Cars, Sims, and Civilisations
Bobby watches The Grand Tour, revisits The Sims franchise on Apple Silicon, and reviews Sid Meier's Civilization VI.
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It has been a few weeks since my last blog post, and this is the first one I've written using an M2 MacBook Air, so the software I selected was Apple Pages and Visual Studio Code. This feels like a step up from using Microsoft Word on an iPad and then processing it with Vim or Notepad++ on a separate machine.
As I write this blog post I'm also re-watching the latest instalment of The Grand Tour. I won't spoil Sand Job for anyone because it was fun to watch, but I did get a bit cross about the drag race on a former air strip, because they discovered mid-race that it was actually a busy city intersection and nearly crashed into the locals, who were just going about their day. You'd think that after James May crashed into a wall in Scandi Flick, and in the wake of the BBC's decision to rest Top Gear after Freddie Flintoff's face was de-gloved in an even more horrific crash, that they might want to think about whether three older gentlemen with wives and children want to embrace danger with the same giddy abandon as a gap year student that's gotten lost on the Mongol Rally.
Hanging Out With My Sims
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that The Sims 2: Super Collection on the Mac App Store still works on Apple Silicon, and I've wiled away a dozen or so enjoyable hours re-familiarising myself with the expansions.
I'd most recently enjoyed playing the vanilla game on an old iMac G5 that I refurbished , but when I was forced to move out of a house I'd lived in for 7 years because my landlord wanted to sell up, I had to pack that machine away in a box and store it. So it's fair to say that I was quite excited when I randomly discovered that I'd already bought the digital version of the game, presumably back when I was a university student and regularly used a model Mac mini.
I'm most looking forward to exploring Strangetown again, because I don't think I've played that map since I was a teenager. Also having your Sims unexpectedly abducted by aliens, returned carrying an alien baby in their abdomen regardless of their wedding tackle, and then proceeding to build a dynasty of freaky green alien-human hybrids, is certainly a unique experience!
Before I dismantled my gaming PC and sold off my graphics card, I also explored the Steam version of The Sims 3, which I apparently still own with all its expansions and parts packs. I was left wondering whether there's been some updates since I last played it, because I don't remember there being a really cool map where your Sims can live on a houseboat and move it around a archipelago. Although it's equally possible that I didn't have a powerful enough computer at the time to run it without the game crashing, so that might have been why I missed it! That map is a fun twist on the base game and expands on the mechanic where Sims can walk or drive themselves around the map in real time without loading screens.
It turns out that all my game codes for the Steam version of The Sims 3 still work with Origin, so I downloaded the 64-bit Metal port for macOS. It'll be interesting to see how well that holds up in .
As for the very first instalment of The Sims, there sadly doesn't seem to be a digital download for it on any online storefront. There is a native PowerPC Mac port for The Sims, but according to macintoshrepository.org it can't be emulated because it talks directly to 3D accelerated graphics hardware, so I would need to run it on a physical machine. I do have compatible hardware knocking around in my garage, but for the sake of convenience I'm probably better off using UTM to run the Windows version of The Sims: Complete Collection (for which I already have a physical copy) in an x86 virtual machine. I will have to do that anyway to run Sid Meier's Civilization II, so I think that will be a worthwhile exercise.
Most Uncivilised!
Speaking of Sid Meier's Civilization II, I recently discovered that getting Civilization V to run without crashing is an exercise in frustration. I tried disabling every add-on for the Windows version, and that didn't seem to prevent it from crashing after capturing or liberating a city. The Mac version from Aspyr also crashes a lot when it's running on Rosetta 2, so it now only seems to work reliably on old hardware with unsupported operating systems.
The practical upshot though is that it's forced me to spend more time with Sid Meier's Civilization VI, which plays much more like a board game. There are pros and cons to that approach!
I find being rewarded with bonuses for playing the game and the dark/golden age mechanic quite pleasant, and it's satisfying to plop down city districts instead of waiting for a nebulous build queue to finish. Forcing every faction to be in the same era keeps the game competitive, and once you've progressed to King difficulty you can't just run away with the game by building a massive land army or plopping down a Science district in every city. Shuffling the AI faction personalities also adds some much-needed variety and makes the diplomacy mechanics more interesting. I quite like the art style throughout the game as well.
My main criticism is that the AI factions still struggle with naval combat. The barbarians have no such problems because they just relentlessly spawn units and attack everything on sight, so if you send out a lone caravel to auto-explore a large map, they'll take advantage of your inattention and sink it. City States also relentlessly spawn units, but it's pot luck whether they actually make them useful when an AI faction is invading them or they've joined a war with their Suzerain.
The other quirk with Civilization VI's board game mechanics is that there are a lot of different systems that you need to keep track of, which means that you really need to pay attention to tile yields, and balance the yield bonuses from your faction's policies and religion so that you don't fall behind on gold, science, culture, religion, and standing army. Displaying multiplayer scores in single player games is essential, because if you do fall behind in any of those areas then the AI factions are smart enough to press home their advantage.
I'm also a bit puzzled why they've tried to reintroduce unit stacking with Corps and Armies. As someone that wears glasses, I don't always notice that a unit's been stacked, which can lead to strange combat results that I don't understand until I zoom in on the map. I'm also wondering if it's better to leave units stacked, or whether I should unstack them when they're moving so that they're harder for enemy AI city defences and air units to seek and destroy.
I haven't tried multiplayer yet, but judging by the Twitch streams I've seen I'm guessing that building easily-sniped coastal cities are an even worse idea than they were before, particularly in the early game when cities have no defensive capability without a garrisoned unit or ancient walls. Canals also seem like a mechanic that's best saved for single player games, unless I'm willing to build an unending supply of ironclads, submarines, and bombers to prevent my world from being torn down by two bombarding ships and a boarding vessel.
The other mechanic that I have mixed feelings about is global warming. While I think it's a great way of adding realism to the game and creates some enjoyable diplomacy mechanics, it's rendered completely irrelevant as soon as any faction deploys a nuclear weapon, because making the effort to recover the massive carbon emissions generated by the detonation usually costs me the game. There also doesn't seem to be a mechanism for paying an AI faction to replace their carbon-spewing infrastructure, so I have to rely on diplomatic penalties and warfare to get the job done.
Overall though, I have enjoyed my time with Sid Meier's Civilization VI and can see myself spending hundreds of hours playing it on my usual marathon games on gigantic maps. It's just a shame that Civilization V had to turn into a buggy pile of crap to convince me to commit the time necessary to learn how to play Civilization VI properly, because both games are excellent when they're in a playable state.