Platform: PDP-8; made a BASIC type-in program in 1971, then ported to pretty much every early microcomputer system; DOS in 1995; several Browser versions since 2002; iOS in 2008
Genre: Strategy / Simulation
Developer(s): Doug Dyment; BASIC conversion done by David H. Ahl
Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation
So, I couldn't find Go, and Core War - while very interesting - is off the list for being multiplayer (original version is missing, too.) The PLATO version of Chess is playable (through Pterm and cyber1.org) - took me a while to figure out the inputs - but as it's a basic chess program I'm not going to cover it. I'd almost throw it in the "non-game" category. You could just go to chess.com and get the exact same experience as any of the multitude of chess programs from this era. I've decided to ignore chess programs until they start gaining a bit more substance.
That means I'm moving on to Hamurabi. Aside from Spacewar!, this is the most well-known and probably most influential game from prehistory. It, and to some extent Civil War, form the foundational building blocks for resource management in the strategy, management simulation and city-builder genres. It all starts here, folks.
There's some confusion regarding who was the original author of Hamurabi. It's sometimes attributed to Richard Merrill, the DEC computer scientist who invented the FOCAL programming language, as in the DOS port, but the true author is Doug Dyment, the software support manager at DEC. An interview with Doug exists online where he confirms himself as the author, as well as him being credited in the DECUS program catalogs of the time. He explains in the interview that he based Hamurabi - which he had originally named King of Sumeria - on a description he received from a grad student of The Sumerian Game, a game from 1964 that I've previously covered. Dyment had to simplify the gameplay to fit the limited 4K memory of the PDP-8, and thus the multiple phases of the original game were cut, leaving only the first phase of food distribution and buying / selling of land remained. This is also why Hammurabi is missing an 'm' in the game; there was literally no space to fix the typo! Contrary to the popular assumption that you're playing as Hamurabi, it's actually your steward that Dyment named Hamurabi. The king, formerly called Luduga in The Sumerian Game, is unnamed here.
Dyment created King of Sumeria in 1968, which was then listed in the DECUS program library in 1969. How much exposure it got, I'm not 100% sure, but it seems like it got quite a bit, with numerous versions of the game being written in the following years, including French versions. The single most important version, however, is the BASIC conversion programmed by fellow DEC employee, David Ahl. He would include his version of the game in his legendary book 101 BASIC Computer Games from 1973 onward (having first created the conversion in 1971), and the game's popularity would skyrocket from there, especially once the microcomputer revolution began in the mid 70s. Ahl's version would be the base of every future port, and it was pretty much ported to every computer system imaginable; there's even a German DOS translation!
Just briefly, I'll note here that - as far as I'm aware - Ahl didn't make too many changes to Dyment's program. He cleaned up some of the code, and turned lines into complete sentences, adding the "I beg to report to you" line to the start of every cycle. He also added some performance assessments at the end of the game, where the game would tell you how well (or how poorly) you managed your kingdom, and whether or not the people hate you and would like to see you assassinated. Within the code itself are some rather amusing lines, such as "Rats are running wild!!", "Let's have some babies," and "How many people had full tummies?"
We're now beginning to get into the realm of games that I've had previous experience with. I've played Hamurabi before - the Apple I version, to be precise (yes, Apple I, that's not a typo.) - and beaten it with the highest ranking. It's exactly the same as the version I'm playing for this post (and most ports are the same, as far as I know), so everything I say here will apply to that version - or really any other, for that matter.
The game starts off the exact same way every time, you start year 1 with a population of 100, 1000 acres of land, and 2800 bushels of grain. You play 10 cycles, each representing a year, in which you have 3 basic decisions to make:
Whether to buy or sell land (and how much).
How many bushels of grain you allocate to feeding your people.
How many acres of land to plant grain in.
The option to sell land appears when you opt to buy no land.
The price of land is a variable, usually between 18 - 30 bushels from my experience. The decision it presents is, do you buy land when it's cheap, to have more farming land and support a bigger population? Or do you sell when it's expensive to add some extra grain to your reserves? There are benefits to both. For one, a factor the game judges you on at the end is how many acres you own per person, so making sure that it's higher than what you started with is important. On the other hand, having extra grain reserves is helpful in dealing with the game's random events (more on those in a bit.)
There is a formula to how many bushels you should feed your people to prevent starvation. It's very simple: 20 bushels per person. My usual method centres around this key number. I allocate the food necessary to keep everyone alive, and plant as much as my population allows. It does require doing some arithmetic, so I hope your maths is good, or you go the boring route and use a calculator (but where's the fun in that?) I was always a bit of a wiz with numbers, so I don't mind doing the sums in my head. Your population determines how many acres you can farm, the formula seems to be: (total population * 10) - 10. Meaning I can farm 990 of my 1000 acres with a population of 100.
