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1 week ago
Feature: Don't leave the blankets until spring!
Winter brings out a part of me that immediately seeks a mountain of blankets in which to burrow. Even in my seasonally confused state of Texas, the weather has tended towards the chilly and left me with little excuse not to have a kettle boiling interminably as I layer on socks and pull the biggest comforter from the top of the closet. But this presents…
3 weeks ago
Feature: And those magnets, eh?
The usually remote and mysterious Nate visited the RPS treehouse on Monday, and almost immediately work ground to a halt. Why? Because Nate challenged us with a question: what bits of modern technology could a person from the past figure out the workings of, just by observing and having a good think for a while? This immediately led to the counter-question "when and where in…
2 years ago
Feature: The Eternal Golden Age
All rise and no fall: how Civilization reinforces a dangerous myth
Civilization VI: Rise and Fall wants to solve a problem. That problem is perpetual growth, and it plagues many 4X games. Whether your aim is world conquest or cultural hegemony, victory in Civilization and many of its cohorts depends on domination. However peacefully you try to play, you're often straight-jacketed into a utilitarian-psychotic view where all resources and people are just raw material to be…
3 years ago
Feature: The journey, not the destination, AND YET
I have played Civilization [official site] games as long as there have been Civilization games. I have always enjoyed them. I have always hated winning them.
Feature: Bargain Bin
Every Monday we haul Brendan to the court of the biggest dynasty in the land and demand that he explains an early access game. This week, he stutters about Oriental Empires [official site]. As the kingdom of Zhou burned to ashes around me on the map, I took a moment to reflect on what had been a bad year. A peasants revolt, a devastating war,…
4 years ago
Feature: Location, location, location
As if 2016 didn't already contain a rich enough seam of strategy games, Firaxis announce today that Civilization VI will be released on October 21st. Development duties are in the hands of the team behind Civ V's expansions, Gods & Kings and Brave New World, and when we spoke to designer Ed Beach and associate producer Sarah Darney last week to learn all the details,…
5 years ago
Feature: Of Civilization and its contents
While visiting Firaxis to play Civilization: Beyond Earth, I spent a couple of hours talking to members of the team and learning how the company works. As the current creators and curators of two of my favourite series of games, Firaxis rank among the most interesting studios in existence, and their history is also a large part of the history of PC strategy gaming. With…
Feature: Alien Nations
Last week, I visited Firaxis to talk about the studio's history and the ongoing evolution of Civilization. We mainly focused on the series of games rather than humanity's works as a whole, so as to stay on topic, and I spent part of the day playing Beyond Earth. Is it a sci-fi spin-off or a fully fledged sequel? How precisely is it related to the…
9 years ago
Yes, the free-to-play Facebook Connect version of Sid Meier's Civilization, Civ World, (which was mentioned in this interview) will enter a closed Alpha next week. No details on the game just yet, but interested parties can apply for a slot in the Alpha here. If memory serves the lot of you love Facebook games, you just can't get enough of them, so I am sure…
Quite a few people have pointed us at this, and I suspect most of 'em got it from Kotaku, so let's give 'em a link. Brentalfloss adds his own lyrics to the always atmospheric Baba Yetu theme tune from Civ 4. Watch below!
10 years ago
[Boom]. RPS inbox explodes. And so it should - Civ news is always enormous news. Hooray, hooray! Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth by Civ fans in concern that last year's super-streamlined Civilization Revolution on console meant the end of Civ tradition, the freshly-revealed Civilization V (CiV?) looks about as PC as PC gets. By which I mean, "hexes."
A rifle amongst the oily rags, Toblerone wrappers and bat skulls that litter the floor of the RPS engine room reveals we've never posted about open source Civilization clone FreeCiv before. By turn, that means we've never written about its newish browser-based offshot FreeCiv.net either. This is exactly the kind of site that should be telling you it's possible to play one of the most…
12 years ago
I had a play with an early version of Civilization Revolution on Xbox 360 the other day, my optimistic thoughts on which can be found here. (Don't worry, this post is PC-relevant). Inevitably, a few readers quickly expressed dismay that the tech tree had lost several branches, some micromanagement (e.g. city health) had evaporated, and all-told it has a greater sense of rapidity and accessibility…
From our 'Putting Words In Sid Meier's Mouth' desk. Newish community-written site Gamersglobal chucked up an exclusive interview with cuddly ol' Sid Meier over the weekend. He was there primarily to talk about Civilization Revolution, the upcoming console reimagining of the strategy daddy, but dropped in this intruiging bombshell: "I certainly would like to play around with a MMO concept in the future... I enjoy…
While Meer's been battering his way through it, I haven't had a chance to actually play the new Beyond the Sword pack yet (Though the hype around it has caused me to have a vanilla-Civ4 relapse). However, it looks like I'm never actually going to get a chance to play it as the developers intended, as - by all accounts - I should immediately patch…
