I'm a HUGE fan of the Civilization series. I still remember playing the first Civ for hours on our first computer back in early high school. Those games are ones that I find myself just going back to often, even long after I've seemingly moved on to other games. I started up a saved game from Civ 3 this weekend for the first time since we went to into Iraq. It was very interesting to experience some situations that made me appreciate not only the game more for its realism but also our situation even more. Here are the issues I ran into:
Military conquests cost major money. Seriously, it takes a lot. This won't come as a shock so much since we've seen the amount of money we've been spending, but still consider this. My country (I'm playing as Russia right now) was one of eight other Civs on the map (the other four or so had already been destroyed long ago.) My country is by far the most powerful militarily and economically. I doubled the nearest enemy in military hardware and I had over 30,000 gold. That much money takes a long time to get in Civ 3. It's like 2244AD or something and I've been saving for at least 200 turns. So, as I said, I'm way beyond any of the computer players. I proceeded to oversee (through military action and pacts) the destruction of the weakest of the remaining players. Gone, hardly a problem. They only had a few cities and I destroyed most of them. Only two armored units, a couple of archers...hardly worth the effort. Then I set my sights on a neighbor (China) who was effectively cutting my lands in half because I had destroyed another civ on the other side of them. I aligned with the only remaining civ on my continent and attacked China. China fell in under five turns, it was a spectacular victory. But, even though we were the two strongest civs, it still cost me major money to defeat and take over China's land. By the time I had destroyed them, I had spent over half of my money. My gold was down to 14,000. I had barely lost any units, instead sending in my armies to do the bulk of the work. So why did it cost so much? Because, every time I took over a city, I had to quickly produce new units to come up from my lands to occupy the city. In addition, many of the buildings in said city would be destroyed so I would need to spend major money just to rebuild basic structures to keep the people happy enough to not riot. It took major resources for me to take down even a small industrialized society. Even worse, though their army was small and could not launch any meaningful invasion into my land, they had nukes. Thankfully, my SDI system was able to destroy all three that they launched at me. A fourth probably would have hit had they had one (SDI blocks 75%.)
So just think, all that to destroy even the weakest of the remaining countries. I'm stunned imagining how many units and how much money I will need to take on the next one. I also share a large border with the next civ, so that will be especially brutal as they will send units across to attack my cities as well as defend against me. As tough as war is, it's what comes after that's the truly challenging part. And it's a lesson that we've all seen in real life recently.
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