Let's Discuss Nations (and other civ games)

As I've noted recently , Civilization games, board games especially, are kind of rough for me. I love the concept, but my experience has been too many games that promise empire building but deliver Risk with a tech tree (in which each tech advance lets your soldiers fight better). I understand the need for military, but too often it's clear that this has been the main focus of the game. I want a civilization to be about civilization. Yes, that includes wars, but it should include more than token references to other factors. If I want to play just a straight-up dudes on a map game, I'll play History of the World, which, despite its name, is just that. No tech tree, no grain, nothing but soldiers fighting soldiers and occasionally building a monument. It's a fun game, but it's not a civ game.

The game Through the Ages got criticized for being mapless ("How can you have a civ game without a map?") but that was the appeal to me. No map meant that hopefully I could focus on actually building a civilization and not have to worry that this particular unit wasn't well defended or that I needed my borders were insecure. And I really like Through the Ages. I've thought about getting a copy, but I talked myself out of it on several occasions because I already know folks who have it. It's not perfect, but so far it's the closest thing to what I want. Still, even in that game you can get into a military arms race that overshadows everything else.

When I heard that Nations was a less fussy, slightly kinder version of Through the Ages, I jumped on it. Let me briefly tell you how it works.

(China, ruled by Abraham Lincoln from Versailles, holding down its Finnish colonies with rangers.)

It's all card based. Cards represent buildings, military units, wonders, leaders, and so on. You have four resources: gold, stone, food, and books, which sort of represent culture. You also have a military level and a stability level. You buy cards with gold, and deploy your workers on to them with stone. These cards will generate resources you need. Military is important because it's used to gain colonies, which provide long-term resources and win battles, which provide short-term ones. Military is also used to win wars, but wars are odd. When someone buys a war, his current position on the military track is marked. At the end of the round, anyone lower than that suffers a penalty: a VP and a resource loss. However, if you have a high stability, it mitigates the resource loss. So losing a war is not as terrible as it could be.

More interestingly, and this was something I didn't get until later, military should be used tactically. You can't really completely ignore military, since colonies and battles can be huge, but you also can't rely solely on it because military units are a big drain on resources. Optimally, you build up your military for a war or colony, then once you don't need it, disband those soldiers to once again work on the farms and sacrificial altars and stuff.


(An odd sect of Catholicism that apparently arose in Egypt.)

At first glance it does look like there's an emphasis on military, with those cards working with wars, colonies, battles, and turn order, but when you're playing correctly, a constant high military is going to bring you down. You'll go first, and you can keep having wars, but wars don't gain you anything, they just hurt the other players, and the other players are probably gaining stuff faster than you're making them lose it anyway. If all your guys are perched on their horse archers, they're not getting you food, gold, stone, books, or stability, and you're going to suffer.


(The trick is getting the horse to hold the bow correctly.)

There are four eras, and the card decks are different for each one, so you'll be upgrading buildings and things as you go along, unlike in many "civ" games where the library you originally built to house cuneiform tablets is the same library you presumably access the Internet from, but seventy-four different gradients of archers are available.

At the end of the game you score your VPs plus VP bonuses for buildings, wonders, and colonies, and then you add up your resources, military strength, and stability and divide by 10 and add that to your score. High score wins. Apparently some people dislike that last part, but I think it's a good way to assess the value of your whole civilization.

There's a ton of replayability in the game. In each era there are far more cards than you'll use in a game, so each game you'll see a different small slice of them, and that alone is going to change how you deal with them. Each nation board has an A side, which are all the same, and a B side which is unique, so you have different starting points. There are also event cards, and though you have about a dozen of them for each era, you only use two, so again, the experience can be very different each time. It's not hard to see where the game can be expanded in the future as well.

I had a miserable experience with Nations thanks to overlooking an important rule (if you're in revolt you lose 1 VP + books each production phase -- something that should probably be on the player aids), but since correcting that I've had great games. It goes a little long with five players and there's a weird rule that kicks in at that point, but I think three or four is just fine. I like the artwork, though I'm not crazy about the main card font (check out "Harry Potter and the Sacrificial Altar" in the image up there). The rulebook isn't bad but there's a lot to it and we've overlooked things. All in all it's a great game and I'm glad to have bought it. It may very well be the civ game I've been waiting for.

(reposted from here )

I'm really interested in playing Nations, just because Through the Ages was close to great for me. The problem with TtA is that the game is seriously about 75% bookkeeping. You are always sliding some card or token all over the place. I'm not usually one to gripe too much about that, but I actually wonder if part of the issue is not having a map.

To put it another way, does the lack of map actually end up being a fundamental part of the design? TtA did away with the geography, but I'm not sure it really needed to aside from just being a "look Ma, no hands" kind of party trick. So you designed a civ game with no board, good for you. Now explain why it shouldn't have a board, rather than a game that would have been far simpler WITH one?

Does that make sense? Does Nations fall into some of that?

