"I have discovered. I have led. I have conquered. I have inspired. I have built a civilization to stand the test of time. What will your civilization stand for?"
— Civilization V trailer
Civilization is a popular "4X" Long Runner game series. The original game was developed in 1991 by Sid Meier, and there have been six direct sequels as of February 7, 2025, numerous expansion packs, and many spin-offs (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Colonization, Civilization: Call to Power, Civilization: Beyond Earth), as well as the much simplified Civilization Revolution for home consoles, the Nintendo DS and iPhone, Civ World for Facebook, and the MMO Civilization Online. The game was originally inspired by a Board Game, and has since spawned three others. Many polls and lists of the best computer games ever developed have, at various times, listed several of the games in the series, often at #1.
The general concept is that the player controls a civilization from the stone age through the present day into the space age. The first installments gave you two ways to win: conquering everyone, or sending a colony to Alpha Centauri. Later games added more win conditions: get elected leader of the world by the United Nations, controlling a dominant chunk of the planet (which kind of renders obsolete the "conquer everyone" goal, which is probably why it was removed again later), convert everyone to your religion, or create a culture so influential that it engulfs everyone else's.
All aspects of the civilization are under the control of the player, including exploration, technological advancement, expansion, material production, culture, religion, military development and deployment, foreign negotiations, and trade. The world was viewed from a 3/4 perspective until IV let you zoom in/out and move the camera around, and took place on square-shaped tiles until V moved to hex. The game's open-ended play, and the multiple settings (involving world size, terrain, opposing civilizations, multiple victory scenarios, game play speed and difficulty) mean that every game can be different from the previous one.
It is (in)famous for leading to gameplay sessions that extend well past the player's original self-imposed deadline, so much so that a joke "Civilization Anonymous" website was made.
(Unfortunately the link now redirects to the series' main page, but the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has preserved the original.)
"Baba Yetu" ("Our Father" in Swahili), the menu music from Civilization IV,note became the first song from a video game to ever win a Grammy Award, which hopefully will spur the Grammy Awards into including an award for "interactive fiction" music scores and songs.
Not to be confused with the 1916 silent film with the same title or the noted 1969 BBC documentary about art history.
The franchise so far consists of the following games:
- Civilization (1991)
- Civilization II (1996)
- Civilization III (2001)
- Civilization IV (2005)
- Civilization Revolution (2008)
- Civilization V (2010)
- Civilization: Beyond Earth (2014)
- Civilization VI (2016)
- Civilization VII (2025)
This game provides examples of:
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Series-Wide
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Many, as a game which truly approximated all the headaches of running an Empire would only be interesting to professors, extremely hardcore gamers, and megalomaniacs.
- Alliance Meter: Every game tracks your relationships with other civilizations using one, factoring in both opinions and existing treaties.
- Always Chaotic Evil: Barbarians are universally violent into Omnicidal Maniac territory and, unlike other civs, they simply cannot be reasoned with whatsoever. Most of the time, Violence Is the Only Option when dealing with Barbarians. Averted with VI's Barbarian Clans game mode, which allows barbarian camps to eventually become city-states if they aren't destroyed first, as well as allowing a few diplomatic options with them even before this.
- Anachronism Stew: Somewhat unavoidable in a freeform game that features myriad historical civilizations, many of whom never existed (and in some cases, couldn't possibly have existed) in the same time or place as one another. Add various religions and government styles to the mix and you have a recipe for oddness. Said oddness, however, is a major source of the game's charm after a weirdness adjustment. It leads to Romans with machine guns! George Washington in a toga! Jetpack Bismarck! GANDHI WITH THE BOMB! Even the Leader screens, which are supposed to give the player at least a certain realistic feel for a culture and a time period flub it up occasionally, such as England's Queen Elizabeth I quoting Winston Churchill and Austria's Empress Maria Theresa eating at Neuschwanstein.
- Ancestor Veneration: Ancestor Worship is available as a belief for religions that increases Culture from Shrines.
- And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: In most versions of I, II, and III, when your civilization hit certain milestones, your civilization's people would spontaneously collaborate to renovate a part of your palace (I and III) or throne room (II) as you saw fit.
- Anti Poop-Socking: Starting with IV, the game offers players the option to have the system time displayed on the UI, and has a built-in alarm clock function.
- Appeal to Force: Invoked by the leaders before the negotiations in the first two games: "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" Can also show up in V. In fact, the very same quote is sometimes used as a threat. It also can be invoked by the player as well. If you're the first to acquire nuclear weapons in the world, watch and laugh as all of the other lesser nations near you suddenly become afraid or guarded towards you.
- Arc Words: "Build a civilization to stand the test of time."
- Artifact Title: Despite the series bearing his name, Sid Meier is not the lead designer of any of the games after the first.
- Artificial Brilliance: Sometimes the AI will act like a strategic genius. In II, for example, rival civilizations will only share world maps with you if their attitude toward you is "Worshipful". Since a successful military campaign relies on knowing where your enemies are just as much as it relies on superior troops, the benefits of this strategy are obvious. Also in II, if you ever use spies or diplomats to purchase rival cities, they'll never agree to an alliance with you. And you'll deserve every declaration of war they make.
- Artificial Stupidity: So much over the various installments that all the examples were moved to the trope page.
- Artistic License – Economics: Economic systems are tuned for game balance, not realism, so they sometimes produce counter-intuitive effects.
- Artistic License – Military:
- In every version of the game, the invention of Gunpowder means the immediate advent of Musketeers/Musketmen, with Cannon being invented later. In the real world, the cannon was invented first since it was easier to make a big gunpowder weapon than a small one.
- ICBMs strike their targets whole (as in, the entire missile hits). Real life ICBMs are effectively regular rockets, and they discard booster stages as they run out of fuel. Only the nuclear warhead and its reentry vehicle will reenter the atmosphere.
- Artistic License – Nuclear Physics:
- Uranium extracted from mines can directly go into nuclear power plants, nuclear vessels and nuclear bombs. There is no process to enrich the uranium to be reactor- or weapon-grade or to breed plutonium-239. Of course, this greatly streamlines the gameplay.
- Uranium is portrayed as a glowing green crystal instead of the yellowish-green (for ore) or gray (for the metal) it really is.
- Ascended Glitch: Gandhi's love for nukes was originally thought to have been result of an integer overflow bug in the original Civilization, which supposedly resulted in Gandhi, upon adopting Democracy (which reduces a civ's aggression by 2), going from an aggression score of 1 out of 10 to 255 out of 10. However, as Sid Meier notes in his autobiography, the game's programming language could not have produced such an error in the first place, and the company has no record of any playtester ever experiencing the Nuclear Gandhi bug; Meier theorized that the perception of the bug may have been due to India's science-focused playstyle allowing the civ to survive to the end game and discover nukes significantly earlier than others, which would lead to the shock of finding a suddenly nuclear-capable Gandhi threatening other nations. Nevertheless, the urban legend has been born and the memetic impact was such that the developers have been purposefully making him a nuke monger for every major sequel afterward. Apparently when they started tracking where exactly the rumor of this bug first started circulating, they found the likely origin point to be... this very website in 2012.
- Ascended Meme: "Nuclear Gandhi." In Civ I, nuclear powers would boast that "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!", even Gandhi. This led to his characterization as a nuke-happy psycho, which was acknowledged by Civ V giving Gandhi's AI a "Use of Nukes" rating of 12 out of 10, and Civ VI making him more likely to have the "Nuke-Happy" leader agenda. This is further lampshaded in VI's Rise and Fall expansion with the "I Thought We'd Moved Past This Joke" achievement, which appears when launching a nuclear weapon as India, but with Chandragupta as the leader.
- As the Good Book Says...: The Bible is a very common source for tech quotes in IV and V—probably the single most common source, particularly for early-game techs. The Opening Narration from I and IV also starts with a paraphrase of the King James Version of Genesis 1:2. It sets the tone of the narration and gives it an "epic of evolution" feel.
- Auto-Save: The first game can autosave every fifty turns, using dedicated autosave slots. Later games give more frequent autosaves.
- Author Appeal: Meier is a huge fan of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.note The first three games include "J. S. Bach's Cathedral" as a World Wonder, which turns two unhappy citizens content in every city the player owns on the same continent.
- Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Easily invoked. An aggressive leader is likely to declare war on you if you have a smaller standing army than they do, and will often preface it by making fun of how weak you are. But if you've been focusing on your economy and technology, you can move to a war footing and start cranking out advanced units to crush your invader and start taking their cities. This is especially true in Civ V, since occupying captured cities gives a huge happiness penalty until a courthouse is built, which in turn penalizes manufacturing, economy, and combat unit morale, so wars of conquest are impractical and the advantage usually lies with the defender.
- Ax-Crazy: Mahatma Gandhi is incredibly nuke-happy. In the first game, this was falsely claimed to be down to a bug in the AI's coding, which made Gandhi almost certain to declare war if he adopted a peaceful form of government like Democracy; but in subsequent games it has been retained for the sheer comedy value. In V, despite being very reluctant to start wars unprovoked, Gandhi will rain nukes on you if you're a warmonger, as his AI has a hardcoded Nuke Production and Use of Nukes rating of 12; the maximum rating otherwise is 10. In VI, he's back with a vengeance. Every leader has a constant agenda and a random "hidden" agenda, and each leader has a specific agenda that have a high likelihood to be their random agenda. Gandhi, aside from having the face agenda of "Peacekeeper", also tends to be biased toward "Nuke Happy", making him extremely passive-aggressive and temperamental.
- Benevolent Architecture: If you or the AI is playing a Civ that has bonuses in certain terrain, the game will generally place you in said terrain. For example, in III if your civilization had the Seafaring trait, you will always start near the sea, and in V, the Celts (who get bonus faith from forests) and the Iroquois (who can travel through forests as if they were roads) will start near plenty of forest.
- Blatant Lies: Leaders may claim that "this is nowhere close to a fair deal" even when it's plainly obvious that you're making a one-to-one exchange. The idea of a "fair deal" they subsequently propose will be something that's clearly slanted in their favour. This has to do with how much they like you, but if you do nothing to appease them they'll just demand more and more from you.
- Bold Explorer: Later games in the series often have a dedicated unit, usually called something like the Scout or the Explorer, whose purpose is to quickly and cheaply uncover unknown bits of the world without having to commit an often-expensive military unit to the same job.
- Born Under the Sail: In Civilization V, the Polynesians can embark on the ocean way earlier than any other civilization. In Civilization VI, the Norwegians gain a similar ability. Taken up to its logical conclusion by the Maori in VI's Gathering Storm expansion, as they start out in the ocean and gain appropriate bonuses for doing so.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Diplomats and Spies can pay gold to make enemy cities willingly defect to your civilization.
- Brown Note: Each civilization has music that plays when you engage in diplomacy with them; Civ4 made this Evolving Music by having the song change as the years went by. Babylon's third theme starts with two trumpet blasts that are sliiightly out of key with each other.
- Building Location Restrictions: From V onward, majority of tile improvements can only be built within your own borders. Inverted when founding new cities, as they can't be placed within a certain radius of existing cities. Encampment Districts in VI also can't be placed within a one-tile radius of the City Center.
- Challenge Run: So many people enjoyed limiting themselves to just one city that it has become an option under advanced setup since IV. Brave New World takes it in Venice, a civilization that can't build settlers or annex cities.
- Chaos Architecture: In I through IV, cities radically change their layouts over time as new buildings/wonders are added, often shifting around the existing wonders to make room. V makes it a little more realistic by only showing the city itself expanding without being close enough to see the actual buildings, and wonders remain in one place for the entire game.
