Re: Civ VII: OMG they're selling horse armor

On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:48:44 -0500, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:

On Sat, 22 Mar 2025 10:17:42 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:55:58 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

...I'm beginning to think I'll stick with IV, V and VI.

You're not the only one.

Apparently fewer people are playing "Civilization VII" than are
playing "Civilization 5" right now (and it's about half of those
playing "Civilization VI").* It's not a good sign when a game released
one month ago is being trounced by a game released a decade-and-a-half
earlier.** And the publisher's intent to push monetizations hasn't
made users any happier.

Just discovered I have Civ 1 for Windows 3.11 and it works perfectly in
DosBox!

Yup. A surprising number of Windows 3.1 games and apps run in DOSBox
without issue (you start seeing problems with Win32-era games,
although some of those still work in regular DOSBox). And the handful
that don't work in unmodified DOSBox will usually work in one of the
forks, like DOSBox-X. But WinCiv is a champ, and runs without any
fiddling about.

(A bigger problem was just Windows 3.1 itself; DLL-hell reigned
supreme, and Apple's QuickTime was a major offender. It's often easier
to have multiple Win3x environments than trying to get multiple games
to run under the same Windows 3 install.)

I've a fondness for WinCiv over the DOS original, simply because it
has a bug built into it that lets you reassign worker-units multiple
times on the same turn, which makes it a lot faster to build roads.
One of my biggest gripes with the Civilization games was how long it
takes to move units across long-distances, even into the modern age.
So I usually 'cheat' by building a continent-spanning road-network,
just because it makes the game feel more realistic (and a lot less
aggravating).


(Even DOSBox-X isn't perfect; there are some games that just don't run
in its emulated sandbox. But most do, and for the most difficult you
can even load regular MS-DOS and give the apps an even more realistic
environment. "The CHAOS Continuum" (a rather forgettable Myst-clone)
would crash continuously unless I did that. And if that still doesn't
work, things like x86box usually do. Or just Real Hardware(tm),
although for most people that isn't an option. It is for me, though
;-)