So in the wake of Civ 7's release, I decided to go back and play a game that's been in my backlog for a while... The original, OG, Civilization. No number or subtitle necessary.
(Although *technically* there was a board game with the same name first, and also a similar computer game called Empire that was made for giant mainframe computers. For more on that I recommend this excellent blog: https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-...ilization/)
Civ1 was a genuine cultural phenomenon when it came out. Maybe Civ6 has sold more copies, but that's just because gaming in general is much bigger now. Civ1 made a splash with all sorts of people who didn't normally play computer games, and was one of the most top-selling games of its era. I don't think any later Civ game has really crushed the market like the first one did.
That's how I came to play the game. My dad wasn't really much of a gamer, but he still bought it out of curiousity and installed it on the family computer. I played it as a *very* young child, really too young to understand the game. I didn't even know what many of the words meant, so maybe I learned something that way too. I have a memory of saying something like "wow this Communism government really works well, much better than Democracy" and getting some strange looks from my parents...
So I played it just a little bit as a kid and didn't get too far. Then Civ2 came out which was newer, shinier, and I could understand it better. I switched over to that one and never looked back, playing the hell out of it throughout my childhood. That's what my profile pic is from. I thought it was better overall, since Civ2 is mostly tweaks to the original, more like a mod than a full game. For some reason that's the only time they did it that way, all the other Civs have been massively different than the one before.
When I went back recently to try Civ1, I wasn't expecting much. I thought it would be just be a simpler, more tedious version of Civ2. If you want to see how that game works I'd recommend this excellent let's play: https://lparchive.org/Civilization-2/ where an experienced player explains all the game mechanics and shows how to really crush it.
But honestly, playing it now as an adult and an experienced gamer, Civ1 really impresses me. There's a lot more balance and depth there than I expected! In fact, a lot of the changes made in Civ2 kind of ruin the balance of it. Civ1 is a more solid game overall.
Here's what it looks like in case you've never seen it before:
![[Image: CivilizationAmigaAGA.png]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a7/CivilizationAmigaAGA.png)
*Major differences*
The first thing I noticed was the interface. When you first run it, it asks whether you want to use a mouse, or keyboard only. I guess at that time it was still common for computers to not have a mouse. So you can do everything in the game (or almost everything) with keyboard shortcuts (the highlighted letters). It's a bit cryptic and hard to remember everything, but once you learn it's very convenient and immersive. It reminds of my coding days where I would code in a text editor (Vim) doing everything by keyboard. I wonder if Sid Meier, being an experienced 80s coder, also did his work that way. Some screens (like the city screen) look a bit ugly and cluttered, but all the information is there clear and easy to use. It's a DOS game, so it runs great in DOS box full screen mode. Civ2, unfortunately, was made for windows 95 so it has that Windows UI everywhere and doesn't play nicely with emulators.
The second thing that jumps out is the combat. Combat in Civ1 is simple, elegant, and brutal: you either win or you die. There's no HP or XP system, the game just compares the relative attack and defense values and flips a coin. So if you've got a strength 1 unit attacking a strength 2 unit, that's 1:2 odds, or a 1 in 3 chance to win.
The thing about that system is that it's very "swingy." It's wildly unpredictable, and tends to produce streaks of good and bad luck. it's not at all uncommon to win or lose 3 or more battles in a row, regardless of the odds. I used to think that "spear defeats tank" was just a silly meme that people made up after seeing a rare low-odds loss. But in Civ2 it's not even rare. A "spear" (phalanx) with defense 2, vs a a tank with attack 10, has 2 in 12 odds to win! Almost 20%! You're going to see things like that in basically every game. And since the phalanx costs only 20 shields while the tank costs 80, it's actually not even winning odds. Even a settler with defense 1 is suprisingly tough to kill. I admit that sometimes when this happened i had some gamer rage moments, and sometimes reloaded saves. But once I got used to it I started to adapt. You never know how a combat will go in Civ1, so you have to adapt and find ways to be flexible. Civ2 changed it to have HP and combat rounds, which I think makes it too simple and predictable.
