Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with civilization

I'm not a hippy, but I game like one.

soelo — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:37:24 -0800

Is there a browser based Civilization clone that's any good? shmegegge asked it first on the blue, but I'm asking it here =)
I loved Civ2 the most, and I currently play KOL, AdventureQuest and Cities (RPGs, but mentioned to give you an idea of what I like). What I don't like is being forced to duel other players or protect my land from them. I only wanna fight the game!

And it doesn't have the be a civ clone as much as have building and research be a big part of the game play. Facebook games are good, too.

Can I play CivIV mods on the mac?

ChrisR — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:29:47 -0800

Do Civilization IV mods such as Fall From Heaven and Fall From Heaven 2 work in the Mac OSX version of Civ IV? If so, how do I install them?

Where did flour come from?

allfortheBoss — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:21:32 -0800

Where did flour come from? So I was recently thinking about my diet and the un-natural components of it, and I started thinking about how weird it is that the staple of our diet is a ground up seed, that is then mixed with water and other stuff and baked. Seems sorta un-natural to me...Where did this idea start, what was going through the first guy(or girl)'s head when he/she took a wheat grain and ground it up and made a paste with it? Why did it happen? Where did it happen? How did it develop?

Is Civilization worth the angst?

spinturtle — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:05:20 -0800

I've finally convinced myself that it's time to get Civilization IV, but after reading some reviews I'm worried about the lag/crashing problem (although even the reviewers that complain about the lag still seem to love the game). I've read this question and this question, but was wondering if anyone has more recent info - new patches, newer Macbook eliminates the issue? I'm using a Macbook purchased in January of this year (OSX 10.5.5), but I'm honestly not technical enough to know what other info you might want to know (if you tell me *exactly*where to look, though, I'm sure I could figure it out). So my question boils down to this - will I be ripping my hair out as the game crashes every 4 minutes, or will I enjoy myself for hours on end and only experience infrequent moments of lag?

Is there anywhere I can purchase and download a copy of Civilization 4 for the Mac?

Optimus Chyme — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 13:23:47 -0800

Is there anywhere I can purchase and download a copy of Civilization 4 for the Mac? I've got a jonesing for Civ, and I'd prefer to buy a copy and download it rather than hunt all over the city on a Sunday afternoon. Direct2Drive seems to not even carry it and everywhere else is, you know, a physical copy. But I want it now, because I am a child. Any ideas?

(Note to developers and publishers: this is why people pirate games, you stupid, stupid idiots.)

Real-life tech-tree

Anything — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 02:54:12 -0800

"In order to feasibly produce, say, transparent adhesive tape, integrated circuits or sugar-free soft drinks, you need such-and-such materials and such-and-such equipment, which in turn depend on other things, all the way down to ores and fuel and such. So if you want to build your very own set of night vision goggles from scratch, here's everything you need access to in order to get started" Has anyone compiled, for the public to see, anything resembling a real-life 'tech-tree', akin to what's found in computer games such as Civilization? Such a database would help us see our everyday objects not just as things you can use, but as products of our society, and would greatly aid me in my secret plan for world domination.

Much of this kind of information is already compiled to such places as Wikipedia, and books such as David Gingery's series on how to build a complete metalworking shop from scrap, not to mention libraries full of industry and engineering textbooks, but nowhere have I seen it in a format that lays out technological and material dependencies explicitly for neat searching.

Who was the first person in recorded history?

borkingchikapa — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 13:43:14 -0800

Who was the first person mentioned in recorded history? I remember that my high school history teacher said it was Sargon I of Akkad, but I can't find any reference to that anywhere.

How do I temporarily escape civilization?

kldickson — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:22:39 -0800

How do I temporarily escape civilization? Odd semi-philosophical, semi-practical question.

I am a rather asocial and misanthropic individual. What are ideal locations, from the ridiculously cheap (a couple hundred bucks at most) to the extreme (sky's the limit), to get away from civilization from anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks? I am incredibly disgusted with civilization in general right now.

(I have already considered doing neuroscience research after I get my PhD - I'm a neuroscience student - in Antarctica for a few years. This is already on my to-do list.)

Help find book about attempt to destroy civilization in 27 years

xpermanentx — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:51:34 -0800

What's the name of the history book about the 27 year period at in antiquity where a unknown merauding group attempted to destroy cities and many nascent civilizations? I read a review of this book online, maybe linked from Digg or Reddit about what appeared (to the guy writing the book) to be a concerted effort to destory civilization. A group, about whom very little is known, went around and sacked cities in the Middle East/North Africa/Europe maybe in a pre-Roman era. The main thing I remember about the review and the book is this "27 year" period. The cities were are razed to the ground within this little slot of time so the author believes it was a single group.

I know this sounds vague. Maybe you read the review or know the book? It sounds interesting, doesn't it?

Depress me!

poweredbybeard — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:38:03 -0800

Deforestation. Extinction. Soil depletion. Toxicity. Mental illness. Mass imprisonment. Neocolonialism. Etceterugh. What should one read for a better comprehension of just what the hell we're doing to the planet, ourselves, and eachother? What books or documentaries effectively explain/encapsulate/investigate/contextualize trends such as these? What would you say is essential reading or viewing for anyone wishing to stay conscious of the problems of modern civilization, remind others, and seek out root causes?

Aside from the obvious (An Inconvenient Truth), I suppose other examples could range anywhere from The No-nonsense Guide to the Arms Trade to Silent Spring to The Politics of Experience. Gimme more, new or classic.

What is this addictive game structure called?

argybarg — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 10:23:41 -0800

There's a certain fiendishly addictive structure in video (and other) games, and I'd like to know if anyone has named it or researched it. I'm not much of a gamer, but I have stayed up some very late nights playing Civilization and (wayy back) X-Com: UFO. There's a very basic structure to those (and many other) games, one I'd like to research and especially try to apply to the classroom. But I don't have a simple term for that structure, and I wonder if anyone knows one.

