Civilization Microprose Cost Of Research

• Civilization Microprose Cost Of Research Paper

By Technavio March 19, 2018The cost of a market research report depends on various factors. The five major components which influence the cost of a market analysis report are:.

Research Objective – what you are trying to accomplish or understand. Research Methodology – how the data you need will be collected (existing research, in person, phone, online, focus group, etc.). Target Audience – the group of people the research will help you understand. Time – How long it will take to collect statistically relevant information. Service Provider – Who will be doing the data collection & analysis.So How Does This Break Down into Market Research Cost? Research Objective ClarityIt is important that the objective of the research is well-defined from the start. The methodology of market research changes with the purpose of the research and has a direct effect on the cost factor.

What's the best way to increase my rate of research in Civilization 5? Is it purely a function of population and buildings, or is there something else I can do to speed it up (especially in the early. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the Indirect Costs of Federally Sponsored Research. Why does the federal government provide support for indirect costs of research? In order to perform research on behalf of federal agencies, universities incur a variety of costs.

Lack of clarity can result in data collection that does not support the true goal.For example, if a retailer wants to understand information about products that will do well in their store, both product testing or pricing research could be appropriate.If the goal is profitability, then pricing research would be more fitting. If user behavior or affinity for a product is the goal, then product testing would be best.Without clarity, the amount of time necessary to complete the research could be longer, resulting in higher costs. These decisions also influence research methodology. Research MethodologyThere is a direct co-relation between research objective and research methodology. Clarity on the research objective helps choose the right research methodology.For example, qualitative research in the form of interviews with focus groups will be beneficial to reach the best pricing strategy for a product.According to, the average cost of conducting personal interviews is $325 USD per person.

While a 90-minute session with a focus group of eight people will cost around $500 per participant. Target Audience SizeA major determining factor in the cost of market research is the size of the target audience. Smaller demographic groups result in higher costs. Larger demographic groups result in lower costs.

The reason is access to the group. The more difficult it is to reach the audience, the higher the costs, due to incentives, identification, etc.Research methodology plays a large role in target audience. The size of audience is determined by the method needed to acquire statistically relevant data from said audience. Turnaround TimeResearch can take time, which makes turnaround time a key influencer in cost. The shorter the turn-around time, the higher cost.

The longer the turnaround time the lower the cost. However, in unique circumstances, a longer time line can also increase cost.For example, a company needs research data to understand the long-term side effects of a mineral in a sparkling water beverage. Let’s say, married women, between the ages of 25-45, with a household income over $150,000, in Alabama, is our target audience. Since this demographic data is very narrow and the median income in AL is $29k, regardless of open ended turnaround, cost can still go up because of the scarcity of the audience.

Service ProviderThe cost of market research analysis depends on the nature of service provider hired. Three kinds of service providers who undertake market research studies are:. Traditional Market Research FirmsThough highly costly, market research agencies guarantee promised results without much effort from the client. These agencies undertake end-to-end analysis.

The only down-side is, small and medium businesses cannot afford to hire their services due to high pricing. Self-served Research PlatformsSelf-served research platforms allow clients to design surveys. These surveys can be well framed depending on the research objective and the nature of the target audience.Unlike the traditional market research firms, self-served research platforms are budget-friendly.

These platforms provide all the required data for research analysis. This is another reason several businesses prefer them over other service providers. Survey Hosting PlatformsSurvey hosting platforms are the most inexpensive service providers. But the major disadvantage is they do not guarantee any result to the clients.Unlike the self-served research platforms, survey hosting platforms do not provide any research data to the clients. So, they are required to come up with their own data base and undertake the entire research work.Thus, multiple factors influence the cost of a market research report.Broadly, the cost range for a market research report is:.

$100 – $1,000This is the cost of a top-level report. Generally, these reports cover basic information on an industry. They also provide insights on the size of the industry, names of the top players, and its current market value.

$1,500 – $8,000Full-market reports fall in this price range. These market research reports have a detailed analysis of the market and its subcategories. Aspects like current trends, technological innovations, and future projections, are also included in a full-market report. $10,000 – $30,000The cost of a product detail market report starts from $10,000 and goes up to $30,000.

These reports give an in-depth understanding of a market, by covering specific market values and trends. Factors like cost and demand of a specific product in a specific region is also included in these reports.

Sid MeierDuring Sid Meier’s astonishingly productive first ten years as a designer and programmer, games poured out of him in such a jumble that even his colleagues at MicroProse Software could have trouble keeping straight what all he was working on at any given time. At the beginning of 1990, for instance, he had no fewer than three ambitious projects on the boil. He and his protege Bruce Shelley were finishing up with justifiable enthusiasm.

