Barbarians

So when I was reading other's blogs in order to make my required comments I noticed the trend once finished was to make a city and not do anything to make them happy just see what happens. I decided to give this a try... not a good idea. My game lasted maybe 15 turns. It was taken over by Barbarians which I think is funny because my city had nothing, so I have no idea why these barbarians would even want my pathetic city. I put one settlers, two workers and one farm. By doing this experiment I realized that a city can not survive without protection. The settlers could not defend themselves against the barbarians because their job was to work the farm. With the limited population and resources the people were not able to specialize and create food surplus, as I learned from Jared Diamond. It is neat to test out these theories that we re learning in class to prove that they are true even in a simulation game. Even though I created a farm, these people were really only still hunter gathers because they were not able to create the needed food surplus.
In Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", he talks about New Guinea and how they are behind in the world today because they are not able to create food surplus. They are able to survive because there is a larger group than just 3 people so they can defend themselves better and the whole area is unable to create food surplus because of the land they were given and the plants on it.

Yay Success!!

I am finally done with my first game of Civ. I made it all the way through the game without being defeated and was the most powerful civilization in my game. I am very impressed with myself because I really thought I was going to die off rather quickly. I am really excited to being trying new tactics even if I know they will not lead to success, but rather test my theories. Over the last 30 or so turns I really focused on advancing my cities technologically and scientifically. I figured this would give my cities the upper hand. Without my consent my cities captured others which was pretty cool. I learned that technology leads to success and rapid growth. I know that technology comes from the roots of guns, germs and steel but what I am going to focus on is the technology and its expansion. At the beginning when I could research things like machine guns or something like that (which I thought was huge technology at the time) it would take a long time and the benefits wouldn't be seen for a while. As I gained the knowledge and research of many technological things the time it took to research them was less. At the end the amount of information my cities could gain was endless. It was really neat to watch my cities grow and modernize. Having the technology allowed my city to become impassable and to dominate my little world that I helped to create.
This is true in the real world today. Many countries that are stuck in the third world setting are having a hard time moving up in the world's technology because they don't even have the basic things needed like food surplus. The first world countries like the US are dominating because we have modern technology that is growing exponentially, even more rapidly everyday. Each new piece of technology is used to help find/create the next newest thing and so on.

5th Civilization Post

I am almost done with this game! I have made it to the modern era. It is very interesting to see the computer's impression of 2008. The game is moving at a very quick pace now. I currently have about 40 turns left in the game. This week I have focused on building up my civilization's technology. I have researched refrigeration, hospitals, ecology, railroads, flight, computers, hydro power as well as coal power plants just to name a few. By making all of these technology improvements in my civilization of 20,000 souls has reached the position of impassable. I am assuming this means that with the few number of turns left and the strength/size of my civilization there is no way that any other civilization can take over mine. Looking at the map, I have control of almost the entire continent of Africa.
In real world perspective technology is important. Technology allows countries to become powerful not only economically but militarily as well. With high technology many countries want to trade to receive the technology as well. Who ever has the technology has the power.