[dragonwriter]

Quizzing you with information from the manual which was also regularly relied on in gameplay, IIRC, was common in MicroProse games of the time (before they started using actual copy protection measures on the disks), not unique to Civ; as I recall, some of their combat simulators did similar things with weapon stats, vehicle silhouettes, etc.

[Propelloni]

I have fond memories of the "Dial-a-Pirate" [1] and similar copy protection wheels of Lucas Arts Games such as Monkey Island. I think I have them somewhere in a box.

[1] https://oldgames.sk/codewheel/secret-of-monkey-island-dial-a...

[thaumasiotes]

We didn't have the dial-a-pirate wheel, because the owner of the game kept it. So we used a handwritten table my mother compiled from the wheel.

For LOOM, which was just a chart of arbitrary symbols, we had a xeroxed copy of the chart.

[mathgeek]

Sid’s biography is a great read if you are interested in the details behind these things.

[thaumasiotes]

What, did he intentionally sabotage the copy protection at MicroProse?