The same pair was, with considerably less enthusiasm, returning to, one of the rare Meier designs that he could just never quite get to work to his satisfaction. And then — because what else should a recently married game designer spend his evenings doing? — Meier had embarked on a third project on his own time, a game he was already calling Civilization.Like Railroad Tycoon before it, Civilization was born out of Meier’s abiding fascination with. The programmer and simulation designer inside him recognized Will Wright’s so-called “software toy” to be a stunning achievement, yet the purer game designer within him was always a bit frustrated by the aimlessness of the experience. Thus Railroad Tycoon had attempted to take some of the appeal of SimCity and “gamify” it by adding computerized opponents and a concrete ending date. It had succeeded magnificently on those terms, but Meier wasn’t done building on what Wright had wrought.

In fact, his first conception of Civilization cast it as a much more obvious heir to SimCity than even Railroad Tycoon had been. Whereas SimCity had let the player build her own functioning city, Civilization would let her build a whole network of them, forming a country — or, as the game’s name would imply, a civilization.This, then, was the first of three conceptual layers which would eventually make up the game of Civilization that the world would come to know. Meier abstracted away most of the details of the individual cities, letting the player decide only on which key buildings were built, whilst boiling each city down to a handful of numbers detailing its population, its economy, and its quality of life. This being a country rather than a city simulator, the spaces between the cities were just as important as the urban centers themselves. Meier thus made it possible to irrigate the countryside, to build roads to facilitate commerce, to build mines for digging up the raw materials needed by the centers of industry. At this early stage, Civilization, later to be hailed as the most iconic exemplar of turn-based grand-strategy games, ran in real time, like SimCity and Railroad Tycoon before it.Around March of 1990, after working on Civilization for some months completely alone, Meier began to include Bruce Shelley in the role of sounding board.

Shelley worked a standard eight-to-five day at MicroProse most of the time, while Meier hewed to a typical hacker’s schedule, showing up at noon or shortly before and working late into the evening. Each night, before he went home, he’d leave a disk on Shelley’s chair with the latest version of Civilization. The next morning, when Shelley arrived at work, he’d play it for an hour or so in order to give Meier his feedback. For perhaps as long as a year, Shelley was literally the only person allowed to play the nascent Civilization, under strict instructions to ignore the pleas of his colleagues peering over his shoulder. It was, to say the least, an unorthodox model of game development, but it somehow worked for these two unique personalities. Far from remaining just a glorified play-tester for very long, Shelley got deeper and deeper into the design.

As he did so, Civilization started to become something else entirely.The switch from a real-time to a turn-based approach was made quite early on, possibly even before those disks started appearing on Bruce Shelley’s chair. It would be wonderful to know the details behind the decision, but neither Meier nor Shelley can recall much of the specifics. It’s likely, however, that the change was made when Meier and Shelley — or Meier alone — started mulling over how to prevent Civilization from falling into the SimCity trap of becoming more of a software toy than a game in the traditional sense. The obvious way to gameify the experience was to include competing civilizations, just as Railroad Tycoon had included competing robber barons. But conflicts between civilizations, unlike conflicts between business interests, always have looming over them the prospect of that ultimate diplomatic arbiter: war. So, including competing civilizations seemed to demand that a whole new layer of wargame strategy be mated to the existing game of city and country development.Meier, who somehow found time to remain an avid player of strategy games when he wasn’t developing them, had for years been playing one called Empire, a design so old that it had been born on a big DEC PDP-10 rather than a microcomputer.

Empire has a complicated pre-commercial history, which is complicated further by the fact that at least three mostly or entirely separate games were given the name over the course of the 1970s. But the most relevant version for our purposes was created by Walter Bright, a 20-year-old student at the California Institute of Technology, in 1977.

Bright himself later ported it to microcomputers, efforts which culminated in him selling the game to a small publisher called Interstel, who made something of a specialty out of pulling hoary old classics out of the dustbin of 1970s institutional computing, giving them a coat of spit and polish, and introducing them to the home-computer-owning public. (Their first game, 1984’s, had done the same thing for the old mainframe.) It was, published in 1987 with the subtitle Wargame of the Century, that Sid Meier knew best.At a time when companies like were publishing bafflingly complicated wargames in the name of faithfulness to history, Empire stood out for its elegant simplicity; it was more than. A world on which to play is chosen or, more commonly, generated randomly for each game. You begin in possession of a single city surrounded by just eight visible squares of the 5684 of them that make up the map; the rest of the world remains a mystery.

Each city can be assigned to build one of a handful of armies, aircraft, and ships, each of which demands a set number of turns to bring to completion. Your first objective must be to build a unit in your first city and set out to explore the map as quickly as possible, taking possession of any neutral cities you discover. But eventually you run into the units and cities of your competitors, whereupon you all duke it out, leaving the last person left standing as the winner. Simplicity really is the watchword throughout. The military units, for instance, have their capabilities abstracted into just a handful of numbers: a movement speed, an attack rating, a defense rating, a damage rating describing the number of hits required to destroy it. Combat occurs when one player drives a unit into a square occupied by an enemy unit, whereupon the computer throws a virtual die, runs the result through an equation, and announces the outcome of the battle. A certain kind of player lauds Empire as a pure strategy game, a balanced challenge which rewards purely strategic thinking instead of muddying the issue with the superiority of Nazi optics versus the better armor of Allied tanks and all the rest.

