procedures)
This assumes the genocide has ended, which it very much has not. In what year did Native American parents receive the right to choose not to send their kids to a boarding school?
1978.
Until 1978, Native American families were being separated against their will.
To say that no one currently alive screwed then over is absurd. This month, the President made motions to try and remove birthright citizenship for indigenous people.
No, there are absolutely people still alive who screwed them over.
Sure but people around today benefited tremendously from the horrific acts of their ancestors.
It’s uncomfortable if you’re on the benefactor side but it is the truth.
There are levels to it and some oppressive acts of the past were magnitudes worse than others. I mean literal genocide.
> Sure but people around today benefited tremendously from the horrific acts of their ancestors.
Including the Shawnee people. So it makes this stance just a tad hypocritical.
Not really. One group was literally wiped out. And Shawnee were just one group.
My people lived under imperial colonial rule. Cool we got railroads but trillions looted and millions killed in famines.
Just because some people sold out their own doesn’t forgive the sin of the atrocities brought forth that set generations back.
> Not really. One group was literally wiped out. And Shawnee were just one group.
Does that make them any different? My ancestors were nearly wiped out several times before, although much earlier in the history.
The same applies pretty much to any group of humans.
> My people lived under imperial colonial rule. Cool we got railroads but trillions looted and millions killed in famines.
"Trillions looted" is another example of hypocrisy.
> Just because some people sold out their own doesn’t forgive the sin of the atrocities brought forth that set generations back.
And the notion of "generational sin" is another example of hypocrisy.
couldn’t you just ignore them?
How? If you enter into a contract with them, it has to be litigated in their tribal court. Who do you think is going to win? The chief sits on the court as the judge and jury.
> If you enter into a contract with them, it has to be litigated in their tribal court.
Isn't it possible (and typical) for contracts to specify a particular forum for dispute resolution?
> Isn't it possible (and typical) for contracts to specify a particular forum for dispute resolution?
Tribes are sovereign under U.S. law. In most cases when you sign a contract with a tribe (or under tribal law), the tribe is free to modify it ex post facto.
Looks like they learned this from the US government, which signed a series of treaties with the various Indian groups in the 1800s and then ignored the treaties.
> they learned this from the US government, which signed a series of treaties with the various Indian groups in the 1800s and then ignored the treaties
No, the New World figured out empires, exploitation and abrogration of treaty obligations all on its own. The Maya are notorious. But there is a reason even e.g. the Navajo call the ancestral Puebloans the Anasazi [1].
That's true of all of human history. Alliances shift between nations, disagreements occur, war breaks out and the map gets redrawn.
The USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times. Anyone who signs an agreement with the USA should really expect at most 3-4 years of validity, depending where in the election cycle it was signed.
> USA is really on another level than many other nations in its lack of respect for treaties, at least in modern times
Uh, not really. We basically have a pattern of countries with excess power-projection capabilities going on a rampage as soon as they can. Russia in Ukraine (and Africa and the Middle East, to say nothing of Europe). China in Tibet and Hong Kong, with the Philippines and entire UNCLOS treaty system and now Taiwan. Saudi Arabia in Yemen and the region; same for Iran and Israel.
The U.S. was sort of with Europe for a few years on trying to hold the rules-based international order together. Now we're jumping into the international-law-doesn't-matter pool.
how is it an argument when both sides are so deliciously correct
Not really, unless there is some higher jurisdiction that can assert power over both parties. Maybe america can do that to the tribal nations, but no one wants go near that quagmire, unless there were huge issues at stake like the survival of the country or something of that magnitude.
How would they enforce the court verdict if you aren't on their land?
In this situation they owe you money, not the other way around.
Entering into a contract doesn’t sound like ignoring, we did it to them only makes sense they can get away with exactly the same thing now
It sucks that all the Civ competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.
Civ VII I actually think has a lot of new ideas. The game has civilizations transform into other ones. Ever since Civ VI they have made it so you need to spread improvements across tiles instead of building tall.
Civ does seem to change a good amount each game.