- Character-Driven Strategy: Gandhi will be a pacifist, while Montezuma is aggressive.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
- Some AI will take you to war several times, negotiate peace, and go right back to being "Friendly" again. Really, take it as a rule: If the AI thinks you're too weak to defend yourself (even when you really aren't), you will be attacked.
- The AI has particularly never taken into account industrial strength, wealth, and internal logistics as relevant to military affairs. Sure, you don't have a lot of strong units now, but in five turns, with your economy on a war footing... Suffice it to say, it's very easy to pull a "United States/Soviet Union in World War II" in this game.
- The AI combines this with Artificial Stupidity with alliances to declare war, particularly in III; if given enough money, it's not uncommon to see an AI sign an agreement to declare war on a civilization it's very friendly with, or a civilization it just signed peace with, or sign peace with a civilization it just signed an alliance against, or sign an alliance with one civ to declare war on a second civ, then immediately sign peace with that second civ and sign an alliance against the first civ, to the point that sufficiently large Civilization III games often devolve into chaotic world wars with the AI's all switching sides every couple of turns. It's less true in later games, but you'll still see this sort of behavior to a much lesser extent from time to time.
- Comeback Mechanic:
- In earlier games, the Great Library (of Alexandria) wonder allows the player to get for free any technology that's already known or researched later by at least two other civs. Building it allows for catching up over any given technological gap and is often worth rushing toward to outpace the competition.
- In I and II, conquering a city of a more advanced civ instantly grants a single, randomly selected technology that they know and the attacking civ lacks. This was a double-edged sword, since AI (already cheating with research) could easily catch-up with human players when their cities were poorly defended.
- There is a single wonder in every game in the series that grants one or two instantly researched technologies when built. Getting it allows to either cement your tech lead or to catch up when lagging behind.
- Espionage is designed to help civs that are lagging behind the technology race. In V in particular, once any civ reaches the Renaissance every civ gets their first spy and the main use of that spy is to steal technology. Stealing technology is much faster than researching it, ensuring that a player snowballing Science can't get too out of control.
- The World Congress in VI with Gathering Storm will eventually start holding votes to award or remove Diplomatic Victory Points, which can let civilizations who aren't winning band together to drag down the civilization who is and give them a chance to win instead. If the vote would win the leading civilization the game you can count on every other civilization voting against them.
- Comic-Book Time:
- In addition to an extreme case of Video Game Time (it's possible for a battle's outcome to change due to a forest suddenly growing around the defenders), named characters (civilization leaders and Great People) are immortal, and change appearance to suit the era (until V).
- You may notice that over the course of a game, each turn slowly changes from taking around 100 years (during the BC period) to just 1 (around the 19th or 20th century). This means it can take 1000 years to build just one barracks early game, but a city only takes a few years to build every structure in the late game.
- A Commander Is You: Starting with III, each faction can be loosely mapped to one or more of the Gimmick options, although some also fit the Spammer or Brute Force options—but see also Separate, but Identical.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: There are enough examples for a dedicated subpage.
- The Computer Is a Lying Bastard:
- Most games will claim to have their "Normal" difficulty give the human players and the AI equal advantages. Not even close.
- In V, civ leaders with high Deceptive ratings can literally lie to you. For example, a leader's status might claim that they're Friendly when they're really about to declare war on you.
- The Computer Shall Taunt You: If another civilization considers itself superior to you, they'll let you know it, and they can be quite smug and condescending.
- In general, diplomacy dialogue in both I and II gave other civilizations a never-ending air of smug condescension regardless of the circumstances. Even if they want to trade technology with you, they'll start off by saying "We note that your primitive civilization has not even discovered" whatever technology they want to trade.
- In V, one of the generic insults you might receive: "Ah, it's always nice to see my favorite city-state again."
- Cool Versus Awesome: Civilization is a game where some of the greatest leaders in history go head-to-head in a battle for world domination. Genghis Khan versus George Washington! Alexander the Great versus Catherine the Great! Nebuchadnezzar II versus Napoleon Bonaparte!
- Cosmetic Award: Improving your palace in the original Civilization, your throne room in II, and your castle in III is awesome, but never has any actual impact on gameplay. The gimmick is dropped from IV onwards.
- Creator Cameo: Sid himself appears in multiple games:
- In I, Sid's the one to announce when your civilization discovers new technology. At first he'll appear as a Greco-Roman scholar, but once you reach a certain tech level he'll instead be in a laboratory wearing a Labcoat of Science and Medicine.
- Sid Meier formally acts as your science advisor in III.
- In IV, Sid presides over the in-game tutorial, this time wearing a dark blue polo shirt with the Firaxis Games logo on it.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Submarines are very powerful against other ships, but without giving them one-use missiles, they can't attack land targets. Averted in VI—submarines (and their advanced Nuclear Sub counterparts) are now quite capable of bombarding cities and land-units, and even destroying Improvements... in fact, due to their special ability (being invisible to anything more than one hex away), they're GREAT for it, since they can easily avoid counterattacks by keeping out to sea.
- Critical Existence Failure: Mostly played straight, but some versions of the game avert this by reducing the movement points and/or combat power of heavily damaged units. In V, which averts it for most civs, it's actually the Japanese civilization's unique perk—their units don't get reduced stats for being damaged.
- Cultural Posturing: The Cultural Victory consists of developing your civ's culture to a point where it's impossible for the opposition to catch up. In Civ V vanilla, this involved building the Utopia Project once you've completed the required number of Policy Trees. In "Brave New World" and Civ VI, the mechanic was changed to building up enough Culture (your "defense") and Tourism (your "attack") for the holiday makers from the other civs to conclude that your culture is just better. After all, if everybody wears your blue jeans and listens to your rock music, you can say you've conquered the world... in a manner of speaking.
- Cutscene: The Wonders get them. In II these are made of Stock Footage, while later games have renders. V uses artistic still-images with an attached quote instead, but VI goes back to cutscenes — in this case, a sped-up animation of the wonder being built and activating.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
- In I and II, Democracy was a linear upgrade of Republic and, in many ways, the best government in the game, as it removed corruption out of the picture and offered gigantic economic bonuses. III reworked how governments operate significantly, making Democracy a virtually useless time and money sink to even research it, outside of a tiny handful of situations. But since previous two games made Democracy so damn good, many people straight-out beelined for it.
- V has a pretty bad one as the start of the game. In IV, you would select "Play Now", choose your options (civilization, map, etc), and start the game. In V, selecting "Play Now" takes you directly to the initial loading screen without giving a chance to change the options, perplexing given that most players would want to take a second to confirm their settings before starting a game that takes many hours to complete, unless they're "re-rolling" a new map.
- Ed Beach, lead designer of Civilization VI, deliberately made mechanics different enough that things players would normally do were no longer a good strategy.
- Dare to Be Badass: "Do you have what it takes to build a civilization to stand the test of time?"
- Dead Artists Are Better: Across all six installments, only two individuals have ever been depicted while they were still alive: Steve Jobs (a Great Merchant in IV and V) and Prince Buster (a Great Musician in V). Justified in that dead artists are much, much more numerous, more immeditely germane to the historic civilizations and eras that make up the bulk of the game, and generally much easier to depict without running into legal issues.
- Decapitation Strike: Since a civilization's capital usually has the most wonders and the largest population, capturing it can render an enemy civilization almost powerless. In the first two games, it can trigger a civil war, splitting that civilization into two smaller ones.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: City sieges in any game can sometimes turn into this, especially if they have a lot of defensive buildings and/or a strong garrison.
- Demoted to Extra:
- The Babylonians, a mainstay of the first three games (and one of the easiest civilizations for new players to start with, given their religious and scientific bonuses) are not featured in IV until the Beyond the Sword expansion. In V and VI, they are only made available through Downloadable Content.
- The Sioux are playable in II and are part of the "Native American" civilization in IV as their leader, Sitting Bull, but are missing in III and V .
- Various historical figures who led civilizations in previous games are only featured as minor figures in later ones. For example, Napoléon Bonaparte, Gustavus Adolphus, and Boudica — who led France, Sweden, and the Celts respectively in V — only appear as Great Generals in VI.
- Difficult, but Awesome:
- Aiming for the Domination or Conquest victory fits into this bill in many of the games. Invading other people's cities and annexing them (or Rape, Pillage, and Burn or, in V, making puppet states out of them) fits the bill. It's fun to conquer every single city, but it requires a lot of micromanagement and strategy with your units. You're also going to have to deal with a lot of unhappiness due to overpopulation, angry citizens from occupied cities and city-states, and having diplomatic relations completely cut off and every civilization declare war on you for your war-mongering attitude. This is why "military based civilizations" (i.e. Mongols, Aztecs, Huns, and the Japanese) are considered to be a high-risk/high-reward type of civilization.
- The entire point of Wonders is they are expensive to produce: other people may beat you to building one (meaning you wasted all your effort) and time spent building one could have been better spent making lots of conventional forces. But if you finish it, you get something pretty awesome that changes how you play the game.
- Disc-One Nuke: Many units are superbly strong when you first get them, but are eventually outclassed as technology continues. In III for example, the Swordsman boasts 3 attack and 2 defence and is the pinnacle of Ancient Times military technology, but once you get to the Middle Ages, Knights can outspeed them, Longbowmen outdamage them, Pikemen can stand up to them, and Swordsmen can't upgrade into more powerful units (exceptin the Conquests expansion, where they upgrade to Medieval Infantry, which can beat any other contemporary foot unit they attack in open ground). You can also of course rush to a technology with intent to get a leg up on opponents with a new unit they aren't prepared to deal with, but of course that won't last.
- Disproportionate Retribution: While spies getting caught does result in international incidents, declaring war over catching one might be going a bit far. You can do so.
- Double-Edged Buff: A civilization suffering a Dark Age can enact special Policies that grant a major boost to one aspect of its development at the cost of a substantial penalty or hindrance—for example, "Elite Forces" gives all your units double XP but raises their maintenance costs.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: It's up to the RNG, but in quite a few situations, particularly in V, it's better for your unit to take an enemy unit down to very low HP instead of outright destroying it. This is because destroying it makes your unit move in to the tile the enemy had occupied, which is usually deeper in enemy territory than the tile your unit is currently occupying, perhaps in range of an enemy city's fire.
- Easy Communication: All of your soldiers and cities can be instantly ordered to do anything, even in the ages before radio.
- Easy Logistics: Troops can "heal" (replenish their numbers) regardless of how far away they are from your civilization, and V takes this a step further with the "instant heal" promotion. Incidentally, the same game has a Logistics promotion, which allows ranged siege units to attack twice in one turn. However, healing takes a lot longer outside of friendly territory. Land units only heal at half the rate, ships and embarked units can't heal at all outside of either the "Instant Heal" or "Supply" promotions.
- Easy-Mode Mockery: The game compares you to a famous (or infamous) world leader after it ends. On easier difficulties before V, you can beat the AI by a mile and still get compared to "Warren G. Harding", or worse, "Dan Quayle".
- Elvis Lives: The King usually stops by for a cameo in each game—
- Entertainers in I appear as Elvis; in the city view screens they'll look like Elvis wearing a bard outfit in early eras, and his iconic rhinestone jumpsuit by modern times.
- Entertainers in II also appear as Elvis. Their appearance also changes with the eras, with Modern Era entertainers appearing as the King of Rock in the Adipose Rex phase of his career.
- II also has Elvis on your High Council as the Attitude Advisor! While the personalities of everyone else changes with the era, no matter what costume he's wearing, he's always Elvis.
- Elvis appears in III as Easter Eggs. If you set your PC's date to Elvis' birthday and start a regicide or capture the flag game, the "flag" unit will be Elvis. He's also in a hidden picture that appears if you wait long enough in the credits.
- In IV he's the icon representing the Great Artist in the Modern Era (even when the artist's name is William Shakespeare or Pablo Picasso!)
