You know, just the other day I was thinking about that blinking wagon surrounded by darkness and the joys of finding that "perfect" starting point for my first city. Rivers abounded, resources littered the landscape like virtual paradise. This brought up other memories:

** I played Civ1 on a very heavy and very over-heated laptop. I still remember stringing the power cord to my bed, "going to sleep" and hiding the glow of the screen under the covers with me as I played until dawn. The heat from that machine was near-deadly, but it didn't matter. A little sweat was good for a person. Still have the disks.

** My first Civ2 experience was no less memorable. I was hired by some wealthy Beverly Hills family to teach their son SAT while he was doing an internship in New Jersey. This meant, of course, that I was free all day long in the hotel room while he worked. Guess what I bought at the computer store down the road? Civ2. And guess what machine I had to play it on? Yep, another laptop (his, of course, top-of-the line..still too heavy and hot, though). But that didn't matter. It was my tradition I guess, and can you imagine how utterly amazing it was to be virtually locked in a hotel room to play Civ2 for hours on end? I was there for 7 days. Must have logged in over 70+ hours of Civ2 in that time. The music still plays in the background of my brain sometimes when I'm tired. That's probably a sign of a pending medical condition.

My very first Civ experience was at the shore one year. My cousin brought down his laptop and was showing me civ. After he was done I started playing, and built my first city "Babylon" on a river on the left side of a continent. I had no real concept of the game yet, and I was only 12. But I ended up building about 7 cities and I was in constant diplomacy with the Russians who controlled the other half of the continent. Looking back the game probably was very bad and I never actually finished it. But the game amazed me and the rest of the week I spent more time on that computer than on the beach. Infact, the next year I did the same. He offered me the disks to install on my cpu and I jumped at the offer, but unfortunately he couldn't find 2 out of the 4 install disks. So I never got Civ 1 on my cpu. I did buy Civ 2 last summer, and have been addicted to it ever since. I believe my first Civ 2 game was me as the Spanish and my rival empire controlling the other part of the continent I was on was the Sioux. I still play Civ 2 at least once a week to this day.

For memorable games I played as the Americans, the best country in Civ2 Anyway heres one of my favorite games

I started out in the american east coast spot. I built up about 5 cities then went on a killing raid with about 15 warriors, wiped out the sioux. Keep ICSin all the over north america and down until I met the Aztecs who had all of south america. The following musketeer dragoon battles were horrible we both lost probably about 100 units each but I had come out on top because I had more cities to produce. So I took all of noth america and started moving in for the kill. built some caravans landed an invasion force by patagonia, blah blah blah killed them off. After that i just disbanded a pile of units leaving 2 in each city but I had a huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge huge navy of about 200 aegis cruisers and battleships and subs. And I played perfectionist got all the wonders, got the spaceship with 20k people to alpha blah blah blah blah blah blah done

I had no idea what I was doing.

I started as the French on earth. I named my first city "Ducondo." Since I was a total novice I didn't know how to build anything but militia, the old farmers with pitchforks. I made a million of them since I couldn't stop, and proceeded to declair war on the Romans. I buldozed Rome and Babylon, all the while surrounding Ducondo with little men since I didn't know how to fortify them.

Let's see now. It began in early 94 when I was doing my military service (In Finland it is compulsory for men) and had just received corporal status a month or two earlier.

When we were staying on campus we often had a few hours of own time after duty&dinner, in the evening. (4-5h)
On one such evening I went to the free time office to read comics etc, but this time I noticed that there was someone sitting in the far back dark corner locking at a small screen.

Well I just had to see and there I found a soldierboy using a 286 and playing Civ. First I wasn't so interested, but for some strange reason I watched him play for a few evenings. Until one evening he finished his current game and left (quite early IIRC) Well there it was, an empty computer.

Hope you'll understand, I just had to try it once myself. (Nothing to do in the evenings, so a boy like me was just bored. And when you are bored you are an easy prey for temptation. Hope you'll forgive me.) Well IIRC my first game was a very short-lived (few turns and less than an hour). So I left, but the next day I returned and the next and the next and ...

