War

After playing civilization, I have decided to experiment with new methods and aspects of the game. This week I decided to declare war another a neighboring civilization. Here were my reasons in choosing that particular civilization.

1.Location- it bordered my civilization. I am the largest civilization and by acquiring this civilization and can add to my landmass.

2.Resources- this civilization had a surplus of ports, harbors and resources. It has fantastic infrastructure but lacked military making it prone to attack.

I am currently in the war and winning. Because of my strong standing in the game I found it easy to get civilizations to join. I ended up getting the other civilization to ask me to end the war and surrender. I consequently expanded my empire and became even stronger. I do however think that who you choose to go with is key. My opponent was weak and had the risk of being attacked. This is why I was able to defeat them so easily. I was lucky as it has all of the aspects in my favor, this does not also happen.

How Realistic is Civilization?

After playing the game for a few weeks now and catching myself playing for 3 hours in a row without realizing it, I am advancing pretty quickly in the game. I am the leading civilization, and have been throughout the entire game and have been since I started. I am currently in the 18th century. In reality how many civilizations begin as the most powerful and held that power for that length of time. None. Not the Greek Empire, Roman Empire, the Persians or the Egyptian that all at one point were at the top of their game. While empires like Japan and China have survived the length of time, they never were the top civilization. Because of this I am beginning to wonder how realistic the game is? Yes you can give your cities different names, but historically is the game accurate? For example in one of my cities currently houses the Parthenon, the Scottish Yard, Versailles, Palaces Stone Henge, The great library, an Academy to a great scholar, The Sistine Chapel, and Oxford University, and I am currently working on the Statue of Liberity amongst other things. It houses all this while producing both a strong military / naval forces and while building factories and industrializing my cities. In the world today all of these famous national landmarks exist. However some of them don’t even exist in the same country, so why is it that I have the ability to build them all in one civilization? I just begin to wonder, how long could a city really remain this powerful in reality without falling apart.

The Roman Empire eventually failed despite its apparent sophistication eventually. It lacked taxes and simply ran out of wars to fight, land to conquer and consequently their economy weakened making in vulnerable to invasion. I begin to wonder…why has this yet happen to my Civilization. I am not going out and conquering the land as the Romans did. But in reality why has not another civilization invaded my territory or attempted to? In all the years my civilization has now “existed” in reality with its wealth and power it would not go untouched for so long. I just begin to think it is unreasonable. Civilization does a great job of teaching you about empires develop and finding a balance between culture, religion, protection, food and development. However I think in the aspect of going to war, nations invading or lasting to the extent that mine has I am not sure if it true to the real world.

The theme of military and protection became very important while playing civilization. One of the first aspects you need to consider when building a city and later and empire is the type of protection that you are going to use. I learned there is a variety of ways to protect your civilization, and as time progress methods that were successful before no longer are, thus it requires the constant development of technology in metals to be able to keep up. Of course to be able to develop steel, iron and copper one needs to establish a food surplus. According to Heilbroner “In premarket societies, wealth tended to follow power” (Heilbroner 21). Therefore in order to be able to protect yourself and be powerful you need to have wealth. Wealth in a premarket economy parallels the amount of surplus of food you have. As time progressed to basic warrior would no longer survive when fighting an opponent. Therefore all my attention was focused at developing military and later naval forces. Including swordsmen, gunpowder, developing chemistry, engineering and later ships that would fight offshore including the galleon. I quickly learned that even if I was not going to be fighting wars, my military capabilities reflected the ways in which other civilizations interacted with me, The stronger military power I had, the more civil out interactions were and the more seriously they took me as a leader of the empire.

Works Cited:
Heilbroner, Robert L and William Milberg. The Making of Economic Society. New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 1998.