[extremeMath]

My biggest shock with Civ was funding out that I was a military dictator at heart.

I started with hope of a cultural victory. I gave away technology and trade at a disadvantage to keep aggressive allies on my side.

Then genghis khan attacks me unprovoked despite previously good relations.

He sacked a city and I decided he needed to be completely removed from the game for peace. So after stabilizing, I built up a huge military and defeated him.

But now I had a huge military draining my resources. And alexander was pretty aggressive. Before you knew it, my wife was begging me not to attack the last survivor, Gandhi. Which I defeated and achieved world domination.

I was literally horrified at myself.

[ajuc]

The game is set up like that. Military victory has the most mechanics and is the most fun. Other victories are basically watching numbers grow with little interaction with the enemy.

There's few games where non-combat mechanics are as fun as combat mechanics. If you like strategies I recommend Crusader King series - it's about dynastic politics and plots instead of combat (combat still exists but it's not the main focus). It tends to generate very dark Game Of Thrones-like scenarios by the basic mechanics not by hardcoded plot.

[pintxo]

CIV VI (and its add-ons) has slightly improved here with religious units that can actively distribute your religion and also fight other religious units. Also the "band" gaining cultural points for your civ are somewhat going into this direction. But I agree, combat still has the most fun game mechanics.

[ywei3410]

I remember being extremely spiteful when I first got attacked in Civ.

I didn't just wipe them off the map; I first found a tiny one tile island near one of the poles with a couple of resources around. I then forced them to take ownership of the island in a war and then in subsequent wars took all of their other cities.

I then spent the remainder of the game leaving 2 privateer units (the only unit which can pillage unprovoked) destroying any fishing boats which left their now-capital. Every so often I would just gift them technology knowing that their capital wouldn't be able to make use of it. This happened for over 700 years before the game ended.

In other words, I kept a civilization around just to punish them for a minor transgression of their ancestors. I like to believe I am a kind and compassionate person...

[colanderman]

I'm playing VI right now as Suleiman. Domination isn't so troubling as him: cities he captures do not lose population. So I've narratively convinced myself I'm wresting mismanaged cities from poor leaders and integrating their grateful and unharmed inhabitants into my glorious (albeit fascist) empire.

Come to think of it, that's probably what a lot of imperialist leaders tell themselves...

[segfaultbuserr]

> I was a military dictator at heart.

Not really.

The mechanism of the game is intentionally made to drive the player to do this. The diplomatic system is similar to the game of Diplomacy - allies are formed and betrayed before it's formed and betrayed again, and achieving world domination at all costs is one goal of the game by design. You can also see this from various game mechanisms, such as that the player is able to adopt any of the available ideologies, even several in a row, for their material benefits alone without having real consequences, it's just a matter of weighting the pros and cons - if necessary, enforcing slavery is an option. Scientific research, cultural development, and city building remains independent from the state of peace and war, the political or economic systems (beyond some bonuses from each system). And regardless of how impoverished the life of ordinary citizens has became, the player is always the eternal dictator. In real life, if you are a Czarist regime, sooner or later it will be overthrown in the upcoming Bolshevik Revolution.

Nevertheless, I guess the political system in Civilization can be alternatively interpreted as a cautious tale similar to Universal Paperclip's warning - If you give the wrong goal function - in PaperClip, to produce as many paperclips as possible, or in Civilization, to achieve world domination at all costs - and let a human or an AI overlord agent to optimize that, inevitably, humanity will suffer.

[jandrese]

Diplomacy isn't about sucking up to your rivals, it's about making invasion too expensive for them. A big military is a diplomatic asset. Nobody wants to pick a fight with the guy who is going to kick their butt. A tech lead is another diplomatic asset, although one the Civ AI is kind of bad at recognizing. Swarms of pikemen against artillery and machine guns is not a good strategy. Having a lot of friends can also help, but in a fight they usually won't stick their neck out to help you, even if they're always begging for you to go to war against their enemies.

Downside of Civ V is that the AI is just not up to the task of waging war. It's pretty typical that they'll have 4-5x as much army when they declare war and you'll still wipe them out without a single loss. Between the fairly tanky cities, easily abusable terrain, and general AI incompetence there is a lot you can do to bleed an enemy dry over the course of a few turns.

But of course after you've killed one Civ, even the one everybody hated, they'll call you a Warmonger and constantly denounce you. At least your city states will still love you, especially if you've gone for Freedom.

[arkitaip]

Games inherent the biases of their creators, so it's more a reflection of them than you.

[asgard1024]

If anything, I think Civ tried to subvert the bias of war games by allowing other types of victories than just a military one.

[raxxorrax]

It is still fun if you see Washington build the Kremlin - you might remember that differently from history class.

[extremeMath]

I could have taken care of genghis and stopped. I could have left Gandhi alone.

I take responsibility.

[cptnapalm]

Playing CKII gave me that feeling. I was doing okay, but things were looking up and was feeling very smug that I had never killed any kids. Then it happened: my new heir was an imbecile. Once he inherited, all my efforts for dozens of hours would explode. That assassinate button beckoned me, begged me to use it. And I did.

[linkdd]

Peace was never an option.

[082349872349872]

An acquaintance once showed me a large SimCity layout that was little boxes, little boxes all the same, only sometimes instead of houses and police station the block contained a stadium. custodes et circenses?

[iso1631]

Did Gandhi use his nukes?

[qznc]

The infamous Ghandi nuking requires you to have good relations with him. You have to overflow the integer such that it wraps to negative.

[jbeam]

The overflow was the error in the first version. Not needed in other versions; Ghandi loving nukes is funny so he just loves nukes.

Civ VI randomly rolls character traits for leaders and each leader has specific ones they are more likely to get. Ghandi is highly likely to roll Nuke Happy. Your relationship has nothing to do with it.

[triceratops]

*Gandhi

[triceratops]

One of Civ's only sins was misspelling Mohandas Gandhi.

It's not "Ghandi".