Although I also will say, I’m pretty happy with Civ VII, and I think popular opinion is 50-50 right now
The problem is, I don't think their new ideas are good ideas. Civ switching was really not fun when Humankind did it, and the eras system doing a lot of progress resetting seems to undermine the entire point of playing well in the early eras. And to make matters worse, these things are in service of solving a problem I don't even agree is a problem. I think late game Civ has always been fun and enjoyable, it didn't need them to completely overhaul the formula to make it so.
I do want to be open minded - maybe these things are more fun than they seem to me. But I'm also not going to drop $70 just to find out. So until they release a demo, put it on game pass, or have a deep discount sale, I'm not going to risk my money on this one.
I did pay the 70 and by the time I found out I hated the concept the return window was over.
The game has a broken UI, broke gameplay and everything which should be included is dlc. Try playing on a random map. Oh no you can't as the game requires two continents.
Wait two years and then buy for 15$. At least you feel less cheated by then.
Civilizations switching is a bad idea stolen from Humankind.
I would argue the bulk of Civ VII's ideas were actually taken from Humankind
makes me wonder if valve has a publisher protection service you can pay extra for.
I’m Sid Meier’s memoir he mentions how intentionally this certain amount of change each game is done.
Paradox Interactive is right there and thriving? They’re like the next step into the 4x rabbit hole and their fanbase is pretty loyal.
I'm a big paradox fan, especially eu4 and hoi4, but their dlc policy is downright toxic. There are tons of dlcs, they are all overpriced and they all break the base game in their own ways, and the only way to "fix" it is to buy the dlc. Oh and often time the quality of their dlcs is shit because it's all outsourced to other firms who don't know the game, or the code and are stuck with tight deadlines and budgets
Once a year paradox releases a dlc. Its pretty reasonable. It only seems unreasonable if you jump in 15 years after.
I honestly like the Paradox model, game mechanics breaking until patches aside.
Give a chunk of new base functionality as a free update.
Charge for a more expanded form of that functionality as a DLC.
We can quibble over whether this DLC or that DLC was worth the price, and there are certainly balance issues that are patch resolved, but it keeps expanding their games for years with pretty serious new stuff.
That's more than you can say for other publishers' post-release behavior.
EU4: 11 years
HOI4: 8 years
Stellaris: 8 years
How about we don't drip feed content over the years, causing problems and then graciously fixing them?
Why not? The only thing I think you could reasonably say is that it would be nice if there was a built-in way to freeze the game at a certain state, so that you can still play, say, Stellaris 2.0 if that's what you liked, and not get any of the patches that essentially assume you'll also have certain paid DLCs to function fully.
But Stellaris 1.0 and all the other were massive games people enjoyed playing, they weren't stripped down skeletons to build DLC on.
Were they as good at release as they are 8 years later? Not at all. But having them change and generally evolve over those 8 years is a key part of what makes people still play Stellaris today, when many other games from that time have long been abandoned.
Not to mention, plenty of people would have actually preferred it if instead of Civ VI and Civ VII, we were getting Civ V 4.0 today.
I mean, do you expect them to have created these massive games with multiple expansions’ worth of content at the beginning? Hasn’t Stellaris been essentially rebuilt over the years with DLC?
Stellaris has had at least two Ship of Theseus level reworks over the years.
There was a time Paradox was releasing almost 2 paid DLCs and even a couple of unpaid ones every year. Particularly in the case of EU4, where some DLCs ended up overriding the content of previous, even paid ones, to the point that they have 37 expansions for that game alone (and that's not even including the paid aesthetic expansions).
and this is how they keep updates flowing to games released 9 years ago. I'll take that over "log in every day to get your battlepass coins" MAU engagement psychological warfare any day of the week.
It also sucks that all the Paradox competitors seemed to have failed so far. The genre really needs some innovation.
Yep and paradox 4x games honestly take a brute force approach by adding too many limits of various kinds to ensure you don’t break the game.
Eg. fleet cap, star base cap, empire size, new systems requires spending influence that ticks over slowly, leader caps, etc.
Yes there’s ways you can increase things like influence 25% faster but that means you’re only 25% larger in size (and you’ll then be hit by the empire cap). In general I just don’t think paradox makes great 4x games compared to what I’ve played in the past. There must be a smarter way to have a fun 4x without resorting to a ton of different types of caps to stop you getting too far ahead. I will definitely +1 that the genre needs a shakeup.