Since each first year starts you off the same, the strategy for me is pretty simple:
2000 bushels allocated for food.
The remaining 800 are planted.
This strategy might vary if the price of land is high, so I might sell a few acres to get some extra grain, which I can then plant in the acres that are leftover. It was only 23 bushels per acre this time, so I went with the basic strategy this time.
A plague strikes! Bring out yer dead...
So this game didn't start out too well at all... we experienced a plague, and half of my population succumbed to it. Now is a good time to expand on the game's random events!
Hamurabi throws a few random events at the player, both good and bad. On the good side, you can have a bountiful harvest or a population boom. On the bad side, a plague can occur that will wipe out half your city's population, or rats - which each a random number of bushels each cycle - can "run wild", as the code says, and can eat a substantially higher number of bushels than normal. This is where the game's challenge resides: in dealing with these random events that occur each cycle, managing your resources wisely to ensure that your people don't starve. If too many starve, the game will end early, with you being impeached, thrown out of office and declared "national fink." The game certainly has personality. These random events help increase the replayability of Hamurabi, as no two games will ever be the same. It's a much better implementation of randomness than in PDP 10 Basketball, where every event was a random chance occurrence, making your decisions effectively irrelevant.
Things were good in this cycle from an economic standpoint. My land harvested 4 bushels of grain per acre, which is quite good; usually it hovers between 1 - 3. Nothing was eaten by rats, either. I decided to buy some land in this cycle - 50 acres, forgetting that I could only work as many acres as my population allowed. I made sure my people were fed, tried to plant seed in all my fields, with the game telling me off for trying to overwork the populace. Eventually I remembered and planted according to my population.
I think these people are just lazy.
Year 3: Another plague. Only 28 people remain the city, which is obviously not much of a city anymore. The harvest was poor, and rats ate over 300 bushels, meaning supplies are getting low.
Fortunately, land is trading at 26 bushels - a good time to sell! Seeing as I can't make much use of the land I own, might as well sell a bunch of it to replenish my granaries. I sell 300 acres, netting me 7800 bushels of grain. Never running out of food now...
For once we didn't have mass deaths, though the rats thought all their Christmases had come early.
And that's pretty much the basic gameplay loop there: buy and sell land, feed the people, plant fields and react to whatever happens over the next cycle. It's all about setting yourself up early, being well prepared for any potential disasters, or population booms. I'll briefly go over the highlights for the rest of the game:
Year 4: A relative population boom, with the population growing to 44. Rats enjoyed my freshly bought grain, though I still had more than enough in reserve for the rest of the game. Land was dirt cheap (see what I did there?), so I bought back 100 of the acres I previously sold.
Year 5: Yet another plague. Population down to 25. Rats ate nothing, and land remained at the same price as last year. I bought back another 50 acres.
Year 6: +17 population, back up to 42. Rats were busy, eating 902 bushels, and my harvest was poor, but I still had enough grain to distribute across people and fields.
Year 7: Once again, plague. Makes me question why people keep coming to the city when the bubonic plague is clearly on the rampage. The rats were too busy giving everyone plague to eat anything this year, and a decent harvest meant that my grain stocks increased. Land was back down to 18 bushels, so I took advantage and bought 10 more acres.
Year 8: Guess what? Plague. You know, there's only a 15% chance of a plague occurring in any given year. 5/8 years have had plague so far. 25 people arrived in town, only to find that everyone had died of plague. Tell you what, this makes for fun narration, at least. Rats were too busy to eat again, so things were relatively unchanged in my grain reserves.
Year 9: No plague, for once, and a population boom, with 26 people arriving to bring the total back up to 51. Rats ate some grain, but I still had more than enough to see out the year. The extra population will help with harvest.
Year 10: The 15% chance strikes again. A 6th plague. 31 people remain. A poor harvest, but no rat infestation meant I still had enough to feed everyone. For some reason I decided to sell 5 acres. I'm looking at my footage from yesterday at the time of writing this, and I cannot remember why I did this.
Year 11: The final assessment. No plague, and 13 people came to the city to make the final population 44. Now the game provides its assessment on how well I did. You're graded on your performance based on how well you managed your resources throughout your kingship. The main two factors the game considers are the average percentage of the population that starved per year, and the number of acres you own per person at the end of the 10 years compared to the start. It lets you know how well you did through a statement of assessment from your steward. There are three of these, aside from the early impeachment one:
"A fantastic performance!! Charlemange, Disraeli and Jefferson combined could not have done better!" (It's at this point Hamurabi asks who these people are...)
"Your heavy-handed performance smacks of Nero and Ivan IV. The people (remaining) find you an unpleasant ruler, and, frankly, hate your guts!!"
"Your performance could have been somewhat better, but really wasn't too bad at all. (x) people dearly like to see you assassinated but we all have our trivial problems."