The other big thing is the stack losses. When you lose once on defense, and you're not in a city, your entire stack dies. Instantly. So it's a big risk to stack too many units together. You still have to do it sometimes, and there's definitely an advantage in having more numbers, but it also encourages you to find some other tactics besides piling everything on one stack. The AI *is* smart enough to attack your big stacks, even in the ocean. The tactic that I find works best is to gradually flow a continuous stream of units towards the front, which will fluctuate randomly back and forth depending on how the combat rolls go. Usually chariots are the best, since they're fast, high attack (4), and relatively cheap (40).
If you don't want to deal with the randomness of combat, you can use diplomats. Diplomats are crazy powerful in Civ1. They're cheap to build, fast, ignore the "zone of control" mechanic that locks out most units, and have the unique ability to buy units, or even a city with all the units stacked inside, for gold. The only thing you can't buy is a stack of enemy units outside a city, so a combination of both combat units and diplomats tends to work well. You can try first with units, and then splash the cash with diplomats to make up for bad combat rolls. It also helps to have a few diplomats inside your core homeland in case the barbarians show up, because they'll appear randomly from boats and they get an attack bonus which makes them tough to defend against in a conventional way. Some people might say this makes diplomats OP, but I think it really helps to make gold feel like a distinct resource, and not just spend it all on research.
Speaking of research...
![[Image: Zkamvbt.png]](https://i.imgur.com/Zkamvbt.png)
Notice anything missing? The cost! All civ1 techs cost the same, the price just increments based on how many techs you've already researched. And the prereqs are ignored when you steal a tech from someone else by capturing one of their cities. In theory you could wait forever not researching anything, steal Nuclear Power from someone, and then research Fusion for the same price as Pottery. That's a bit extreme, but you can make some really deep dives into the tech tree.
It also means that, in combination with the wild randomness of combat, there's a lot of comeback potential. Even if someone is way behind in tech, they can come back instantly by taking a few cities. Pretty annoying when one of the low tech aggressive AIs like Genghis Khan takes one of your border cities and steals a tech like Conscription (giving riflemen), but it does a lot to keep the late game balanced and engaging.
Besides combat, you can also improve tiles just like all other civ games. The difference here is that setters are both slow and expensive. Only 1 move, only 1 settler can improve a tile at a time, it takes a long time (5 turns to irrigate a grassland, 15 turns to irrigate a jungle), and the settler is costing a constant maintenance in both food and production. Civ2 has an Engineer that's an upgraded settler (2 moves and works twice as fast), but the slow settlers keep things balanced in Civ1. I found that I could never get as many settlers as I wanted, so there was still a lot of work to be done even well into the late game. That's a nice difference from other civs (including civ4!) where you can pretty much finish every tile improvement in the midgame and then put your workers to sleep.
Another late game feature is the scoring. It ends with the list comparing you to famous leaders from history, with "Dan Quayle" at the bottom, which feels incredibly dated now. That's a joke, but the scoring is very real. I got the sense that they wanted players to compete for high scores like a classic arcade game. I'm not much into that kind of gameplay, but I know some people are and it's definitely a way to give players something to do in the end game besides trying to hunt down the last few enemy cities. It feels a lot more natural than the civ6 age system.
*Strategies*
Now, I don't claim to be an expert on Civ1. I've never played it multiplayer (the original didn't have multiplayer, although there was an updated version released called CivNet which allowed it). And I've never done any high-score competitions either. Still, I think I can say that I'm an experienced gamer who has now played this game a lot on the highest difficulty, and I'm surprised that I haven't found any one single best-strat. There's at least 4 different ways to play and win on Emperor, based on the 4 government types. There may be more! That's *amazing* balance and depth for any game, much less the first of its series. Much more than most modern games have!