Crusader Kings and Stellaris always felt more like… story-generation games than strategy games, to me. Sorta like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld at a different scale.
Yep, which makes them so amazing after Civ decided to abandon that approach and heavily push into trying to be a static boardgame.
I really wish they believed in UX, though. Going from Civ to EU4 is like going from one of those meal kit recipes to someone handing you some raw olives, grain, and a live chickens and expecting you to figure out the details.
You chose your path poorly.
The correct order is Civ to classic Dwarf Fortress to EU4.
Old World, made by some ex-civ people, is really quite excellent
I heard this from so many people that I bought it, and ultimately sought a refund. I had similar problems with its UI that I did with Civ VII. The row of 15 unlabeled icons, a parade of numbers. Font pairings that do not work together. It was hard to see the likely good game underneath.
I wish Humankind was a better game because its presentation is so good.
I am playing this right now and love it, though the learning curve is steep even for a Civilization veteran. This is what Civ VI or VII could be if they didn't try to dumb down the game to increase the audience.
I especially like that they’re still making substantial improvements. It’s quite the contrast to Civ V having game-breaking bugs which were never patched.
Not to discount your experience, but I’ve played for thousands of hours and never had any problems like this so YMMV
Yeah, I know it’s a complex game but we had a big multiplayer game deadlock a couple hundred turns in and that kind of soured everyone on the franchise.
Try “HUMANKIND” by Amplitude Studios.
Amplitude Studios’ Endless Space and Endless Legend series. Age of Wonder. Zephon. Terra Invicta.
Their AI is atrocious though. F.ex. Endless Space has a mechanic that to take over a planet, you to have to put this bomb upgrade into a ship. The AI just... doesn't. Their fleet meta sucks, their individual ship designs suck. All harder difficulties do is generate larger piss-poor clumps of ships which attack without any strategy.
I’d hardly call Paradox a failure. Europa Universalis in particular is the most 4X game from PDX, even if grand strategy game is a better description.
civ started with an idea based on nerding out over history… it needs more history and less game. half the reason anyone likes civ v is because of the narration of the tech tree. it makes you feel like you are voyaging across history. now the history is simply a two dimensional backdrop for the game which is not even very good
Eh, the problem is that god games like this always have to focus on a few angles or risk making a tedious game no one will ever play outside of a few nerds.
I liked Civ(1, 2, uh.. 3 and 4 I think)because it felt like a good balance of strategy, discovery, and turn-based action. Actually I was hooked by Civ I because it was like nothing I'd ever played before, having missed out on Empire. The closest thing to it I'd played at the time was Dan(i) Bunton's Modem Wars on c64/128.
> failed
What is success meant to look like? Many play and enjoy other Civ-style games, as they offer varied experiences and alternative styles of play. If success is just about becoming the biggest game, then that's a fairly narrow view of what entertainment is supposed to be.
old Wolrd is absolutely incredible as a CIV replacement
>Shawnee language
>Native speakers 100-200 (2024)
Imagine knowing every single speaker of your language personally. You could invent neologisms and make them spread quickly.
Civ was completely changed after Civ 4.
The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack".
Blitzkrieg style operations were death stacks too (e.g.: schwerpunkt)
And almost every major conflict involved a decisive battle with two death stacks on each side.
The game designers of Civ 5 decided to restrict forming death stacks and the new versions of the game still have this mechanic. This is the moment Civ became a completely different game. The last true Civ game was Civ 4.
Why do people hate 'doomstacks' I dont get it. It is a 4X game about civilizations after all not a turn based military strategy. There is also startegy involved in doom stack composition and you can beat a much larger doomstack with better troop composition. But like in real life of course, with all things being equal bigger doomstack will defeat smaller one. How realistic are armies of a few thousands man spread across half a continent like in latter Civ series.
The problem isn’t really the existence of death stacks so much as the fact that the map is too zoomed out for _any_ tactical nuance. This creates extremely unrealistic game-y mechanics when you have two opposing stacks of 50 guys and one guy moves right while the other guy jukes and runs into a city that’s not defended.