(Of course, another kind of player, of a more, finds it utterly uninteresting for the same reason.). And doing the same thing in Civilization.There’s really no delicate way to put this: confirming the old adage that good artists borrow while great ones steal, Sid Meier pretty much ripped off Empire wholesale and transported it into his burgeoning Civilization. The unknown map just begging to be revealed, the combat system, even many of the specific commands a player could issue to her units all arrived virtually unchanged in Civilization, to such an extent that anyone who had played Empire — and Bruce Shelley, for one, certainly had — would immediately know what to do. Where Meier did make changes, it was generally to simplify Empire‘s already hugely abstracted approach to wargaming yet further. For example, he removed the damage rating from his units altogether in favor of a one-hit-and-you’re-done model.

(This would lead to one of the more indelible images of Civilization in the cultural memory: that of a Greek phalanx destroying, thanks to a lucky roll of the virtual die, a platoon of modern tanks.)By this point, Meier and Shelley had a fairly credible game already, a version of Empire grafted to a city-building game of economic development which determined how many and what sorts of military units the player could produce and support. Said units were confined to the ancient era: legions, phalanxes, chariots, cavalry. Shelley remembers the two of them discussing the fact that, should worse come to worst, they could probably just polish up what they had and release it as a beer-and-pretzels strategy game of the Punic Wars or something. Yet neither one was at all inclined to do so; to turn Civilization into a just another conquer-the-world game would be to lose some palpable if unarticulated sense of otherness that had been lurking within the project from the very beginning.

Wild Bill Stealey with his ill-fated F-15 Strike Eagle arcade game.But it was the other big initiative of 1988 that was closest to Wild Bill Stealey’s flyboy heart. Frustrated by the limitations of the personal computers which ran his beloved flight simulators, he concocted a scheme to build his own hardware in order to do them justice. Gene Lipkin, a former executive with the original Atari, took charge of a project to build coin-op versions of MicroProse’s games for arcades, beginning with F-15 Strike Eagle, their most successful game of all.

The arcade version of that game, which was unveiled in 1990, could draw 60,000 polygons per second to its huge 27-inch screen at a time when the average PC-based MicroProse simulator was pushing about 1500. But, impressive though the hardware may have been, the whole project was profoundly ill-conceived from a business perspective.

Like its microcomputer equivalent, the arcade version of F-15 Strike Eagle was a deep, fairly realistic game that would require some time even to fully understand, much less master. That was fine for home-computer software, but totally at odds with the quick thrills typically offered by arcade quarter-munchers. The extended play time, the complex missions which the player had to earn the right to play none of it made any sense whatsoever as an arcade game. Even the First Gulf War, which was being televised live every night on CNN and creating a voracious appetite for flight simulators on home computers, couldn’t save it. It flopped.As all of these misbegotten ventures ran their course, the losses piled up at MicroProse: $1.4 million in 1988, $300,000 in 1989, $600,000 in 1990.

In 1991, Stealey decided that the best way to clear all of his failed ventures off the books and start moving forward again was to launch an IPO. On October 3, 1991, just as Meier and Shelley and their helpers were in the midst of the final mad scramble to finish Civilization, MicroProse issued 2 million shares at an initial price of $9 each. It was, to say the least, an unconventional move; companies normally launch IPOs when things are going well, not when they’re going poorly. For MicroProse, it would prove only the most short-lived of bandages on a series of financial wounds Stealey would only continue to inflict on his company.Nevertheless, Civilization did come out that December, in a nice-looking box, with a fat manual (largely written by Shelley) and a pull-out insert for that magnificent Advances Chart. No one, of course — not even the game’s designers or its most zealous devotees among MicroProse’s creative staff — had any idea of what it would ultimately come to mean for its industry or its art form.

Certainly no one could have dreamed that Civilization would still be going strong as I write these words more than a quarter of a century later, that it would become the sort of game quite likely to go on for as long as our own civilization exists to sustain it. “We knew it was a fun game,” remembers Meier, “but there had been no historical example of a computer game that had that kind of longevity at that point. We didn’t have a sense that this was going to be so different from the other games we had made. We thought it was good and creative and had new ideas in it, but had it flopped we would not have been shocked.”Following the lead of its designers, gamers at large for the most part regarded Civilization as merely the latest release from the highly respected Sid Meier, albeit perhaps one with an unusually intriguing premise.