But there was a problem; we were two players on one computer -> competition of who got there first after duty&dinner. And this was a serious problem, you'll know that in 4 hours you don't play much Civ (4-5h was normal time after duty&diiner and before we had to be in bed.) So finally I made a deal with my collegs. Every morning I woke our soldiers and took them to breakfast. In exchange I was free from dinner (Dinner normally ends the official day when on campus), so when they went for dinner, I was already sitting in a dark corner locking at a small screen (14"), practicing my military skills for the last 3-4 months of my servicetime when on campus.

IIRC I newer played Civ since. I got CivII a year or two later and have played it like hell.

My computer was an Amiga 600, equipped with a 68000-processor - clocking at a whooping 7,14 Mhz!! Question: How much did that kind of awesome number-crunching processing power translated into Civ map-generating waiting-time, do you think? Take a guess – 20, 30 seconds perhaps?
Answer: It took around 6 looong and rather inpatient minutes, each and every time you started a new fresh game (no, not seconds – minutes!!).

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Learn the mistakes of yesterday to prevent the ones of tomorrow...

I started it. I had a settler (I also had no Idea that was a vagon for a few months) and that's it. I had absolutely no idea what to do. She wasn't very good at civ, so I listened to her basic explanation. It sounded nice, but I didn't understand how can a stupid DOS game do all that.

I played a bit with the greek, I believe they were pink. I lost my troops several times because I wasn't aware of the meanings of differrent techs and I couldn't answer the quiz thingy (remember that?)

I had no idea what revolution does, and quite frankly was very afraid of it. I first changed my govt. only after many games.
Also I had no idea what taxes\tech\luxury do.

The whole Civ 1 period is very obscured in my memory. I remember only bits and pieces.

I built ships. I conquered all sorts of lands. I was quite strong and then I met a russian diplomat. The russians were living on some small island I haven't discovered yet and were quite weak. I made peace. In the next turn, the russians attacked. I couldn't unbderstand why. I just wanted to keep exploring the newly discovered continent.

I have another bitter memory with the russians when I was playing zuulus on the earth map, I had little cities and sent most of my units exploring. Somewhere in egypt I met a russian soldier. I talked to stalin who had an evil grin. I made peace. And then stalin fortified his units so I caouldn't andvance and go to the middle east and beyond. I tried to use diplomats but his units were too expensive.

I got civ 2 around the beginning of 98. sucked at first. was perfectionist. I remember babylonians conquering my cities and then making peace. But I never forgot and I never forgave. Also, one time, I was allied wiht the greeks. They are really *****y. After a long while they wanted some money to continue the alliance. Ok. I agreed. (I was lame back then. I'm not anymore. Really. I'm not. Why are you laughing?) Then they asked for some tech. I grumbled but Agreed. then they wanted two more techs. And it was all in the same conversation. I got really mad. And, what can I say. After a while they were no more.
And then I moved up to warlord level. Just kidding I wasn't that lame.

It's been 9 years, but I still remember the joy I got from this game when I first found it. I think I saw it advertised in PC Magazine, and I had to have it.

I used to take it to work and play on my lunch hour every day. Soon, I was putting in tons of "overtime", 12 hour days on Saturdays when no one else was around.

I let a few of the guys at work copy the game, and in no time, they were regaling me with their exploits. Others would walk by my desk, and they'd think we were nuts because we were always talking about world domination.

No game has ever given me the feeling I had when I first started playing Civ. I've searched and searched for a game that would recapture and rekindle the love affair I've had with computer games, but in 9 long years there has been nothing but dissappointment.

I had been movin' that darn unit of mine all over the planet looking for those other units which I tought were meant to be roughed up a bit...

