Gamer Keeps Civilization II Game Going for 10 Years
Have you ever wondered what a game of Civilization 2 would look like after running for 10 years? According to one gamer it's a "hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation." "Lycerius" says that he's been playing the same game of Civ II off and on for over a decade. Some highlights of the marathon session include: 1700 years of war, the ice caps melting over 20 times, constant guerrilla uprisings, and "Roughly 90% of the world's population has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm." It's too bad you can't build the Hanging Gardens more than once.
How is this news? REALLY. HOW IS THIS NEWS?
Die in a fire, samzenpus!
He must be a pretty crappy gamer if, in all that time, there are still other civilizations in his way with which to have constant nuclear warfare. If he'd actually eliminated the other civilizations, he could easily rebuild everything.
Also, how on earth did he have so much global warming? That can really only be the effect of poor decisions or poorly waged nuclear war.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Really? We're in the middle of a presidential reelection, syria is in strife, E3 just happened, Macworld is in full swing, literally hundreds of new IvyBridge laptops/ultrabook models have been released, Lenovo announces a no-contract wireless data plan at a reasonable price, and it's a "slow news day" so slashdot is rerunning crap from the front page of reddit? Really?
Oh CmdrTaco, how I miss you. Did your non-compete say anything about creating a competitor? I'm glad you got out before the corporate drones sucked the last life out of Slashdot, but you couldn't have established a safe haven for the rest of us?
moox. for a new generation.
I knew it! Those developers are damn liberal hippies! :)
Seriously though, life defining game series.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
and he will time travel and write the book 1894
This reminds me of 1984 actually, right down to there being three superpowers left in the world. For those who haven't read it, perpetual war is fought over border zones that constantly change hands, with each power too strong to ever be defeated.
Track IP - Remotely track the IP address of a machine via email or MySQL.
So that's what our future looks like...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
First, I thought this was about a continuously running game... And my fist thought was dang, I bet he wish he started it in a VM, because he could have kept moving it to new hardware, rateh than keeping that old Pentium IV around. But I guess there's a save-game feature.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
... boarded the ship for Alpha Centauri.
Now we know whom not to vote for in the next election. Such mismanagement never happens in my games...
Deny it exists and do nothing to stop it?
So that's what it leads to?
"the Amercans"
Damn you...
This smells to me like someone trying to make a thinly-veiled political statement. I've played a lot of Civ, and I find it hard to believe that 3 civilizations could still exist after playing for that long.
sim city does not have war
So basically this game looks like a mirror image of our future ?
Slahshdot I'm disappointed you just steal Reddit posts and try to create "news" with it. How about trying to have original content instead?
He should have used the infamous kinghit strategy.
Basically build one city, rush your tech, then overwhelm the enemy.
If I could find the page that documented it, I would post it, but Usenet is dead.
You can play a game of chess in 30 minutes or it could take you 6 months to play the game if you made one move a day and played someone via email. But that doesn't mean that the moves are any different in either game.
Therefore I don't see the relevance of playing Civilization II over 10 years here, apart from it being a notable but geeky thing to do.
I've not played Civ in a long time but from what I recall the number of physical game turns are fixed and apart from a couple of the variants ("Test Of Time" springs to mind), the game starts in 4000BC and ends at around 2000AD - so how long it takes you to play that fixed number of turns seems largely irrelevant.
Sure, if the guy had reported that he'd replayed the same game over and over again using different strategies and it *ALWAYS* finished up with the three civilizations at constant war in a nuclear wasteland, then that might be worthy of mention.
But otherwise I must be missing something here or it's just a slow Slashdot news day...
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
7,338 tanks destroyed by phalanxes
When does this happen in the movie?
Wow, this guy has some serious management skillz! Maybe he should be running Spain or Greece or the US?
The problem with reddit is that its even more of an echo chamber because of the way they do moderation. Basically its all determined by the masses, like digg was. It used to be (circa 2006) that differing opinions were more visible. Now they are completely buried.