Despotism. The starting government. It has one huge penalty, and one huge bonus. The penalty is that all tiles lose -1 yield over 2, so going from 3 to 2. That's a big problem when even an irrigated grassland produces just 3 food, which turns into 2, and every citizen needs 2 food to be sustained. So you basically can't grow your cities under Despotism, except just a little by using food bonus tiles (which still don't give you much). But the bonus is that settlers, which normally cost 2 food as maintenance, just cost 1, so it's good for early expansion. It also allows free support for military units, whereas normally they all cost 1 shield of maintenance. But despotism has huge corruption penalties that make it almost impossible to get good research or wealth. Every building costs money as maintenance, so as a despotism you can't afford many buildings either.
So the usual play with despotism is to build lots of small cities everywhere (no distance limit at all, build them right next to each other if you want), and then send a flood of cheap early units like chariots (4 strength, 1 defense, 2 move, costs 40) or horseman (half the attack strength but also half the cost) and focus on pure conquest. Thanks to the random combat system, those cheap early units are strong enough to keep even the most advanced units or well defended cities, so it really works well. Still, there's a limit to how much you can push with numbers before you lose them all in a stack loss. I *imagine* that if we ever played it as competitive multiplayer this would be the dominant meta, but I'd be fascinated to see how it works against other strats.
Incidentally, the game has a tool for keeping track of everyone's losses from the entire game. Looks kind of wonky, but it's very handy! They really give you a lot of helpful information through the UI of this game! Here's what it looks like from my game, after I fought an intense early war to wipe out my two nearest neighbors
![[Image: 0brFiMs.png]](https://i.imgur.com/0brFiMs.png)
The grey was Genghis Khan, who's always aggressive. The pink was Elizabeth, who's more peaceful and techs faster. It cost me 35 chariots and 3 diplomats to break through their defenses, but I won in the end.
Monarchy. AKA "fancy despotism." The tile yield penalty is gone, so now you can build larger/better cities. Unfortunately, your units now cost maintenance, and you'll need one to keep your people content, so your net production might not get better. And settlers cost 2 food, so it's not great for early expansion. I've lost settlers from switching government because I forgot about that detail. Also, the corruption is still bad, so research is slow. Overall, not a great choice.
Except for one detail. You see the upper left of the tech tree? Monarchy, Feudalism, Horseback riding, and Chivalry. In a normal game you can completely skip those techs because they're a deadend that leads to nothing else. And in fact, it's *better* to avoid them because they'll increase the cost of everything else. But they *do* unlock the knight, which is by far the best of the early game units. They're the same attack, movement, and cost of a chariot, but with twice the defense (2). Put them on a hill or fortify them, and it multiplies to 4. This completely solves the main weakness of chariots, which is their weakness to counterattacks. A large force of knights- which they AI uses a lot- is quite hard to stop.
Democracy. AKA "money wars." It's a midgame tech so it normally takes a while to research it, but if you build the Pyramids you can start using it right away. +1 commerce on every tile, and no corruption at all, so your research and wealth skyrockets. However, you can no longer use units to keep cities content, and every time you move a unit out of its home city- even into another city!- it causes 2 unhappiness. More unhappy than happy and the city goes into revolt, and if it revolts 2 turns in a row you're forced into anarchy. Very annoying. Also you're not allowed to declare war. Even just exploring and expanding is kind of a pain in Democracy. You have to constantly make religious buildings (expensive and cost maintenance) to keep people content, or devote trade to luxuries instead of wealth or research.
Instead, the main strategy is diplomats. Diplomats everywhere. Don't worry about research, keep the tax rate high and just buy everything. Sometimes diplomats get killed, and sometimes there are stacks of enemy units you can't buy. That's ok. just keep trying and eventually the diplomats break through. You can buy their capital too, there's no restriction. The only thing you can't buy is cities from other democracies.
Republic. AKA "the way you're intended to play the game." Available pretty early on if you beeline it. It has the same +1 commerce as Democracy, and low (though not zero) corruption, so you can make the same big cash or research. But the units only cause 1 unhappiness, you're allowed to declare war, and revolts don't bring down the government, so it's a lot more flexible. This is the one form of government where I think it makes sense to do a lot of research.
