My favourite bit of Civilization, back when I had time to play entire games of it to the end, was the animation at the end that showed how that game had progressed. In the game you take on a civilization and, from the first settlers founding a first city, work through technological developments, explorations, political change, war, peace and building the Great Pyramids of Canterbury. At the end, after you play through thousands of years of history, making almost as many small moves and decisions, little victories and disappointments, you get to see how it all looked from miles up, as colours spreading across a map. There was a beauty in the perspective switch and in seeing complexity reduced down to simplicity, at the same time as seeing my actions written across a world scale.
Civilization II, as is the way of things with sequels, ups the complexity a little further. Amid a lot of aesthetic changes that take the experience further away from the static board game that it sometimes still refers to itself like, there are more significant changes. The range of options for trade and diplomacy are particularly increased, meaning that it feels a little less like it is railroading you into genocidal imperialism as the best way to play the game, although the tweaks to combat still make it tempting (energy bars! ‘Repair’ your units who are apparently now Command & Conquer-style replicants!). There is more reward for different approaches in general. If you are really focused on building up your cities and the happiness of your people, using the increased options for making the land better for them, you will get more feedback on that, too. The little activities add up to writing a whole history in a more engrossing way than ever.
The more Civilization II looks to be all-encompassing, though, the more glaring the gaps its assumptions leave. Many of the compromises to realism are clearly made in the name of providing a compelling game, not least your own dictatorial powers over everything your civilization does. That doesn’t mean there are no issues with those compromises, but there is a sensible explanation, at least. To an extent, that goes for the technology tree, the way that the scientific advances that give you new options are made by your people working away in the background, one planned item at a time along a set path. It makes for very clear-cut decisions at regular intervals. It feels a bit stupid when the game lets you encounter a village of gifted mercenaries who will join you as cavalry but doesn’t let you just learn the secret of horse-riding from these people riding around on horses in your colours, but sure.
Aside even from the toxic progress delusion built in to this mechanism, though, it’s the way it presents itself as an education and makes such a horrifically bad job of it that grates. Each time you discover something you get a bit of written background to its real-life development. Not content with providing the means of writing virtual history, it acts like it’s teaching you real history. As a child I picked up some facts and ideas of the progression of history and development from playing these games. As an adult I played Civilization, got to the early point of discovering the alphabet and being told that alphabets were crucial in moving away from oral history, and recoiled in horror. In six years between Civilization and Civilization II, not only did they not fix this, but they added the words “the development of alphabets was significant in the development of advanced civilizations”.
This collides with aspects in which the game’s complexity is even more severely limited. The differences between all the different civilizations you can choose to play as are essentially no more than different colours on the map. Aztecs, Celts, Americans, it makes no real difference. Civilization II might add some different styles of architecture for cities, but its reflection of diversity is skin-deep. You can literally play the game as the Chinese and be told that you wouldn’t be able to do anything involving the benefits of writing without an alphabet (helpfully it starts you off with that tech). You’re not one of us in advanced civilization without it. If that isn’t the most thoughtlessly terrible thing I’ve seen in any game to date, it’s only because the competition is so fierce.