A fantastic performance... if you ignore all the people that died from plague, that is.
I finished with 0 deaths from starvation, and doubled the amount of land per person. Fortunately the game doesn't count deaths from plague against you, which is fair, seeing as it's out of your control. The game gave me the highest praise it could, naming all these leaders that definitelydidn't exist at the time of Hammurabi. Charlemagne's name is misspelled, by the way. Couldn't have referenced some of the other great ancient kings? Sargon? The Pharaohs of the pyramids? It's not much to ask for consistency with the game's setting?
I digress, time for the scores. Once again Sound and Story are N/A.
Time Played: A playthrough takes between 6-10 minutes. Mine took 6, though I already knew what I was doing, so 10 - 15 might be more likely for a first full playthrough.
Difficulty:2/10
It's not a difficult game to get the hang of. Once you know what the basic requirement is for keeping the population fed, it's a matter of process and reacting to variables. Even though some arithmetic is required, we have calculators to help with that. I think you'd actively have to try to play badly to get one of the worse assessments.
Gameplay: 10
It's well done for such a simple resource management game. The variables are what make it, and provide a small degree of replay value. The mechanics all work well around the central core of managing your grain resources, and all your choices have a material impact on how the game plays out. However, it does become a bit rote once you know the important numbers. The ending assessment doesn't really work out too well, either. Since it's partly based on acres per person, it's almost always going to end higher if you have a plague or two, which is almost certain at a 15% chance over 10 cycles.
Controls: 10
Very simple inputs required - only numbers, no text, and ones that aren't that big, either. Could play the whole game with a numpad.
Visual: 4
I don't quite like how Hamurabi is formatted, compared to the clarity of Civil War's presentation. It's just very... basic? The game is laid out quite plainly, without much thought to jazz it up. It gets points for the entertaining and humorous impeachment and assessment messages, but that's it.
Functionality: 5
Freebies; no glitches, and the formatting is easy to read.
Accessibility: 2
It's a text game that requires some reading and mathematics aptitude (though the maths bit can be somewhat circumvented by the handy calculator). There are no in-game instructions, either, it throws you straight into the game with a lot of details to wrap your head around straight away. My girlfriend asked about what game I was blogging about. She's not a gamer, took one look at the game and said "looks complicated!" Sort of proves my point.
Fun Factor: 9
I find it moderately enjoyable as a fan of resource management. Again, knowing the static formulas and having a calculator trivialises things a bit, but it's offset by the variables giving it some replay value. I make things more interesting on myself by not using a calculator, but I know that definitely won't be everyone's cup of tea.
Hamurabi gets a score of 40/70 (57.14%), being the first game reaching the C-tier and comfortably overtaking Computer Space as the highest rated game. It's thoroughly deserved by my reckoning, as Hamurabi it's easily the best, most well designed game up to this time in gaming history.
[Add.] Upon completing the rescore, Hamurabi has lost its crown as the highest rated game on the blog. It also lost its C-tier placement, going down to a 36/70 (51.42%)
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And thus, history was changed, but maybe not for the better...
If I'm one thing when it comes to games, it's stubborn.
Despite my discouragement with Civil War yesterday, after going away from it, I couldn't stop thinking about wanting to win. I desperately wanted to beat those battles I lost before, especially Battle 3. It was eating away at me a little bit. I hate leaving something unfinished, that's a bad habit I've had for many years.
So today I decided to come back to Civil War and give it another crack. I decided I'd experiment a bit, look into those trouble battles, and see if they had a solution. I also wanted to look at the other battles to see if there were solutions that produced better results. Then, after all that, I'd go through the game once more to see if I could win the war. As you can see, I was successful. I'll briefly talk you through how I did it.
One thing I didn't mention in the first post on Civil War (because I found this out after posting it) was that there's a formula for getting high morale in every fight. High morale is tied to your food and salary spending vs. the number of men in your army. In order to get a high morale rating, you need to spend roughly 1.44 x the number of men on food and salary. I thought inflation might affect this number, but it doesn't, so inflation is basically a meaningless stat. Once I figured this out, I could get high morale for every fight.
To figure out the precise numbers I needed for each fight, I pulled up the handy Calculator app on my laptop and my notepad document for the game, and went through each battle, did the calculations, and noted them all down. During this time, I also experimented with the strategy options to see which choice performed the best in each battle.
A little taste of my notes for Civil War.
There were a few trouble battles when it came to finding a solution. 11 (Chickamauga) was inconsistent. I managed to win it once in my testing, but only just. I actually lost it in my winning run using that strategy (I assume the computer chose a different strategy to the test run, wasn't paying attention.) However, there were three other battles that caused me quite a bit of grief:
Battle 3 (Seven Days)
Battle 12 (Chattanooga)
Battle 14 (Atlanta)
I did quite a lot of testing with these three. Actually, I did all the testing possible. What I found immensely helpful was the option to replay with 0 (which I ironically said was redundant in the first post.) It replays the battle with the exact same stats as last time, meaning I could freely test different spending combinations. It allowing you to control the Union's strategy meant I could test each possible strategy combination to see if there were any winning combinations for me.
