Civilization II

I found my old Civilization discs over the holidays, so what better time to discuss the quirks of the Civilization II map generator?

Civ2 was the gold-standard Civilization-style game in the late 90s. With the collapse of MicroProse it looked like the end of the series, and most other civ-style games at the time were clearly direct reactions to it.

And, like the first Civilization, it had a map generator.

Not a terribly realistic generator, as you can see from the pictures above, but one that looked close enough to work for gameplay.

The random seeds for the special resources and bonus huts followed a predicable pattern, with resources being a knight’s-move away from a central square. An example:

There were 64 different arrangements of this resource pattern, with slightly different offsets based on the seed. This was partially obscured by the different terrain types, so it took a little while to catch on. (The huts followed a similar but different pattern.) There was enough interest in the game that the details were reverse-engineered and custom map generators were created.

This pattern fits right in with the radius of tiles that a city could use, so I presume that it was deliberate. However, none of the later Civilization games had similar quirks in their generators. Probably because having such a dominant city location ultimately works against the hard-choices gameplay. Alpha Centauri corrected this in spades, but that’s a topic for another time.

Civ2 also has maps that are way too big for the amount of interaction you have. Late game, you’re inevitably going to end up with a lot of empty map or way too many tiny cities to micromanage. (Of course, I’ve played what I’d guess to be thousands of hours of Civ2, so this drawback only goes so far.)

I find that when I think of Civ2 maps (versus Civ4 maps) I remember the individual tiles much less and the shape of the continents much more.

The map editor helped a bit with that, I suppose; one of the games that sticks in my mind is the early game I played on a very narrow but very tall cylinder, where I had the south pole to myself thanks to a ring content I drew in the map editor. But there was also the high-difficulty game on a completely random map where I got stuck at the north pole and had a difficult time moving down to the warmer continents. I couldn’t begin to remember what the individual tiles looked like, but I could probably sketch a vague map of the land-forms.