"In one such instance," he describes, "I was playing a scenario called 'Earth 2014' – a scenario designed to recreate the political landscape on earth of 2014. He found that with a feature called FireTuner he could playtest the AI, sans human player, and began to setup games to run overnight – with the end goal of making a large, detailed political map of the world. TPangolin first explored the concept in 2014, a year after he began looking through the Official SDK for Civ V (a set of tools to help modders do their thing).
Perhaps we love these even more because we know that instead of athletes we're watching historical world leaders battle it out in a fight to death on a global scale."ĪI-only Civilization games are the purest form of the Civilization concept: take the beginnings of recorded human history, tweak some variables, hit start, and marvel at how a series of interesting decisions leads to a radically-different present day.
"We know all the rules and how to play, so now for entertainment we watch multiple third parties battle it out. "It's frighteningly similar to watching sports," TPangolin continues. They get sad when their favourite loses or celebrate when it wins, with long comment threads and terse proclamations punctuating the major milestones. "People love to assign sentimentality and personalities to these AIs," he explains.
Now there's even an official community game being organised and run (including a live Twitch stream) by subreddit mod TPangolin, with 42 civs and 42 mods enabled, which has dominated the community discussions since it was announced - there are separate threads for in-jokes, pre-game analyses, and trash talking, amongst other things.įor TPangolin, the secret to these games' popularity is emergent storytelling. There's an African version, a Civ IV Rhye's and Fall of Civilization mod version, one with just the British Isles, another with 20 civs on a map meant for just two, and at least 10 more – not counting the AI-only campaigns some people run privately to satiate their own curiosity or to compare with their favourite ongoing narrative. Thenyanmaster's game of "what if?" has won such a following – particularly after a nod on the 4.8-million-subscribers-strong Bestof subreddit – that copycats have sprung up all over the place. But the Poles stuck it out, spurred on by a rabid (though bemused) online fanbase they couldn't hear which chanted in unison some variation on "STRONK POLAND IS STRONK." As I write this now, at 16 parts, 363 turns, and 4,130 years deep into the epic, still-unravelling storyline, Poland stands among the contenders for victory, with four (soon to be five) capital cities conquered and a red army that dominates Eastern Europe. It seemed like Poland would fall quickly, hemmed in on all sides and lacking the natural defenses that protected the likes of Carthage and Persia. Casimir III's early aggression put Poland on the wrong side of its neighbours just as a desperate power struggle ensued between around a dozen civilisations vying for control over the continent. The early stages of Jasper K's game saw most of the world engage in a gentle process of discovery and expansion into unoccupied land, Europe was an immediate clusterfuck. Reddit's Civilization community has AI-only fever, but what exactly is so compelling about watching the computer play a very slow-paced turn-based strategy game with itself? Since then, the practice has exploded in popularity. Inspired by similar, smaller-scale offerings by a livestream and fellow redditor DarkLava (from whom he explicitly sought permission), user Jasper K., aka thenyanmaster, shared the first part of an experiment he was conducting wherein he put 42 computer-controlled civilisations in their real-life locations on a giant model of the Earth and left them to duke it out in a battle to the death, Highlander style (except instead of heads they need capital cities).
A strange thing happened in the Civilization community r/civ on January 10, 2015.