What Civilization V taught me about world building
I’ve taken into world building and recently purchased Civilization V which tries to mimic the progress of empire expansion from thousands and thousands of years ago. The game taught me a lot about how people think and how rulers think when guiding their people and bettering their world.
Here are a few important things:
You try to advance as fast as possible
Time is of the essence and advancing your world is essential. You can’t fall back and make the wrong moves. That may cost you 9-10 moves easy and then you’re pretty screwed.
You have to decide whether to expand, conquer, or build up your current empire
That’s a huge one. Every time your city asks you what you want to produce, you have to decide one of those. You can decide to expand (settlers + guard), conquer (guard + guard), or build your empire (buildings + workers).
If you think about it, we face this every day in our current world. Do we decide to enhance our lives? Build our defences? Expand our frontiers? It’s a hard decision but these decision will shape your world. Here are the extremes of what will happen:
* vast rural empire (akin to russia (expansion))
* strong central empire with conquered nations it controls (akin to Britain)
* strong and powerful central empire (japan)
When someone tries to enter a territory you had your eye out on, you’re willing to kill them
Really. I had a few islands, expanding over it slowly. Had a guy, out of nowhere, throw his settlers there. Initial reaction? My damn island. So I moved all of my army people to surround the settlers.
Even if it doesn’t seem like a competition it is.