Most of the initial reviews showed no inkling of the game’s ultimate importance, although they were universally positive. The one reviewer who did seem to grasp the game’s timeless quality was Alan Emrich. Writing in his usual affected style for Computer Gaming World, the journal of record for hardcore strategy gamers, he concluded his review by saying that “a new Olympian in the genre of god games has truly emerged, and Civilization is likely to prove itself the greatest discovery in computer entertainment since the wheel.”But most importantly, Civilization sold quite well following its release, spending several months among the top ten sellers in the industry, rising once or twice as high as the number-three spot. Whatever he personally thought of Sid Meier’s recent esoteric project choices, Wild Bill Stealey couldn’t complain about the commercial performance of this, his latest effort, which earned back all of the money it had cost to make it in fairly short order.And then, something else started to happen. After those first several months were over, when sales of any other computer game could normally be expected to fall off a cliff, they did no such thing in the case of Civilization.

Month after month, Civilization kept right on selling. It became that rarest of beasts in what was becoming an ever more ephemeral, hits-driven industry: a perennial. Over the course of its first four and a half years on the market, it sold 850,000 copies, while becoming a huge influence on a whole new generation of ambitious turn-based grand-strategy games. Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley had never made a sequel in their careers, and never had any inkling that this latest game of theirs would spawn a franchise, much less a genre — much less, for some players, a veritable lifestyle. But when MicroProse bowed to their customers’ demands and belatedly returned to the well in 1996 with Civilization II, the die was well and truly cast.

Publishers, designers, and technology might come and go, but Civilization was forever.( Sources: the books Civilization, or Rome on 640K A Day by Johnny L. Wilson and Alan Emrich, Game Design: Theory & Practice by Richard Rouse III, and Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Game People Play by Morgan Ramsay; PC Review of August 1992; A.C.E. Of May 1990; Computer Gaming World of January 1988, June 1989, September 1990, December 1990, November 1991, December 1991, and April 1992; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin from October 25 1991, March 27 1992, June 5 1992, and August 14 1992; Soren Johnson’s interviews with. My huge thanks go to Soren for providing me with the raw audio of his Sid Meier interview months before it went up on his site, thus giving me a big leg up on my research.).Soren Johnson, who many years later worked as co-designer of Civilization III and lead designer of Civilization IV, remembers Meier loaning him some reference books near the beginning of his involvement with the franchise, telling him that they might be good resources to use in refining or expanding the Advances Charts of the earlier games. Flipping through the books, he noticed underlined phrases like “ceremonial burial.” With a start, he realized that he had in his hands a history book that had itself become a piece of history: one of Sid Meier’s original sources for the original Civilization.Dan Bunten began living as the woman Danielle Bunten Berry shortly after the publication of Global Conquest. As per my usual editorial policy on these matters, I refer to her as “he” and by her original name only to avoid historical anachronisms and to stay true to the context of the times.MicroProse had become a distributor of “affiliated labels,” smaller publishers who paid for access to their distribution network, in the late 1980s. In the run-up to the IPO, trying to make their bottom line look better, they abruptly stopped paying such labels for the games they sold.

Among the publishers that were nearly undone by this move was. In light of episodes like this, it’s perhaps not a big surprise that, while Sid Meier was universally liked and respected, Bill Stealey’s reputation within his industry was, at best, mixed. A few points on this one:Gene Lipkin was not a co-founder of Atari. He began his career in arcade sales at Allied Leisure in 1969 and only joined Atari in late 1974 as director of special projects, later becoming VP of marketing and then president of coin-op.On the real-time version, Sid Meier told the following to GamesTM in an article on the making of the game: “The first pass at Civilization was actually more of a real-time game. More like SimCity where you had a world and you zoned, say, this area for agriculture, and this area for building, but there was a lot of watching, and not a lot of playing. So we switched it over after a couple of months to what it eventually ended up — turn-based, moving things actually physically around and being a lot more hands-on, having a lot more things to do.

And that turned out to be, I think, one of the key aspects of the game that drew you in and gave you this investment which you were making because you’d really had a hand in every decision you made along the way.”One story Wild Bill tells about the game that may be worthy of note is that he felt initial sales were hampered by player confusion. His solution was to “put Sid in the box” by including the advisers that give suggestions on what to research, build, etc. He credits the adviser system with making the game more accessible and boosting sales. Whether it did or not is left as an exercise for the reader. Thanks, corrected the Lipkin bit.The Wild Bill anecdote is interesting, and not one I’ve heard anywhere else. Likewise, I’ve never heard that the advisors weren’t in the original version of the game. Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley have actually spoken quite a lot about the process of patching Civilization after its release, but they’ve always spoken about heading off exploits, not about adding such a major new feature.

It would be interesting to ask them about this specifically.As it is, the fact remains that Wild Bill seldom lets the fact get in the way of a good story. Without further evidence, I’m a little reluctant to credit this story.