As it turns out, there were no winning strategies for any of these three battles. None even came close. I got absolutely annihilated at Chattanooga, and the results at Atlanta and Seven Days didn't really come close to a win for me in any instance, but were less savage. It seems very clear that these battles were programmed to be unwinnable from the outset. However, I wonder if that was the original intent of Cram, Goodie and Hibbard, or if something got altered along the way in the revisions of Civil War that caused this to occur? I mostly wonder this because the fact that I can't win Seven Days as the Confederacy makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I did a little bit of research on this battle last night, and it was a battle that the Confederates won! So how come I can't win it in this game??? I find that an immensely frustrating oversight, if it indeed was an oversight. If it's intentional, I seriously question the teaching standards of Lexington High in 1968...
Anyway, I'll put up my notes for each battle here, so you can see exactly what I did. The ammo spending did vary from what my notes had in my winning run. Numbers I have in between asterisks indicate the best performing strategies if multiple strategies worked for a single battle.
Battle 1:
26k food & salary
29k ammo
Win defensive with *1*, 2, 4
Lose defensive with 3
Battle 2:
58k food & salary
68k ammo
Win offensive with 1
Lose offensive with 2, 3
Battle 3:
138k food & salary
170k ammo
Lose offensive with 1, 2, 3, 4
Seems to me that, historically, this was a frontal assault, but it never works in game. Makes no sense, as this was a Confederate win IRL. I question if this one's bugged.
Battle 4:
80k food & salary
89k ammo
Win offensive with 1
Lose offensive with 3
Battle 5:
60k food & salary
68k ammo
Win offensive with 1, 3, *4*
Lose offensive with 2
Battle 6:
110k food & salary
148k ammo
Win defensive with *1*
Battle 7:
56k food & salary
70k ammo
Win defensive with 1, 3, *4*
Lose defensive with 2
Battle 8:
47k food & salary
74k ammo
Win offensive with 1
Battle 9:
73k food & salary
120k ammo
Win defensive with 4
Battle 10:
106k food & salary
184k ammo
Win offensive with 1
Battle 11:
97k food & salary
172k ammo
Win offensive with 4
Lose offensive with 1, 2, 3
Battle 12:
55k food & salary
87k ammo
Lose offensive with 1, 2, 3, 4
I think this is another unwinnable one, 1 seemed the least worst option.
Battle 13:
92k food & salary
114k ammo
Win offensive with 1
Lose offensive with 2, 3, 4
Battle 14:
96k food & salary
114k ammo
Lose defensive with 1, 2, 3, 4
Also unwinnable, I think. 4 seems least worst.
All this netted me a result of 10 wins and 4 losses, and thus the game declared me to have won the American Civil War, and with a fair bit less bloodshed than the real thing, as can be seen in my winning screenshot. Strategy 1 was the best option for most battles, with 4 as second-best. I never found 2 to work outside of the first battle, and 3 worked occasionally. Nothing's changing in my scores after this run, but I did spend about another hour all up playing and experimenting with the game. Though I suspect that score revisions will happen in the future as more games are added and my experience increases. However, I'll drop the difficulty down a point to 3/10, since it's really not that hard to figure out how to win enough battles to win the war. Though I'm not entirely sure that's how war works in reality...
There's a couple of games I'm not sure about next on the list, Chess and Go. Will need to have a look into them to see if they're not missing, and then if they're worth playing. The next landmark game after that is Hamurabi, which I'm quite looking forward to.
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You know, I'm starting to think my little disclaimer at the beginning of these Prehistory articles is becoming a bit superfluous. When starting the project, I assumed everything was going to be either unplayable, or unranked due to multiplayer / oversimplicity reasons, hence the disclaimer. Turns out I was wrong on that front, which is hardly surprising, since I didn't put much effort digging into this time period initially. From now on I'm not going to bother with the disclaimer note.
Before getting into Civil War, some business needs to be attended to. There are a couple of games on my list that come before it, Reflect and The New Clea Casino. Both are oddball educational games programmed for the PDP-10, but I can't find anything on them, despite MobyGames assigning them more precise dates in 1968. Searching for them or their authors just comes up with a load of bizarre, unrelated nonsense, so I'm declaring them missing and won't be covering them. They seem like interesting games, though, so I hope they appear in the future.
Now, time to get back into playing something after the previous little history lesson... oh, wait. Never mind. We're getting another history lesson anyway (plus, it is kind of the point of this whole blog...)
