Never On Sunday

I realized something vaguely disturbing tonight: I’m not playing Civ properly any more.

Let me clarify. Ultimately, “playing properly” is a subjective standard: if you’re having fun, you’re “doing it right.” And I’m having fun. But I no longer (A) push myself to operate at higher and higher difficulties, ultimately demonstrating my superiority over the machine at the top setting, nor (B) find and exploit the game’s peculiarities necessary to do so. Now, exploiting rule loopholes and foolish AI to crack the system and ensure victory is not in itself a worthy play style—indeed, one might argue it a wholly unworthy play style—but the process of finding those loopholes and AI blind spots in the first place is a respectable pastime, and extremely good mental exercise. In the days of the original Civ, and later Civ2, I had the energy to work out for myself what the computer opponent was designed to do, and the proof of that insight was regularly whipping the game at deity level. Every so often I would stumble across someone’s advice only to discover I’d already figured it out, or even found something superior. Now a robust internet allows anyone simply to look up discoveries in an online forum and get someone else’s cracks mere days after the game hits the shelves. Without the exercise of finding the exploits in the first place, simply reading about and employing them becomes a form of cheating.

Not that I employ them, anyway. I read about others’ Civ experiences, note the exploits discovered, and silently applaud the effort and insight employed to find them, perhaps smile at the sometimes ridiculous implications, then return to my own games and play in my own style, ignoring the exploits entirely. Quite apart from a sense that that would be cheating, using such exploits means giving up a sense of “building an empire to stand the test of time,” the game’s explicit purpose and informal motto, and simply swarming the map with cheap units and cheap shots.

I enjoy building empires. I keep returning to Civ because I like building efficient systems more than blowing up bad guys. (That, and nobody else makes 4x games any more.) I also enjoy building sustainable and profitable cities, supply chains, corporations, and criminal gangs. It’s nice to have some kind of military component or other dramatic fail condition; otherwise mere patience becomes a substitute for intelligent play. But all other design elements being equal, I enjoy most those games that enable builder strategies.

Civ does, and that’s swell. But, once you give up on trying to crack the game, you’re on a subtle and slippery slope. Without exploits, there’s no hope of whipping the most advanced skill levels. (Not any more. Civ1’s promise that emperor difficulty was only for players feeling a need to be humbled was laughably untrue, but the AI has been built much smarter since then.) If you’re not going to be able to whip the most advanced skill levels without exploits no matter how cleverly you play, you’re justified in setting the difficulty to something more modest. If you don’t feel like micromanagement of every damn worker in every damn city every damn turn, you’re justified in setting the difficulty to something more modest still. But once you start making concessions like these to the slider bar that sets initial difficulty, where do you stop? When do you cross the line between setting difficulty to reflect the inherent challenge of the game and setting the difficulty to enable you to win with your favorite play style, free of the need to figure out how to play well?

For me, the slider stops at whatever setting is nominally the fair game—that is, employs no asymmetric advantages like a 20% reduction in building costs for computer players, or a 10% research bonus for the human. But is that really fair? Civ4 and Civ5 have superior AI to earlier titles in the series, but it still isn’t all that bright. If resources are even, then beating a random number generator shouldn’t be that great a challenge. If I can’t win a level or two above that, well… maybe I need to consider looking a little more closely towards my survival in a hostile world, and indulging a little less in projects to make my people happy, just as real world leaders must. Refusing to exploit the game’s loopholes becomes an excuse for refusing to step up to a proper challenge.

That’s not entirely wrong. I play Civ for fun. Building a shining, orderly empire is fun. Building a conquering army, terrorizing my neighbors, and generally behaving like an international jackass is not fun. (Not for me. If you like hacking your empire from the corpses of your enemies, go for it.) Adopting a game setting that makes the building of a shining orderly empire impossible is not fun. But a challenge is fun, too. Building a shining orderly empire despite Montezuma’s threats, and maybe even tearing away some of his territory for his affront, makes victory all the sweeter. And somewhere along the line, I stopped forcing myself to fight for victory simply to enjoy the more meditative pleasures of pure management. Maybe it’s time for a return to cracking the system.