Civilization Microprose Cost Of Research Paper

I discovered Civilizations and Connections at more or less the same time and while they’re definitely drinking from the same well, what’s kind of interesting is that their fundamental assumptions of how technology develops are really opposite: Connections is primarily about the unexpected and unforeseen links between different technologies, whereas everything in Civilization is laid out in advance and consciously chosen. (Of course that was probably a necessary approach to take in a game, but it’s also a good example of how a simulation can communicate false or misleading information without meaning to.). I’m definitely no expert in this field, butThe ancient Romans never had stirrups; they were introduced to Byzantium around the 6th-7th century by the Avars, nomadic tribes from the East, whom the Byzantines fought. The Romans did, however, have wooden saddle frames or “trees”, which gave riders support while attacking with weapon in hand.Ancient Rome definitely had cavalry: they were known as “equites” or knights, and constituted an entire social class, being the lowest tier of the Roman aristocracy. However, Roman cavalry were usually not decisive in battles, which hinged mainly on the performance of the infantry.Also, the later Roman Empire developed heavier armor for cavalry: either mail or things like “locked scale” chest armor made of tiny metal plates tied together. (Arthur’s armor in Sierra’s Conquests of Camelot — a scale breastplate with mail sleeves and skirt — is actually not a bad depiction.) Still no stirrups, though.In fact, there’s much debate in medieval historical circles about just how and when stirrups spread to Western Europe, given their complete lack of use in the Roman period (and what knock-on societal effects resulted from their introduction).

It’s called “the Stirrup Controversy”. “Also, it’s worth noting that the ancient Romans didn’t use stirrups”They didn’t have heavy cavalry either. They usually used, mercenary light cavalry units, for hit and run tactics.This beautiful box!! If only I had bought it at the time (The Amiga version of Civ ). I decided buying something else at the time, and I ended up playing a pirated copy!!!If I remember correctly, Firebird and Rainbird had the right to publish Elite, all 800 hundred versions of it. So acquiring them, if the price was right, made sense.

Turning F-15 into arcade did not make any sense. But I ‘ve just watched a couple of videos, and I was astonished by the speed of its gameplay. An Ace Combat type game, before the Playstation was even conceived.

What kind of hardware did it used? To think, most 4X games today, they tend to just copy Civ’s basic formula, including elements like the city-building, warfare, diplomacy, technologyAnd then the guys making the first Civ had no idea that this would become a genre, just putting together systems that seemed to make sense to them.

If they hadn’t thought of the technology idea, for instance, would anyone else have come up with it? Today, it feels like such an obvious idea that surely someone would eventually have made a game that also had you developing technology throughout the ages but would they?I keep playing with the idea, suppose some major event in our history had been different – like if WW2 had never happened, large enough that basically everyone born in the late 20th century would have been entirely different people – but we would still have ended up developing computers and a gaming industry as before. But with entirely different pioneers, coming up with their own entirely idiosyncratic designs for games, before any genres had established themselves.

Would we have converged on similar game genres as the ones we see today? Or would there be entirely different ones?Thank you for this article. I played Civ – Civ V far more hours than is probably healthy but I’m not going back to the series until they fix the AI. 25 years and enemy units still act irrationally and the computer hasn’t any tactics other than swarming. I don’t expect AI metacognition (e.g. Appreciating the random event in Civ III where your civ’s happiness improves when someone creates a a computer game called Civilization) or ratiocination or modeled unit diffusion but V doesn’t seem much better than Civ II.

Reviews of this lone aspect keep me from playing Civ VI, (though I bought the limited edition with the book and coins.). I would also add the Chris Crawford did have a different tone when he wrote about Civ in 2003:There are few games that show a flair for simplification. Sid Meier’s Civilization is one; Sid was so brutal in his simplification of history that I sometimes wince at the game’s inaccuracies.

Yet the result of Sid’s design parsimony was one of the greatest computer games of all time. I can see many places in that game where a lesser designer would have succumbed to the temptation to pile it on; Sid’s discipline in cutting out the dirt should be emulated by all designers.I used a portion of that quote as my footer in our private development forum during Civ 4, to remind myself and everyone else of this point. While I appreciate the article, I fear it heavily downplays the influence of Francis Tresham’s Civilization in Sid Meier’s own game.1) The advancements in FT’s Civilization are very similar to the advancements in SM’s Civilization.

They both represent a timeline of progess with certain advancements requiring previous ones and both are bought with income earned elswhere in the game.Conceptually there’s not a large difference beyond SM’s implementation being much simplified and being much longer (Only a few advancements in FT’s civilizations have strict requirements).Most notably your example of democracy and literacy is already present in Civilization. Democracy is one of the few cards with strict requirements, it requires Law. But it’s very difficult to get it with Law alone, chances are you’ll need other advancements, most notably one called Literacy which gives a huge discount to the cost to Democracy, Law and Philosophy.Being printed on cards is just for ease of use, it could be tracked in a similar manner to the computer game.2) Note that both games use the term “advancements” and several advancements are similar.