I actually love Humankind’s approach where you have a fairly chunky stack and the stack gets spread out over the map into individual units during combat where you do some short term tactics that pulls in all surrounding units as reinforcements with temporary combat only movements.
I played a lot of the original Civ but it was in the early 90's so my memories are a little hazy now. Units on the world map had a "zone of control", you couldn't move units through tiles adjacent to an enemy unit, so the behavior you mention where you could juke past a stack of units wasn't possible, you could put units around cities and similar to create blockades, cut off reinforcements etc (including with naval units).
There was even a tile improvement you could build "fortress" which was useful to build in chokepoint areas as it gave defenders a big advantage. It made this blockading tactic more effective.
The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.
Alpha Centauri was the peak civ game for me had so many cool things you could do like nerve stapling (removed the cities unhappy population permanently but also removed specialists), population booms - where you could grow cities extremely fast by funneling a massive amount of growth resources into them, Supply crawlers (could ferry resources from any tile on the map to crawlers home city), multi tiered social civics (for example rather than just playing a constitutional republic, you could be a combination of Democratic/Planned Economy or Fundamentalist + Free Market, Police State + Green Economy etc.)
I think the issue is that people actually want to do tactical fighting with flanking and concentrating attacks, but the scale is quite odd. Zone of control is a good game mechanic but it’s very game-y; I can’t pass this guy who’s standing a city’s distance away from me?
Maybe a better mechanic could be for units to be able to pass by each other, but it could cause attrition for the moving unit (representing the fact that the moving unit will have trouble foraging with all the entrenched defenders hanging around).
> The big difference I feel going from old school civ games vs newer games is map tile improvements in old games you had to dedicate a unit to upgrading the tiles around cities (you would have units dedicated to permanently building irrigation, mines, roads and in late game they'd be on pollution cleanup duty to avoid global warming occurring). In modern civ they've abandoned this.
I haven't played Civ VII, and I don't think I played much of Civ II or III, but tile improvements is still a thing in Civ IV, V, and VI. In Civ I, the settler unit would do tile improvements and found cities, and at some point they switched to a settler that only founds cities and a worker unit that does tile improvements. In Civ VI, the worker only has a certain number of charges and then disbands, and they separated out road construction to happen with trade routes, but you still need workers to irrigate and add mines and whatever you need for special resources (in Civ I, there was one special resource and it was called resources; later games there's like spices and bananas and coffee and gold and what have you)
That's kind of the niche Age of Wonders occupied, a civ-lite strategic layer and xcom-like tactical layer. Too bad 4 is hideously bland (I'll blame paradox and focus group testing for that)
The problem is that Civ has never modeled military logistics.
That gap means death stacks are magically logistically-supported.
But fair, as that's not the kind of game it wants to be.
I have to agree: Humankind has a much better base for combat.
You can pick the world size.
Knowing how to concentrate your forces is a tactical element. Once you get railroad you can move your units across your territory easier.
“Put everyone in a single stack” is not an interesting tactic or knowledge check imo.
There was a year-ish period of sc2 which was death stacks, I think at that point I went back to watching sc1 lol
I agree, it's not fun or interesting
Normandy was not a death stack. The actual landings involved 156k troops facing 50k troops over 80 km of coastline. That's maybe 2x as many troops as in a major ancient battle, stretched over a frontline 20x as long.
WW2 battles were physically large, often spread over hundreds of kilometers. When the main threat was artillery, dense concentrations of force made no sense.
How big do you think a single square in civ takes up? It's about 80 km wide[0].
And Normandy was multiple units moving against multiple defensive units occupying the same space. This is far better approximated by the original of many units in one spot moving into a singular space occupied by many other units, than the new method of singular units spread hundreds to thousands of miles apart.
[0] Post in thread 'How much area does a single tile cover in Civ?' https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-much-area-does-a-...
It depends on the map. In the Civ 6 Europe map, the area where the Normandy landings took place was 3 tiles. You could have three units attacking in the initial wave against 1 defending unit, with various ranged units on both sides. At that point in the game, the units could be corps or armies, which would make the overall scale of fighting about right.