- Encyclopedia Exposita: The Civilopedia, which contains just about everything you need to know about the game's structures, units, technologies, terrain and resources, with a smattering of Actual History scattered throughout.
- Epic Flail: Medieval Infantry from III wield flails in combat.
- Epic Rocking: Several civs have quite lengthy themes. Special mention goes to the Middle Eastern theme from III, which clocks in at exactly 7 minutes, and two of Korea's ambient themes in VI, which each last for nearly 9 minutes.
- Epigraph: In Civilization IV, every technology has a quote with it from The Bible to Oscar Wilde to Sputnik 1. Narrated (mostly) by Leonard Nimoy. V follows suit with quotes narrated by W. Morgan Sheppard. VI continues with Sean Bean taking over, and VII follows suit with Gwendoline Christie.
- Everyone Is Bi: Leaders who flirt with the player at high relation do so regardless of the gender of the leader selected by the player. Catherine the Great has been particularly notorious for this throughout the series, but in V this was taken up to eleven, where she seems... surprisingly resigned to become your captive. Averted with Harald Bluetooth, who will make passes at and take off his helmet for female rulers, but not men.
- Evil Is Easy: Just don't engage in Diplomacy with other nations. Ever. It's certainly better than getting inconveniently betrayed or having to give them your technology and money. (See Chronic Backstabbing Disorder above.)An Emissary from the _ wishes to speak with you. Will you receive him?
[You choose Reject.] - Evil Is Hammy: Notorious warmongers such as Montezuma and Attila tend to have a lot more ham in their diet than the more peaceful leaders, especially in V.
- End-Game Results Screen: Your score is presented at the end of the game and is based on a complex metric based on the difficulty and how long it took you to finish. It's used for high score ranking.
- Eye of Horus Means Egypt: In Civilization IV, V, and VI, the icons for the Egyptian Empire are the "Eye Of Horus".
- Fictional Earth: The game always takes place on Earth and uses its cultures, and most of the games have an option to replicate a real world map, but it's also possible to use a randomly-generated map that looks nothing like the real Earth.
- Fictional Holiday: "We Love the King Day" is where one of your cities is jubilant at you acquiring a particular luxury resource. They get a boost in food production (population growth rate) and it lasts a few turns.
- Fog of War: You can't see more than a few tiles away. In IV, the Explorer and some of the promotions permit an extra square or two. If there's wild animals around, this is valuable. VI plays with the convention by having the fog resemble a map, with discovered features represented as sketches and unexplored areas as blank parchment with random monsters.
- Frontline General: It's actually a bit of a problem in some games. For example, in the Civ IV expansions, Great Generals can be attached to units, giving them access to special promotions and letting them upgrade for free when you develop a new unit type. The downside is that the game picks your best defender when the enemy attacks you, and if that's your Great General because of all the upgrades and promotions, and your combat odds aren't 100%, it's entirely possible to lose them Leeroy Jenkins style. The consensus is that Great Generals are best used for the Medic promotions (which don't influence combat order), or simply left to settle in cities for an experience bonus to new units.
- The Fundamentalist:
- There is an actual government type called Fundamentalism in II, and a Theocracy civic in IV.
- V has several "Social Policies", of which one can have either Piety or Rationalism. You are forever barred from the other, likely for this reason. No longer the case in Brave New World, however.
- The AI in Gods & Kings tends to act like this when spreading religion. If they have their own religion and you try to spread your religion in one of their cities, they get angry, slap you with a diplomatic penalty and tell you to send your missionaries somewhere else. (You can choose to ignore their warning, which will lead to more serious diplomatic repercussions.) However, they're completely okay with sending their Great Prophets and Missionaries to convert your holy city to their religion (and if they do succeed in making their religion stick in your Holy City you get the "Indoctrinated" achievementnote ). If one of your cities is converted to another civilization's, you can ask them to stop sending missionaries to your cities, and depending on the AI's feelings toward you, they may comply. (For a while, at least.) If they don't they'll give a speech about "sending the true message to your people" who are cast into "ignorance" from your religion.
- Geo Effects:
- All types of terrain give various offensive and/or defensive bonuses to units attacking to or defending from them. Furthermore, all types of terrain produce specific amounts of Food, Gold and Production, which can be altered with "Improvements" such as farms, watermills, railroads, etc.
- V's hex system now includes actual line of sight, and ranged units will need a clear shot at their target. If a hill, forest or mountain is one hex between the target and the unit, no dice. An exception is that a unit on a hill can shoot over a forest or hill, but not over a forest on a hill. Units with the "indirect fire" promotion (which is free for modern ranged units) skip all of these effects and can shoot any target in range, as long as the player can see it. (Units in III and IV also received bonuses to line-of-sight from on top of a hill, but this didn't affect combat.)
- Movement penalties for difficult terrain (forests, hills etc) are more pronounced in VI. In previous games, moving into a tile with such will cost 2 movement points if you have 2 or more, but you can still move a unit with 1 movement point into them. In VI, if you don't have at least 2 movement points, the unit can't even move into difficult terrain at all. This also buffs units that ignore difficult terrain or have movement bonuses in such.
- Glass Cannon: Cannons, catapults and various other forms of artillery are portrayed as a powerful offensive or bombardment unit with little to no defensive capabilities whatsoever, which make them easy to capture if left undefended by another military unit. This is averted in II, where artillery is the strongest offensive unit and decent defensively. II doesn't have any unit capture, however. In V, archers, catapults and other ranged units can fire from further away than in front of the enemy's faces (usually leading in previous games to getting smacked down without an escort on the same tile, although in IV archers were actually the best units at defending cities before the advent of gunpowder). A necessary change as they're still as fragile as ever and units can't share spaces. Also in V, ranged units take less damage from other ranged units.
- Global Currency: Undifferentiated gold (which is still used before you research "currency" and gain the ability to trade it with other players). This "gold" in an abstract representation of each civ's buying power. Strangely enough, in IV you can use the United Nations to enact a single global currency, boosting trade. This is probably because modeling currency exchange rates is well beyond the scope of the game's economic system.
- Global Warming: Better watch that pollution, or your cities will sink! More recent games back off on this, instead occasionally altering a terrain square to an inferior type, such as grasslands to deserts, but VI's Gathering Storm expansion brought it back big-time.
- Godzilla Threshold: Using nukes turns the affected tiles into unproductive Fallout, which will hamper you strategically in the long run. However, if there's a big enemy army incoming that you can't beat conventionally, it may be worth going for the Nuclear Option so you can live another day.
- Good Pays Better: The Republic and Democracy forms of government place some restrictions on your foreign policy (harder to initiate or sustain a war effort) and support for military units, and your populace gets discontented quicker when you are engaged in war (even those not initiated by you)—not exactly easy for a player bent on conquest (at least early and mid game), compared to Despotism, Monarchy, or Communism. But the economic benefits of these government forms (especially Democracy) is astronomical, to the point that late in the game the player can still pay for a large military (with advanced technology paid for with more money that can go into research or tech trades) if they're so inclined, and become a formidable superpower. Or they're more likely to achieve the technological victory (first ship to Alpha Centauri). In first and second game Democracy is a
Game-Breaker, since it gives you immunity to corruption — your empire can run smoothly without any loss of money from its sheer size. Not only that, but keeping the majority of your citizens happy and entertained allows your cities to gain one population point per turn each as long as you had enough food to sustain growth and luxuries to stave off discontent. - Green Aesop: The early games focus on how pollution and rampant exploitation of resources is bad and eventually counter-productive, as resources and manpower spend on dealing with the fallout of heavy pollution will outweight any sort of gains.
- Gunboat Diplomacy: Permeates through all the games. V: Brave New World has it by name as a tier-3 Autocracy Tenet that makes city states become more friendly with you for each turn that they're afraid of your military might, while in VI it's the name of a Policy that gives you open borders from all city-states and increases the rate at which you earn Envoys.
- Hard-Coded Hostility: Barbarians in every game. No civilization can have diplomatic relations with them, and they are hostile to every civilization.
- Hegemonic Empire: Since the third game, there is usually some form or another of a culture mechanic that allows civilizations to potentially annex cities without conflict and ultimately win the game by creating a highly influential culture that utterly overwhelms all others.
- Herd-Hitting Attack: Nukes are great for ruining people's day, as you might expect. Depending on the game they do a varying amount of direct damage to an area and then some insidious damage over time which might ruin the environment itself until cleaned up.
- Hint System: Each game will automatically give periodic hints about game features. In the city and technology screens, advisors recommend which option to pick. These hints may be turned off, with later games also letting the player to just give hints on new features.
- Historical Domain Character: Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong, Napoléon Bonaparte, Elizabeth I, Frederick the Great, Alexander the Great, Mahatma Gandhi, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Josef Stalin, Shaka Zulu... And that's just the first game.
- Hopeless War: Often, when you get close to winning, the tiny, incredibly outdated and outnumbered AI will attack you just as a last gesture of defiance. In V, they may even acknowledge the futility of the gesture, but just say that they hope to buy a little more time.
- Human Popsicle: The crew of the spaceship that flies to Alpha Centauri in the Technology victory.
- Humans Are White: With the exception of special units, all units in III and IV are white. However, the Beyond the Sword expansion for IV added different skin sets for different civilizations (Mali has black swordsmen etc).
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels:
- "Settler" (IV and V)
- "Chieftain" (I to V, Revolution)
- "Warlord" (I to V, Revolution)
- "Noble" (IV)
- "Prince" (I, II and V) / Regent (III and IV)
- "King" (I, II, V and Revolution) / Monarch (III and IV)
- "Emperor" (I to V, Revolution)
- "Demigod" (III: Play the World, Conquests mode)
- "Immortal" (IV and V)
- "Deity" (II to V, Revolution)
- "Sid" (III: Play the World, Conquests mode)
- Idle Animation: All of the leaders have them on their diplomacy screens after IV, although always on a short loop. It's especially noticeable in V, where leaders will roll their eyes, gesture for you to act and generally look confused or irritated if you're doing nothing and wasting their time.
- Instant-Win Condition: Once an ending condition is reached, that civ wins, no matter how the actual situation looks at the time. There can be a massive column of tanks ready to flatten an enemy's capital, but if their spaceship reaches Alpha Centauri, they win. Civilization V even mentions that if you want a Domination Victory, you'd better hop to it, since even if you've crushed every city around and brought their Capital to their last few health-points, they still win if they managed to launch their spaceship or completed the Utopia Project, even if half their city is burning to the ground.
- Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: In the player's favor, for once. In earlier games, if you were alone in a land that was separated from the rest of a world by a narrow one-tile isthmus (which was common, due to the random fractal maps) you could put one single unit on it and thus keep the computer from settling "your" area unless it wanted to declare war. IV and V avert this by allowing friendly units to pass friendly units, and allowing units to embark to shallow water early in the game with the right tech. However, with tricky city planning a player can still accomplish this with borders - even the tiniest area covered by borders is still unpassable without war if you deny opponents Open Borders.
- Irony: Researching the Scientific Method obsoletes monasteries and the Great Library, among other things. If your scientific research heavily depended on monasteries or the Great Library, the scientific method will actually set back your research a bit.
- Item Amplifier: Some of the Wonders that can be built will amplify the effects of any city improvements you've also built (such as the Sistine Chapel, which doubles the effects of any cathedrals you've built), or amplify unit abilities (Magellan's Expedition increasing ship mobility).
- Item-Drop Mechanic: Barbarians often have some kind of reward mechanic associated with their defeat:
- In I and II, Barbarian Leaders give a sum of gold upon defeat, representing the ransom paid by the leader's kinsmen for his release. In I the reward is always 100 Gold, but in II the amount depends on the level of Barbarian activity chosen at the game's start—from 50 for "Roving Bands" to 150 for "Raging Hordes." Also, the Barbarian Leader needs to be attacked while he is alone. If he's killed as part of a stack of units, you'll get no ransom.