There are many clear influences if one compares both games. For example, the ideas behind how naval movement works in SM’s game is very similar to Tresham (Two different kinds of sea areas, one that requires advanced technology, etc).3) Sid Meier is lying when he claims he didn’t play Civilization.

In fact, he played with either Sandy Peterson’s copy or Bruce Shelley’s. You can see Mr Peterson say so here:While I no longer have sources at hand for the rest, Mr Peterson is not the only one to claim Meier had played FT’s Civilization quite a bit.

In fact, Mr Meir said so himself in older interviews, he settled for denial only later on.4) Bruce Shelley is also denying his very obvious ties to Francis Tresham’ and Civilization. First,let’s say the obvious: He was a huge fan of the game and a well-known play-by-mail player. In fact, he introduced Civilization to Alan R.

Moon and Mick Uhl when he came to Avalon Hill.Check entry numner 8 here:Wait, how could have Shelley taught the guys at Avalon Hill their own game? Well, it’s simple: It’s not an Avalon Hill game. The game was originally released in 1980 by Tresham’s own Hartland Trefoil.

The Avalon Hill release would not come until 1982. So not only did he know about FT’s Civilization, he was a key component in its sucess!Even better, why did Shelley know about FT’s Civilization? It was, after all, a boutique mail-order only game released only on the other side of the planet.

The answer is simple: He was the man who brought Francis Tresham’s own 1829 into Avalon Hill! This is why he was chosen to work on 1830: Railroads and Robber Barons and why Railroad Tycoon has a stock market.5) There’s one aspect of both games that I’m surprised you didn’t mention and which is another connection between the two: The trading. I think it’s another clear influence, as it’s very orthogonal to SM’s game and actually breaks it.6) Tresham’s Civilization is not the first game to have a tech tree. Which one was first, I don’t know, but I do know Stellar Conquest was released in 1975 and already has one. It’s in fact similar to TH’s Civ in that techs give discounts. Titan’s muster chart (1980) is also a tech tree just with monsters instead of technologies.

Chances are that by 1991, Sid Meier’s Civilization was not the only example of a game with tech trees as we know them.I hope this doesn’t come as being overly aggressive as I highly respect your writing, Mr Maher. In fact, I discovered your blog because I enjoyed The Future Was Here very much.

I’ve read your articles here, they have been a delight (You actually got me to play Wishbringer!).I just feel that Sid Meier is often given credit by things he didn’t do, specially regarding Civilization and I felt compelled to comment. I hope this is not an issue.Sincerely,Erik Twice. Of course it’s not an issue! I welcome other points of view and factual corrections equally, and sometimes feel like I learn as much from my readers as they learn from me.An interesting point, perhaps in your favor, is that in Meier’s later Civilization Revolution it’s possible to acquire technologies for which you lack the prerequisite by paying more for them — the same mechanic that’s found in the Civilization board game.In general, however, I’m very reluctant to accuse anyone of deliberately lying without a lot of evidence. Misremembering is in my experience much more common, and there could certainly be some of that going on here.Counterpoints in Meier’s favor include his reputation among his peers; I don’t know him personally, but Meier is universally regarded within the industry as an honest broker and a straight shooter.

Further, and as noted in the article, he’s never been reluctant to credit his other inspirations. He freely admits that Pirates! Would never have existed but for Seven Cities of Gold, that Railroad Tycoon and Civilization would never have existed but for SimCity, and that the Civilization combat layer basically.is. the game of Empire imported wholesale into this new context. Why would he suddenly decide to deny the influence of the Civilization board game?One obvious answer, of course, is if there were legal issues involved.

I’d be interested to see these interviews you mention where Meier credits the board game more freely. It would be especially telling if they occurred before the legal battle over Civilization exploded in the late 1990s.Another likely scenario is that some of the elements you mention — and your points are certainly well-taken — were proposed by Shelley, who admits to considerably more familiarity with the board game, if not quite as much as what you describe. In this case, it’s possible that Meier may literally never have.known.

their original source.I’m always ready to reconsider, but as of now I will say that sometimes as a writer you have to go with your gut. And, having listened to several hours of interviews with Meier and Shelley and read much more about their careers, both men strike me as honest, trustworthy people. Other considerations could override that gut feeling, but I haven’t yet seen enough evidence to accuse them of even deliberate obfuscation, much less outright lying.I am interested in your take on trade as “orthogonal” to the rest of the game, as I’m planning to write a whole article on Civilization and trade. And thanks for the noting that the original Civilization board game didn’t come out under the Avalon Hill imprint initially. I didn’t know that. I will remain agnostic on how much Meier and Shelley borrowed from the board game and how much was parallel evolution, but I think this sentence in the article is misleading:“the board game doesn’t have anything like the computer game’s Advances Chart, instead using decks of cards for the purpose.”The civilization cards in the board game are in fact quite like the computer game’s Advances Chart; they’re not really a “deck”, since you don’t shuffle them or anything, they’re things you can buy that give you special abilities and discounts for buying other more advanced civilization cards.