I'm not sure I follow, but I don't see any reason for a map in Nations. I can't see what that would add. The bookkeeping from TtA is gone (all that nutty crap with spoilage and corruption and junk) and it all works in a very obvious sense. It works. Adding a map to it, in my opinion, would be just saying, "this has a map now because civ games need a map." I think TtA suggested that a map was not necessary, and Nations confirmed it.

In Nations you don't have to worry about having a plot of land nearby that gives you strawberries or goats or molybdenum. It's all focused on what's in your city, with the cards. I like being able to focus on the alleged task at hand -- building a civilization -- instead of moving this plastic figure one space closer to the fishing hole or whatever.

Well, what I'm saying is that TtA said it DIDN'T need a map, when I feel like the lack of map mostly resulted in a lot of upkeep. It didn't have a map and had to come up with a ton of inelegent solutions to get around that. I've only played once, so that assessment might be a little off. That's strictly a shoot-from-the-hip thought process.

Either way, it sounds like Nations isn't nearly as laborious. That definitely has me interested, although probably more as something to play than to buy. I already have my board-less civ game, and it's called Innovation.

I'm really interested in giving Nations a try, more so now after your review. The approach to the military you describe plus the streamlining of some of the Through the Ages ideas really appeals.

I really liked TtA a lot when I played it, but I hated the upkeep. When I discovered the online implementation of it, I sold my copy. I would still play a face-to-face game I suppose, but the time/fun vs. time/tedious ratio is badly skewed.

A couple of months ago for my birthday I came very close to ordering Nations, but opted for Clash of Cultures instead. I don't regret it. I think that is an excellent civ game. It can go long, but it never feels long. The VPs can be a little arbitrary, but I don't mind. I think it has about the right amount of military presence.

I pre-ordered (perhaps foolishly) a copy of Patch History which should be arriving fairly soon. I'm very curious how it will rank among these types of games.

I haven't played Nations but i have played most of the several of the well known Civ games (Clash of Cultures, TTA, Treshams Civ, Eagle Games Civ) , the exceptions being the FFG sid Meier's and Mare Nostrum. Although i do now have a copy of Nostrum+its expansion on the shelf. There are also the sort of civ games like Colonial Europes Empires of Seas, or the Space games like Eclipse.

Not sure which is my favourite. I often feel that Civ games are very meta game dictated. Particularly with military conflict. The amount of the game spent fighting is basically decided by the most aggressive player.

I like TTA but it feels a bit abstract to me, and i agree that the game is largely book keeping in various guises. The only mechanic that allows you to explore creatively is really buying cards, everything else is game engine. It does sort of reduce human history to an efficiency engine / vp factory a bit. I do like it but there is something about seeing cities grow across a map that connects to me much more. I'd probably favour Clash at the moment. I certainly like its settlement and city building elements. It can sometimes turn into more of a dudes on a map game though. Sometimes i like this, other times i just want to build and be left too it.

DukeofChutney wrote: II often feel that Civ games are very meta game dictated. Particularly with military conflict. The amount of the game spent fighting is basically decided by the most aggressive player.

Yes, this is part of what I'm getting at. With most civ games, if one player decides it's going to be a wargame, then it's a wargame. Unlike other possible strategies (economics, cultural, etc) the military strategy is usually the only one that can dictate how the other players MUST play. And the military strategy is almost always focused on offense, seldom on defense (that is, there usually aren't techs or buildings that make you a tougher target, just offensive units of your own.) It's not that I want a hands-off fluffy euro where nobody can interfere with your plans, but it's often not possible to explore other areas of the game if someone always wants to play plastic soldiers.

I also have a thematic (and probably political) problem with one of the ways to win a civilization game being to just pump out military units and shit on everyone else. In many civ games there's already a faction that does that; they're called "barbarians" and they can't win. For a player to do the same thing and then get declared king of the world is, for me, not in the spirit of things. There's a reason we don't talk about the great Mongol culture.

DukeofChutney wrote: I like TTA but it feels a bit abstract to me, and i agree that the game is largely book keeping in various guises. The only mechanic that allows you to explore creatively is really buying cards, everything else is game engine. It does sort of reduce human history to an efficiency engine / vp factory a bit.

This is a valid criticism and applies to Nations as well. While a lot of the silly upkeep from TtA has been removed, it's still, essentially, a very euro efficiency game, only you're creating a civilization instead of a vineyard or merchant league or whatever.

DukeofChutney wrote: I'd probably favour Clash at the moment. I certainly like its settlement and city building elements. It can sometimes turn into more of a dudes on a map game though. Sometimes i like this, other times i just want to build and be left too it.

I played Clash also this weekend and I've only played it twice but something about it doesn't much grab me yet. It seems very gamey to me with the objective cards, in which you're not scoring points for doing things that build your empire, you're building your empire in ways that score points, and they're usually not particularly logical or helpful. I scored a card for getting a category of techs I didn't care anything about, twice.

Clash also feels like the "not enough actions to do everything you want" idea had been taken just one step or so too far. Turns are frustratingly skimpy, almost to Agricola's micro-turn level. But I do still see potential there and want to play more.