I'll try to describe the form: By taking on challenges, you gain new skills, technologies and opportunities to build; which in turn expand your ability to take on novel challenges; which get you new skills, technologies and opportunities to build; which let you take on novel challenges which ... and so on ad infinitum.

(The Tech Tree for Civilization IV might give a notion of the branching-upward structure. Each new technology makes you better able to move towards the next, which makes you better able to move towards the next...)

It's probably a basic cycle in many games (Dungeons and Dragons, perhaps Settlers of Catan). Most of these games are turn-based -- but just calling them turn-based doesn't capture that loop of attainment-leading to challenge-leading to attainment (getting that next thing that will help you fight to get that next-next thing) that makes these games so addictive.

I'd love to put that mechanism to use in the classroom, but I don't know if A) anyone has invented a generally accepted term for it; and B) if it has been researched or modeled in idealized form. Any help is most welcome. (Brainstorming what it ought to be called -- feh. I can do that.)

How do I make this sort of diagram?

argybarg — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 15:19:01 -0800

I need help charting information in a way that's intuitive. If you know Civilization, this diagram is familiar to you. (Even if you don't, it's probably self-explanatory -- it shows the progresson of civilization advances within the game and how they depend on each other.)

I want to do something similar for a math curriculum I'm designing. My questions:

1) What is this kind of diagram called?
2) What is the best method for creating one? I'm on a Mac, and I know FileMaker. I'll probably create some behind-the-scenes accounting for the final system in FileMaker, but I'd like something that I can use intuitively to arrange the sequence in a graphic format and (ideally) export it into an outline or database.

If pen-and-paper or some other hands-on system works best in your experience, I'm receptive to that outcome as well. Thoughts on the thought process also appreciated.

SpeedUpMyMacFilter

grapefruitmoon — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 22:08:11 -0800

SpeedUpMyMacFilter: Is there any way to optimize the amount of memory I have to make my Mac run certain programs at a more acceptable speed? I am both a rabid Apple geek (of the "wears scarves indoors and listens to Belle & Sebastian" variety) and completely hopelessly addicted to the Civilization game series. So, of course, as soon as Civ IV came out for the Mac, I had it pre-ordered and in my hot little hands as soon as humanly possible.

There is but one problem, with my bare-minimum-requirements-meeting 512mb of RAM, Civ takes an awful long time thinking about itself. I'm nearing the end of an Epic-length game (which in and of itself explains why I haven't oh, checked in on MeFi, in days) and it's occasionally stopping for minutes at a time - it's all but completely frozen, only mouse control is left.

Is there any way that I can, with the RAM that I have, make it not do this? Some GoFasterPlz program or something?

(Follow up: If not, where is the cheapest place to buy additional RAM online for future reference.)

72 hours to anarchy

junkbox — Mon, 08 May 2006 08:33:19 -0800

Where did I read the claim that organized society as we know it here in the US could fall apart in as little as 72 hours? I read an article at least a year ago which argued that given 72 hours without electricity, running water, police or medical services, re-suppling the local grocery store -- all those things we take for granted every day -- that what we think of as "civilization" would fall apart quite rapidly. The point of this argument was, I believe, that a stable and organized society takes a lot of time, money and effort to build, and very little to tear apart; that we are much closer to still being savages than we like to admit to ourselves. The article itself may have been about a much larger issue -- rebuilding Iraq, peak oil, rising cost of social welfare, homeland security, I can't remember -- but somehow this "72 hours" number stuck in my brain.

I was reminded of the article during the hurricane Katrina disaster, but my Google-fu has failed to turn it up again. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I am 85% certain of the 72 hours factoid. All other recollections about this article may be fabrications of my own poor memory.

Pre-Apocalypse Living In A Post-Apocalypse World

cyrusdogstar — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 08:59:52 -0800

Ways to maximize one's chances of survival, or even to regain some mere semblance of pre-disaster developed-world lifestyle, after an apocalyptic event? Apologies for any incoherence, and for any overlap with previous questions. I searched for a handful of words/tags and found nothing that really matched.

I was thinking about the average post-apocalyptic scenario, and how the authors of such usually present the world and how society and technology exist afterwards.

The stories taking place long after the event show a feudal/medieval society where the old world technology exists only in a few artifacts (e.g. Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East). The ones closer to the event show people still trying to use remaining scrap, such as fighting over existing resources required to run technology, like gas for vehicles (e.g. Road Warrior).

The main reasoning behind these scenarios appears to be: current technology depends on the entirety of civilization, and could not exist outside it. For example, take a machine gun--even if you had blueprints for one, you'd still need raw materials, mining abilities, the machinery for both of those, electricity and its infrastructure, and so on and so forth.

So, given that any sufficiently "modern" piece of equipment requires a pyramid of now-mostly-destroyed technology, I wonder: just what could a sufficiently driven individual or group accomplish post-apocalypse? Consider it fairly open-ended w/r/t timeline and amount of left-over pre-apocalypse tech (within reason).

Advanced civilizations on various continents

event — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:29:05 -0800

Pre-industrial age: the Egyptians in Africa, Chinese in Asia, the Aztecs/Incas/Mayans in South America. Why did an equivalently advanced civilization never develop in North America?

Vital, earth-shattering question...

jpburns — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 07:48:47 -0800

When men wear pajamas, should they go commando or wear underwear? Yes... this is to settle an argument between me, and my wife and daughter. I say commando (pajamas are a clothing unto themselves, and require no undergarments), while my wife and daughter are grossed out. Who's right?