- In Revolution and Revolution 2, conquered Barbarian encampments provide rewards similar to the "Goody Huts" of earlier games. For example, the survivors may join your civilization as Settlers, you might find new technology, or you may get a new military unit.Brennos the Mighty: You have captured the village of my son-in-law. He has been working on a strange seagoing craft.
- Just One More Level!: Some games directly invoke this by prompting the player with the option "Just one more turn" after they win the game or when they try to quit. In general, the games entice a "just one more turn before I go to bed" mentality that has caused several missed hours of sleep.
- Leitmotif: Starting in I and continued in IV, V, and VI, each civilization (or leader, in IV) has a particular theme song. Some of them come from existing compositions, some inspired by surviving fragments or melodies from ancient civilizations, and some are original compositions. In IV and VI the leitmotifs change with the ages, reflecting the technological development of the respective civs. V has "peace" and "war" versions of each civ's theme instead.
- Let's You and Him Fight: You can do this to the AI if you have good relations with one of the AI. Warmonger AI might even do it for free (especially Alexander), but most of the others will join in if you have a technology or two to trade and they don't feel completely outmatched.
- Lemony Narrator: Comparable to the overall changing Tone Shifts of the series, there are perceptible shifts of this nature in the Civilopedia. From I to IV, many recurring Civilopedia entries remained the same—or were expanded upon without completely rewriting—and had an academic tone. V's Civilopedia started doing away with this, sometimes outright adding snark. This more lemony, "relatable" style of writing became more pronounced in VI. A good example of this change is in the Submarine's Civilopedia entry. Short and academic in I, expanded in II, unchanged in III and barely edited in IV, but rewritten in V with a subtly lemony tone—then rewritten again with more pronounced lemon flavor in VI.
- Life-Giving Oasis: Oases are vital terrain features in desert areas, providing lots of food, some gold, and, most importantly, a source of fresh water for adjacent cities. Some civilization features make them even more valuable, like Arabia's Bazaars boosting their gold production in Civ 5.
- Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Combat-based factions like the Huns and Songhai get major bonuses in the early game, though their special abilities become less useful as the game progresses. Production, science, and culture-based factions typically start off much weaker, but their bonuses and unique units often stay useful longer. The Iroquois, for example, are crippled in the early game (as clearing forest tiles will ruin their late-game production and destroy their "roads"), but once they unlock the Lumber Mill and the Longhouse, their production skyrockets to a level that few civilizations can equal.
- Location Capture Boost:
- Early editions (I and II) allowed diplomats to instantly capture a city by spending gold, and allowed paying double the amount to prevent the other country from declaring war in response. Countries using a democracy government type are immune to being bribed.
- A nuclear weapon will kill all units inside and next to the attacked city, when normally any defending units would need to be killed one-at-a-time. After using the nuke the attacker can capture the city unopposed if they can move a unit into the city before the end of their turn. However, a nuclear attack can be blocked entirely if the defender has built the Strategic Defense Initiative.
- Low-Tech Spears: From the third game onward, spearmen are among the first combat units that civs can obtain in the Ancient Era, requiring only one or two advances on the Tech Tree to unlock. They can persist through the Classical Era but are completely inferior by the Medieval Era.
- Magically Binding Contract: In the earlier games, the players are free to break treaties as they wished. Later on, some treaties are given a minimum duration — for example, after signing a peace treaty in IV, it's actually impossible to declare war against the same player for ten turns.
- Magikarp Power:
- America's special units and bonuses only appear in the Industrial Era, but those B-52 bombers and Navy SEALs hit hard. In VI they also get the Film Studio unique building which can help them snag a late-game Cultural Victory.
- England is a naval power geared towards gaining an intercontinental empire, but crossing ocean tiles isn't possible until the Renaissance, so for the first half of the game England won't be doing anything special — except quietly bulking up on its army tech, of course. As soon as the Renaissance hits, England will be locking down maritime trade and invading all over the place with deadly Ships of the Line and Redcoats.
- Venice tends to have a rough early game because it can only control one city, meaning one wrong move can be fatal, especially if you're placed next to a warlike Civ. However, later on you'll be swimming in boatloads of cash and can simply buy whatever military units you need and bribe every other city-state to your cause, provided of course you don't instead simply use Merchants of Venice to make them your puppets.
- Medium Awareness:
- On rare occasions, when declaring war, Alexander the Great will look the player in the eye and ask, "You didn't really think I was going for a cultural victory, did you?" Hannibal does this too sometimes.
- Some of the reasons why another civ isn't on good terms with you dip into this. From V: "They think we are trying to win the game in a manner similar to theirs, and they don't like it."
- Million Mook March: Large standing armies come at a cost: the opportunity cost of building fighting units instead of other things, and whatever unit maintenance costs you incur through the size of your military. Certain government types such as communism and fascism make it easier to support large numbers of military units. V offers a few Policies that make a small army worthwhile, and the combat system generally favors small armies of high-tech units.
- Modern Stasis: You can play this game as far into the future as you like, rack up a bunch of "Future Techs", discover Fusion Power and journey into the stars. However, weapons technology in The first four games will never evolve past the date when that particular Civ game was released. This can be averted with player-made modifications or official scenarios, such as "Next War" and "Final Frontier" in the Beyond the Sword expansion for IV. V makes the aversion official with energy weapons on the Giant Death Robot and XCOM Squad.
- Modular Difficulty: In addition to the overall difficulty level, the advanced game setup allows the player to adjust factors like the threat of hostile barbarians; the abundance of resources; whether your starting location is biased towards favourable conditions; and whether new Policies and Promotions can be saved up or must be used immediately.
- Mook Commander: Starting in IV, there's Great Generals, and in V onwards, Admirals as well. In IV, the Great General can be attached to a unit to give him better upgrades and status buffs. In V and VI, the Great General/Admiral gives status buffs to units within a couple of tiles, and in VI their bonuses are limited to units of specific eras. In all games' cases, the Great General doesn't fight directly, and in IV and V, they'll be killed in action if directly attacked. In VI, they instead teleport away to safety.
- Morale Mechanic:
- The "Happiness" mechanic works like this. The happier your populace, the more productive your empire is and (from V onwards) the more frequent your Golden Ages will be; an unhappy city will shut down and potentially even revolt against you.
- There are also "Morale" promotions for units, which simply improve unit strength. In IV, it's just a normal promotion choice; in V, it's given to units trained in the city where you built your Heroic Epic.
- Also inverted in V; military units lose combat strength based on how unhappy your empire is.
- III, IV, and VI have a "war weariness" mechanic, which is based heavily on losses taken during war, amongst other factors. The higher your war weariness, the less productive your cities are. Certain government types can reduce war weariness and lessen the effect.
- Multiple Endings: Multiple win conditions, actually.
- The first two games had the warlike method (conquer every other civilization) or the peaceful method (send a spaceship to another planet). Later games introduced diplomatic, cultural, or domination-based victory conditions.
- Domination was taken out, and Revolution added Economic: Have 200,000 gold and build the World Bank wonder. This was not included in V.
- The diplomatic victory has changed quite a bit.
- In III and IV, it was about getting enough votes from the other civs to be elected the leader of the world’s nations (good luck doing this in a multiplayer game). In V, it's mostly financial. City states make requests from time to time, and if conquered by another civ, you can liberate them to guarantee a vote from them, but in practice, most influence with city states is simply bought with gold, especially if other players are competing for diplomatic victories.
- Gods & Kings added a lot more to City States, who can now have several requests active at a time and can be further influenced by Espionage (and Religion, with the right perk). Furthermore, civs can no longer vote for themselves. The AI will vote for whichever Civ they like best, so you can actually improve your chances by being nice to them.
- Brave New World again changed things around for diplomatic victory. Civs can once again vote for themselves with all of their delegates. You get delegates from city state allies, and by getting the Globalization tech and then assigning diplomats instead of spies (and some bonus delegates to be gained in other ways). If you get enough delegates, you can win with them on the next world leader vote.
- Munchkin:
- Some AI, especially in V, play to win. For example, if they have nukes and you're about to win by peaceful means, they are likely to declare war and drop those nukes. But at least they don't exploit any bugs.
- And they usually play to their strengths. Alexander for example will put his City-state relations bonus to good use by befriending as many as possible, even if he isn't going for a diplomatic victory.
- My Rules Are Not Your Rules: When playing on the higher difficulty levels, the AI doesn't actually get smarter but instead relies on simply ignoring the game rules that limit the player's own success to do as it pleases.
- The main way of controlling the player's expansion is happiness. Playing on the Prince ("normal") difficulty, the AI only gets 60% of the unhappiness that the player does, and gets more happiness to start and an extra point of happiness for each luxury. This roughly translates to allowing an AI Civ to be twice as large as a human one with the same level of happiness, on normal, the difficulty where "The AI receives no particular bonuses". The extra happiness the AI receives was toned down a bit in the Brave New World expansion.
- In earlier games, the AI will simply decide "now's a good time to instantly build a wonder". Nowadays, the cheating is mostly relegated to numbers; a lot of them.
- Higher difficulties also give the AI a pretty blatant starting boost, most notably giving it scouts to start with, and on the highest difficulty, another settler.
- In IV, you could set separate levels of difficulties for the AI in Custom Game. They don't pay much attention at all to having a higher difficulty.
- Narrator: In more recent games, they've had most of their descriptive text be read aloud, following in the footsteps of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Though in this case, they only have one person doing the job:
- Leonard Nimoy in IV. Though Nimoy wasn't hired for the expansion packs, making the new narration (by Sid Meier) rather jarring.
- W. Morgan Sheppard in V. Unlike Nimoy, he did come back for the expansions, and even did the voice-work for the marketing featurettes in Brave New World.
- Sean Bean takes over as narrator in VI. Like Sheppard, he returned for the DLCs.
- Gwendoline Christie takes over as narrator for VII, becoming the franchie's first female narrator.
- Naval Blockade: You can do this in some of the games. It prevents the blockaded city from working water tiles or gaining income from trade routes.
- Necessary Drawback:
- Building Settlers to found new cities and expand your civ's potential for long-term growth has always involved slowing or stopping your cities' natural population growth in some fashion or another.
- Nearly every unit type has some advantage and disadvantage over the basic slow melee unit. Fast melee (mounted and armour) have more movement points and usually can move after attacking, but have penalties against cities. Anti-mounted (spearman tree) are weaker than basic melee against anything that isn't their prey. Ranged units are Glass Cannons that, although able to attack without hurting themselves, will suffer against melee; the Gatling Gun and later units are equally strong in defence as in offence but can only attack adjacent targets. Siege units are strong against cities but, with few exceptions, need to use one movement point on setting up and have reduced sight range necessitating other units to spot for them. Aircraft can attack from afar without exposing their basing city or carrier but there are lots of ways for a prepared defender to punish their use.
- Nerf: In II, the Great Library wonder is buffed from I, since it expires only after researching Electricity, a late mid-game tech. III nerfs it by restoring the original game's expiration tech (University/Education) from late early game. IV nerfed it further, making it virtually useless as a +6 research wonder and a Great Scientist multiplier, making it easily one of the weakest wonders in the game. Even its form from V, while stronger than in IV, is a pale shadow of the all-powerful wonder it was in parts I-III.
- New Resource Midgame: Starting with III, strategic resources get revealed based on newly obtained technologies, and these resources enable construction of units or buildings.