Many of the names are the same too, including Mysticism, Astronomy, Literacy, Philosophy, and Democracy. The BoardGameGeek summary for Civilization says:“Civilization is widely thought to be the first game ever to incorporate a ‘technology tree,’ allowing players to gain certain items and abilities only after particular other items were obtained.”Also, another minor correction: Advanced Civilization, despite the name, is not a “whole new version” of the game, just an expansion set that requires the original game to play. Thanks for this! I’ve made some edits to that part of the article to state the case rather more ambiguously, as seems appropriate given all this information. This will probably have to remain something of a gray area, although it does strain credibility to believe that so many advances could have made their way from the board to the computer game.under the exact same names. absent a more marked influence than Meier and Shelley are generally willing to credit. I’ll put their lack of clarity down to the passage of time and perhaps to certain pressures created by the legal battle.

Thanks for your reply, some thoughts:1) I haven’t played Revolution, so I cannot say. Still while it’s possible, I think it makes more sense for that to be developed naturally (Hey, what if you could skip requirements for a fee?) than a throwback to the discount-based tech tree of FT’s Civ. And while the might seem similar on a structural level, chances are the gameplay ramifications are massively different.2) I simply think Meier is lying because he says something he knows is not true. I don’t mean it so much as a moral judgement but simply as a descriptory term.

The facts, quite simply, don’t bear out.I don’t know why he denies the influence of FT’s Civ, I just see he do it. And more than outright denying it, he seems to have an uncanny ability to not mention it or word his way around it when asked about the tech tree, or boardgaming influences or anything of the sort.I actually looked around a bit and found something very interesting. He was actually asked about it once:“There was a Civilization board game but it was more a card game, and it was limited to the ancient era. It was actually less like our game than some of these other games that were out there. That was an English game actually.”Of course, I don’t buy it.

There’s far more of FT’s Civilization in his game than there is Simcity even if it’s just the core concept of ta game about Civilization or the tech tree.But that’s not the thing that is most interesting, what is find most interesting is this bit:“That was an English game actually.”An English game. That’s an odd thing to remember, specially given he can’t remember Empire’s name or the fact that FT’s Civilization is very much played on the board and has over a hundred chits.And yet, it would make perfect sense for him to remember that detail, because Shelley might have had a Hartland Trefoil copy. After all, he had been playing the game before AH released it and he had a copy of 1829, it is not unlikely for him to have a British copy of Civ.I also remember that I saw someone comment at Boardgamegeek that they had seen Meier “pour over” Shelley’s copy of the game, though they hadn’t seen him actually play it.

I can’t find the comment now, but it seems to fit perfectly here.Of course, it’s all conjeture, he might have simply known it was an English company because Microprose bought Hartland Foil during the legal kerkuffle.3) I checked and I was wrong: Avalon Hill released its first edition of Civilization in 1981 (month unknown, here’s the cover: ). The 1982 release date is for the much more common second edition.4) If you haven’t been able to play FT’s Civ, I recommend the computer version of Advanced Civilization. It runs on DOS and is easy to pick up.

It should help you get your own conclusions. It has some subtle but important (some say game-breaking, some say game-improving) changes—RE: Trading.I’ll note that by “trading” I mean tech trading and not Caravans. Not sure if you meant the latter, I forgot about the Caravans and trade routes at first.The reason why I feel that trading in SM’s Civilization is orthogonal to the rest of the game(s) is that it’s extraneous to the core gamplay. That is, the “gameplay loop”, to use that new fancy term, does not include trading and there’s very little interaction between trading and growing cities, building troops and researching technology. The game could do without it.There’s some aesthethic value in being able to speak with your enemies and being able to collaborate, but I do think it’s heavily ouweighted by the fact that trading technology breaks the game. You research one technology and then get 4-5 technologies for free by trading it with every other civilization for something you don’t have.Of course, one does not need trading to break Civilization I but I think that moves the conversation to a whole different set of values. Your definition of “lying” is certainly a good one, but my problem with your application of it to Sid Meier is an epistemological one: it’s simply not possible for us to know what he “knows” all these years later.

Human memory is a funny thing. Remembering every detail of how a game was developed during this insanely productive period of his life is asking a lot of him. And when details fade, one can unconsciously put the spin on events that is most favorable to oneself. That’s not being a bad person; that’s just being a person.That said, you and Doug Orleans between you have certainly made a good case that the board game likely had a considerably greater influence on the computer game than either the original version of this article or recent interviews with Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley would imply. If you can provide a cite for those early interviews you mention in your first comment, in which you say Sid Meier was much more forthcoming about the influence of the board game, that would be as close as we’re likely to get to a smoking gun in this case — perhaps enough so as to prompt another revision of this article. As it is, though, I haven’t seen them.I was indeed talking about diplomat-driven economic trade in my previous response. That said, I don’t agree that tech trading between civilizations damages the game.

