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This is the end of an era. A very small-scale, personal era, but still… The Civilization product line has finally come up with a game I don’t want to play. I’ve been a complete Civ addict since the dawn of the series. And even though many good games have come since Sid Meier first popped a disk into that box with skyscrapers sprouting over a Pharaonic tomb—many games better than Civ, to be honest—it’s always Civ I return to. I’ve got Civ, Civ2, Civ3, Civ4, the Civ2 expansion, the Civ3 expansion, the Civ4 Warlords and Beyond the Sword expansions, the daring but disappointing Conqueror the World spinoff, the even more clunky Fantastic Worlds spinoff, and even the Civ2Gold expansion so I could have imbalanced fan-made scenarios on hand instead of getting them off the internet where they belong, just for a little variety. I realize that gamers who can boast buying every title in a series are about as rare as gravel, but there is only one series good enough to put me, mister negativity, into that category. I’ve played fan maps and fan scenarios and designed a couple myself, long after the world had moved on to shinier packages with more instant gratification.

But I have to draw the line at Civilization Revolutions. When I first learned of the adaptation to console, I was hesitant, along with many dedicated Civ fans. Unwilling to prejudge, but concerned. The original Civ was, by current standards, quite crude in many respects: a single map size littered with long, stringy continents, for example, or the infamous battleship-sinking spearmen. New bells and whistles don’t always improve a title, but Civ has only improved in its continuing efforts to whittle away such awkward lumps and corners. The game still cheats to compensate for the fact that the AI can’t move its units sanely, much less intelligently. How far, then, would a console version regress in its need to quash the package down into limited memory? Could this version of Civ capture that epic sweep of history, when it actually boasts the absence of a “save game” function on the grounds that it’s unnecessary because every that can be finished in a sitting? How many compromises with simplicity need be made?

Alas, a lot. Many of the simplifications are predictable. Gone are the customizable maps. All games include precisely five nations, who share enough map room for a mere 3-5 cities apiece. The tech tree has shrunk along with the roster of playable nations, and with it the selection of military units and building projects. Such losses, while lamentable, are forgivable. Small can be good—though you won’t convince most die-hard Civ fans of that—and clearing away some of the city management and overspecialized units could produce an amusing Civ lite, even if it doesn’t preserve the stately historical march of the original.

Other losses, however, are not forgivable. The Civ AI, which has only recently risen from defective to merely dim, has apparently regressed once again to the point where automated opponents qualify for mercy killings. In a desperate effort to present a challenge, the developers have restored a lot of the old cheats: triremes allowed to sail deep waters, planes which never run out of fuel, automatic coalitions against the human player. Sadly, even this isn’t enough; CivRev needs creative new cheats to function, like armies that materialize out of nowhere to menace your empire—even when the host nation doesn’t have the necessary weapon technology, or the ships to transport them to your shores.

As I’ve noted before, there’s cheating, and there’s cheating. Giving the computer some extra resources or similarly subtle handicaps is less than ideal, but acceptable; it’s entirely appropriate when a player asks for it by selecting a high difficulty level. Asymmetric cheats, like unsinkable triremes, are considerably less acceptable; human players understandably resent the discovery that their opponents can do things they can’t. Armies materializing out of nowhere and invisible, unthwartable saboteurs who destroy your defenses without warning raise the cheating to an entirely new level, one which destroys the rise-and-fall-of-nations narrative the game is supposed to simulate. The player no longer cleverly plans the strategy which will defeat his foes; he merely endures the caprices of a spiteful god until his foes self-destruct. It’s like playing checkers with someone who can flick one of your pieces off the board whenever he feels like it, or turn any of his pieces into kings no matter where they are on the board—but still loses because he’s too stupid to do it in a way that works.

So, at long last, I’m going to take a pass on a Civ title. I appreciate the desire—motivated by both love and greed—to bring the game to a new audience, and the unfortunate need to compromise certain facets of game design to do it. Unfortunately, there’s a line beyond which the necessary compromises make the ultimate goal of tranporting the experience impossible, because the experience doesn’t survive the operation. Judging by player commentary, I think CivRev has crossed it.