- No Blood for Phlebotinum: If you don't have a resource and can't get it through trade or peaceful expansion, the only options left are either do without it or resort to violence. The Beyond the Sword expansion for IV introduces the "Greed" and "Corporate Expansion" quests, which codify this. In I and II, Democracy will completely eliminate Corruption in all of your cities but your people will get very pissy (2 Unhappy People) for every military unit that you move outside its home city. Democracy will also prevent you from breaking or refusing peace treaties with other factions, meaning that you can only fight when they break the peace or by never engaging in diplomacy.
- No Fair Cheating: Earlier games include a cheat function, allowing you to do all kinds of things, like alter amounts of gold and production, spawn and heal units, and edit enemy cities, stalling their production, reducing their population, or even straight-up deleting them, but if you enable this your score is recorded with a big red "CHEATER" tag. In V and Beyond Earth the cheat menu is absent — but playing with any mod, even purely cosmetic ones, disables all achievements.
- Non-Combat EXP: Scout units can gain Experience Points by claiming villages and discovering Natural Wonders to make up for the fact that it's difficult for them to survive direct combat with other units and gain Experience Points that way.
- Non-Entity General: Both played straight for the player's leader (although you can choose your leader from among all the available ones, AI players react to you the same way regardless), and averted by AI leaders, some of whom are much more trigger-happy than others (looking at you, Isabella), and all of whom have personalized and sometimes entertaining interactions. For instance, if presented with a deal she doesn't like, Catherine the Great may slap "the player", complete with Star Trek Shake, while if your relations are good, she may favor you with a flirtatious wink. Tick off Sumerian badass Gilgamesh, and he'll grab your throat, bring you up close for a Death Glare, then hurl you back.
- Non-Standard Game Over: The Earth will cease to exist if you use about two hundred or more Nukes.
- No Swastikas:
- The Third Reich is conspicuous in its near-total absence, although there is one quote from Adolf Hitler for IV's Fascism tech (although he's simply listed as "a German dictator" in the German version), and Erwin Rommel is featured as a Great General in Warlords. In any case, it is highly unlikely for Hitler to be playable in any future installments due to Germany's
tough censorship laws restricting the depiction of Nazi material, not to mention the PR disaster it would bring. Because of this, one of the best-known player mods to II is the so-called "Fascism Patch", which, in addition to doing a great many other things (bugfixes, better-looking units and so on) replaces the Fundamentalism government type with Fascism and gives the player appropriate units including the Stormtrooper (elite infantry) and the Dive Bomber. - There's also the World War II scenario in II; it has scripted AI, so the Axis and Allies will repeat events that happened in real life in the first few turns, like the Axis occupying Holland. On the other hand, the only built-in scenario for III dealing with World War II (in the Conquests expansion) was the Pacific Theatre.
- The "World War II: Road to War" mod included with the Beyond the Sword expansion for IV solves this problem by including two versions of each scenario—one with Hitler, and one in which he is replaced with Franz von Papen. The former is presumably taken out in countries where Nazi symbolism and direct references to the Third Reich are banned.
- Brave New World for V introduces ideologies modeled after the three major ones that emerged during the aforementioned World War II period (liberalism, communism, and fascism, just so we're on the same page). Except it's not called as such, it's freedom, order, and autocracy. One of the new Wonders introduced is Prora, a giant vacation resort... built by the Nazis. It even requires a Civilization to follow Autocracy in order to build it.
- The long-standing exclusion of Adolf Hitler and the inclusion of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong (as well as other unpleasant historical leaders included without complaint) has been somewhat controversial among fans of the series: the typical justification is that Stalin and Mao were brutal dictators who nevertheless made their countries into great powers and established governments that endured for decades (and in Mao's case, to this day), while Hitler was a brutal dictator who left his nation a smoking ruin divided amongst his enemies. However the fandom is united in their criticism of Hitler's absence in mods and scenarios where his inclusion would be appropriate, rendering him an unseen Greater-Scope Villain. V cleaned things up by using historical leaders from further back in time, like Wu Zetian for China, Catherine the Great for Russia and Otto Von Bismarck for Germany.
- The Third Reich is conspicuous in its near-total absence, although there is one quote from Adolf Hitler for IV's Fascism tech (although he's simply listed as "a German dictator" in the German version), and Erwin Rommel is featured as a Great General in Warlords. In any case, it is highly unlikely for Hitler to be playable in any future installments due to Germany's
- Not the Intended Use: The Great Library wonder is stupidly powerful in both II and III for reasons that weren't intended at all. What it does is grant a free tech advance that two other civs already know, intended as a catch-up wonder. What it means, however, is that once you have it, you can tank your research slider to zero and just farm all the gold saved this way, creating a massive surplus for later use while the AI does the research for you. And AI cheats on its research, so you cheat with it. Not having a tech lead in early game is not really a problem, but having a massive pile of gold is great for rushing construction, fielding huge armies, and carries to mid-game, allowing to blitz over AI once the Great Library is obsolete. In III, it comes with the additional bonus of being one of the best culture-generating wonders in the game.
- Nuke 'Em: Across all the games, nuclear weapons are by far the most devastating weapon that can be built (but see One-Hit Kill below). Using them, however, is something of a Moral Event Horizon as far as the game is concerned, causing all AI players to declare war with you automatically and leaving horrendous pollution behind, beginning a catastrophic period of Global Warming (A.K.A. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!). Interestingly, in IV you can get the UN to sign a nonproliferation treaty banning the building (but not use) of nuclear weapons, and an advanced player can sometimes do this after building his own nukes, leaving himself the sole nuclear armed power in the game.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder:
- Civilian units are this in every game, barring special circumstances.
- All military units are this until II, which introduced a Hit Points system to avert the "Spearman Beats Tank" problem. III simplified the combat system but reintroduced the problem. IV merged Hit Points and combat power into one figure, making Death of a Thousand Cuts a serious problem. V generally averts this, but there are a few situations where units become One Hit Point Wonders despite having 10 HP:
- Any embarked unit is instantly killed by enemy naval units moving onto their tile, unless they have Defensive Embarkment. (No longer the case as of Gods and Kings)
- Units stationed in cities are instantly killed if the city is captured or nuked.
- Civilian units attacked in melee on land are either captured or killed instantly, depending on type.
- One-Hit Polykill: An attacking unit can destroy all units in an enemy stack. Starting with Civilization III and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, it started to be replaced by a collateral damage mechanic to make massed assaults easier. The result was the "Stack of Doom" strategy, so V did away with stacks entirely.
- One Stat to Rule Them All:
- Food and population growth is the highest value stat in most Civilization games, particularly from IV onward, as it removed infrastructure requirement to grow above certain size of a city (which was particularly harsh in III). By having more population, you have more people working, more wealth being generated, and population growing. Various buildings in IV offer either percentage modifiers, so the more the city was making of a given thing, the bigger the bonus. Not to mention, in V, several buildings (such as the Library) scale proportionally based on population and kept percentage-based modifiers. It's not uncommon for people to build 2-3 cities on one playthrough and win because of this (since having lots of small cities carries a higher unhappiness penalty than having a few massive ones). Its relationship with Science makes the problem worse in V. A larger population means higher Science output, and each city you found marginally increases your technology costs, so by only having a few cities with high population, you're going to have a technological advantage over larger civs. This is apparently one of the main reasons why putting heavy emphasis on science is important, since Artificial Stupidity causes the AI to suffer technological penalties for having more cities and instead are blessed with a cheating economy so that they can put emphasis on building a lot of weak units while neglecting to properly build their own cities. It's usually better to have few strong units than to try and build as many units as possible.
- Production in VI where the population bottleneck for most of the game is Housing rather than Food, making the latter considerably less valuable than it used to be. In particular well-placed Industrial Districts can become massive powerhouses of production without ever taking up more than one tile, rapidly accelerating everything else the city wants to focus on from science to culture with the only real exception being Faith-purchased units.
- While various victory types can ignore certain stats unless you're going for their victory type (as in, faith has little value if you're not focusing on religion) no victory type can ignore science output. Science victories require you to race ahead through the tech tree as fast as possible, military units for domination are locked behind increasingly advanced technologies and wonders are also locked behind technology. And even if you're going for culture or faith victories, you need to be able to repel potential invaders and spearmen just won't cut it. This isn't as prevalent in VI due to the introduction of the culture based civics tree, but the game still doesn't really require you to focus on those for all victory types, meaning culture buildings are a secondary concern. You still do need decent cultural output for new governments and so on, but it's very easy to ignore many civics.
- Opening Narration: In the first game, this was used to cover the Loads and Loads of Loading. In IV, it was brought back as a tribute... And recited by Leonard Nimoy! V has W. Morgan Sheppard doing the opening narrations (there's one for every civ) as well as the quotes for when you research something. In VI, Sean Bean narrates, as well as voicing one of the characters in the opening cinematic.
- A Party, Also Known as an Orgy: Cities celebrating "We Love the King Day" can get a growth bonus, depending on the game. From I through III, it was only available to Democracies and Republics; other governments got production bonuses instead. In V, it's available for everyone.
- Permanent Elected Official: You—and every other civ leader—are apparently immortal and can reign for thousands of years without any chance of being elected out or overthrown.
- Personality Mechanic: The AI roleplays the various rulers. Montezuma is always happy to go to war, Gandhi is a major peace promoter and so on.
- Pimped-Out Dress: The queens usually wear fancy gowns based on their clothes in real life.
- Player Elimination: Player elimination is a victory condition. In the first game, the AI player gets a second chance if killed too early, being switched with the variant choice. The human player doesn't get this benefit, at least not until an option found in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
- Politically Correct History: The Civilopedia and leader descriptions desperately try to portray all civilizations in an entirely positive light. They glorify expansion without necessarily mentioning what that entailed (say, for the Spanish or Mongols), and gloss over some inequality. For instance, Korea's Joseon Dynasty is praised as intellectually and culturally enlightened, while not mentioning how conditions were for females. Civ V attempts to give a more rounded view on each civilisation, and also a 'judged by history' section comparing how their ethics match up to today's.
- Popular History:
- For the most part, only wonders and civs that are well ingrained in the public consciousness end up in the games (before mods and expansions, at least). Within a civ, their unique units/buildings/improvements are more often what the civ is famous for in real life, with less emphasis on what really helped the civ develop and compete.
- Averted in VI, where even the base game contained several wonders (World and Natural) that most people would be unlikely to have ever heard of — along with a Civ (Scythia) and several Leaders (Tomyris of Scythia, Mvemba a Nzinga of Kongo, Hojo Tokimune of Japan, etc) unfamiliar to those that haven't studied history extensively. Even several old-hat Civs have received leaders who are far less well-known (but perhaps more suitable) than the old, familiar faces. Gone is Alexander the Great (to be later added in a pack as the leader of the Macedon civilization), with Greece instead being led by either Pericles of Athens or Gorgo of Sparta. And rather than Augustus or Julius Caesar, Rome is spearheaded by Emperor Trajan (though Caesar would later return as a DLC leader). Add to that wonders such as Great Zimbabwe, Huey Teocalli, Mahabodhi and the Potala Palace, and you've got a great opportunity to actually learn a bunch of new stuff about history from playing the game... or, more likely, getting curious enough to read the Civilopedia entries.
- Power-Up Letdown:
- Scouts are early units excellent for exploring, mainly since they ignore most terrain movement penalties. This is nice as they can find "goody huts" or ancient ruins before other civilizations can... except when they get the "Your unit arms itself with weapons found in the ruins" event, which effectively changes the unit from a scout to an early combat unit, good in combat, but losing the movement bonus which was essentially the only reason to have the scout in the first place. V fixes this problem by having these huts upgrade scouts to archers that still have all existing scout abilities (ignore terrain cost, see farther, plus any scouting promotions it has earned). Fans have coined this unit the "scarcher", and it keeps these scouting abilities after it is upgraded through the ages, so even as a machine gunner it enjoys the scouting bonuses, while normal scouts cannot upgrade at all and thus become thoroughly obsolete for combat.