Release Date: 1968; included in 101 BASIC Computer Games in 1973
Platform: HP 2000; later a BASIC type-in program and ported to various home computer systems
Genre: Strategy / Simulation
Developer(s): Larry Cram, Luther Goodie, Doug Hibbard
Publisher(s): Creative Computing Software
Moving on to 1968 now. More than twice the games I had for 1967, but I suspect most of them will turn up missing. What's strange is that 1968 in my list has more games than 1969 and 1971. 1968 has nine, while 1969 only has five, and 1971 has eight at the current count. Should be able to breeze through the rest of the decade, then. Just you wait until we get to 1970, though... 22 games!
In case it wasn't obvious from the game's title, Civil War is... well, about the civil war. The American Civil War, to be exact. My history-minded brain needs to specify, as there have been many civil wars over the centuries. Could've been the English or Spanish Civil War, for all you know. Anyway, the game simulates 14 battles from the war, attempting to do so in precise detail with regards to facts, figures and strategic outcomes.
Most of my information comes from the outline given in the 1973 version of 101 BASIC Computer Games. Apparently, if you know your Civil War history, you can make the same choices as the generals did in the real battles and produce the same outcomes. I won't be looking into their decisions unless I get hopelessly stuck. You can also "outperform" them, if they made sub-optimal decisions due to lack of enemy intel. My knowledge of the American Civil War extends no more beyond the Oversimplified video on it, so this should be interesting...
Civil War was written by a group of high school students: Larry Cram, Luther Goodie and Doug Hibbard, from Lexington High School in Massachusetts. That school has cropped up a few times in my list research, so I assume they must've had a computer or two there for students to learn programming and whatnot. These three students are credited as program writers in Dave Kaufman's 1975 book, What to do After You Hit Return, but I'm not sure if they wrote programs other than Civil War, as its their only credited game according to MobyGames.
Upon opening the game, it asks if you'd like to read the instructions. I usually like to read the instructions before playing a new game, so I happily take up the game's offer.
The future of America is in my hands, now. This will not end well.
This is far more complicated than anything I've played up to this point in time, which I thought might bode well for the actual gameplay. I don't see myself ever using the surrender command, even if I face Unconditional Surrender himself. Who thought that was a good nickname, by the way?
Interestingly, Civil War has a two-player option. It appears to have been a later modification to the game, being added by G. Paul and R. Hess of TIES. Not much info on TIES out there, but I found a site that told me that it's a computer programming company founded in 1967. Checks out. A link was provided to their website, but it appears to redirect to another company's site, likely suggesting that TIES is no longer around. Yet another mystery, to go alongside what the actual first names of G. Paul and R. Hess are...
After saying no to the two-player mode, the game takes me to its proper introduction, where it tells me I'm playing as... the Confederacy?!? You're telling me that I'm controlling the losingside? Great. That fills me with great hope and confidence for my chances of winning this game...
I'm gonna need a whole lot more than good luck...
As a side, I typed the 0 command to replay the game once, and it replayed the scenario in two-player mode. It's a redundant command anyway, since you can simply replay the scenario by typing in its number. Interesting little side note it provides there regarding negative food entry... must've found that little glitch during playtesting. I don't know why you'd ever type a negative number for food, but thanks for the heads up, I guess?
I figured that the easiest and most logical way to proceed with the game is to do the 14 battles in the order they're given. So, after saying yes to the battle descriptions, I start with Battle 1: The Battle of Bull Run. The battle descriptions give you a very brief overview of how the real battle went, and I suspect they also act as clues for the solution to winning.
Civil War doesn't just have you select different battle strategies, but also presents a rudimentary form of resource management that influences the results of your chosen battle strategy. Each battle scenario first presents you with the description of the battle (if you opt to have them), and then the army size, funds available and an "inflation" rating. I have no idea what effect "inflation" is supposed to have, if it even has one at all. It has no bearing on the amount of money you can spend out of your total pool. You are then asked to divide your available funds between food for your army, salaries for paying your men, and ammunition. Food and salary effect troop morale - underspending results in poor morale. I generally found that spending around $10k more than the army size for both was a good guideline for getting high morale. I assume ammunition also effects how effective your army is in the battle, but I'm not entirely sure how it works.
Making sure the troops are well paid and well fed is a good start.
You can see from the screenshot how I opted to divide my resources in this first attempt at the first battle. I figured roughly even spending on each category was a sensible decision. This resulted in my troops having high morale for the battle. The game told me I was on the defensive for this battle, and asked for my strategy. I decided an artillery strike was a good idea. Turns out it was a good idea, and I won the battle comfortably.
Well, that was easy enough. This might turn out okay, after all.
