I love Civilization, always have. I’ve been playing it off and on for fifteen years or so.

This doesn’t mean I’m any good at it.

I’m not.


I never make any long term plans. I build whatever I feel like at the time, research technologies more or less at random (unless I actually have a clear goal in mind, which only happens if I start on a small island, or whatever), let cities decide which squares to use and generally just bumble about. My only real goal in any game is to try and get the borders of all my cities to touch so I can have a unified country.

I generally, therefore, play on the easy settings. I’m not above playing on the very easiest setting, just so I can do whatever I want without worrying. At the moment, though, I’m playing on one level above that, on Warlord. I’m Genghis Khan this time around, which means I should be running around on horseback kicking people in the teeth. (Historians: please check.) Instead the Romans have defended their cities like crazy, stopping my expansion and everybody but them keeps declaring war on me. I’m not in any danger – the odd enemy unit that wanders over to my little empire doesn’t live long – but I haven’t got the same free reign that I have on the easiest difficulty level.

I’ve pretty much decided not to bother going for a domination victory. I even switched to democracy, which means you can’t declare war on people. I’m leading the tech race at the moment, so I might go to space.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking back to the Civ game that I played on my last mobile phone, Civilization 3. That had no diplomacy, no naval units, not much of anything. (You can read a few brief impressions by clicking the “civilization” label at the bottom of this post and scrolling down.) That was rather what you expected from mobile games back then. Now, one phone later, we have this. Amazing.