Several years ago, after high school, during university studies, I remember how a few evenings, before going to sleep, I turned on the computer thinking "well let's play Civilization for an hour, before going to bed, just to get to sleep". After moving my armies, attacking neighboring populations, making peace negotiations, founding a new city, discovering new technologies and fixing public order problems, I turned off my computer and discovered to my surprise and terror that they had made 6 am ...This was Civilization di Sid Meyer, a masterpiece in the history of videogames that never tired and that made you spend hours and hours in front of the screen without being aware of it. Civilization can be played on the PC and also online via the internet for free.
For those unfamiliar with Civilization, let me briefly say it is a turn-based strategy game where it is necessary to develop a civilization from scratch and make it grow faster than rival countries. Of course, civilization with advanced technology will eventually beat all other nations to conquer the world. But you don't necessarily have to play as a conqueror, you can also establish a relationship of peace with all your neighbors and live in peace or live on an island, lock it up and be quiet in isolation.
La ability to simulate political and military scenarios of Civilization it is considered by many to be a true test of a person's leadership ability and a geographic test of how resource distribution can dramatically impact a country's prosperity. Despite some flaws and some bugs in the opponents' artificial intelligence, the game makes an extremely realistic simulation of political and commercial relations between peoples and is extremely instructive.
The official Civilization game you can buy it in stores in the 2019 Civilization 6 version.
Those who want to play the first Civilization for free can instead connect to the Play Classic Games site, where the original versions of Civilization 1 and 2, free online.
Those who do not want to pay but still enjoy this amazing game, for free, can instead download the free opensource versions of Civilization, absolutely identical to the original. These are FreeCiv e C-evoTwo free games, also translated in your language, equal to the real Civilization, to download and install on Windows, Linux and Mac PCs and to play online too. FreeCiv is the most alive project, really comparable to the original Civilization, also playable online on the browser at play.freeciv.org
While open-source games usually have horrible graphics, FreeCiv, from this point of view, it is saved with one neat and pleasant graphics.
Before starting a game you have to choose whether to start with a randomly created Earth and play alone against the computer or whether to join a game that has already started and play online. Among other options you can configure the number of opponents to fight against and how smart they must be (hence the difficulty level). Furthermore, for the Earth on which you then begin to play, you can also decide how big it should be, how much percentage of trees, water, oceans and small islands, the average temperature and then the general orientations on the economy. , sociology, science, military regime. These kinds of possible alterations make it a lot of fun to experiment with different kinds of worlds and social trends. It must then choose which country to lead and which leader to impersonate.
On the list are the historical heads of state for each country, whether from modern states or from ancient or medieval civilizations. When the game starts, you only see a group of lighted boxes with darkness around them. Means that the world must be explored and discovered as you develop and progress in the game. The first thing to decide is the location in which found the first city and start development.
The movement of the characters can be done with the keyboard or with the mouse and, by clicking with the right button on each box or object, you will see detailed statistics and cards. The game is turn-based but if an explorer is told to go 20 squares up, the move will be automatic until it reaches its destination. The game, therefore, despite being made up of reasoning, can also run fast if you already had clear ideas about what to do. Every time you click on a city, you will find all the information relating to the production of resources, the levels of happiness and much more.
Each city can be improved with new buildings, then you can create new roads in your territory to make military or commercial units move faster, you can create defensive barriers or irrigated fields. When you come across other civilizations, diplomacy begins with a dialogue between leaders that can bring peace and trade agreements or declarations of war. Each leader, depending on the people he meets, has a different character, can therefore be more aggressive, expansionist or peaceful. During development, scientists, depending on the resources provided, discover new technologies that can be oriented towards warfare or towards religion, philosophy, culture and commerce.
Anyone who has played Civilization in the past will find FreeCiv absolutely up to scratch while for those who have never played it, I can only strongly advise you to try and fall in love with this masterpiece that has made the history of PC video games.
If you don't like FreeCiv, a great alternative is FreeCol open source clone of another game called Colonization, similar but with some differences from Civilization, based more on a colonization of a new world than on the creation of civilization. We must therefore attract settlers with money or with religious freedom, collaborate with Europe, choose whether to become a friend or foe of the Native Americans, whether to plunder them or make them collaborate in the birth of the new world.
FreCiv was on my list of free games for Windows, Linux and Mac.
Play Civilization for free on PC and online with FreeCiv and FreeCol
