4000 B.C., and You Are There

Two years ago, when last we heard from game designer Sid Meier, he had attached his name to one of the all-time best computer games: Micro Prose’s “Railroad Tycoon.” That was a tough act to follow, but with “Civilization” Meier and Micro Prose have made a great try.

“Civilization” doesn’t surpass its predecessor, but it certainly broadens the playing field.

The goal is to lead a society from the Stone Age through the Space Age, from founding a settlement of mud huts 6,000 years ago to the launch of interstellar travel and colonization.

Think of it as Romulus and Remus meet Wernher von Braun.

The play of “Civilization” is much like a board game. You run individual pieces on a grid of the world. There’s a nice stab at verisimilitude in the way that all but just a few squares are blacked out at first so that you don’t know where you are or what most of the world looks like until you go exploring.

You start off as one wandering band of settlers who found their home city, plant some crops and search the nearby countryside for gold or other valuables. The world broadens a bit more with every move. Eventually, as you push back the darkness of the unknown, you will found other cities, travel the oceans, encounter other civilizations (run by the computer) and compete with them.

As usual, the Micro Prose manual is terrific and informative. But the game’s graphics could use work. And philosophically, “Civilization” is a little too weighted toward technological developments as the yardsticks of advancement. There are one or two suppositions about the heavy hand of government that only the Libertarian Party would unquestionably agree with, too.

Civilization

Rating: ****

IBM & compatibles; 640K; VGA; mouse recommended. List: $69.95.

Computer games are rated on a five-star system, from one star for poor to five for excellent.