Civilization 3 Analysis

(This entry was written for SNHU's GAM-205 class in the Fall 2017 semester.)

    I have kind of a funny history with Civ 3. I was given it for Christmas around 2004. Mom knew I was a smart kid, and maybe she thought I'd be good at it. However, as a dumb preteen, I couldn't even beat the easiest difficulty level. Every game went one of three ways:

Even today, the faces of the leaders are kind of creepy. Especially on someone as corpse-like as the Queen here. So pale!

    1a: I'd play a peaceful game while not having a complete grasp of how the game works. Eventually, every single one of my opponents would decide that there was nothing I could possess which they couldn't take away. They demanded all of my techs and money, and I'd eventually quit when I realized how behind I was.

    1b: Same as above, but when the demands came in, but I'd refuse their demands, and they'd crush me for having the sheer audacity to stand up to a bully. All those anti-bullying specials that said to just ignore them were total liars.

    2:  Inevitably, after being bullied into oblivion a few times, I'd go for a more aggressive strategy and try to war with someone. Each time, my opponent would spontaneously discover the lawnmower and my ass would become grass.

    To summarize my first game in over a decade, I'm leaps and bounds ahead of the AI, despite my Civ 5 experience telling me not to spam cities. Also, despite my huge technology lead, Scandinavia still had the nerve to go to war after I rejected a demand. Maybe the AI is just intrinsically bloodthirsty. I knew that about Gandhi, but not the others. Now for the analyzing.

    One of the most analyzable parts of the game in my opinion is the technology tree. Looking at it, you can get a pretty decent idea of how Firaxis Games views/viewed the concepts of civilization. I'm also comparing it to the tech trees of the future Civilization games, because I'm a bit more familiar with Civ 4 onwards. The theme I'm analyzing is how Civ 3 seems to have a bias towards western civilization and industrialization.

Gandhi always knows how to cover his bases, I suppose.

    In every version of Civilization, there's a tree where you can research technology to improve your civilization. Each civilization, whether American, Greek, or Sumerian, shares the same tree. Other than certain civilizations having special replacements for certain units, each civilization gets the same advancements and will more or less wind up in the same place: in a industrialized western society. It sort of gives the implication that this is supposed to be the definition of "modern" society and that will be how every civilization will go, and this is counting the ones that no longer exist to this day. Who knows how those civilizations would have developed if they hadn't collapsed. Also, in order to even be able to progress down the tech tree, you must have a city, preventing the player from playing as a nomadic civilization, even with the Huns or Mongols, both traditionally nomadic groups. 

    While this game doesn't have official mechanics for religion, there are still "technologies" related to it. Two notable techs are 'polytheism' and 'monotheism'. Unlike the later games, each of the four "ages" of technology (ancient, medieval, industrial, and modern) are divided into their own tech trees, and the players have to research most of the options in a tree to start researching the most basic tech in the next tree. Ignoring how this can lead to a bizarre idea of a modern society with no grasp of what literature is or how gravity works, this can lead to the observation of a possible bias when you notice that polytheism is a mid-Ancient tech, while monotheism is an early Medieval tech. It leads to the implication that monotheistic religions, such as Christianity, are technologically superior to polytheistic religions, with Shinto being a good example of a polytheistic religion that exists today.


        Firaxis Games (2001). Sid Meier’s Civilization III Complete [Video game]. Lyon, France: Infrogames Entertainment, SA.