> How big do you think a single square in civ takes up?
On the largest map size in the last game to have squares at all (Civ 4), about 278km east-west if you assume that the cylindrical map has the same circumference as earth does at the equator. Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference. (The answer you linked is based on the hexes of a later civ game, but based on Earth’s land area.)
Later Civ games the answers are larger, since, as well as switching to hexes, the largest map size is smaller in each subsequent Civ iteration (5 is smaller than 4, 6 smaller than 5, and 7 uses the same sizes as 6 but cuts off the two largest.)
That’s one way to measure it, sure. Another way is that archers can shoot 2 tiles away.
Part of the abstraction of the game is that the map for cities and the map for units are at different scales (despite being the same map), and scales change depending on what year you’re in
> Smaller if you assume that the the map has the same surface area as the Earth instead of the same circumference.
This would make no sense; the top and bottom of the map are always land that blocks you from going that way. If you assume that you're on a spherical Earth, you also need to assume that the regions around the north and south pole don't appear on the ingame map.
> The Normandy invasion in World war 2 was a "death stack".
It's clear to me that the designers wanted to include flanking as a mechanic, and other positioning elements of warfare (ranged attacks, zone of control, etc) thus stacks of doom had to go.
If you want to be pedantic about it, Normandy was 5 separate beaches in a 50 mile stretch, and involved paratroopers behind the beachfront ahead of time. And the game does model concentration of power to some degree, in the form of armies and corps.
Fair argument, but death stacks (however realistic) were boring. There was no gameplay there, it was just "mash your stack into the other stack". Perhaps the 1UPT system wasn't the right answer, but they needed to do something to make warfare be an actually interesting part of the game.
They were never boring for me at all and there was lot of strategy and planning involved in troop composition of such stacks. Civ4 was a game about research, development and relationships between civilizations and not an turn based strategy game like latter iterations try to be.
One thing that bugs me the most in Civ7 is that there's no option to continue playing after the victory condition is achieved, anymore. Nor can you disable some victory conditions if you don't want them.
This seems to be the biggest (gameplay) complaint across the web, so I would be shocked if it’s not addressed in an update fairly soon.
I haven’t played much Civ — is there some reason that preserving that particular mechanic is important? It doesn’t seem obviously desirable (or undesirable).
I preferred it because I considered the point of Civ to be building up your economy/tech such that you were superior to your opponents, and then using that economic/technological advantage to out-produce them in military and defeat them that way.
The shift from death-stacks to one-unit-per-tile made economic advantage relatively less important and battlefield tactics relatively more important. Tech is still important, though.
Some players like the old feel where battlefield tactics were abstracted away, and some players like the new feel where battlefield tactics are a big part of the game. But they are two very different feels from the same franchise, so we get into this debate.
Imo one way it was desirable was it was much easier for the AI to play (most people only play against the AI). It has never reeeally gotten the hang of routing and positioning units around in a 1-unit-per-tile model. Consequently they struggle to pro-actively fight each-other even.
Civ 1, 2, 3, 4 all played the roughly the same.
Civ 5 onwards plays completely different because how tile movements are restricted.
In real life those silly restrictions they added do not exist and get in the way of simulating a war.
A single giant blob of every unit you have moving as one is about as unrealistic as you can get with respect to war logistics and strategy.
Moving to one unit per tile didn’t add a logistics or strategic component. It jumped all the way down to a tactical one, you suddenly care about individual units flanking each other.
IMO it was sort of more “honest” from a realism point of view to just admit that the simulation is not that accurate at the unit level, you smash the stacks into each other and assume the officer corps of each army is handling flanking.
It is hard to say which way is more fun really. Seems like a matter of preference. I like tactical games better anyway, so IMO the new way is an improvement. But, realism? Not really.
On the other hand the “solution” has to be create a carpet of units creating traffic jams, just a different set of annoying and unrealistic logistical problems.
At random, I picked and read Battle of Pharsalus. The Deployment section explains in detail how, through meticulous troop positioning and clever tactics, Caesar was able to defeat the overwhelming force of Pompey.
