Civilization: Revolution

is plenty addictive enough

I’m hearing there’s a new Civilization game out—when did they get up to seven? Presumably sometime after six, which I barely played,¹ so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I’m not going to be buying it any time soon. And yet I did buy a Civ game recently, and I’ve been playing it a fair bit. 2008’s Civilization: Revolution for the Nintendo DS, to be precise.

“My” childhood Civilization game was III, which originally came out in 2001—although I only got it in the latter part of that decade, well after IV was already out. It was a birthday present from a friend, presumably from a bargain bin and without expansions, and over the next few years it joined a small rotation of games I played endlessly. In comparison with later iterations Civ III is incredibly simplistic, being before the introduction of such staples as city-states and religions, yet it is definitely A Civ. To the point where I had to learn not to dehydrate myself while playing.

My DS context, meanwhile, is… not having one until last year. I’ve got a lot of catching up on the classics to do.

Civ Rev came out closer to V than even to IV, and yet it feels more like a simplified version of III to me. That may well have been quite disappointing to players at the time but I really like it. It has no city states, no religions, but also no unit maintenance, or workers (which I hear VII has also removed, but for different reasons), or even tile improvements at all beyond roads between cities. I’d like more nuanced diplomacy options and some level of map customisation,² but you take what you can get.

So what can you do? You pick from a (small) list of civs/leaders, along with a difficulty level, but that’s all.³ You’re dropped into a map at 4000 BC with a single settler, as per usual, and assuming you don’t do anything funny you’ll auto-advance turns until your first warrior appears and you can start exploring.

The map is top-down 2D with square cells, which I don’t think Civ has done since the second game went isometric, and is topologically cylindrical with irregular ice walls at each “pole”. The layout of the main continent is a maze of twisty little little peninsulas and isthmuses, all alike (seriously, it gets quite monotonous after a few games). I get the vibe of a Perlin noise algorithm with minimal additional tuning to avoid overtaxing the tiny DS CPU.

You explore and expand more-or-less as normal, but with such a limited subset of mechanics most of what remains is the conflict. At least in my experience the other civs are constantly trying to extort you for your technology or financial reserves, however they often back down if you call their bluff. When they don’t it becomes extremely confusing to determine which players you’re actually at war with. With a diplomacy system so impenetrable you might just want to stay fighting everyone all at once, provided you’re not a democracy. That government, otherwise completely OP, has for its drawback a prohibition on the declaration of war—not stated is that if ever offered peace without strings attached the senate⁴ will force you to take it. If you want to stay at war without random interruptions you should probably switch to Monarchy. I always enjoy the mechanics given to government types in these early Civ games, they have such a ‘baby’s first social studies class’ vibe.

If you prefer to give peace a chance you can still win via your standard Technology, Cultural, or Economic victories: in this case Economic merely requires becoming sufficiently rich, and then building the World Bank;⁵ Cultural requires the construction of a certain number of wonders/acquisition of a certain number of Great People/culture flips of enough cities, followed by the construction of the United Nations; Technology of course needs all the techs plus launching a multi-component colony ship. And you can win on score if the game goes on too long, I guess.

Domination, though, is more fun, which means that (even though I tend to be a fairly pacifist player in games that give me the option) I’m quite aggressive here. And ‘fun’ is the operative word: despite the lack of features I really enjoy this game. The typical loop is a period of exploration, a period of scrambling to defend against a bellicose neighbour when, and then a period of snowballing to conquer the whole world. This is all I really want out of a Civ game. Extra mechanics are just gravy, dubiously worth the hundred dollars they cost new.

Civilization games aren’t really historical simulations, and I’m not sure they even could be if they tried. The extra features of the PC games have diminishing returns, and it turns out that you don’t need any of them for Civ’s primary function: making you forget what time it is in pursuit of Just One More Turn.

One more turn to find them; one more turn to bring them all and in the darkness bind them… Uh, you get the idea. It’s incredibly easy to lose upwards of 45 minutes between tasks when you have a good game going, and were only intending a quick break. What do they put in these games?

Regardless, I don’t think I’ll be buying Civilization VII, certainly not any time soon. I have what I need, on a pink DSi I can fit in my pocket. The real struggle turns out to be putting it down.

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1. Steam claims I played less than 12 hours of VI, and for that matter just shy of a hundred hours of V—pathetic numbers.↩︎

2. If you know anything about the Game of the Week maps, especially a way to load them the better part of 20 years later, let me know.↩︎

3. Despite all that III as a kid I’ve never had much luck with a difficulty above Warlord—but it might be time.↩︎

4. A mechanic otherwise unmentioned anywhere else in this version of Civ, as far as I can tell.↩︎

5. What does that say? Quite a lot, with extra irony in 2025.↩︎