I love Clash of Cultures. I think you should give it a few more plays. Unless you get some particularly synergistic Objective Cards they probably shouldn't be your primary focus. If your opponents aren't disrupting you enough that you're able to just pump out completed Objectives then I wonder what they are doing. CoC's military aspect is strong, but there are several ways to combat it. Cultural Influence is a big one. There are some crafty ways to become an economic powerhouse. Trade Ships are awesome. Don't forget that the game has some pretty lenient negotiation/trading rules so there are lots of underhanded ways to fight back against the dude that goes full military.

Civilization + Advanced Civ is still one of (if not the) best civ games. Yeah the play time can be unwieldy and some of the mechanics are a bit antiquated, but the game is more than the sum of its parts. Military aggression is rarely the best course of action in Civ+AdvCiv. Selling yourself on military in this game means you're really selling yourself short somewhere else.

7 Ages is a fantastic rise and fall of civilizations game. It really has a different feel than any other civ game I've played, and it really is underexposed. My favorite write-up on the game is here . The events in 7 Ages are wild and fantastic. The game just isn't fair, and I mean that in the best way. When you're down you're down and when you're up you're up, and every player should get a good taste of both. A good game of 7 Ages will leave you with a story to tell, and that for me is one of the hallmarks of a good civ game.

Is Age of Renaissance a civ game? I think it is in some ways. AoR is all military, trade, expansion, negotiation, and events. It's also one of my favorite games, but it has a tone much different from most civ games so I'm not sure it fully qualifies.

7 Ages I was able to play once long ago and I really dug it but I have never found anyone willing to try it again which is sad.

There is, or was, one common aspect to Civ games that I really hated and that was the pressure to "feed" your people. Yes, I understand where the idea comes from. Much of a culture's energy and resources must be used for general well being but in a game I always found the whole concept to be draining away the number of fun actions you could take and diverting them to something dull and tedious (and usually quite punishing if you failed to provide).

One of the reasons I really like Clash of Cultures is that idea is completely swept away. There is still resource gathering but none of the desperation to make wheat or whatever lest your Civ be crippled.

How does Nations approach the "feed the people" issue?

Food is a resource in Nations, but there isn't a specific "feed your people" moment. It largely comes into play in three ways:

1) military units. Military units raise your strength, but cost a resource, which is often food. They decrease your food production. However, food is not the only cost. Some cost gold or stability.

2) new workers. You start with 5 workers available to place on buildings and you have 8 more available. Four of these can be paid for by reducing your food production and four reduce stability.

During the production phase, you look at how much food you produce and subtract whatever you're using for the above two. If you're still positive, you get food. If you're negative, you pay food. If you need to pay and you're out, you suffer the same penalty as when you're out of any other resource and need to pay some.

3) Famine. Each round there is an event card, which also contains famine. At the end of the round you will need to be able to pay that much food. It ranges from zero to as high as six (highest I've seen so far). This is the closest thing to a "feed your citizens" thing there is, but the cost is the same to all players no matter how many workers they have.

Basically, the cost for more workers or military can be food, but there are other ways to get these. Famine is the biggest food need.

There are also events that may require a food payment or it might be the penalty for losing a war.

I didn't really like TtA. It was a bit too abstract for me, and had lots of upkeep. I have a small tolerance for upkeep in board games nowadays. Arkham Horror is annoying to me for the same reason, even though I find it really fun, too.

My favorite Civ game is Settlers.

Copied from the What Are You Playing thread:

Then a 3-player Clash of Cultures game. I want to like that one, I really do, but it just doesn't grab me. Once again, the plans I had for the game were wrecked when another player decided we were going to play Risk instead. He parked four units outside my city and I had to move all my energy towards matching him militarily. He wasn't doing anything except making soldiers, so he was essentially just ensuring that the third player won, which is exactly what happened. I also got some awful objectives in the first half of the game, ended up fulfilling maybe three total, because nothing I drew was "don't do anything except keep your city from being taken."

Sounds like you gave it a chance and it's not for you... sorry to hear it.

Still, it's strange to watch someone play a strategy that is not going to win. You'd think (s)he would have switched tactics once it was clear (s)he wasn't going to win militarily against you.

Gary Sax wrote: Sounds like you gave it a chance and it's not for you... sorry to hear it.

Still, it's strange to watch someone play a strategy that is not going to win. You'd think (s)he would have switched tactics once it was clear he wasn't going to win militarily against you.

In his defense, he was new to the game, and is not a hardcore gamer, so the military strategy was probably the most obvious one.

Also, I can't completely blame him. I did some boneheaded stuff that hurt myself.

I have found that military makes everyone else respond to a point, but once prepared there's not much the aggressor can do. The military strategy is so action heavy that defense is much more efficient than offense, especially w/the 4 army unit stacking limit, which is not that many, so after you get the basic techs to defend yourself it's way easier to keep up a strong 4 unit defense and simultaneously do productive things than to attack.