If Civilization is falling apart, I might as well control it myself | Games

I am feeling anxious about the world. We have had mayoral elections in my part of Canada in which one candidate was backed with more gold than Croesus, so it wasn’t even a contest. In the UK people have not got the Labour government they hoped they were voting for. And as someone who lives a few hours’ drive from the US border, I can only pray that Orange Hitler doesn’t get in again. Or maybe I pray that he does, lest our neighbours to the south end up in an election-denial-driven repeat of the civil war. So I thought I’d play a game where I get to direct the rise and fall of civilisation myself instead. As a treat.

Civilization 6 is what’s known as a 4X game. 4X stands for “EXplore, EXpand, EXploit and EXterminate”, a phrase that offends my pedantic spelling sensibilities. Unfortunately the four “exes” I spent a lot of time doing here was Exert, Expire, Exclaim and then Exit due to this game’s Execrable gamepad controls, which are as intuitive as a Heston Blumenthal recipe. I lost count of the times I moved the wrong unit, or had brain freeze trying to remember what button did what. I would have preferred a more common sense control system, mouse and keyboard support, or an interface that uses the power of thought, like that one Elon Musk pretends he has.

My frustration is tempered by the reminder that few things are as joy-inducing as finding a barbarian camp in a Civilization game. Free stuff! Yay! As I work my way through the years, the intellectually sturdy menu of advancements reminds me that there are many elegant roads to civilisation. You learn how the world developed, through trade routes that reward mathematical thinking and furthering your goals through philanthropic diplomacy. It offers a real chance to form a spiritual land of pure peace and happiness with environmental safeguards.

But we’re not here for that, are we? We want to play as Alexander the Great and watch the world burn! But the controls cause me to mistakenly swap unit locations when I mean to attack and – in contrast to the still-outstanding Advance Wars on the Game Boy Advance – I cannot combine two weak units to make a strong one until later in the game. That makes zero sense to me.

So I switch to a non-combat DLC scenario: Outback Tycoon, which involves settling Australia, looking for gold. And sheep. I love this scenario because it only lasts for 50 turns and is primarily about sending out explorers and hoping they find something cool before the snakes and spiders get them. It’s more like opening an Advent calendar than playing a video game. But it pleases me. Maybe I didn’t get enough Advent calendars as a kid. Or maybe it’s because we have no adventuring left in the real world. Nothing left to explore. Nothing to pioneer. I emigrated to Canada in 2009, only to find the whole country had already been discovered. So I became a zealous missionary, opening up a crucial trade route: every year I transport British people over here on vacation to import irony, and send Canadians on visits to my recommended places in the UK, where they arrive with suitcases full of passive aggression.

Next, I try out a new Halloween-themed scenario. Hello! Playing as Cleopatra, you can only have the most basic military units … but that unit can convert barbarians into zombies. Your zombies. And then those zombies can make more zombies. Before you can say “brainzzzz” you amass an army of the undead large enough to surround entire cities and take them for you. I love it!

I realise that at some point the rest of the world will develop jet fighters that will easily take my zombies down, but I don’t get that far. After 100 turns or so my zombie army is so large it clogs the planet. And DDZA (Dominik Diamond’s Zombie Army) moves so slowly, and only as individual units, which is tedious. Also as a Catholic I don’t think I will ever get over the guilt of surrounding the Vatican City with zombies and showing them Jesus wasn’t the only one to come back from the dead.

So I start the scenario again, returning to those glorious first turns. My first warrior, my first builder, my first buildings. I start each turn talking to them, like I do to players in Championship Manager:

“Good morning, Frank, how’s it going?”

“Great, boss. Nearly finished this monument.”

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“Well stick at it and one day I’ll put you on the Hanging Gardens, eh? Good morning Terry, how’s it with you!”

“Just discovered the Great Barrier Reef!”

“Good times! Give me 40 more turns to make a boat and I’ll ship Frank down there to help.”

But then they become just one of many things I have to move around. Turns out the modern world is a bloody hard place to run. Perhaps a zombie apocalypse is in fact the way to go.