History Videogame / Civilization

* ArtificialBrilliance: Sometimes the AI will act like a strategic genius. In II, for example, rival civilizations will only share world maps with you if their attitute toward you is "Worshipful." Since a successful military campaign relies on knowing where your enemies are just as much as it relies on superior troops, the benefits of this strategy are obvious.
- Also in II, if you ever use spies or diplomats to purchase rival cities, they'll never agree to an alliance with you. And you'll deserve every declaration of what they make.

* {{Cap}}: In the earliest game, resources never ran out. In ''III'', they have a small % chance of disappearing ''every'' turn, even if you just started using them last turn, leading to annoying scenarios like them running out at [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard the most inconvenient time possible]]. ''V'' is the first game with this trope; how many copies of a resource now determines how many of a thing you can have at once. For instance, if you have only four herds of horses, that's how many Horse Archers you can own simultaneously.

It is (in)famous for leading to gameplay sessions that [[JustOneMoreLevel extend well past the player's original self-imposed deadline]], [[http://www.civanon.org/home.shtml so much so that a joke "Civilization Anonymous" website was made.]]

* ObviousBeta: When ''V'' first came out, it had a lot of bugs and balance issues, routinely crashed to desktop for many machines, and had obtuse, sociopathic [=AIs=] in an over-reaching effort to make them more like human players. Patches fixed many of the crashes, fan-made mods such as [=VEM=] took care of the balance issues and bugs (and much of [=VEM=] was later implemented into official patches), and the [=AI=] has found a balance between the above and the manipulable point-based relations of ''IV''.

* DumbassHasAPoint: The culture advisor in Civ II is an Elvis impersonator who gives all of his advice in a ridiculous Elvis voice...and generally makes pretty solid points.

* SandIsWater: Many game mods substitute different types of terrain for oceans. For example, the Test of Time [[LevelInTheClouds fantasy cloud world has sky]] with SolidClouds, the Sci-fi orbital map has space, and a ''{{Franchise/Dune}}''-based mod uses sand for the "ocean" terrain, while using, respectively, clouds, orbital platforms, and rocky terrain as "land".

** Nuclear power plants in ''IV'' can randomly ''explode'', with the ''same effects as a nuclear bomb''. Nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs are completely different things.

* ArtisticLicenseMilitary: In every version of Civilization, the invention of Gunpowder means the immediate advent of Musketeers/Musketmen, with Cannon being invented later. In the real world, the cannon was invented ''first'' since it was easier to make a big gunpowder weapon than a small one.

%% * GettingCrapPastThe Radar: Due to overwhelming and persistent misuse, GCPTR is on-page examples only until 01 June 2021. If you are reading this in the future, please check the trope page to make sure your example fits the current definition.

* DamnYouMuscleMemory: ''V'' has a pretty bad one as the start of the game. In ''IV'', you would select "Play Now", choose your options (civilization, map, etc), and start the game. In ''V'', selecting "Play Now" takes you directly to the initial loading screen without giving a chance to change the options, perplexing given that most players would want to take a second to confirm their settings before starting a game that takes many hours to complete, unless they're "re-rolling" a new map.
** Ed Beach, lead designer of ''Civilization VI'', [[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/22/yes-civ-vis-lead-designer-totally-wanted-to-mess-with-the-way-you-play/ deliberately]] made mechanics different enough that things players would normally do were no longer a good strategy.

*** Advanced Flight to Flight2

*** Flight to Flight1

*** Space Flight to Flight3

** While various victory types can ignore certain stats unless you're going for their victory type (as in, faith has little value if you're not focusing on religion) no victory type can ignore science output. Science victories require you to race ahead through the tech tree as fast as possible, military units for domination are locked behind increasingly advanced technologies and wonders are also locked behind technology. And even if you're going for culture or faith victories, you need to be able to repel potential invaders and spearmen just won't cut it. This isn't as prevalent in ''VI'' due to the introduction of the culture based civics tree, but the game still doesn't really require you to focus on those anyway, meaning culture buildings are a secondary concern.

** ''VI'' has Communism, Democracy, and Fascism as the final government forms. The increasingly severe relationship penalties for differing government types mean that any genuine peace between any combination of communists, democrats, and fascists is ''basically'' impossible unless you've been very close friends with someone from the start. The best you can hope for is a cold war.
* OverflowError: The "Nuclear Gandhi" UrbanLegendOfZelda postulated that Gandhi's reputation for loving to NukeEm was caused by an underflow in his aggression score as leader of an AI India civ. Creator/SidMeier's autobiography says it never happened: no civ's aggression could ever go below 1 and the story was probably made up by an InternetTroll annoyed that AI Gandhi had nuked him. [[Website/TVTropes Guess where it apparently started?]]