The strategy is to use "we love the King day" which triggers when your city has no unhappiness and more than half happy citizens, and causes +1 pop growth every turn. The way to do that is by temporarily setting your luxury rate very high, plus buying all the religious building. You also need to feed the new citizens, which requires careful city placement and tile improvements. Ocean tiles only produce 1 food with no way to improve them (civ2 has a harbor building that doubles their food, kind of breaking the game), but do provide good trade to make luxuries to keep people happy. You really need a careful balance of everything to make this work, but when it works it's amazing. You can boom all your cities from size 3 to size 10 in just seven turns, tripling your economy. Although I find it more practical to do multiple, shorter bursts.
Doing that (while also continuing to expand out with new cities), you can tech at a blazing rate. Beeline into the modern era, build factories, and sen
d out your tanks to do battle with enemy spearmen! Then... maybe die to combat RNG... but it's still an advantage to have stronger units and more production. It's also, IMO, the most fun way to play the game, because you really get to see all sides of it.You can win by space race if you want, or just focus purely on modern warfare. Here's what my civ looked like after doing this strategy and racing to the industrial era.
![[Image: xeuNY5hl.png]](https://i.imgur.com/xeuNY5hl.png)
The black lines are railroads, which not only allow free movement, but also increase *all* tile yields by 50%. That's probably the best benefit of teching up. You also get battleships, which are 18 strength and can attack coastal tiles directly, so it's extremely powerful. It can still die to a settler or phalanx though...
That teal unit in the center right is from the Americans who are at war with me. It's a transport loaded with rifles. The AI is surprisingly competent at these amphibious invations (although they're more likely to just snipe a weak city than to threaten your entire civ).
Also, notice the *lack* of ICS. I built a lot of cities, but I had to carefully space them out so they could get enough tiles to build them up this way. I'm "playing wide" by building a lot of cities, but I'm also "playing tall" by building them up. It's not an impossible problem to balance this, the original civ managed it, so I don't understand why later civ games used such heavy handed methods to force you to build tall cities.
Anyway, just wanted to share those thoughts with a community of people who would understand. I'm happy that I can still find new things to discover about the original game, and I think more games should take inspiration from its elegance, balance, and detailed information screens. Is there anyone else here who played it competitively? Or anyone like me who played it just as a kid, and then went back and rediscovered it?
https://imgur.com/xeuNY5h
(Although *technically* there was a board game with the same name first, and also a similar computer game called Empire that was made for giant mainframe computers. For more on that I recommend this excellent blog: https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/the-game-...ilization/)
Civ1 was a genuine cultural phenomenon when it came out. Maybe Civ6 has sold more copies, but that's just because gaming in general is much bigger now. Civ1 made a splash with all sorts of people who didn't normally play computer games, and was one of the most top-selling games of its era. I don't think any later Civ game has really crushed the market like the first one did.
That's how I came to play the game. My dad wasn't really much of a gamer, but he still bought it out of curiousity and installed it on the family computer. I played it as a *very* young child, really too young to understand the game. I didn't even know what many of the words meant, so maybe I learned something that way too. I have a memory of saying something like "wow this Communism government really works well, much better than Democracy" and getting some strange looks from my parents...
So I played it just a little bit as a kid and didn't get too far. Then Civ2 came out which was newer, shinier, and I could understand it better. I switched over to that one and never looked back, playing the hell out of it throughout my childhood. That's what my profile pic is from. I thought it was better overall, since Civ2 is mostly tweaks to the original, more like a mod than a full game. For some reason that's the only time they did it that way, all the other Civs have been massively different than the one before.
When I went back recently to try Civ1, I wasn't expecting much. I thought it would be just be a simpler, more tedious version of Civ2. If you want to see how that game works I'd recommend this excellent let's play: https://lparchive.org/Civilization-2/ where an experienced player explains all the game mechanics and shows how to really crush it.
But honestly, playing it now as an adult and an experienced gamer, Civ1 really impresses me. There's a lot more balance and depth there than I expected! In fact, a lot of the changes made in Civ2 kind of ruin the balance of it. Civ1 is a more solid game overall.