One down, 13 more to go. They can't all be this easy, right? Battle 2 is The Battle of Shiloh, which the game describes the Confederates losing on account of a poorly organised surprise attack. Already fighting an uphill battle to win this one, I see. The number of troops and funds are significantly higher for this battle, with my army consisting of over 40,000 men, with $186,300 at my disposal. The Union has similar, if slightly higher numbers. I delegate $60k to food, $75k to salaries and $50k to ammo. Morale is high. Things are looking good. I choose flanking as my strategy, and we lose. Badly.
At least we had fewer deserters.
Thus, history repeats. I decide to try again, this time selecting a frontal attack as my strategy. We lose again, but not as badly as last time. Upon reflection, I think I wasn't reading the battle descriptions properly. If it was a surprise attack, wouldn't it make sense to fire an artillery barrage first, sending the enemy into a panic? That's what I tried on my third attempt, and I was successful at winning the battle.
Then it was on to Battle 3: The Battle of Seven Days, and oh boy, do I have a lot to say about this one. I could not for the life of me figure out how to win this battle (and this is one that the Confederacy won, according to the battle description.) I tried absolutely everything, but nothing worked, and I lost badly every single time. I maybe tried the battle 10 - 15 times over.
Eventually, I noticed something as I was replaying this battle. Every time I replayed it, I had less and less money to work with. Inflation went up for me, too, and down for the Union. The numbers got pretty ridiculous, with the Union enjoying something like -40% inflation. It appears that winning and losing battles affects the inflation figures and how much money you get in each successive battle. Eventually I had less men, too, but this seems to take longer to decrease. In my first attempt at this battle, I had over $400k to work with. In my last, I had less than half that.
What kind of nightmare economy is this???
I don't know why the game does this, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. It seems, to me, to treat each battle as its own isolated scenario, as there is no tally at the end of how many battles you won or lost, and if you overall won the war or not. [I found out later that it does if you type in any number above 14] So why then is there this mechanic that treats each battle as connected? It appears to be a conflicting gameplay mechanic.
Unless the intended way of playing the game was to do each battle one after the other in succession. The battles are sequenced in chronological order, so it makes sense. Start from Battle 1, finish with 14, and see if you can win all of them in a row. I decided that would be my end goal for Civil War. But first, I wanted to see how the rest of the battles went. So I restarted the program to reset the inflation and money, but I opted to start at Battle 3, as I had already won the first two. Still couldn't win Seven Days. I gave it a few more attempts before deciding to move on to the rest of the battles.
I'll briefly list how they all went, along with the strategy I chose:
As you can see, I managed to win most of the middle battles, but lost the last four. Some were rather close losses, others were complete disasters. That ended my first full playthrough of Civil War, and, as it was getting late, I decided to shelf it for the night and come back the next day to try for winning all 14. My policy with this game - as is generally the case with all games - is not to look at any sort of guide unless I get seriously stuck. If I continue to get stuck on a battle, I'll go look up the actual battle and use that as a guide.
What I also noticed is that, more often than not, strategy 1 (artillery strike) is generally the best option for winning most battles. I wonder how consistent that is with how the real battles went?
So, as the next day came, I started up another session. My plan was to start at Battle 1, and keep going until I lost, starting again from the beginning. All I can say is that Battle 3 continued to be a thorn in my side. I lost it every single time again. Strategy 1 got me the closest, but it was futile. As far as I'm concerned, it's impossible to win this fight this way. I tried all sorts of spending combinations, but nothing came close. So I decided to just ignore this battle and come back later.
I managed to win Battle 4, which I didn't last time, but then things took a rather bad turn, and I lost every battle after Battle 9 (losing 8), including Battle 3 again, which I thought would go better if my stats were better. The computer simply chose a different option for itself and destroyed me. I found out that choosing a number after 14 brings up a stats page that tells you how many battles each side won, and declares a winner, also providing a comparison chart for casualties between the real war and your performance, and telling you how often you used each strategy. I mostly just used artillery since it worked well last time. It was a 7 - 7 draw on battles, and the computer decided that I'd lost the war.
History repeats.
I was rather discouraged at this point. I felt stuck. Maybe it's not possible to win? Maybe history is simply destined to repeat itself, over and over again? I decided to look for some help.
I found a scan from at 1975 edition of Creative Computing Magazine that explains the mechanics of Civil War in greater detail. Turns out that some things I had suspected were right, some were wrong. Some things I hadn't thought of.
The success of your previous battles is indeed intended to affect your resources and inflation for the next battle.
Inflationdoes in fact do something - Apparently it "determines the present value of your money and is used in calculating the effectiveness of your money." A rather vague statement, but at least I know it does something.
Morale is also affected by your success in battle. It basically snowballs if you keep doing well.
The computer apparently tries to guess your strategy and counter it. I still don't know what counters what, exactly, other than the corresponding 2 and 3 strategies countering each other.
