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Civilization

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The first Civilization could keep a person glued to their computer for hours on end constantly uttering the phrase "just one more turn". The graphics weren't the greatest but hey the game play was fun. One little trick that my dad found out was that when you load up a saved game the computer always lets you go first. Seems innocent enough? Hardly. Since the computer moves after your turn is over you could actually move all of your units and before you ended your turn you would save and quit. Immediately after you could re-open the game and voila it's your turn again, from the beginning. This meant that a person could explore the entire world in a "single turn". I never had the patiance to take full advantage of this little trick but my dad pushed it to the extreame and in one game managed to get his spaceship to Alpha Centari by 600 BC, yes BC.

Civilization II had several improvements including graphics, and extended tech tree and a terrain editor. But aside from that the game play was exatly the same, your best way to victory was through the sheer hard handed use of military forces to dominate the world.

Civilization III had massive break throughs from the previous versions of the game, not just in graphics but in combat, play styles and even victories were changed. Starting with your single settler you quickly find out that settlers no longer upgrade terrains, they just build cities now, it's the workers that have taken over the role of building roads and canals. Aside from that the tech tree has been expanded again and now is broken up into ages forcing you to get all the techs from an age before advancing.

Introduced in this game are cultural boarders actually allowing you to form an empire with defined borders, I always hated how you could never really keep people out of you lands before. But with the introduction of culture new forms of victory were added. Before there were two victories; kill everyone or launch your spaceship to Alpha Centari. Now there is much more. In Civ III the old victories are still around but cultural, domination and ruler victories were also added.

Culture is also an interesting way of raging war on someone else without actually going to war with them. As a city's culture expands people in other nation's cities begin to long for what your cities have and could eventually convert over to you and become a new city for you, however this does work both ways so culture is always a good thing to increase.

With all of the changes I listed and the ones I didn't the newest Civilization title has the capacity to consume the time of people who don't have much to do.