- Some of the Unique Units lose their massive bonuses when they get upgraded. The poor Zulu Impi are probably the worst, losing nearly all their unique bonuses over the next two upgrades above them.
- Primitive Clubs: The first military unit in the Tech Tree is the warrior, which from Civilization IV onwards is depicted with a simple club.
- Proud Warrior Race Guy: Some leaders act this way in their dialogue, although their behaviour towards you may not be that honorable.
- Pyramid Power: Throughout the series, the Pyramids have always been one of the available Wonders of the World, and they always grant a fairly impressive bonus to whoever builds them.
- Pyrrhic Victory: War in general can easily lead to this, especially if you're the aggressor. It increases your civ's unhappiness, forces you to divert resources from buildings, wonders, and science to military units, and causes your reputation to suffer among the rest of the leaders. Even if you succeed in your strategic goals, if you're not careful it can cripple you in the long term.
- Randomly Generated Levels: There's a selection of such maps; Pangaea, Continents, Archipelago, Fractal, etc. The randomness makes exploration an important part of the early game, to scout the shape and quality of the land and also to find your neighbors and, from V onwards, natural wonders. Some games/add-ons have preset maps too.
- Recurring Element: Across the series, the ocean and rivers have been associated with profit as much as with sea travel. Usually this is simply represented as water and river tiles granting more gold by default, but around V and VI this changed to an enhancement to trade routes. Many coastal Wonders have something to do with commerce, the "Exploration" Civic tree in V was half-naval power, half trade bonuses, and the retirement abilities of Great Admirals in VI are often similar to those of Great Merchants.
- Recycled Soundtrack: Several cases:
- The main theme and music used in the Opening Narration for I makes a return with said narration in IV.
- II took Montezuma's theme from I and made it a Leitmotif for the game itself, while an alternate take ("Tenochtitlan Revealed") is part of the in-game soundtrack. (This was also done for other I leaders who had original music: Hammurabi's theme became "Hammurabi's Code", Ramesses' theme became "Harvest of the Nile", Caesar's theme became "Augustus Rises", Alexander's theme became "Aristotle's Pupil", Mao's theme became "The Shining Path", and Gandhi's theme became "Gautama Ponders".)
- The funeral dirge that plays in II when a civilization (whether it's yours or another) is destroyed comes from the game over sequence from I. The theme came back again in IV, but this time as Bismarck's theme.
- IV specifically brings back the leitmotifs from I for most of the returning leaders: specifically Ramesses, Caesar, Montezuma, Elizabeth, Napoleon, Frederick, Stalin and Mao. For Ramesses and Stalin, their songs were first used by Hatshepsut and Peter before they got added to the game in expansions.
- Redshirt Army: "Nationhood" allows you to draft military units, but they are less effective than ones built the normal way and cost population.
- Recurring Extra: Several American native tribes. Most notable are the Cherokee and Arawak, who appeared in Colonization and were featured as City-States in "Conquest of the New World", a scenario in V.
- Reed Richards Is Useless: In some games in the series, you can research nuclear fusion, the panacea of energy technology. What can you use it for? Spaceship engines and Giant Death Robots.
- Requisite Royal Regalia: The royalty of course wear their grand robes, capes, and cool crowns.
- Reward for Removal: Some games provide a partial refund for deleting units (which one might do for, say, an outdated combat unit that's not worth the upkeep cost)—either in gold to the parent civilization or in a one-time production boost to the city the unit is stationed in.
- Rock Beats Laser:
- Due to the behind-the-scenes dice rolls, you can have some truly bizarre outcomes, like the common meme among fans of a spearman beating a tank. Each game after the first altered the combat equations in various ways without actually removing the problem. Fundamentally, it's about units having attack and (in some versions) defense values that fail to take into account basic concepts like range. Therefore, the Random Number God will eventually allow the spearman to get lucky. With the right combination of bonuses, it doesn't even need to be a lucky roll. In II, a veteran phalanx (+50% strength) in a mountain-top (x3 defence) city with walls (x3 defence) would win more often than not against anything less than a tank.
- Further, there are some "auto win" situations, as in IV, where ships and aircraft in base/port are automatically destroyed when a land unit occupies their square. Yes, this means you can take out a squadron of stealth fighters and a fleet of battleships with a club-wielding warrior (presumably they bash them into nothing while on the ground/port). V did this on water prior to the Gods & Kings expansion. Any embarked land unit can be instantly killed by any ship moving on them. Also made worse by inconsistent unit range scaling: riflemen, modern infantry and tanks are intended to be late-game counterparts of early game infantry and cavalry (swordsmen and cavalry, etc) so they are melee units with no ranged attack capability, while archers and crossbowmen (and the English Longbow deserves a special mention for having 3 range) have at least 2 range and can attack these modern units without fear of enemy retaliation. Even more strangely, in V, the late-game counterpart of archers, the machine gun, has only 1 range. You essentially lose 1 range in exchange for (much) more firepower when upgrading archers into machine guns. It's generally worth it, but could make you lose battles in some edge cases.
- In IV, on the lower difficulties, you are guaranteed to win your first encounters with barbarians. If you haven't used up these "free wins", you can create a barbarian modern armour with World Builder and your warrior will defeat it.
- In the first two games, aircraft are moveable units. Hence you jave surreal things like a phalanx beating a bomber.
- Ruthless Modern Pirates: In later games, particularly V and VI, this is what barbarians become once you hit the more modern tech ages. Their spiky tribal outposts become a more modern shantytown and they keep pace technologically with you, deploying more advanced units to harass your civilization. And since barbarian camps on the coast put out ships as well as land units, expect them to do actual piracy on your sea trade routes.
- Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: If you beeline for key technologies and civics, you can easily end up in odd situations like being in the middle of the industrial revolution without ever having figured out that wheel thing your neighbors keep talking about.
- Save Scumming: Across all the games, it's disturbingly easy to abuse the save feature to get favorable battle outcomes or avoid negative randomly generated events. Some versions try to prevent this by saving the random number generator's seed along with the game, so you get the exact same outcomes after a reload unless you do things in a different order. This option can be turned off, however.
- Schizo Tech: A particularly skilled player can roll over his spear-equipped enemies with legions of tanks. (Well, all except That One Unit...) Just like Japan did in real life.
- This is bound to happen in any game where one player runs away with the science race. What could be more satisfying than crushing enemy spearmen with Giant Death Robots?
- This problem was noticeably worse before the concept of technological eras was further developed in III. In the first two games, one could climb disturbingly far up just one or two branches of the tech tree before finally having to go back and research, say, The Wheel.
- In II and earlier, you didn't necessarily even have to go back and research it. You could trade for techs without having all the prerequisites for them, so if you had all the follow-on techs, and didn't need the specific units or abilities that a particular tech gave you (chariots, in the case of The Wheel in II), you could ignore it completely. Which could lead to hilarious exchanges with AI civs: "We notice that your puny civilization hasn't even discovered The Wheel. We'll gladly give it to you in exchange for the secret of the Automobile."
- While tech trading was taken out of V, it is possible to get units that would logically need a technology you don't have. For example, you can make Chariot Archers without Archery, Ironclads without Sailing, or Gatling Guns without Gunpowder.
- Resources can work either way in III: India's elite unit, the War Elephant, can be built without access to ivory (represented as an elephant on the map). Samurai require both horses and iron despite not being mounted units. Saltpeter is needed to build Musketmen but not Riflemen (the notion being that industrial production supplants native saltpeter as a source); however, on the other hand, a civilization that has oil but not coal still cannot build railroads (diesel or oil-fired steam locomotives apparently aren't a thing in III's 'verse). Many of these were fixed in IV (War Elephants require ivory, Samurai replace Macemen instead of Knights and don't require horses, Saltpeter was removed entirely), but you still can't build railroads without Coal.
- A 2020 update for VI includes an option to randomize the order of the tech tree within a given era, making it possible to develop a technology before its logical prerequisite (to pick a simple example, Advanced Flight before regular Flight, meaning you theoretically know how to make a jet engine, but not the hangar to build it in).
- Scoring Points: Each civ in a game is scored based on how many wonders, techs, and tiles of land they have. This doesn't always signify who has the upper-hand, but it's an okay indication of a civ's development, and decides the winner if the game goes on for too long. In most games, researching Future Tech only provides bonus points; IV is the exception, as it added happiness and health with each Future Tech, which added up fast, but it went back to being points-only in V.
- Screw the Money, This Is Personal!: Other civilizations adjust their asking price for trade goods based on how much they like you and how big of a threat you are. Alienate them enough and they'll refuse to sell you anything for any price.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: If you're rich enough you can do most anything, including paying off faction leaders for technology, cities and resources, and rushing to complete city improvements in a single turn when normally they would take dozens. Alternately, Screw The Rules, I Have Faith in VI; you have to use Faith to buy certain units, but you can also use it to buy religious buildings.
- Sea of Sand: 5 and 6 depict desert terrain as barren sand and desert hills as sand dunes, meaning that civs often build mines on the latter.
- Separate, but Identical: In full force in the first two games, aside from a few minor differences in AI personalities. Installments after III move away from this by giving unique units and buildings to each civilization and different traits to each leader, but all civs still draw from the same Tech Tree (with all that that implies).
- Settling the Frontier: As with most 4X games, you want to create new settlements early and often.
- Shout-Out: Many.
- The picture for "The Internet" world wonder is Al Gore.
- Some of the leaders' quotes are movie references ("Now I have a machinegunner. Ho ho ho.").
- As are some of the advisors' quotes ("I'm not even supposed to be here today!").
- Every game is guaranteed to contain at least one reference to the king.
- Shown Their Work: Rhye's and Fall of Civilization — a game mod usually included as a bonus in expansion packs of the formal game — a historical simulator for the entire world, is ridiculously detailed, with pretty much every tile named after a city that really exists there, and they change according to the controlling Civ.
- Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: Nukes (the missiles, not the nuclear devices from II) do far less damage to the city than they realistically should, often only destroying several buildings and knocking off a point or two of population besides the fallout. Before Brave New World, they could never completely destroy a city.
- In III they can't even totally kill units, only drop them to minimum health. Since units gain one health per turn when sitting on friendly cities, you needed to attack with a full-scale invasion force immediately afterwards for them to be useful.
- Not so much in VI. Nukes come in two forms: Nuclear (1 tile radius), and Thermonuclear (2 tile radius). They can be deployed from a silo improvement, missile submarine, or bomber, and any tile within range is a valid target. They destroy units outright, pillage any and all improvements and districts on the target tile and surrounding tiles out to their effective radius, reduce the city's population by the number of pillaged tiles, then leave behind Radiation in all those tiles for 20 turns. Any unit that ends its turn in Radiation takes 50 damage (and all units have 100 max health), more than they can heal in a single turn. Nuclear weapons will effectively render the area impassable and suppress a city for decades unless cleanup crews are deployed immediately after impact.
- Smart Bomb: Not a recommended move, but since Nukes have an area effect of wiping out (or heavily decimating) all units within one square of ground zero, one might use one in desperation if facing multiple stacks of units in proximity to each other, closing in on your territory and outnumbering and outgunning whatever units you have readily available for defense. The drawbacks being huge amounts of land pollution (also on all those squares) which you may need to clean up, and ensuring retaliation in kind (including by third parties disgusted by your use of nukes) if a nuclear war isn't already underway.
- Space Compression: Every world in the Civ series is much, MUCH smaller than real-life Earth. Later games have actually increased the compression levels so that games on larger maps won't take forever and/or fry your PCnote . (See Suspiciously Small Army below.)