Leaving aside the fact that researching one technology and then trading it for four or five others is a rather far-fetched example of an absolute best-case scenario, I would say that looking at tech trading purely in mechanical terms is to somewhat miss the point of Civilization. It’s an.extremely.

thematic game, driven by the designers’ understanding of the processes of history. The trading mechanism is one way of simulating the fact that historical civilizations have learned and benefited from contact with one another (the economic trade is, of course, another way of portraying the same thing). It may not “need” to be there, but the game benefits thematically from its inclusion. If you want a game where every element is perfectly calibrated in abstract terms, Euro game style, Civilization probably just isn’t the strategy game for you. Well, I don’t think Sid Meier is a bad person or anything, I just think he’s saying something that is not true. I really don’t mean to want to judge him on a moral level, I just think there’s a clear influence of Tresham’s game in his.No need for a rewrite of the article, either, just thought you might be interested in knowing this stuff.As far as trading goes, it’s not that trading per se damages the game, it’s that particular implementation of it.

For me it’s not about “mechanical terms” versus “theme”, but simple about the game simply being flawed. And I don’t think that’s a very controversial claim, most people will agree that the oldest Civilization entries are poorly balanced or otherwise heavily flawed.In that sense, I don’t think it’s any different than your criticism of Sierra games and how they handle death, puzzles and so on.

If this isn’t one of the best articles I’ve read in recent history on the topic of games and gaming, then I have no idea what could be.This was brilliant, engaging, witty & thoroughly informative.I have never been to this site before and I’ve not read any of your previous work yet (that’ll change soon), but I know I HAD to comment here because work like this just doesn’t happen often on the internet anymore. People don’t tell stories like this anymore – ‘snippets’ and catchy titles can bring eyes faster than substance and so narrative is thrown out for ‘we don’t know, we’ve asked for a comment, but we’ll tell you when we find out’.Thank you for your work. One of the great things about Civ is the turn-based play- it really feeds an OCD personality to be fully DONE before allowing time to advance. I couldn’t get into Microsoft’s AOE because of that (despite getting the chance to do some playtesting in Seattle on it).Speaking of the silly ‘femwashing’ complaint, I started playing Civ when I was a young newlywed and my wife explained this game she had been playing for a few years.

Either CivII or CivIII, and I’ve played it ever since. I remember many adult Saturdays where nothing gets done other than playing civ and drinking coffee.I can see links between Civ and Kerbal- they don’t exactly strain modern graphics engines, are an open world, have a tech tree, etc. They both also have that (flaw? Of) gameplay where early activity is horribly slow and endgame activity involves an excessive amount of micromanagement.Jimmy, any idea what some of the reference books were that Meier and Johnson used? Also- the footnote felt like a very graceful way of covering the Dan/Danielle thing, which ‘we’ have addressed before in the blog and comments.+1 on adding some tech tree blog posts on this blog. It’s worth noting that an ex-NoA Game Counselor (who notably created the original version of Captain N for a Nintendo Power comic) was briefly consulting with Microprose (the company isn’t named in the original article) and mentioned that F-15 arcade was apparently more complex initially, before being simplified down for a final release, as well as that they sunk 2 million for just the location test release.

While the ex-NoA guy does have a bit of an over inflated ego, he was right on regarding what would bring in quarters. I’m betting part of the reason it flopped was that it was too expensive for your average operator to earn their money back, and unusual enough in theme and game-play that operators willing to splash out a lot of money to buy it wouldn’t, because it was too “weird” theme wise. “This would lead to one of the more indelible images of Civilization in the cultural memory: that of a Greek phalanx destroying, thanks to a lucky roll of the virtual die, a platoon of modern tanks.”I can’t find my old copy to check, but either the manual or the readme that came with Civilization II (at least, the version I had) had a section explaining why they included a “HP” system in the second game. This anecdote was mentioned as the problem they were trying to solve, except it wasn’t tanks.

According to that version; a fortified, veteran phalanx in a city had a small chance of taking out a battleship. I am a brand new Civilization player – Civ VI on the Nintendo Switch to be exact. I’ve been wanting to play Civ for years and finally am getting to it. Wow, quite overwhelming at this early point but I know it’ll be well worth it.What an AMAZING read this is! I am absolutely enraptured with the detail put into these 3 parts I’m about halfway through Part 1 and am enjoying it so much that I don’t want to finish it. It is rare to find this kind of detail nowadays.

I’ve been online since 1985 and can’t wait to dig more into this incredible website THANK YOU.