** The Civilopedia entry for Writing in ''V'' claims that logographic writing systems have a separate character for each and every word, and require tens of thousands of characters to work. That is true to an extent: logographic systems have a separate symbol for every verb, noun, adjective, and anything in between, but the entry goes on to say "There's a symbol for sheep, and another symbol for a thousand sheep, and yet another symbol for the sound a sheep makes when falling off of a pyramid" which is inaccurate. The confusion mainly comes from the fact that English doesn't combine words often - for example, the German word ''Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften'' might seem to be one really long word, but it's equivalent to English writing ''Insurancecompaniesprovidinglegalprotection''. Is that one word, or is that 5? Thus, in reality they only need around 2000 ~ 3000 characters.

** Food and population growth is the highest stat value in most Civilization games, particularly from ''IV'' onward, as it removed infrastructure requirement to grow above certain size of a city (which was particularly harsh in ''III''). By having more population, you have more people working, more wealth being generated, and population growing. Various buildings in ''IV'' offer either percentage modifiers, so the more the city was making of a given thing, the bigger the bonus. Not to mention, in ''V'', several buildings (such as the Library) scale proportionally based on population ''and'' kept percentage-based modifiers. It's not uncommon for people to build 2-3 cities on one playthrough and win because of this (since having lots of small cities carries a higher unhappiness penalty than having a few massive ones). Its relationship with Science makes the problem worse in ''V''. A larger population means higher Science output, and each city you found marginally increases your technology costs, so by only having a few cities with high population, you're going to have a technological advantage over larger civs. This is apparently one of the main reasons why putting heavy emphasis on science is important, since ArtificialStupidity causes the AI to suffer technological penalties for having more cities and instead are blessed with [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard a cheating economy]] so that they can put emphasis on [[ZergRush building a lot of weak units]] while neglecting to properly build their own cities. It's usually better to have few strong units than to try and build as many units as possible.

* ArtisticLicenseLinguistics: The Civilopedia entry for Writing in ''V'' claims that logographic writing systems have a separate character for each and every word, and require tens of thousands of characters to work. That is true to an extent: logographic systems have a separate symbol for every verb, noun, adjective, and anything in between, but the entry goes on to say "There's a symbol for sheep, and another symbol for a thousand sheep, and yet another symbol for the sound a sheep makes when falling off of a pyramid" which is inaccurate. The confusion mainly comes from the fact that English doesn't combine words often - for example, the German word ''Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften'' might seem to be one really long word, but it's equivalent to English writing ''Insurancecompaniesprovidinglegalprotection''. Is that one word, or is that 5? Thus, in reality they only need around 2000 ~ 3000 characters.

* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: See ''TheComputerIsACheatingBastard/Civilization'', as there's enough examples for a dedicated subpage.

* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: This game has an entire folder on the trope page.

-->''Centuries later, archeologists discover the remains of your ancient civilization. Evidence of thriving towns, (a technology you discovered), roads, and a centralized government amaze the startled scientists. Finally, they come upon a stone tablet, which contains but one mysterious phrase: "(leader's name) will return!"''

-->''Your Civilization has fallen...but your people do not despair. For they know you will one day return to lead them back to glory.''

--> ''"Fearsome General, your people call for the recreation of a new Hunnic Empire, one which will make the exploits and histories of the former seem like the faded dreamings of a dying sun."''

-->"You are merely a stepping-stone on my grand ascent to world domination!"
-->"Now is the time for my master plan to commence. You will now die like the rest of these fools."

---> "My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!"

--> We meant no offense when we were trying to take your cultural heritage.

-->'''Horse Riding''': ''"[[ShoutOutToShakespeare A horse! A horse! My]] '''[[Theatre/RichardIII kingdom]]''' [[Theatre/RichardIII for a horse!]]"''

--> '''Unit Description''': Good luck, Commander!

---> ''This form of government was quite popular in [[ThoseWackyNazis certain states in Central Europe]] during the last century but other states didn't much like it, and it was ultimately abandoned after [[UsefulNotes/WorldWar2 some unpleasantness]].''

---> '''Gandhi:''' I have just been informed that a large number of our soldiers have entered your territory. I strongly recommend a campaign of passive resistance as the best way to defeat them.

--> '''Catherine''' We were defeated, so this makes me your slave. [[HappinessInSlavery I suppose there are worse fates]].

--> An Emissary from the _ wishes to speak with you. Will you receive him?\\

----> '''Civilization's Leader''': You have something that we want. Perhaps you'd like to trade for it?

--> The world's first Nuclear Test has taken place in Hiroshima!

-->'''Brennos the Mighty:''' You have captured the village of my son-in-law. He has been working on a strange seagoing craft.

** In ''I'' and ''II'', conquering a city of a more advanced civ instantly grants a single, randomly selected technology that they know and your civ lacks.

** Espionage in ''V'' is designed to help civs that are lagging behind the technology race. Once any civ reaches the Renaissance ''every'' civ gets their first spy and the main use of that spy is to steal technology. Stealing technology is much faster than researching it, ensuring that a player snowballing Science can't get too out of control.