- Starship Luxurious: In II, you can launch a half-assembled, rickety ship toward Alpha Centauri, as long as it has all the most crucial components. It will almost certainly fail to reach the target, but you can still try. In III, you can only launch a finished spaceship. Component list includes various important machinery... and the Planetary Party Lounge, "the most expensive discotheque and museum gallery ever made", with "professional masseuses and physical therapists (...) on hand to see to the pleasures of the body". That despite the ship being also equipped with stasis chambers.
- Suicidal Overconfidence: Zigzagged with the AI. On the one hand, if you've got a standing army of dozens of gun-toting infantry and the AI is still using horseback warriors and archers, they're probably not going to be stupid enough to declare war on you. On the other hand, if you declare war on them and predictably steamroll their civilization off the map, they are stupid enough to not throw themselves at your feet and beg for mercy, and will still snort and posture when you approach for a treaty. In V they also don't appear to take Defensive Pacts into account when judging strength, and so will eagerly throw themselves into war with a coalition that can wipe them off the map in order to fight one of the members who happens to be of lower power. Sometimes, in V, the AI will actually admit how woefully outmatched they are, but note that they're just trying to slow you down when you're about to win, often by cultural victory.
- Suspiciously Small Army: A "unit" can be anything from one ship or aircraft to ten soldiers, depending on the game. Most players, however, seem to regard this as a non-issue, regarding land and air units to represent larger groupings (what seems to be ten Riflemen is actually a whole division of rifles; what seems to be one Jet Fighter is actually a whole wing of jets). For naval units, early units like Galleys seem to be groupings, but it would actually make sense for later units to be individual ships (those things are big and expensive enough, and tend to be built in smaller numbers anyway). (See Space Compression above.)
- Symbology Research Failure: The Kremlin world wonder... is actually St. Basil's Cathedral. By V, this has become a Running Gag since the wonder portrait that pops up when you build the Kremlin depicts the actual Kremlin, while the wonder still looks like a cathedral on the world map. Averted in VI, where St. Basil's Cathedral is a Wonder in its own right, and the Kremlin doesn't appear.
- Tactical Superweapon Unit: The Giant Death Robot is a unique endgame "Super-unit" with greater melee strength than an army full of the next-most powerful unit, plus unmatched ranged strength, resistance to nuclear weapons, and the ability to upgrade it further with Future tech, such as a city-busting particle beam cannon.
- Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Starting with IV, units are placed in certain categories (Mounted, Melee, Gunpowder, Siege, etc.), each of which has certain strengths and weaknesses. VI took this a step further, adding the Ranged and Bombard distinctions between ranged units (Ranged are effective against other units but weak against city/district defenses; Bombard is the opposite) as well as "Support" units that aren't usually combat-capable by themselves, but improve nearby friendly units; e.g. a Battering Ram can be attached to melee units to increase their effectiveness against city walls.
- Melee: Simple combat units that will make up the bulk of your armies in the early ages and become obsolete later. Spearmen and Pikemen defend well against Mounted units, Axemen and Macemen are superior to other melee units and get a bonus fighting them, Swordsman is a generalist unit.
- Archery: By far the best defensive units early on. Useful for protecting cities, chokepoints and hilltops, and often get bonuses or first strike ability against melee units, but vulnerable to Mounted. Archer upgrades to the more powerful Longbowman and Crossbowman.
- Gunpowder: Strong mid-game units used offensively or defensively. Being the first Civ to develop Musketman will give you an enormous tactical edge, but these upgrade to Rifleman, Infantry and eventually Mechanized Infantry, each stronger than the last.
- Siege: Usually required for taking cities or bombarding units from far away, but vulnerable to direct attack. Quite strong defensively.
- Mounted: Very strong and mobile offensive units for early to mid-game. While they can run down Archery and Siege units and do lots of damage to most Melee types, they tend to be poor defensively and require special strategic resources like horses and iron.
- Armoured: Extremely strong Tank Goodness with hefty strategic resource requirements. Generally effective against everything but vulnerable to specific counter units like Gunships.
- Helicopter: Fast harasser and annoyance unit, strong but vulnerable to anti-air units like SAM Infantry. Functions like a modern Mounted unit. Handy to keep in the border cities. Especially if your neighbour is Germany.
- Naval: Water units with various functions. Some can transport troops for taking coastal cities, and some can bombard like Siege units.
- Take Over the World: The main goal of a Conquest or Domination victory is to conquer either all cities or all capitals in the world.
- Take That!:
- After your score is computed, it shows where you rank among a list of historical leaders. At the top are people like Augustus, Abraham Lincoln, Hammurabi, Charlemagne, and Winston Churchill. At the very bottom? Dan Quayle. Quayle's "The future will be better tomorrow" quote is also read by Nimoy in IV when you research your first Future Tech. V has a less but still somewhat silly out-of-context Bushism spoken dramatically by Morgan Sheppard: "I think we agree, the past is over."
- The announcement video for the June 2020 patch, which fixed a wide number of Game-Breaker exploits and poked fun at those who had used them, was widely considered to be a veiled Take That! towards The Spiffing Brit, whose videos had called attention to and popularised pretty much every single exploit that had been fixed.
- Tone Shift: The series as a whole has experienced several of these.
- Initially, I and II had a mostly-serious tone. I in particular seemed to go for the feel of an epic narrative given its opening sequence. Dialogue with other civs (as noted elsewhere) was mostly arrogant and haughty. Elvis was much of the source of both games' sillier moments, especially in II, where he acted as the Attitude Advisor on your High Council. (Though the High Council in general had their own hammy and silly moments.)
- III introduced a markedly sillier tone compared to the first two games. In diplomacy, leaders tend to make a lot of in-jokes or puns regarding themselves—for example, Hannibal insisting he is not a cannibal when you first meet him. If you're defeated in this game, you get treated to a screen showing your civ's leader, battered and bruised, being used as the bullseye for a dart board◊ while the other civ leaders mock you. A similar screen has them reacting poorly to being defeated◊ if you win—if they weren't allied with you, that is.
- IV retained the silly elements and in-jokey dialogue from III and introduced even more silliness. Putting aside units responding to orders in their corresponding civ's language, some take to Speaking Simlish and Sim-like grunts when idle or performing actions.
- Revolution got even more Denser and Wackier than IV. The Sim-speak is even more pronounced in this game, even among the leaders. Barbarians have rather hammy dialogue in your encounters with them. Advisors (and other leaders!) will appear on-screen and shove each other out of the way when they have something they want to tell you and you're already speaking with someone else.
- V stands out from the series has having a uplifting and awe-inspiring tone, reinforced by its use of Art Deco motifs for its UI. Where the art style of VI, Revolution and VI are more stylized or even cartoony, V aimed for a more realistic style.
- VI takes the series back to a more stylized and Lighter and Softer tone. The art direction for the leaders, units, and individual characters wouldn't be out of place in a Pixar movie. Dialogue in diplomacy retains most of the seriousness V had, though it can have some lighter moments, such as when when leaders describe what their delegation's bringing you, or when they (or you) send an invitation to a city.
- Too Dumb to Live: The AI is fond of insulting your "puny little empire" even if you own half the world and are poised to run over them with a legion of tanks. "Now I have a warrior! Ho ho ho!"
- Sometimes the AI will still treat you like that after getting their ass handed to them in a previous war. Including eventually declaring war on you again and losing just as badly.
- Even better, sometimes the AI will declare war on you from that state, only to dash their army to pieces against your technological superiority. At this point they frantically sue for peace, bribing you with gold, resources and even cities. To end a war that they started.
- In V, if the computer believes it has the upper hand in a war through some nebulous logic that apparently reaches this conclusion even if you are rapidly blitzkrieging through their cities, it will offer you a peace treaty in exchange of essentially everything you own (money, resources, cities) except for your capital. To end a war you are winning. Perhaps it's betting on your hand twitching and clicking Accept by accident.
- Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: At its heart, Civ is a game about bringing together all the greatest national leaders of human history in a battle royale for world domination, winner takes it all. Whether that is achieved through supremacy of culture or science, diplomatic overtures to become first among equals in the United Nations, being the first nation to launch a starship and build colonies on another planet, or simply wiping out all the competition.
- Unexplained Accent: The games tend to use English-speaking voice actors who phonetically say their lines in whatever language the world leader they are voicing is speaking. This extends to figures speaking languages that are not extinct like French and Spanish. In some cases, it can get so bad a native speaker of the language will have trouble understanding what the leader in question is actually saying.
- Uniqueness Rule: Wonders have always had some restriction. Initially all wonders were required to be unique on the entire map, while later games relaxed it for ordinary wonders to just having one per player. And no, no refunds if someone else was building the same wonder as you.
- Unskilled, but Strong: The AI in higher difficulties don't really improve on their skills at all, rather they simply cheat by gaining more and more advantages the higher the difficulty level is, while still falling prey to several Artificial Stupidity moments. The key to overcoming these difficulties is exploiting these flaws and using them to your advantage.
- Unstable Equilibrium: Present in all the games. An empire that manages to secure good territory early on can research faster and produce more units, making it easier for them to expand even further. The endgame is typically resolved between two or three strong empires while the weaker ones have already been wiped out or reduced to barely influential lapdogs with practically zero chance of winning.
- Variable Player Goals: Any civilization can achieve any of the win conditions, but some civs have particular traits that make achieving certain goals easier than others.
- Vast Bureaucracy: Different games have found different ways to represent this:
- The first three games have a corruption mechanic which affect individual cities, affected by government type, empire size, and the particular city's distance from the capital. This is supposed to represent a sprawling empire's tendency to be plagued by expensive red tape, inefficiency, and graft.
- IV replaces the corruption mechanic with city maintenance costs and Civics upkeep, largely representing the same thing. Unlike corruption (which drains a fixed proportion of a city's produced resources), the maintenance costs stay relatively static as the city grows - meaning that building a new city initially actually harms your economy, but once the city's developed the maintenance costs are negligible compared to the money the city produces. (By comparison, in the earlier games there was little reason not to grab land as quickly as possible as it would always at least produce something). There's also a Bureaucracy Civic, which provides a significant boost to your civ's capital (and no other city at all).
- V just gave up and made everything global; the empire itself is the basic unit of measure, instead of individual cities:
- If you build a Colosseum, it adds +X smileys to your empire's Happiness total. This makes war a lot easier, since it eliminates the catch-22 of newly-conquered citizens who are too furious to build things that would placate them. However, it does cause some Fridge Logic when you realize that angry citizens in newly-conquered, say, Shanghai are being pacified by the goings-on of a theater in New York. However, it was later changed so that basic happiness buildings can't provide more happiness than there are people in that city.
- On the other hand, other mechanics, particularly Culture, slant the game towards empires with a small number of well-developed cities. The more towns you have, the more Culture points each new policy requires; this slows down anyone who's going for a Culture Victory or who just wants the bonuses policies provide. Plus, the AI will get hostile if you encroach on (what they perceive to be) their territory.
- National Wonders: Every civilization gets to build one, but they require that each city under your control build one of a specific structure first (everyone needs a Library to build a National College in your capital, for example) so the more cities you have, the harder it becomes to build the National Wonder.
- Velvet Revolution: Using the culture mechanic allows you to bloodlessly take over rival cities by simply overwhelming them. Earlier Civ games have this as you expanding your border to envelop rival cities. Brave New World for V allows this to happen when you put so much cultural pressure on a rival ideology that their citizens revolt ("We hate being Order! We're joining Autocracy instead!"). A balance patch also allows you to conquer enemy cities by force but leave their population completely untouched and receptive to their new owners when you take them, if your culture is dominant over theirs. In the Rise and Fall expansion for VI, the new Loyalty mechanic does a similar thing: your citizens aren't going to be happy if their city is on the other side of the continent a thousand miles away from your capital and are eventually going to revolt and join another Civ unless you can find ways to placate them and keep them loyal to you.