Here's what it looks like in case you've never seen it before:
*Major differences*
The first thing I noticed was the interface. When you first run it, it asks whether you want to use a mouse, or keyboard only. I guess at that time it was still common for computers to not have a mouse. So you can do everything in the game (or almost everything) with keyboard shortcuts (the highlighted letters). It's a bit cryptic and hard to remember everything, but once you learn it's very convenient and immersive. It reminds of my coding days where I would code in a text editor (Vim) doing everything by keyboard. I wonder if Sid Meier, being an experienced 80s coder, also did his work that way. Some screens (like the city screen) look a bit ugly and cluttered, but all the information is there clear and easy to use. It's a DOS game, so it runs great in DOS box full screen mode. Civ2, unfortunately, was made for windows 95 so it has that Windows UI everywhere and doesn't play nicely with emulators.
The second thing that jumps out is the combat. Combat in Civ1 is simple, elegant, and brutal: you either win or you die. There's no HP or XP system, the game just compares the relative attack and defense values and flips a coin. So if you've got a strength 1 unit attacking a strength 2 unit, that's 1:2 odds, or a 1 in 3 chance to win.
The thing about that system is that it's very "swingy." It's wildly unpredictable, and tends to produce streaks of good and bad luck. it's not at all uncommon to win or lose 3 or more battles in a row, regardless of the odds. I used to think that "spear defeats tank" was just a silly meme that people made up after seeing a rare low-odds loss. But in Civ2 it's not even rare. A "spear" (phalanx) with defense 2, vs a a tank with attack 10, has 2 in 12 odds to win! Almost 20%! You're going to see things like that in basically every game. And since the phalanx costs only 20 shields while the tank costs 80, it's actually not even winning odds. Even a settler with defense 1 is suprisingly tough to kill. I admit that sometimes when this happened i had some gamer rage moments, and sometimes reloaded saves. But once I got used to it I started to adapt. You never know how a combat will go in Civ1, so you have to adapt and find ways to be flexible. Civ2 changed it to have HP and combat rounds, which I think makes it too simple and predictable.
The other big thing is the stack losses. When you lose once on defense, and you're not in a city, your entire stack dies. Instantly. So it's a big risk to stack too many units together. You still have to do it sometimes, and there's definitely an advantage in having more numbers, but it also encourages you to find some other tactics besides piling everything on one stack. The AI *is* smart enough to attack your big stacks, even in the ocean. The tactic that I find works best is to gradually flow a continuous stream of units towards the front, which will fluctuate randomly back and forth depending on how the combat rolls go. Usually chariots are the best, since they're fast, high attack (4), and relatively cheap (40).
If you don't want to deal with the randomness of combat, you can use diplomats. Diplomats are crazy powerful in Civ1. They're cheap to build, fast, ignore the "zone of control" mechanic that locks out most units, and have the unique ability to buy units, or even a city with all the units stacked inside, for gold. The only thing you can't buy is a stack of enemy units outside a city, so a combination of both combat units and diplomats tends to work well. You can try first with units, and then splash the cash with diplomats to make up for bad combat rolls. It also helps to have a few diplomats inside your core homeland in case the barbarians show up, because they'll appear randomly from boats and they get an attack bonus which makes them tough to defend against in a conventional way. Some people might say this makes diplomats OP, but I think it really helps to make gold feel like a distinct resource, and not just spend it all on research.
Speaking of research...
Notice anything missing? The cost! All civ1 techs cost the same, the price just increments based on how many techs you've already researched. And the prereqs are ignored when you steal a tech from someone else by capturing one of their cities. In theory you could wait forever not researching anything, steal Nuclear Power from someone, and then research Fusion for the same price as Pottery. That's a bit extreme, but you can make some really deep dives into the tech tree.
It also means that, in combination with the wild randomness of combat, there's a lot of comeback potential. Even if someone is way behind in tech, they can come back instantly by taking a few cities. Pretty annoying when one of the low tech aggressive AIs like Genghis Khan takes one of your border cities and steals a tech like Conscription (giving riflemen), but it does a lot to keep the late game balanced and engaging.