All of those battles involve battlefield tactics, and in several of them the numerically inferior force won — exactly the opposite of "death stacks."
The Civ series is not the Total War series.
The level of detail of battles is meant to be low because it's focused in wars not battles. You are not a war general you are a head of government.
There are still plenty of tactics in Civ 4. Units have different bonuses depending on terrain and other factors. You have to plan where the combat takes place and what types units you want to use.
Some unit types have collateral damage (catapult, trebuchet, cannon, artillery, mobile artillery, etc.), and there are similar mechanics with air units, cavalry, etc.
The game is not short of battle tactics just not the board game inspired mechanic of Civ 5+.
Stalingrad was won because the Soviets flanked and cut off the supply lines supplying the German 6th Army, not because of one death stack defeating another.
And in Civ 4:
- you can destroy roads (needed for some resources)
- you can also occupy the tile or destroy the improvement (mine/plantation/camp/quarry/etc) needed to harvest a resource
- you can use diplomacy to deny a resource
- you can use a spy to destroy an improvement
Civ 1 and Civ 4 got highest ratings on Metacritic .
https://www.metacritic.com/pictures/every-sid-meiers-civiliz...
Civ 4 is cheap on steam. I decided to buy that and go back and run a campaign on there while I wait for VII to mature a bit.
Yeah but it's mac and windows only, no?
Civ 4 Colonization is a lot of fun.
And the AI was totally incompetent at maneuvering tactically. They had to massively outnumber you to even have a chance at taking your city. And they really haven't learned anything since!
I only play Beyond the Sword, the new Civs are not for me. Civ4 is a logistics game, as is real life.
even unit stacks were janky. for me the last true civ game was CTP 2
Ironically Call to Power 2 is not a Civ game because their Civilization license was lost so they had to remove Civilization from the name.
yep, that was the joke!
Cautiously optimistic, though I'm skeptical a game based on "explore, expand, extirpate, exploit, extract, exterminate", capitalism, and colonization will change sufficiently in this next iteration. To be fayuh... I mostly played Civ3, Civ4 and only a little bit of CiV, and put Civ6 on my Steam Ignore list after reading enough about it (and now I've gone and (gladly, willingly) deleted my Steam account, so this is academic for me).
Awhile back I daydreamed about other "victory" conditions (what other victory is there but an interesting story across generations, a sense of meaning and purpose to life, and the continuation of a diverse interrelation of life forms on Earth?), and would like to have played a game where I set up the initial conditions, played out as many turns as I wanted, and then turned it over to the algorithm (not AI, not the current ML/LLM fad, but something far cheaper to run, and with just the biases of the devs as a result of all their research) to see how things shook out over the next ten thousand years.
> With each Civilization title, we take great care to thoughtfully and authentically portray every culture on our roster of civilizations and leaders
Especially Gandhi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
(Note that while the original bug apparently wasn’t real, they _did_ play with it in subsequent games, at least V and VI).
Nuclear Gandhi, as far as I can tell, was actually about Civ I, not Civ II. Gandhi would get to nukes early because India had a tech boost, and he would threaten the player in every diplomatic interaction that his words were backed with nukes. The AI in the early Civ games is pretty aggressive, too, so I assume that if you rejected him too many times, he absolutely would become a big warmonger.
As to the integer underflow, that appears to either be debunked or to be something that Sid Meyer misremembered (IMO both are possible). I don't think you need an integer underflow for Gandhi to go nuclear in an early Civ game, though.
It is authoritatively debunked in Sid Meier's (excellent) memoir - there was no such integer underflow bug in Civ I, it was all a rumor that went viral. The franchise did embrace the meme, though.
I am aware that it's in his memoir, but I am not sure whether he actually went through the code to write it or just went back through his notes/memory. Or whether 2K told him to "debunk" it so he wrote some fiction (also a possibility - see Feynman's memoirs which have quite a bit of fiction in them). It was a long time ago and prior to the memoir, neither he nor any of the other developers on a Civ franchise remembered whether there was an error, and they all said as much on the record. Also, the story of an underflow was about Civ II, not Civ I. I am not necessarily convinced there is no underflow, but I am convinced that there is a plausible alternative theory.