- Veteran Unit: Unit experience mechanics have been present in all iterations of the game to date. The first two simply had a binary distinction between "veteran" and "non-veteran"; later games have added increasingly more elaborate implementations.
- Video Game Caring Potential:
- "We Love The King Day celebrated in <city name>."
- It's a part of gameplay for V; a City will request a certain resource, and if you can get hold of that resource, the local populace start getting busy.
- If a Civilization is defeated by another player and you liberate one of their former cities, they'll be back in the game and you'll be given a large relationship bonus for resurrecting them.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Poison your neighbors' water supplies! Bomb farmlands and cause the starving deaths of millions! Nuke Gandhi!
- In addition to allowing (read: encouraging) you to use slavery, Civilization also entices you to wipe out entire nations. If you manage to subjugate or genocide every race but your own, the game declares you a winner.
- Some civilizations (particularly in V) are specifically geared towards dog-kicking, like Montezuma, who gains culture by sacrificing captured enemies, or Genghis Khan, who is designed to hunt down and destroy City-States. Also, the "Autocracy" policy track is specifically modeled after conquering the world by force and all of its policies are named after unfortunate things associated with fascism.
- All the games, one way or the other, give you the option to raze captured cities to the ground instead of adding them to your empire. Since the citizens aren't observed to be fleeing anywhere, you also presumably slaughter the population when you do so. In many cases, this is the best strategic option, since AI has no clue about proper city placement. If that wasn't bad by itself, later games in the series added various mechanics that made it hard to hang onto a captured city without it revolting and breaking away while you're in the middle of a war. This strategy also encourages pillaging and burning the countryside around the city; if you wanted to keep the city, you'd want that infrastructure intact, but since you're not, may as well reap the benefits of plunder while weakening the enemy for the final blow. And then there is pure spite—knowing the city will be impossible to defend once taken, it's better to knock it off permanently, with nothing left to reclaim for the enemy units.
- Violence Is the Only Option:
- You cannot engange in diplomacy with barbarians; the only option is wiping them out.
- At higher difficulties, anything other than a Domination Victory becomes practically impossible.
- Western Zodiac: An astrological star chart provides a background in the map and main menu, and several of the signsnote are used as generic religious icons for custom religions.
- Writer on Board: Early games have a serious love for the Green Aesop, with pollution and Global Warming being extremely punishing. Later games tone it down, but never truly abandon it.
- Tech Tree: Generally containing upwards of eighty technologies. Of course, it does take 6,000 in-universe years to climb to the top of it. You start out in the Stone Age, and eventually wind up with rockets.
- In V, Culture was reworked as a secondary Tech Tree with "Social Policies". If you generate enough culture, you can activate a new ability for your civ. It's balanced out by the fact that having lots of cities makes the upgrade threshold take longer to reach; in V, research is accomplished directly by having a large population, so a sprawling empire will likely have more technology and less culture. The Cultural Victory prior to Brave New World is accomplished when you completely max out five social reform tracks and build a Wonder, so Cultural Victory is usually accomplished by having a smaller but very well-developed nation.
- VI continues V's example by creating a parallel Civics Tree which is advanced by accumulating Culture. Just like the standard Tech Tree, the Civics Tree unlocks buildings and units, as well as governments, policy cards, Governor titles (Rise and Fall onward), and diplomatic elements such as Envoys and Alliances.
- Theme Song: "Baba Yetu" from Civilization IV became the series theme, especially after becoming the first video game theme to win a Grammy Award.
Civilization Revolution
- A.I. Breaker:
- The Great Wall Wonder completely destroys them. The AI is programmed to, upon contact, constantly wage war with you, barring situations where you've managed to defeat them so thoroughly that they can only last a couple more turns if the situation continues. The Great Wall, however, forces all civilizations to be at peace with you, and to offer peace if they're at war. The way it breaks them is that rather than realize they can't fight you, they think they're in those few turns before they declare war again rather than trying anything else, and indeed, the diplomacy menu for other civs pops up a lot and has the civs you're at peace with offer peace and do nothing else on a regular basis like they would if they'd be allowed to declare war (though without trying to coerce your much stronger civ).
- War utterly breaks the AI's competence. Every single civ is supposed to prioritize war with you, and are very eager to blow all their resources on it, leaving very little for development beyond what’s required to advance. Conversely, if the AI is left to their own devices and can’t discover you, they’re scarily competent at using their resources effectively, to the point where they can complete the space shuttle well before the 1940s. As a comparison, there’s an achievement for completing it before a man was put on the moon in real life, over twenty years later.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Nearly all the wonders get this treatment barring the East India Company, which is always good and very powerful. In a game that runs at such a fast pace (193 turns max, and most games can be decided in sixty or less by a decent player) nearly all of them are just too expensive to build in the relatively short amount of time you have to devote to frivolous endeavors; even the decent ones are only situational useful instead of strong enough to justify always trying for, and most eventually go obsolete to boot. Special mention goes to the Apollo Program: it instantly hands you all technologies that remain un-researched in the game... which would be great if it wasn't unlocked by the penultimate technology requiring most of the others in the first place, and that ALSO unlocks the Technological victory option by itself (an oversight perhaps, you DO NOT have to build Apollo to go to space, you only need the Space Flight tech which unlocks all the spaceship parts at once), making the wonder largely pointless.
- Being Good Sucks: It's largely better to bully the AI and hamper them as much as possible, since diplomacy is so simplified in the first place as to not allow many options and ALL of the AI WILL declare war on you eventually; it's not a matter of "if" but "when", even for the ridiculously stoic Alexander of Greece. Playing nice generally just gives them more map control, money, freedom to expand, etc. while the most you get out of it is... selling techs to them for a pittance of gold in the window of time they choose to remain non-hostile.
- Blatant Lies: The AI will eventually stop selling techs to you under the guise of not knowing anything you don't already have ("Our People are proud but ignorant, you'll have to seek knowledge elsewhere...") despite the fact that you can see their total (real-time) tech total in the diplomacy window. When Mao Zedong has 13 techs and you have 8, it's kind of hard to believe he isn't holding out on you.
- Blow Gun: In Revolution, one of the barbarian tribes you can encounter has a spokesman who threatens you with a blow gun.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: A mechanic. If your battle odds are 7:1 in favour on the attack, it's an Overrun, and the defending unit cries out in terror and flees with accompanying sound effect. Note that sometimes the unit can't animate itself away, and you still have to sit there watching your tank corps annihilate a squad of spearmen. The Zulu have a special ability here: they win at 4:1.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: This is an effective strategy, as the Spanish, utilizing mass single Legion units combined with naval support (which is boosted indirectly by one of their civ unique bonuses) to weaken much stronger defending armies through volume attacks intended to chip them down into a killable range of defending power. With enough Legion units, you can take down pikemen armies(a powerful defensive unit a tier above Legions) note that armies are 3x as strong as individual units that comprise them and pikemen (3) are already stronger than Legions (2) individually.
- Demoted to Extra: Brennus and the Celts are demoted from a playable faction in III and IV to being AI-only barbarians in Revolution, and then brought back (under Boudicca) with the Gods & Kings expansion for V.
- Disc-One Nuke: The Horseman units are ridiculously powerful for their era. Unlocked by a basic technology that would only take you 5 turns to research, each horseman costs twice as much as the basic warrior unit but has double the attack power. More importantly, they have twice as many movement points, meaning they can cross the map and bring this power to bear very quickly. Horse armies are completely effective even on the highest difficulty of Deity and define most multiplayer matchups, as players are never truly safe from the threat they pose until they get pikemen, a unit unlocked by a mid-game tech! Much of the civ tier ranking in Revolution relates to how quickly each can field horse armies or what special bonuses they have that enhance their application.
- Fanservice:
- Cleopatra VII in the DS port constantly makes flirty gestures (if the player's on good terms with her, at least).
- The incredibly busty Catherine the Great, and Elizabeth I has a cleavage window. For a male example, Alexander the Great is muscular with flowing golden locks and a cleft chin, and every bit as flirtatious as the girls are, flexing and blowing kisses a lot. Make of that what you will, considering Alex historically was probably not blonde and possibly homosexual depending on the scholar. It makes for some amusement if nothing else.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Granting certain upgrades gives the unit a title, so you can wind up with unit called a "Ninja Samurai Knight Army." And it is just as awesome as the name would suggest.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The Modern Era diplomacy advisor is clearly modeled on Condoleeza Rice.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat:
- Purchase the Democracy perk and your production and culture increase greatly, but at the cost of your Congress vetoing you whenever you try to breaking peace treaties or refuse peace offers from rival civs. The other civs understand this limitation, and will liberally abuse it by attacking and capturing one of your cities, quickly offering you peace so you can't do anything about it, and repeating the process from there. And Congress never lets you refuse the peace offer or launch a counter-attack to reclaim your city, no matter how obvious it is that you're being played. The Senate under Republic and Democracy in I and II also vetoed any attempt to declare war or refuse peace, but the AI was less advanced then.
- Averted by the AI themselves. Not only do they not have to agree to peace on the turn you attacked them if in Democracy themselves (they are usually given it as a grace period and will often demand something in compensation if you really want to force peace again), but they will remain at war until you/they initiate diplomacy again. In certain cases, AI in Democracy can refuse peace (at least without a bribe) indefinitely while remaining in Democracy, making this a case of them playing by different rules as well!
- Secret A.I. Moves: You have things like AI spies being totally invisible (unless it's one they captured in the field from you), being able to remove settled Great People from cities and relocate them, the ability to defend a city with a 0 defense unit like a Spy/Great Person (to clarify, even though the 0 defense unit will always lose, you still have to have enough units to attack it else they keep the city; If it happens to you, the city and all 0 def units in will be captured when your last defender dies to an attacking unit), and being able to move naval or air units into your territory/block worked tiles without causing a war. There are also a host of abilities which are more akin to full-blown cheating, like unit teleportation around the map into any fog of war tile, but these were owned up to by the dev team as necessary to save on performance that proper logistical behavior would eat up on the weaker home video game consoles.
- Stealth Pun: The advance that makes the great person Leopold Stokowski more likely to appear is called "Superconductor".
- The Theme Park Version: The mainline Civilization games can be considered as the Theme Park Version of world history, but Revolution is definitely the "kiddie introductory Civilization game." Not that it's bad, per se, but it's very simplified and over-exaggerated, especially in art style and presentation.
- Too Awesome to Use: You can get an intercontinental ballistic missile that will destroy anything it hits (except for a capital city) and deal massive damage to the adjacent tiles as well. However, you can't build it—it comes with the Manhattan Project wonder, meaning that there can only be one in a single game. You may rush to build the Manhattan Project out of fear that an enemy will get to it first, only to find yourself sitting on the nuke, wondering when to use it.
- Uniqueness Rule: There's only one nuke in any single game, given to the player who builds the Manhattan Project wonder.
- Warm-Up Boss: Barbarians play this role. There's usually Barbarian villages not far from your starting position, so you're likely to run into them before you contact other civilizations. Unlike other most other games in the franchise, you actually engage in dialogue with them—but because of their Hard-Coded Hostility, it largely consists of them gloating about what they're going to do to you, cursing you for your victories over them, or dismissing them as unimportant. Barbarians also have an "Uncivilized" modifier that reduces the defense of their units by half compared to a comparable unit built by a civilization.Norte Chico: (Player), we Barbarians laugh at your excessive height and need for "culture". You will soon feel the sting of our pointy blowguns!
''Just... one... more... edit!'' *click*