Aaannnnd that's about it as far as any talk about this game goes online. I'd have to go research these battles, and frankly, I can't be bothered doing so. It's not worth the effort for such a basic text game that is honestly not that good. With that in mind, I'm going to do the scores now, and if I get the motivation to try the game again and beat it, that'll be covered in its own post, since this one is long enough already. Sound andStory are N/A, as is standard for simulation-style text games. Yes, it's based on history, so it technically does have a story, but it's not told as a story. It's just "here's the battle, go fight."
Time Played: 1 hour; a full playthrough of all battles takes no more than 10 minutes.
Difficulty: 4/10
It's actually quite hard to judge the difficulty of this one. On the one hand, half of the battles are really easy to figure out, so much so that I won half of them on my first or second attempt. Some of the battles seem utterly impossible to win, however, without knowledge of the historical battles. Overall, though, it's not difficult to figure out the pattern for success.
Game Design: 4
Civil War represents quite a significant leap in the complexity of game design in comparison to PDP Basketball, which was designed only a year prior. It seems to add on to and modify the base that PDP Basketball started with, as Civil War includes the same 4 offensive and defensive options the former game had, but adds more in between deciding what play to choose. We have a basic form of resource management, which I appreciate as it gives some freedom in decision making, with choices actually having a difference in the battle's results. The game then builds on top of this by having the results of each subsequent battle affecting the next. Great stuff in theory, and it encourages repeat playthroughs.
In practice, however, these resource decisions seem to make little material impact on the outcome of a battle. It mostly comes down to the strategy you choose vs. the computer's choice. Inflation appears to do nothing, other than a lower number than the base number indicating that you'll have more starting cash and men. There's also a formula that can be easily figured out to ensure that funds distribution always results in high morale, cutting out the guesswork. Even in spite of all this, a few battles are completely unwinnable. The game suggests that this would be because of the game trying to follow the historic results, but this results in inconsistencies, with battles you can win as the Confederacy that they didn't actually win, and having unwinnable battles that they actually won (Seven Days, I'm looking at you). This kind of inconsistency really annoys me when a game is claiming to be "historical". It also seems to expect you to have some prior knowledge of the American Civil War, which may seem short sighted, but this game was written in an American high school, so the presumption may have been valid in context, but I find it a bit irritating regardless.
Controls: 9
It's very easy to manage for a text-based game. Just type in the numbers and press enter. An issue can crop up due to the large numbers needing to be inputted, where I often accidentally type in a number a digit short of what I intended - usually one ending with several 0s.
Visual: 7
Civil War is formatted really well - the instructions are clear and formatted exactly how I wish PDP Basketball formatted them. The battle information is also presented very clearly, with enough blank space for information to be processed easily. Bonus points for the optional battle descriptions and the way the instructions are written - gives the game some extra personality and immersion. I didn't detect any typos either. For what it is, I really appreciate it.
Functionality: 5
Free points. UI design is great, nice and clear. In-game instructions were easy to read and understand, and there were no glitches during my time playing.
Accessibility: 2
I've already criticised it for expecting the player to have knowledge of the American Civil War, and it's also a text game - one with a lot of big numbers - so accessibility is automatically bad. It at least doesn't require you to have knowledge of the Civil War to have any success, but it still assumes it.
Fun Factor: 4
I probably enjoyed it a little more than PDP Basketball, but not by much. I'm a sucker for resource management and strategy games, so that helped draw me in a little it, but the overall simplicity and repetitiveness of the game, combined with the aforementioned frustrations made it overall not that enjoyable to play.
Overall: Civil War gets a slightly below average score of 31/70. The percentage conversion, 38.75%, gets it into the top of the E tier, just missing out on the D tier, unfortunately.
This might be my longest post to date. Lots to talk about, even with such a simple game. Plus, there's probably a second post coming once I win. Makes me wonder how things are going to be when I get to far longer and more complex games. Breaking them up over several posts will probably be the way to go.
[Add.] Upon completing the rescore, I saw yet again that I made another scoring mistake. Civil War's score was listed as out of 80, when it should have been 70. This means that it should have been up in the D-tier after all. In spite of this, its score has actually increased to 32/70, or 45.71%
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This is the sixth in a series of mini-articles on the early history of video games. The game featured here will not receive a review score, and thus will not appear on the Tier List.
The Prehistory of video games series continues into the 1960s. This pair of games seemed relatively unrelated to me at first. However, upon reflection, they both have a bit of 'global' flavour, so to speak, in different ways. One represents the spread of video games beyond the West, and the other takes inspiration from Ancient Near Eastern civilisation. Both also represent the beginnings of different legacies in gaming. One, the beginning of Poland's contribution to video games, and the other the beginnings of the resource management / city builder genres. It's fascinating (to me, anyway) how these primitive beginnings, seemingly unrelated to the current state of the video game industry, and despite their limited reach, are still part of the overall family tree.