Also 95% of the stuff on there is memes, pictures of girls or animals, people complaining, or self aggrandizing (bestof, iama, TIL) and also constant reposts of the same crap from 10 years ago.
In short, its now a "community" as opposed to what it was when it started, a site which didn't require any email verification and was trying to be as anonymous as possible. Now they have karma, anniversaries (cake) and other "features" which make it more like a social networking site than a link agregator. They want people to build up their reputations, but this stifles independent thought. The delays on postings for non long term users is horrible now. Was much better when it was pseudo anonymous and not as popular. I blame the diggers who came over in 2008 or thereabouts.
all that said, i read it every day, but not usually the comments. Slashdot comments and moderation are far far far superior.
I wouldn't be at all surprised that if in 10 years we'll have some people playing the same Minecraft worlds as well. It would even be more interesting, since your "history" would be remembered as you moved from camp to camp.
It is futile to ceaselessly yield to an AI that will never honor a treaty.
Crucify them all!
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
I've played it - as a despicable player (as the game describes me for doing it in cheat mode). Actually, under the more honorable scenario mode. What I do is create enough units, and beseige and blocade every one of my enemies, w/o killing them, and cheating and giving myself 30k of money (the limit in the game) and all the technologies. I then change my government to fundamentalist (where I'll be flush w/ both cash and stability, but my research suffers, which doesn't matter since I know everything), create as many settlers and build cities all over the place, making farmland and raillines everywhere. In each city, I usually start off w/ airports, mass transits, recycling plants before building factories, and after that, I put each city in domestic advisor autobuild.
Any time any square gets polluted, I go there, highlight it and alter the terrain. If my financial advisor tells me that I need more trade routes, I create freights near cities that I want to trade w/, set the home city and commodity of the freight, and viola! I make a windfall!. After playing for a while, this is more convenient than having plenty of engineers, b'cos when the entire map is fully developed, they just wander around aimlessly unless there is pollution somewhere, or something. They don't grow cities above size 8, and they become distracting when they have nowhere to go.
The main problem I run into is naming so many cities - that becomes a headache. Otherwise, before too long, they are into capitalization. Note that all this assumes that one ignores the target date of either 2020 or whatever date a scenario has as its target. Otherwise, the scoring ends at that point.
Another interesting mode to play in is what I call movie mode, where, in cheat mode, you set yourself as 'No human player'. Every civilization, including yours, is driven by the computer.
The concept of religion in Civ IV - is it there in Civ V and beyond as well? It seemed a neat way to head loyal allies, although it would seem to me that the largest 2 civilizations of the same religion would be fighting for control of who gets to be more influential amongst that religion's faithful, rather than be allies, as Civ IV designed.
No one has asked yet?
The guy should publish his saved game files. It'd be interesting to see the replay (if he's been auto-saving for forever) or at the very least to try the level out and see if there's a way to win.
I used to play Civ and Civ 2 a lot. I've never gotten into a long running stalemate. When I get that far I normally/always win. It's the early game I'm worst at.
Bah! That's nothing come back with a story after someone spends 10 years in the world of DayZ. :)
We now know what happens when a politician from the certain states tries to play civilized, I mean Civilization..
Once on the Mediterranean map I controlled the south and southern Italy and one other civ controlled the rest. No matter what I did I couldn't get anywhere; it was perpetual stalemate. It is possible in this game but only if you're outnumbered but still fairly strong, which seems to be what happened to him.
They made a Civilization 2? Holy crap! I'm going to stop playing the Civilization game that I've been playing for 20 years on my IBM PC and go get myself a copy! Or...does anyone know a good Fido-Net BBS that I could download it from using my Hayes 2400 baud modem? I think I can still hack calling cards to call toll-free.
What'smore boring than playing Civilization II for 10 years.....
Reading about it in /.