Besides combat, you can also improve tiles just like all other civ games. The difference here is that setters are both slow and expensive. Only 1 move, only 1 settler can improve a tile at a time, it takes a long time (5 turns to irrigate a grassland, 15 turns to irrigate a jungle), and the settler is costing a constant maintenance in both food and production. Civ2 has an Engineer that's an upgraded settler (2 moves and works twice as fast), but the slow settlers keep things balanced in Civ1. I found that I could never get as many settlers as I wanted, so there was still a lot of work to be done even well into the late game. That's a nice difference from other civs (including civ4!) where you can pretty much finish every tile improvement in the midgame and then put your workers to sleep.
Another late game feature is the scoring. It ends with the list comparing you to famous leaders from history, with "Dan Quayle" at the bottom, which feels incredibly dated now. That's a joke, but the scoring is very real. I got the sense that they wanted players to compete for high scores like a classic arcade game. I'm not much into that kind of gameplay, but I know some people are and it's definitely a way to give players something to do in the end game besides trying to hunt down the last few enemy cities. It feels a lot more natural than the civ6 age system.
*Strategies*
Now, I don't claim to be an expert on Civ1. I've never played it multiplayer (the original didn't have multiplayer, although there was an updated version released called CivNet which allowed it). And I've never done any high-score competitions either. Still, I think I can say that I'm an experienced gamer who has now played this game a lot on the highest difficulty, and I'm surprised that I haven't found any one single best-strat. There's at least 4 different ways to play and win on Emperor, based on the 4 government types. There may be more! That's *amazing* balance and depth for any game, much less the first of its series. Much more than most modern games have!
Despotism. The starting government. It has one huge penalty, and one huge bonus. The penalty is that all tiles lose -1 yield over 2, so going from 3 to 2. That's a big problem when even an irrigated grassland produces just 3 food, which turns into 2, and every citizen needs 2 food to be sustained. So you basically can't grow your cities under Despotism, except just a little by using food bonus tiles (which still don't give you much). But the bonus is that settlers, which normally cost 2 food as maintenance, just cost 1, so it's good for early expansion. It also allows free support for military units, whereas normally they all cost 1 shield of maintenance. But despotism has huge corruption penalties that make it almost impossible to get good research or wealth. Every building costs money as maintenance, so as a despotism you can't afford many buildings either.
So the usual play with despotism is to build lots of small cities everywhere (no distance limit at all, build them right next to each other if you want), and then send a flood of cheap early units like chariots (4 strength, 1 defense, 2 move, costs 40) or horseman (half the attack strength but also half the cost) and focus on pure conquest. Thanks to the random combat system, those cheap early units are strong enough to keep even the most advanced units or well defended cities, so it really works well. Still, there's a limit to how much you can push with numbers before you lose them all in a stack loss. I *imagine* that if we ever played it as competitive multiplayer this would be the dominant meta, but I'd be fascinated to see how it works against other strats.
Incidentally, the game has a tool for keeping track of everyone's losses from the entire game. Looks kind of wonky, but it's very handy! They really give you a lot of helpful information through the UI of this game! Here's what it looks like from my game, after I fought an intense early war to wipe out my two nearest neighbors
The grey was Genghis Khan, who's always aggressive. The pink was Elizabeth, who's more peaceful and techs faster. It cost me 35 chariots and 3 diplomats to break through their defenses, but I won in the end.
Monarchy. AKA "fancy despotism." The tile yield penalty is gone, so now you can build larger/better cities. Unfortunately, your units now cost maintenance, and you'll need one to keep your people content, so your net production might not get better. And settlers cost 2 food, so it's not great for early expansion. I've lost settlers from switching government because I forgot about that detail. Also, the corruption is still bad, so research is slow. Overall, not a great choice.
