Age of Civilization

[davidn]

Another dream, this time about Civilization! I haven't played it in ages, so I'm not sure where this one came from. This one was fully three-dimensional and you could zoom down to the level of Age of Empires and see people working in the cities and fields, and I was playing on a map where I had an island in the north-west and everyone else was on the mainland (the world didn't wrap like in the real games).

I was exploring the mainland and found a goody-hut, which told me I had found a friendly band of militia and had the option of getting 1000 horsemen, 2000 of some other unit or just "4000" on its own. In any other Civilization game these numbers would be ludicrous, but in this version, military units had a headcount attached to them that determined their power - a unit consisting of several thousand would have many times the power of a simple thousand-person unit, and units could be combined and split. Now that I'm writing that, it sounds like a really interesting mechanic, being able to sacrifice power by splitting and getting multiple attacks and movement...

Anyway. "4000" turned out to give me the Militia unit from the first game, the unit with the icon that makes it look like they have their jacket zipped up over their heads. I used these four thousand militia to march towards one of the enemy cities, and started strategically taking out their resources. quadralien was watching over my shoulder and being rude about my decision to destroy one of the farms on the east side of the city instead of the one below, so I told him to get out of the room in my Doctor Murderbeaks voice (which seems massively harsh in retrospect).

I called him back shortly afterwards, though, because then the game went mad - while I was distracted attacking the city in the south of the mainland, the enemy and its allies changed the rules of the game to make it real-time and started rapidly building things, creating and destroying them in bizarre wave patterns, to approach and attack my own base in the north (the game having now become Age of Empires instead). I did not end up winning, but this is typical for me in real-time strategy if the AI is ever allowed above the "Thick as mince" difficulty setting.

Comments

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

*cough* Europa 4 is released in one week, featuring concepts like "realistically" sized units of several thousand, which can be split-up and moved around independently; as well as being playable in either turn based or real time style, which you can juggle between as you want. . . .you'll sort of have to change around what you think "turn based" means, however.





Though if you want to have a game of Civ 5, I'll be hosting a match this Saturday~~~~!!! Open invite :D