For my birthday (three...four...five years back? I don't exactly remember), my mom brought me home a gift. It was a few months after we got our ***new*** computer, a Power Mac 7100/66. It had a whooping 12 MB of RAM and a gigantic 450 MB hard drive (Glances at machine in brother's room now and laughs). I looked at the box cover. Thought it looked cool. Opened the box cover. Thought it looked even cooler...until I saw a manual about the size of my history textbook.

I thought, are there people who write these things? Then I thought, are there people who read them? Since the answer to both questions is obviously 'yes' (well...at least I hope so, so I don't feel stupid), I busted out then and there. It was about eight o'clock. I didn't go to sleep that night, because I thought that the game would be interesting. And because the manual was so long.

Problems arose in the morning. Hmm...PC game does not work on the Macintosh. No...kicking the CD rom drive didn't help, nor did beating up the monitor. It wasn't their fault. But I was thirteen (or so) years old, and my computer experience was limited to the Apple 2GS and Apple LMs (or whatever the next generation of macs was). And, of course, if there was a problem, you contacted your computer teacher, and he made it work as you watched in awe of the computer-fixing god.

To make a long story short, I eventually found out that the game wasn't designed to run on macs. And, after purchasing a new machine, my dad wasn't about to shell out the money to get a machine that would run the game. My allowance wasn't enough to pay for a new machine (of course), but I was able to buy a program called Soft Windows. Although a problem arose when the machine did not have enough RAM to run the windows-on-Mac operating system, my dad did agree to buy more RAM. He saw how much I wanted to play the game.

The rest is history. The fact that I had to cheat and give myself four nuclear missiles and three mechanized infantry to defend my capital on the first game was not important, especially since I was playing on chieftain level. Nor was it important to know that I didn't ever negotiate with any other foreign civ until I got to prince level, even when I wasn't cheating. I bought all the X-packs I could (but never did get around to getting ToT), and had a great time with the nuclear exchange scenario from one of them. Oh, yes, there was multiplayer, and that was fun too. I was spending hours in front of the computer with civ.

SMAC eventually came along, but by that time my dad finally realized that three boys did not work well having only one household machine, and so we got another one. SMAC was no different that civilization (in the basic style, like movement, city windows, etc) and I was soon rocking computer players like crazy. Never did get around to playing much MP with SMAC (I was busy with schoolwork), and MP just seemed to fall through. Bought the X-pack for SMAC, though, and found that a lot of fun. Of course, after a while, watching computer players die horrible deaths got a little boring, and I have since moved on to Age of Empires and the Command and Conquer series. But I'll be all over civ3.

Overall, here is my approximate civ hour-log:
civ1: 0
civ2: in the hundreds (ie try 8)
SMAC: several hundred (ie try 6)

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- Biddles

Seeing everyone's progression was a great feature!

However I hated the Zulus, in my first game as the Americans the Zulus overran me. So I played as the Zulus in my next game and sent the Russians packing. In those days the Zulu were my favorite tribe along with the Romans.

My first Civ 2 experience was very strange. I got two boxes of it for my birthday, partially because I talked about the original civ so much. I ended up exchanging one for another game (which I do not remember)

I had great fun then in early 1997 I set it aside and played other games however in late 1997 I bought Fantastic Worlds and made scenarios units etc.. but became bored until in 1999 I found other peoples scenarios on the net.

In 2000 I found this forum!!!

The first game of Civ was played on a friend's notebook computer. It didn't even have a colur LCD, just 64 shades of grey I had no idea what I was doing, but I had the game generated a random map, started my own tribe The Buffalos, and called my capital city Horns. Hours later my friend wanted his computer back but he had no luck prying it away from me Later that evening I went home quite dejected because I didn't have a computer at home. It wasn't some months later did I buy my first computer.

The plastic shelf above my 14 inch sameron screen twisted after 2 days without sleep.

I got the game very late, ~1995.

I remember that I played in it like i played in C&C. I placed my warriors around my only city and moved them from one place to another.

I believed that legion is the best unit and used few of them to crush the romans.

But I really started to understand what i'm doing when i got CivII.