Except for one detail. You see the upper left of the tech tree? Monarchy, Feudalism, Horseback riding, and Chivalry. In a normal game you can completely skip those techs because they're a deadend that leads to nothing else. And in fact, it's *better* to avoid them because they'll increase the cost of everything else. But they *do* unlock the knight, which is by far the best of the early game units. They're the same attack, movement, and cost of a chariot, but with twice the defense (2). Put them on a hill or fortify them, and it multiplies to 4. This completely solves the main weakness of chariots, which is their weakness to counterattacks. A large force of knights- which they AI uses a lot- is quite hard to stop.
Democracy. AKA "money wars." It's a midgame tech so it normally takes a while to research it, but if you build the Pyramids you can start using it right away. +1 commerce on every tile, and no corruption at all, so your research and wealth skyrockets. However, you can no longer use units to keep cities content, and every time you move a unit out of its home city- even into another city!- it causes 2 unhappiness. More unhappy than happy and the city goes into revolt, and if it revolts 2 turns in a row you're forced into anarchy. Very annoying. Also you're not allowed to declare war. Even just exploring and expanding is kind of a pain in Democracy. You have to constantly make religious buildings (expensive and cost maintenance) to keep people content, or devote trade to luxuries instead of wealth or research.
Instead, the main strategy is diplomats. Diplomats everywhere. Don't worry about research, keep the tax rate high and just buy everything. Sometimes diplomats get killed, and sometimes there are stacks of enemy units you can't buy. That's ok. just keep trying and eventually the diplomats break through. You can buy their capital too, there's no restriction. The only thing you can't buy is cities from other democracies.
Republic. AKA "the way you're intended to play the game." Available pretty early on if you beeline it. It has the same +1 commerce as Democracy, and low (though not zero) corruption, so you can make the same big cash or research. But the units only cause 1 unhappiness, you're allowed to declare war, and revolts don't bring down the government, so it's a lot more flexible. This is the one form of government where I think it makes sense to do a lot of research.
The strategy is to use "we love the King day" which triggers when your city has no unhappiness and more than half happy citizens, and causes +1 pop growth every turn. The way to do that is by temporarily setting your luxury rate very high, plus buying all the religious building. You also need to feed the new citizens, which requires careful city placement and tile improvements. Ocean tiles only produce 1 food with no way to improve them (civ2 has a harbor building that doubles their food, kind of breaking the game), but do provide good trade to make luxuries to keep people happy. You really need a careful balance of everything to make this work, but when it works it's amazing. You can boom all your cities from size 3 to size 10 in just seven turns, tripling your economy. Although I find it more practical to do multiple, shorter bursts.
Doing that (while also continuing to expand out with new cities), you can tech at a blazing rate. Beeline into the modern era, build factories, and sen
d out your tanks to do battle with enemy spearmen! Then... maybe die to combat RNG... but it's still an advantage to have stronger units and more production. It's also, IMO, the most fun way to play the game, because you really get to see all sides of it.You can win by space race if you want, or just focus purely on modern warfare. Here's what my civ looked like after doing this strategy and racing to the industrial era.
The black lines are railroads, which not only allow free movement, but also increase *all* tile yields by 50%. That's probably the best benefit of teching up. You also get battleships, which are 18 strength and can attack coastal tiles directly, so it's extremely powerful. It can still die to a settler or phalanx though...
That teal unit in the center right is from the Americans who are at war with me. It's a transport loaded with rifles. The AI is surprisingly competent at these amphibious invations (although they're more likely to just snipe a weak city than to threaten your entire civ).
Also, notice the *lack* of ICS. I built a lot of cities, but I had to carefully space them out so they could get enough tiles to build them up this way. I'm "playing wide" by building a lot of cities, but I'm also "playing tall" by building them up. It's not an impossible problem to balance this, the original civ managed it, so I don't understand why later civ games used such heavy handed methods to force you to build tall cities.
Anyway, just wanted to share those thoughts with a community of people who would understand. I'm happy that I can still find new things to discover about the original game, and I think more games should take inspiration from its elegance, balance, and detailed information screens. Is there anyone else here who played it competitively? Or anyone like me who played it just as a kid, and then went back and rediscovered it?
https://imgur.com/xeuNY5h
Brings back a lot of memories. 