Marienbad (1962)
Hope you know Polish.
Release Date: 1962
Platform: Odra 1003
Genre: Strategy
Developer(s): Witold Podgórski
Publisher(s): N/A
It's quite the shame that there's little to discuss for what is most likely the first non-English video game ever developed, as there is little-to-no surviving documentation, screenshots or the like available (hence why nobody's ever attempted to recreate it.) Even the photo of the print out of the game code is not original (observe the [C] 2020 on the second line.) Wikipedia has a substantial article detailing the game's development by Witold Podgórski at least, so we know how the game came to be, even if we don't know how the game played or what it looked like.
In basic terms, Marienbad is an adaptation of a variant of Nim, the ancient game of logic. Each player would take turns removing matches from a pile, with the victor forcing their opponent to take the last match. Nim became quite a popular game to implement among early programmers, by the way, and many renditions of it appeared during the 60s and 70s.
Marienbad seems an unusual name for a game of Nim, and in fact Podgórski didn't actually give it this title. Rather, it was named retrospectively, as it's based on a variant played in a French film titled Last Year at Marienbad. It's a rather fancy title considering the time, where the titles of most other games were literally just describing what the game was.
Considering that there's effectively no surviving details of Marienbad, why discuss it? What significance does it have in the story of video games? For one, it's the first documented game we know of that was developed outside of an English-speaking country, Poland. It's also the first Soviet-developed game we know of, so technically non-Western. Both Poland and the Soviets have left quite a legacy in the gaming industry, most obviously with Tetris from the Soviets, and Poland beginning to develop games in the mid-80s up until now with, most notably, CD Projekt Red and their The Witcher series and their GOG digital platform (which we should all be thankful for for their preservation of many classic PC games.)
Marienbad, then, represents the beginning of what is a significant legacy and contribution in video games from continental Europe. And that's why it should be remembered.
The Sumerian Game (1964)
Release Date: 1964
Platform: IBM 7090
Genre: Simulation
Developer(s): Mabel Addis, William McKay
Publisher(s): N/A
Now here's a game that some of you may be familiar with, although maybe not under the title The Sumerian Game. This game of resource management has been tinkered with and re-released in many forms by many programmers throughout the early days of home computers, most commonly under the name Hammurabi (most famously by David Ahl.) But this is the original source, created initially as an educational experiment, to see how computers could be used in schools. The concept was created by Mabel Addis, a primary (or elementary for my American readers) school teacher, and then programmed using Fortran on the IBM 7090 mainframe computer by William McKay. While The Sumerian Game was initially completed in 1964, it was revised a few times, with more and more additions being made to its presentation and gameplay, until a final revision was tested in-class in 1967.
The Sumerian Game had the player taking the role of three successive, fictitious kings (all named Luduga) of the city of Lagash in ancient Sumer. These three rulers represent different stages of the game. Stage 1 simply has you allocating how much grain to distribute as food for your people, how much to plant, and how much to store over a series of several turns. Each turn, a report would come from your court advisor on the result of your choices, plus any random events generated by the game. These affect how much your population grows (or shrinks), and how much food you have to allocate for the next turn. Stages two and three follow the same pattern, but add in workers that can be assigned to various tasks, and later trade and expansion. This is far more advanced than anything we've seen so far in the prehistory era with regards to strategic gameplay.
Despite The Sumerian Game itself being relegated exclusively to being a school-based experiment, its legacy is tangible and quite immediate. Doug Dyment produced a version of the game in 1968 for the PDP-8, which he title King of Sumeria (it was also sometimes called The Sumer Game), after hearing a description of it from a woman who had previously seen it. This is where the name Hammurabi enters the picture. Despite Hammurabi being the legendary king of the Old Babylonian empire - decidedly not Sumerian (ancient history is a special interest of mine), Dyment opted to rename the king in his version of the game to Hammurabi (or "Hamurabi," as he spelled it) due to it being a well-known name in ancient civilisation. [Ed. slight correction: the steward is named Hamurabi in Dyment's game, not the king.] David Ahl would then produce his own version using the BASIC programming language in 1971, which he included in his famous BASIC Computer Games book under the title Hammurabi. This version would provide the basis for many future city-building and resource management games. All this leads back to the orignial The Sumerian Game, which stands as a pioneering game in resource management, a core component of future city builders like Sim City, and strategy games, both turn-based and real time.
There's going to be plenty of versions of The Sumerian Game that'll show up on the blog later on, mostly all based on Ahl's rendition, so keep a look out for those in the future. The Sumerian Game is an exciting game for me to cover, as resource management is one of my favourite gameplay mechanics. Well-designed resource management in strategy games and even RPGs I find immensely satisfying, so being able to learn about the game in which it was pioneered is particularly exciting.
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